In Kharkov and In Rafah

In Kharkov and In Rafah

I am beginning to believe that Ukrainian lives are worth less crocodile tears than Palestinian lives.

Those Americans who follow events abroad are generally vaguely aware of the slow but steady Russian advance on eastern Ukraine. Although the areas in the line of fire have been evacuated, some residents refused to move, and, as a result, reports of small numbers of casualties are piling up.

These single-digit casualties rarely get attention abroad, but May 25 saw a more significant attack — and it didn’t make headlines either. On that day Russia hit a hardware store in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, causing a massive fire and damage. Ukraine’s latest update puts the number of dead at 18 and the number of wounded at 48, with many still missing. The dead include a twelve-year-old girl and her mother.

Suppose American news consumers have never heard about that carnage. In that case, it’s because, after the 10/7 massacre in southern Israel, the Israel-Gaza war displaced the Russo-Ukrainian war as the central subject of international news. With antizionism firmly entrenched in the U.S. and international institutions, the media has a template for covering Israel, and social media is very adept at disseminating blood libels.

Compare the Kharkov bombing to the following day’s events in the Middle East. With the war raging since October, Egypt sealed the border on Gaza refugees, effectively trapping them in a war zone. Last Shabbat, terrorists fired medium-range rockets at central Israel, triggering Israeli action to neutralize the threat. Israel eliminated two top-level Hamas terrorists in a targeted strike near the Egyptian border. A large fire broke out at the site of the strike, which we now know resulted not from heavy bombs as initially reported but from a fuel truck parked nearby. Reviewing a video of the incident, Israeli military analyst Eitan Fischberger concluded that secondary explosions occurred on site because it was loaded with ammunition. This was consistent with later IDF findings.

This is not how the media reported the event and how it reverberated on social media. Immediately following the retaliatory attack, Gazans circulated what they said was a video of a “decapitated Palestinian baby as a result of Israel’s ‘response’ to the ICJ ceasefire order.” The alleged ICJ ceasefire order is an unrelated event, and the gruesome footage showed a man shaking what is purported to be the carcass of a small child in front of the cameras. The media strategy is consistent with the recent report of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian bots amplifying grizzly news to bring it to the attention of worldwide social networks — an appeal to raw emotion put on replay with an attached narrative stripped of fact or attempt at reason.

Mainstream media like The Washington Post circulated the claim that Israel hit inside of something called a “designated humanitarian zone” into which the Jewish State evacuated non-combatants for the duration of its military operation. Naturally, the question arises whether a territory can be considered a designated humanitarian zone if militants infiltrate it. The allegation was false; the counter-strike occurred outside that area.

Pro-Palestinians are claiming 40 or so dead, but considering multiple other high-profile incidents of alleged Israeli atrocities where the number of dead was revised down drastically, all allegations coming from Palestinian sources should be viewed with skepticism. This type of coverage falls within the decades-old Western newsroom tradition of covering the Arab-Israeli conflict from the point of view not of right and wrong or international law but of the alleged Arab suffering.

In terms of sheer damage to civilians, the bombing in Kharkov is likely roughly comparable to that in Rafah. Russians insist that the building they hit was a weapons storage that constituted a legitimate military target. I have no way of verifying it, nor do I consider this information relevant. If Israel can’t assassinate two terror honchos — and, as a bonus, perhaps eliminate weapons designed to slaughter its civilians — then Russia should have no right to target any alleged weapons depots either.

Factors other than pure Jew hate may explain the fascination with the alleged Israeli wrongdoings. Ukrainians are far more modest about their casualties than Gazans. They don’t dangle bodies in front of cameras, nor do their leaders boldly proclaim like Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh that:

The blood of the women, children, and elderly… I am not saying that this blood is calling for your [help]. We are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens within us resolve, so it awakens within us the spirit of challenge, and [pushes us] to move forward.

Maybe graphic violence and stated willingness to inflict suffering on their own can help them gain attention and sympathy.

It could be that we hear more about Israel and its neighbors because Americans care — and always cared — about that region more than Russia and Ukraine. Jews have been present in American life since before colonial times, and Americans like to visit the Holy Land. On the other hand, Crimea and Donbas are essentially abstractions. At the onset of the war in Ukraine, Kamala Harris had to explain in layman’s terms:

Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for.

None of it explains why the world leaders lined up to condemn Israel before anything resembling an investigation could come out but had nothing to say about the Russian store bombing in Ukraine. Narcissistic and hyperbolic comments by Western influencers flooded the internet, like one woman screaming about “beheaded babies.”

The self-proclaimed bleeding hearts need to explain why they cry bitter tears for Gaza when the pain of others doesn’t catch their attention. Suppose the focus of chest-thumping humanitarians is on the refugees. In that case, they need to do more for them — take them out of the line of fire and provide a haven in a third country, just like it was done for millions of Ukrainians at the beginning of the conflict. Instead, what we see today is the instrumentalization of human suffering via social media journalism, which deliberately intensifies and prolongs war and pain.

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