Gaza war turned public opinion against Israel

Western analyst, Peter Jones believes that the war on Gaza has changed the world public opinion against Israel. He wrote in Scotsman.com:

The world sees that Israel has a defence system which manages to shoot down most of the rockets. It sees that it is inflicting a death toll which is about 20 times higher than what it is suffering. And it sees that about 150,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes.

Israel tries hard to explain, graphically illustrated with pictures and videos from drones and aircraft, that Hamas is firing its rockets from schoolyards and from amidst apartment blocks, that it warns Gazan residents to get out of their homes when it is about to strike them in search of Hamas fighters.

But up against the dreadful scenes of women and children being injured and killed, these explanations do not seem to cut much ice. Neither is world opinion convinced that Hamas is stopping civilians, as Israel claims, from leaving areas it is using to launch its rocket strikes. Reporters from various international news outlets have seen no evidence of that happening.

Instead the evidence is that Israel is losing the battle for world opinion. A variety of non-governmental human rights organisations, including the UN Human Rights Council, have either accused the Israeli government of war crimes or are calling for an investigation into whether they have been committed. A good many western governments, normally supportive of Israel’s rights to self-defence, believe that its assaults on Gaza are utterly disproportionate to the attacks on it.

In short, neither Israel’s medium-term policy towards Gaza – maintaining a blockade while allowing enough humanitarian aid in to prevent malnutrition and starvation, a state of existence rather than life – nor its short-term resort to massive reprisals, are working.

And while Palestinians on the West Bank have not been subject to quite the same horrors, their condition is also miserable. In ten days of a military operation to find the three Israeli youths whose kidnapping began the current conflict, some 800 people were arrested and more than 1,000 premises destructively searched. Meantime they have to accept living under Israeli occupation and having to give up land to Israeli settlers at the government’s whim with no compensation.