As I watch the news media in the US and Israeli officials talk of the carnage in Gaza, it is indeed interesting how the powerful always use similar language to justify their actions against the oppressed. First, of course, is the attempt to blame the victims. As Israeli planes and tanks blow up schools, hospitals and even a power plant in Gaza they, through some twisted logic, somehow blame Hamas for these atrocities. And when the Israelis cannot blame Hamas, the Israelis then insist that they made a mistake and apologise for it. As the Israeli actions in Gaza have intensified and the death toll of civilians, especially women and children, has crossed the 1,000 mark, both Israelis as well as their supporters in the US media have latched on to the mantra that the Palestinians are to blame for their own misfortunes and that Israel is only defending itself. When a school, a hospital or the major power plant in Gaza were destroyed, the Israelis tried blaming Hamas and when that did not work they called it an “honest” mistake. These excuses sort of remind me of the time almost a decade ago when General Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan, blamed the victims of gang rapes by insisting that the victims brought it upon themselves so that they could collect money from foreign NGOs and get Canadian visas. Of course, the famous Punjab police have used the second method as its standard operating procedure. The police arrest ‘suspects’, beat them up and, when confronted by the innocence of the accused, apologise profusely but they never accept blame for their malfeasance. Perhaps all oppressors have a limited vocabulary when it comes to attempts at justification of their actions. This does depend on some control of the media. Even though the major news media as well as the US government and members of the US Congress have mostly defended Israel in public, there seem to be some within the liberal establishment as well as some ‘Zionists’ that have come out in opposition to the “excessive” Israeli actions. What has served as a strong counterpoint to the news outlets as well as the politicians has been the social media. Pictures of the carnage in Gaza have flooded different sites on the internet, making Israeli claims of restraint seem less than true. All this has created an interesting paradox as far as the mainline media is concerned. Almost all commentators routinely support the right of Israel to defend itself against the terrorist attacks from Hamas and the large number of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel but, at the same time, they also routinely mention the extreme suffering of the ordinary civilians, non-combatants and the large number of women and children that have been killed by Israeli air and ground actions, thus making the Israeli offensive seem quite brutal and excessive even though that is never said in so many words. Even though this has made the press coverage of what happens in Gaza slightly more even-handed and the Israelis look pretty bad, it does not seem to prevent Israel from pursuing its present course of action. Evidently, when it comes to Gaza and Hamas, the Israelis are following the abhorrent US pacification policy in Vietnam best described by the following: “Yet the words once spoken here resonated around the world. People who have never heard of Ben Tre know the phrase, uttered by an American major to Associated Press correspondent Peter Arnett, as together they surveyed the post-Tet devastation: ‘It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it’” (The New York Times, March 23, 2004, ‘Meanwhile: The quiet town where the Vietnam War began’.) This does not mean at all that what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza right now and what it has been doing to the Palestinians in the ‘occupied territories’ is because Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are made up of Jews but rather it is because most of them belong to the right wing. They have defied all attempts at finding a two state solution, going against previous Israeli government policies. Many Israelis as well as Zionists are opposed to the policies of this Israeli government. Perhaps the best statement of the point of view of a Jewish Zionist who does not agree with the policies of the present Israeli government is from a column in The New York Times, ‘Zionism and its discontents’, by Roger Cohen, which appeared on July 29, 2014. I am excerpting parts of his column: “What I cannot accept, however, is the perversion of Zionism that has seen the inexorable growth of a Messianic Israeli nationalism claiming all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River; that has, for almost a half-century now, produced the systematic oppression of another people in the West Bank; that has led to the steady expansion of Israeli settlements on the very West Bank land of any Palestinian state; that isolates moderate Palestinians like Salam Fayyad in the name of divide-and-rule; that pursues policies that will make it impossible to remain a Jewish and democratic state; that seeks tactical advantage rather than the strategic breakthrough of a two-state peace; that blockades Gaza with 1.8 million people locked in its prison and is then surprised by the periodic eruptions of the inmates; and that responds disproportionately to attack in a way that kills hundreds of children.” And: “This corrosive Israeli exercise in the control of another people, breeding the contempt of the powerful for the oppressed, is a betrayal of the Zionism in which I still believe.” Most importantly, I have included two entire paragraphs from his column to exclude the possibility of taking what Mr Cohen has to say out of context. PS: I thank Chris Upchurch for correcting a misstatement in my article last week, ‘Media biases’ (Daily Times, July 26, 2014). Jordan did sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. The writer has practiced and taught medicine in the US. He can be reached at smhmbbs70@yahoo.com