Frontline: "Israel's Second Front" and "Failure of the Fence" (Schonder Productions, Washington Post, WGBH, PBS, aired January 23, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the American Experience show “Nazi Town, U.S.A.” I kept PBS on for a split-level Frontline episode containing two vest-pocket documentaries on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from radically different perspectives. The first was called “Israel’s Second Front” and featured Ramita Navai, half-British, half-Iranian journalist (that’s a bit of a surprise since she speaks Arabic perfectly even though her ancestral languages are English and Farsi), touring not only Gaza but also the West Bank, where since October 7, 2023 Israel has staged major attacks (though nothing so far like the genocidal campaign they’re waging in Gaza!) and have killed hundreds of Palestinians, including women and children, in a vain hunt for leaders of Hamas and its allies. The second was called “Failure of the Fence,” was produced, directed and written by Gabrielle Schonder and featured Washington Post reporters John Swayne and Joyce Sohyun Lee trying to figure out how Hamas’s fighters were able to break through Israel’s so-called “Iron Wall” across the border with Gaza and stage the October 7 attacks in the first place. This show could be an object lesson for all the Trump-worshiping idiots who think not only can we build a wall across the U.S.-Mexican border but it will stop undocumented immigration once and for all. Among their tactics were using paragliders literally to fly over the wall, literally cutting their way through it, burrowing under it (despite Israel’s attempts to harden the ground under the wall to make tunneling impossible) and targeting the surveillance balloons that are supposed to alert Israelis to an impending or in-progress incursion from Gaza.

One aspect of the attack that’s pretty amazing is that Hamas wasn’t making much of an attempt to keep the planning secret; they had not only made graphic training videos of just what they wanted their commandos to do but had posted them on social media for all the world to see. Apparently “all the world” didn’t mean Israeli intelligence, because either no one was monitoring Hamas’s social-media sites or (a conspiratorial possibility but one that occurred to me almost immediately) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others in his government allowed the Hamas attacks to take place because they would provide the pretext for the genocidal campaign against the Palestinians Netanyahu has always wanted. “Israel’s Second Front” was, in its way, even more chilling: proof that Thomas Jefferson was right when he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” During the show, Navai talked about the Israeli settlements that have steadily been built in the West Bank territories that, along with Gaza, were supposed to be the site of the future Palestinian state envisioned by the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). “Under the far-Right government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the settlements have been expanding,” Navai said. (They’ve actually been expanding steadily under whatever government Israel had at the moment, including supposedly more “liberal” ones.) “And adding to the tensions since Oct. 7, there have been hundreds of reported attacks by extremist settlers against Palestinians.” Navai showed an interview with Abdul Hakim Wadi, survivor of a settler raid that killed four members of his family, in which he said, “I was shocked that my brother and his son were martyred, and they wouldn’t be with us anymore, not in this lifetime, at least. [Cries.] The increased attacks by settlers mean we are in uncharted territory. The future appears uncertain, and we are unsure of what lies ahead.”

She also talked with Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, and Shikaki told her that his polls showed an already strong level of support among West Bank Palestinians for armed resistance to the Israeli occupation has risen sharply since October 7. “The level of support for armed struggle in the West Bank before October the 7th stood at about 54 percent. Today, it is almost 70 percent,” Shikaki explained. “The perception is that there is today no political or diplomatic option available to Palestinians. If Palestinians are unhappy with the status quo, the only way to change it is violence, armed struggle, formation of armed groups. That is a fundamental reasoning that the overwhelming majority of the Palestinians today fully endorse.” Navai described an increasing level of Palestinian resistance that is coming uncomfortably close to the campaign that ultimately brought down the Shah of Iran in 1979 and led to the Islamist regime that has bedeviled that country ever since. Though one of her interviewees is a Palestinian woman who considers herself a feminist and has every reason in the world to hate and fear Hamas’s extreme Islamist agenda, including the entrenched sexism that seems to come with the territory, Navai notes that Hamas has become the personification of Palestine’s liberation from Israel’s suffocating occupation and a lot of people are being drawn to their cause even if they’d probably not want to live in the regime a victorious Hamas would set up. One of her most heart-rending interviews is with a young Palestinian fighter named Mohammed (she agreed not to use any more of his name, and given the penchant of Arab parents generally to name their sons after the Prophet, “Mohammed” could be just about anybody) who told her, “They started to attack us with missiles. This has never happened before. They attack us with missiles and we don't have missiles.”

Mohammed also told Navai that his brother had just been killed by an Israeli drone – “It fell from above the cover. He was here. Here, exactly” – and Navai added that just two days after that interview, Mohammed was also killed in an Israeli attack. At the same time she showed interviews with Israeli officials who blandly asserted that the atrocities Israel is committing against the Palestinian population are necessary for “security.” One of her strangest interviews was with Orna Mizrahi of the Institute for National Security Studies, who tried to assure her that Israel is doing its best to minimize civilian casualties – “There is no intention in doing it, but it happens. Sometimes it happens. And I tell you, as one who is coming from the army, that there is a big effort to prevent these accidents, but sometimes they happen” – which had me yelling at the TV, “Bullshit.” Navai closed her show with a quote from Palestinian scholar and philosopher Sari Nusseibeh (a male, born in 1949, and former president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem): “I hope it's, we've passed the critical stage between the Israelis and the Palestinians of the war that’s raging in Gaza. And I hope that after this, the world will open its eyes to the need to step in and do something here. If it doesn't, if there's no solution, if there's no solution to the conflict, I think it'll just get worse in time. You never know how a situation of war can actually drive people to act. Things are boiling, simmering. And I think the wise thing to do for everybody concerned, local and international players, is to try and contain this before it explodes.” Unfortunately, that’s not the way things are trending right now: with Joe Biden maintaining public support for Israel while vainly trying to dissuade Israel’s current government from carrying out its genocidal campaign against Palestine, and Donald Trump waiting in the wings to take over as President and give the full green light to Israel’s genocide, the likely outlook for the Palestinians is virtual annihilation – and a sustained campaign that will only drive the few Palestinians that survive ever closer to Hamas and its militant agenda.