Searching for truth in Gaza conflict

article 

It has been my observation certain news articles , especially unpopular ones, tend to mysteriously vanish. So , I'm copying this one , in full, it was written by John Robson , QMI agency  , in the toronto sun. 

With Israel winding down its incursion into Gaza, we search through the physical and mental rubble for lessons. As usual, an air of unreality permeates the exercise.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that a brutal Israeli overreaction to Hamas provocations outraged world opinion and forced Tel Aviv back to the negotiating table with reasonable local players and its staunch American ally to seek a two-state solution to help the poor Palestinians. Not one bit of that is true.

OK. The Hamas provocations were real, from rocket attacks to an elaborate expensive network of terror tunnels. But Israel did not overreact and was not brutal.
Those who say “Israel has a right to defend itself but…” have never explained what it could have done that would have been less forceful yet effective. And despite the common narrative of Israel as a callous bully spraying fire at civilians and outraging world opinion, the IDF acted to minimize civilian and maximize jihadi deaths with considerable effect.

Most accounts tell you the bulk of victims were “civilians” then list a few dead children for added pathos. And all decent people are horrified by non-combatant deaths, young or old, and wish they could be avoided. But in fact a far higher proportion of the dead are young men with terrorist affiliations than would result from careless or random fire. And Hamas has been storing weapons in schools, firing from beside hospitals, hiding tunnel entrances behind UNRWA signs and otherwise seeking to maximize innocent deaths it can then exploit for publicity and recruitment.
Why do we hear so little of this? Because the official account of events within Gaza comes from Hamas, which doesn’t just kill Jews and its own people without compunction, as human shields or in brutal extralegal torture-murders of suspected collaborators. It also routinely bullies and threatens journalists, who then say, and omit, what Hamas dictates without mentioning that they report under duress.

As for international “pressure” helping end the incursion, world opinion may influence the course of debate in a genuinely divided society like, say, white South Africa during apartheid. But something like 95% of Israeli Jews favoured “Operation Protective Edge.” Mind you, more than half think it ended too soon.

Thus the Obama administration is doubly deluded in thinking UN, Western liberal and Islamist outrage now force a stubborn Israeli government to join a negotiating process among various local parties seeking a genuine compromise solution. John Kerry can trade words with open backers of Hamas like Qatar and Turkey until his Nobel Peace Prize comes home, but Israelis know there’s no partner for peace on the other side so they do what they need to do and stop when they think it’s done.

As it happens most of Israel’s neighbours hate and fear Hamas, and its Iranian backers, so much that for once they don’t want to kill the Jews then start in on each other. This time the Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian governments, among others, want to do it in the other order.
Finally, the Muslim world does not sympathize with the Palestinians. No Arab neighbour has offered them refuge and citizenship at any point in the last 66 years. Instead, like Hamas, those governments find Palestinian suffering instrumentally useful but otherwise uninteresting.

There is an old saying that a lie is half-way around the world before the truth gets its boots on. But as the dust settles, at least some people will keep asking questions like: Why do the negotiations go nowhere? What does the Hamas Charter say? Why do media peddle Hamas numbers? Why should we trust Western journalists and politicians who are so reliably wrong on every important aspect of the Middle East?

Why the persistent air of unreality?