Nearly seventy ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in the Israeli and US corporate media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as “hostages” and exploit the women and children as “human shields”, they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.

In this war, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.

Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government (“The state must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets”) has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.

Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western TV screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.

True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a tiny fraction of the dreadful events that appear 24 hours every day on Aljazeera’s Arabic channel, but one picture of a dead baby in the arms of its terrified father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly constructed sentences from the Israeli army spokesman. And that is what is decisive, in the end.

War – every war – is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for one’s country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being branded a traitor.

The Israeli propagandist claim that Israel had withdrawn from Gaza and as a reward Hamas is raining rockets on Israeli town is bogus. Maintaining a large military force in gaza whose main function was to serve as personal body guards for the Jewish settlers at a ratio of about 10 soldiers per one settler was just too expensive. Very few Israeli reservists or regular army wanted any part of serving in the "strip". Israel wanted to use the resources spent on Gaza for the acceleration of the theft of the much coveted West Bank land. Israel kept a de-facto occupation by turning Gaza into the largest concentration camp/favela in the world, with full control over the Gaza air-space and access from the sea. The blockade, a clear declaration of war under international law had commenced even before the Israeli bogus withdrawal. No people anywhere in the world would accept such oppression and subjugation without armed resistance. It makes no sense for the Israeli civilians to live in peace when the Gaza civilians have been forcibly incarcerated in a squalid concentration camp by Israel.

the British should have leveled Tel Aviv (where the bombing was planned) after the July 22, 1946 King David hotel bombing by Menachem Begin's terrorist Irgun. For those who don't know, the explosion, which occurred at 12:37, caused the collapse of the southwestern corner of the southern wing of the hotel. 91 people were killed, most of them being hotel staff. 46 people were injured. Some of the deaths and injuries occurred in the road outside the hotel and in adjacent buildings. No identifiable traces were found of thirteen of those killed.

Just one example:in 1970, Gaza has become restless and unruly as far as the Israeli occupation was concerned. An Israeli family traveling by car near the strip hit a PLO land-mine and the 2 children in the car were killed. As a result, Ariel Sharon was appointed commander of the southern front. His strategy was based on the Waffen-SS. Every terror act from gaza was retaliated by collective punishment, often disproportionate assassinations of civilians who had nothing to do with the PLO. IDF death squads would kill Gazans indiscriminately, with the sole purpose of terrorizing the civilian population and deter it from cooperation with the PLO. Entire residential blocks would be blown up if one resident was deemed a terrorist by the Israelis. The terror originating from Gaza had been reduced for awhile, but in the long run, it radicalized the entire strip, actually increased the terror level and the identification of the population with the PLO and the much more radical terror groups, made Gaza a hotbed for resistance and paved the way for an eventual Hamas takeover many years later.