NYT’s Goldberg: ‘Understandable’ Why People Blamed Israel for Hospital, Israel Damaged Its Credibility

On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that it’s “understandable” why people blamed Israel for the Gaza hospital blast and “what we’re seeing is the cost of squandering some of your credibility, so that, when you really need it, when you have the world in such a combustible situation, it becomes very difficult” to convince people.

Goldberg said that there was a “rush” to blame Israel, but “in the past, when Israel has accidentally killed civilians, it has blamed it on an errant Islamic Jihad missile and it’s turned out to be — in a case just last year — an Israeli airstrike. So, it’s understandable why people believed that.”

She added, “There [were] five boys who were killed in Gaza who, initially, the Israeli military said that it was this errant missile. There was the killing of the Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, who it turned out was killed by — it looks like — by Israeli ammunition. And so, I think that what we’re seeing is the cost of squandering some of your credibility, so that, when you really need it, when you have the world in such a combustible situation, it becomes very difficult for you to convince –.”

She then added that “there [are] a lot of people who are never going to believe what Israel says regardless, but Israel needs to be in a position that people of good faith can, I think, trust their version of events. And then, meanwhile, you just see, there’s this, I think, intensely painful thing happening right now, where there’s been a lot of doubt cast on the scale of atrocities from Hamas’ attack. And again, some of that is about, I think, antisemitism and denial, and some of it is maybe about mistakes that were made in the initial round of reporting. But you have a situation where Israel has been forced to basically show hours and hours and hours of unedited Hamas footage of atrocities just to kind of try and convey the truth of what happened on October 7, which many people around the world still refuse to believe.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett