Or, I should ask, the people who edit Mondoweiss, plus the blogger Roland Nikles, whose post on Moshe Feiglin Mondoweiss published the other day (and that was uncritically posted on FB by a prominent MENA historian, which is where I saw it). Now I have no objection to anything Nikles has to say about the unspeakable Feiglin. On the S.O.B., we are in 100% agreement. What got me was this
Over the past month Israel bombed countless targets in Gaza, killed more than 1,800 Palestinians (mostly civilians), wounded in excess of 9,000, destroyed in excess of 10,000 homes, the strip’s only power plant, hospitals, schools, and other infrastructure, and lost 64 Israelis in the process (Haaretz’s tally). The onslaught lit up the sky to outer space.
The paragraph was followed by the above photo, followed in turn by this
If this bombardment speaks a language, it speaks the language of Moshe Feiglin.
The photo of the apparent bombardment was taken by German astronaut Alexander Gerst on July 23rd from the International Space Station. Gerst, who’d been tweeting numerous photos from outer space, had the above one and with this text (as Nikles does not explain or link to the tweet, here it is)
My saddest photo yet. From #ISS we can actually see explosions and rockets flying over #Gaza & #Israel
This wasn’t the first time I’d seen the pic, as various persons posted it in social media. So where are the explosions and flying rockets?
What I see in the photo is Israel (on a west-east axis), with Ashdod to Haifa in the upper right quadrant, Amman the lit up splotch on the bottom right, and El-Arish, Egypt, on the upper left. The streaking lines—what are apparently taken to be flying rockets—link Beersheba with Qiryat Gat (upper right) and Dimona (bottom left; I can’t say where the other little ones emanate to or from). I have no idea what these streaks are but they have nothing to do with Gaza and are definitely not rockets. And they certainly do not involve explosions (who knows, maybe they’re highways, all lit up like in Belgium).
In this outer space photo, Gaza city is the less lit up bit of what it geographically south of Ashqelon. Now I do happen to find this sad, but because so relatively little of the densely populated Gaza strip is lit up, not because it’s exploding or being hit by rockets, of which one sees none at all in the pic. Do people have any idea of what they’re looking at? Don’t they know their geography? Astronaut Gerst may be forgiven for his ignorance of this but the editors of Mondoweiss—who spend their waking hours obsessing about I-P—and all the others who approvingly linked to the pic? Not at all. They have no excuse.
ADDENDUM: In the interest of fairness and balance I should say that Mondoweiss is not stupid 100% of the time. It can, on occasion, run a worthy piece, e.g. the post on July 15th (with updates) by Sam Knight, on the Rue de la Roquette synagogue incident in Paris, which is the most accurate and comprehensive I’ve seen on it in English. I’ll link to it when I do my (long overdue) post—in the coming days, inshallah—on the Gaza war demos, French Jews, and antisemitism in France.
Arun with a View 
I wish that Mondoweisss cared more about Palestinians.
Hello Arun:
Just saw this. First, thanks for reading. I have three comments. 1) the article, as you briefly note, is about Feiglin’s comments on Gaza, not Gerst’s picture. You say you agree with the article’s take on Feiglin. 2) The photo is in no way integral to the article. 3) You imply there was something misleading or dishonest about the Gerst photo or its use. But you are ridiculing a position the article did not take. There is no dispute the photo was taken from space by Gerst. Gerst says in his tweet it’s the saddest photo he’s taken because he can actually see explosions and rockets from his vantage point in space. Girst did not mean to represent that all of the lights in the photo are the lights of rockets or explosions–and, as you correctly point out, they pretty obviously are not. “This bombardment….” in my post refers to the destruction detailed in the previous paragraph, not the picture.
That said, I take your point, that the placement of the picture without some more explanation might lead some people to erroneously conclude that all the light in the photo is war related explosions. It was not intended that way, and I would not expect an ordinary reader to interpret it that way. Nevertheless, I accept your point that I should have been clearer to avoid any such misunderstanding. The fact that the bombardment lit up the sky to outer space in a manner to be visible to astronauts in space in this background of lights is the point, and quite sufficient.