Among my guilty pleasures is listening to National Public Radio’s weekly storytelling anthology This American Life. Even as someone on the center-right, I manage to overcome my irritation at the occasional progressive talking points embedded implicitly or, sometimes, explicitly in the tales that founder and host Ira Glass and his team share because their creativity and quality outweighs their annoying political valence. But not today, when NPR took a gratuitous swipe at Israel and, perhaps worse, missed a golden opportunity.
This week’s episode, entitled “The Cavalry Is Not Coming,” mostly fits the series’ usual bill, fusing together two vignettes organized loosely around a common theme, in this case, the ability of everyday citizens to act in the absence of negligent authorities. Act One featured a Pennsylvania hospital CEO who resorted to launching a GoFundMe to finance a major budget shortfall. Act Two starred immigration activists who rallied against the Trump and Biden administrations to aid purported asylum seekers (this was the typically annoying bit).
But the introduction was where things went off the rails. There, Glass and producer Miki Meek interviewed Saddam Sayyaleh, an aid worker in Gaza with an organization named the American Near East Relief Association, or ANERA, about his efforts to deliver humanitarian supplies into the enclave despite supposed Israeli intransigence. They also spoke with Juliette Touma, the director of communications at the UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), the organization uniquely charged with responsibility for Palestinian refugees (or, more accurately, the descendants of Palestinian refugees), about how Israel has allegedly prevented aid trucks from entering Gaza.
Set aside, for the moment, the factual errors in the report, such as when Glass said that “even before this war, for years now, Israel has controlled everyone and everything that went in and out of Gaza” (in fact, Egypt, too, shares a border with Gaza, through which goods have passed for decades). Forget, for now, Israel’s willing participation in delivering aid to Gazan civilians. Ignore, too, the show’s befuddling lack of curiosity about the groups it profiled (ANERA has faced allegations that at least one Gaza project coordinator has spread pro-Hamas propaganda, while UNRWA for years has inculcated antisemitism and hostility to Israel in its curricula).
Instead, what got my goat was the suggestion that, when it comes to Gaza, the “cavalry” of international aid was “not coming” was the premise of the show. On the contrary, dozens of countries have delivered many tons of food, supplies, and fuel to the enclave. Others have built medical facilities in the field and dispatched floating hospitals to treat civilians in the enclave. Even Israel itself has delivered food, medical supplies, and equipment to Palestinian civilians in an unprecedented display of humanity. In other words, the cavalry has very much arrived in every sense of the word. Unfortunately, the show abused its own storytelling conceit to attack Israel.
This calumny is doubly disappointing because of the prime opportunity TAL relinquished to showcase an inspiring instance of valor and benevolence in the face of an actual, literal cavalry not coming. When Hamas terrorists so brutally attacked Israeli civilians during its October 7 onslaught, the Israeli army was, shockingly, nowhere to be found. Courageous Israelis of all walks of life fearlessly streamed to aid those in distress, grabbing whatever weapons they had on hand. More than 200 of these heroes — including the children of our friends and neighbors — made the ultimate sacrifice to save women and children. Their stories of selflessness are legion, as are the incredible efforts by Israeli civil society, in the immediate wake of the attack, to organize, feed, clothe, and care for those affected by the attacks and to prepare and equip an army of reservists more or less abandoned by the Israeli government. It was in Israel’s case, not Gaza’s, that the cavalry didn’t arrive, and it was in Israel, not in Gaza, where ordinary citizens stepped into the breach with grace, bravery, and generosity.
What adds insult to injury is that Israel Story, an Israeli version of TAL whose founder, Mishy Harman, frequently cites Glass as his inspiration and who has welcome Glass to his show, has spent the last two months dedicating itself to reporting on exactly these stories. Every day, Harman highlights the extraordinary efforts made by everyday Israelis in the absence of a functioning government and, on the day of Hamas’s barbaric onslaught, an absent army. One can only hope that Glass and his team atone for their mistakes by featuring these valiant and altruistic heroes on a future episode.