My dear American friends What has been amazingly clear during this latest attack on Gaza is that cycles of brutality are continued and reinforced by cycles of rhetoric. The Israeli PR machine works by constantly shifting and re-setting the parameters of the critique. Opinions are made and forgotten. investigations are held and dismissed. First principles are ignored and histories are erased by carefully trained spokespeople who excel in double-speak and a logic of empathetic violence audience-tested for optimum American scrumptiousness. Their mantra: it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear. The facts are all out there that, together, make a case that is undeniably damning for Israel. But the damnation is endlessly postponed and complexified by a media machine that forces distractions to the forefront of the debate. The statistics, the photographs, the captured anguishes do not lie - and yet it is the spin that gathers quickly around them that dominates the agenda. Since the beginning of this assault, Israeli campaign has changed three times - The words were: kidnapped, rockets and then tunnels. The following day the death toll spiked, with 60 people killed in 24 hours, and a fourth buzz term entered the arena: human shield. Now that tunnels are all allegedly destroyed, if another word is needed it will be “disarm” KIDNAPPED: the Israeli government has now admitted that Hamas did not kidnap the three boys. ROCKETS: Israel boasts about its Iron Dome defense system, claiming it is a prime specimen of Israeli engineering that keeps its civilians safe. What little damage they do is caused mainly by the momentum of their impact.” To date, two Israelis and one Thai civilian have been killed by these rockets, giving them a kill rate of 0.1%. The number of Palestinians killed? 1,886. HUMAN SHIELDS: Hamas uses human shields. The fact is that it is Israel, and not Hamas, who have been documented as using human shields. The UN’s Goldstone Report into Operation Cast Lead found Israel had killed civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and documented multiple instances of Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields. TUNNELS: No civilian has ever been abducted through them. Along the Egyptian border it is not Hamas that builds the tunnels, they merely tax the goods being moved through by the entrepreneurs that dig and own them. Israel talks of a “terrorist organization [that] deliberately embeds its terrorist infrastructure inside civilians neighborhoods” when actually a system of loosely regulated capitalism is what governs the tunnel industry. The operation is not about the tunnels, and never has been. Just as it was not about the kidnapped boys who were already dead or the rockets that don’t explode. After Israeli public opinion was satiated sixteen months ago a ceasefire was agreed, which Israel proceeded to violate 191 times, killing 18 people. The Palestinians violated it 75 times, killing none. Who is it that is indiscriminately terrorizing a civilian population for a political goal? The media in the USA and Israel always to refer to “Hamas” and not “Palestinians” (Americans are sympathetic to Palestinians, they are not to Hamas), to hit the word “terrorist” as often as possible and stress that Hamas is “committed to the destruction of Israel.” Israel is never mentioned that in their 2006 election manifesto, Hamas dropped their call for the destruction of Israel and simply reaffirmed their right to armed resistance. In 2006, as Hamas were engaging in the democratic process, they announced they were to stop using suicide bombers. At the other end of the battle are the much hyped Israeli Hasbara War Rooms. Young, educated volunteers doing their bit for their army and their country is a news-friendly piece. But now that Israel is focussing on rockets, tunnels and human shields the online output has been little more than a toxic trickle of hate speech, incitement to violence, rallying the troops and shallow victimhood that, combined, are deeply confused as to whether they should be denying what is happening or justifying it. Sentences like “Hamas deprived Palestinian civilians of vital humanitarian aid” accept implicitly that there is a humanitarian catastrophe happening. Hamas, they write is “cynically sacrificing the residents of Gaza it uses as human shields. It must be stopped”. Who, exactly, is it sacrificing these civilians to? And how will it be stopped? By killing more of them? Today it feels largely outdated with tweets :(“Hamas fires rockets at Israel from everywhere in Gaza - nowhere in the Strip is safe from Hamas reign of terror”) to the cinematically imaginative (“Everything you need to know about Hamas’ underground city of terror”). But on television, with the notable exception of Jon Snow, the Israeli spokespeople are rarely asked to back up their info graphical sound bites. The BBC has had thousands of people protesting outside its offices for perceived systemic bias in favor of Israel. There has been an unprecedented level of public celebrity support for Palestine. There has been an upswing in global protest that they have demonstrated that around the world the views of the people are increasingly discordant with those of their governments. For any intifada to be the Last Intifada it has to swell from inside the 1948 territories. Freedom of movement must start from inside. For Palestinians in Gaza it means no siege, freedom to fish, freedom to leave and return, freedom to trade, freedom to work, freedom to breathe. For Palestinians in the Diaspora it means freedom to return home. The central truth is that the contradiction at the heart of Zionism can never be resolved - there can be no state that is Jewish and democratic when 20% of your citizens and a full 50% of the lives under your control are not Jewish. There can be only equality or ethnic cleansing.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 23:19:26 +0000
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