If Hamas had the propaganda machine that Israel has, well, we might think that the Palestinians in Gaza have a right to defend themselves, that Hamas is actually a national resistance organization, and that the Israeli government is a perpetrator of state terror against civilians.
But you won’t see that in the NY Times or the Washington Post because they likely are getting their talking points directly from the National Information Directorate (NID), Israel’s spin machine whose job is to frame government lies and reduce them to sound bites for media consumption.
Mainstream media coverage of Gaza is beyond biased—it’s staged. Editorial pages and TV news shows are flooded with pro-Israel spokespersons. Interviews stick to a few repetitive talking points. Canned responses are never challenged. Underlying assumptions are never questioned. Dialogue is steeped in the simplistic “good versus evil” frame. No one questions, analyzes, or thinks. History, too, is violated, truncated to begin with the December 2008 barrage of rockets that, we are to believe, was the straw that finally broke the long-suffering patience of the Israeli government. Sound bites and spin have long substituted for journalism and analysis in the U.S. media; in the current Gazan conflict they have reached an apotheosis.
This disastrous situation—and if you’ve lived long enough, you would have seen it get progressively worse since Vietnam—demands to be challenged. Basic points of propaganda have to be unpacked and the entire picture must be reframed. We can begin with the two most pervasive cliches repeated ad nauseam by Israeli propagandists:
1. Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel had no choice but to launch a war. Against the onslaught of Hamas rockets, what would any other country have done?
2. Israel’s war is against the terrorist group Hamas, not against the Palestinian people. Israel does not target civilians, only terrorists. But, since terrorists use civilians as human shields, all civilian deaths and casualties are Hamas’ fault.
The reality? The larger picture is becoming crystal clear. But grasping it means giving up those insidious sound bites Americans are so addicted to and learning to frame events through logic and history.
Who has a right to self-defense? And what about those rockets?
That Israel, or any sovereign state, has a right to defend itself is not really at issue, and the fact that the Israelis continually resort to that smokescreen says a lot about the illegitimate nature of their assault on Gaza in particular and Palestinian society in general.
We’ve seen a new sound bite spring up in this war to bring the Israeli “self-defense against terrorists” claim to America’s doorstep: “If Canadians were lobbing rockets at Vermont wouldn’t the U.S. have a right to bomb Canada?”
Like most rationalizations born in desperation, this is pathetically void of reason. Canada and the U.S. are both sovereign states. International law gives sovereign states the right to defend their borders. Now, while Israel is a sovereign state, Gaza is an occupied territory. Despite Israel “leaving” Gaza in 2005, Gaza is still effectively occupied, since Israel controls land, air, and sea access, which it immediately sealed after pulling its troops and settlers out in 2005. This ongoing blockade has resulted in a grave humanitarian crisis.
We should also recognize that most Gazans are refugees from the very Israeli settlements Hamas is rocketing—driven out of their homes in the 1948 Israeli takeover of Palestinian land. This is all background information that is freely available in libraries and on the internet, but the Israeli government counts on Americans being as incurious as their leaders. Israel’s continued control and blockade over all means into and out of Gaza is a key issue in this present crisis: the siege is an immediate cause of the rocket resistance, and lifting the siege must be a part of a negotiated cease-fire.
The Israeli blockade of Gaza may be considered an act of war. Furthermore, denying an entire population food and medicine is a form of collective punishment and disproportionate violence, both of which are war crimes. So, even before we arrive at the latest brutality of the actual bombing of Gaza from land, air, and sea in December 2008, we have nearly three years of consistently tighter and stricter blockade measures that had humanitarian groups begging for international intervention.
Since so much of Israel’s propaganda around its right to defense depends on framing itself as the victim, it’s crucial that we be clear about who in this situation is legally and morally the victim and who is the victimizer. If we begin the narrative with a terrorist Hamas entering stage right and lobbying rockets at innocent civilians in Sderot, then we get one picture—the ahistorical NID picture. But if we widen the lens and go back a few years, we see that Hamas rockets are actually a defensive (and quite proportionate) response to the siege of Gaza and the violence of the occupation.
That the people of Gaza, and the West Bank, have a right to self-defense is recognized by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2649, which: “Affirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples under colonial and alien domination recognized as being entitled to the right of self-determination to restore to themselves that right by any means at their disposal.” The Resolution also “Considers that the acquisition and retention of territory in contravention of the right of the people of that territory to self-determination is inadmissible and a gross violation of the [UN] Charter.”
Terrorists and Civilians
Since 9/11, “terrorists” have become the new communists. “Terrorist”—one who uses force or threats as a political policy to intimidate and subjugate—is a term with wide appeal to world governments. “Terrorist” is ambiguous and flexible: any individual, group, or nation can be labeled a terrorist by any other individual, group, or nation. “Terrorist” has the ability to instantly delegitimize any organized resistance by implying that resistance movements are a threat, not to their oppressors, but to the masses of civilians. “Terrorist” has great fear potential: it pushes our “security” buttons, so populations easily fall into compliance and willingly forfeit their civil liberties when the threat of terrorism is raised by their leaders. “Terrorist” also has long-term potential; unlike communists, who were more or less tied to the life and death of the Soviet Union, terrorists are linked to a religious ideology, Islam, and can endure indefinitely.
Although historically “terror” was understood to be the advantage of the dominant classes, particularly the state, to keep the masses in line, it is no surprise that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the term is redefined to mean any resistance to Israeli occupation. Had Hamas never used suicide bombings or rockets against Israeli civilians, had not one single Israeli civilian died in the last 60 years at the hands of a Palestinian, it would not have made any difference—the act of resistance itself is enough to earn the label of terrorist.
But civilians did die—and many thousands more Palestinians than Israelis—so the “Israel as victim” frame was redeployed to absolve the Israeli state from legal and moral responsibility for all civilian deaths. The state, it is argued, is just defending itself from terrorists who target civilians and use civilians as human shields. Every civilian death in Gaza has been attributed to Hamas—not only by Israeli propaganda, but publicly by the U.S. Congress.
The targeting of civilians by Hamas rockets is used by the Israelis to delegitimize Palestinian resistance and rationalize the massacre in Gaza. But it smacks of the double standard so common among states.
In Gaza, numerous accounts of Israel targeting civilians have been reported by the UN, human rights organizations, and European aid agencies. Amnesty International investigators have collected evidence that the Israeli army holds Palestinian families prisoner in their own homes as human shields: “Our sources in Gaza report that Israeli soldiers have entered and taken up positions in a number of Palestinian homes, forcing families to stay in a ground floor room while they use the rest of their house as a military base and sniper position,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme. “This clearly increases the risk to the Palestinian families concerned and means they are effectively being used as human shields.”
Nor is targeting civilians a new charge against Israel. The slaughter of Palestinian civilians by Israel or its puppet allies has been documented at Sabra and Chatila in 1982, where up to 3,500 civilians were murdered; in Qana in 1996, where 106 civilians were bombed; and in Lebanon in 2006, where more than 1,000 civilians were killed by an Israeli invasion. In addition, thousands of Palestinian youth were killed or maimed for the single crime of throwing stones at their military occupiers, and journalists and peace workers, like Rachel Corrie, have been murdered by the Israeli military just for taking photos and teaching Palestinian children. In fact, the practice of Israelis targeting civilians by using Palestinians as human shields has been so widespread that in 2005 Israel’s Supreme Court actually ruled that the Israeli Defense Forces were prohibited from continuing the practice. In this current crisis, the siege and destruction of Gaza is nothing if not the targeting of civilians and the civilian infrastructure.
Is it just about land?
Territory is certainly the major issue behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since 1967, Israel has sabotaged every attempt at peace, including funding Hamas as a counter to Fatah, since it knew that Hamas at that time rejected the idea of a two-state solution. But now that Hamas has repeatedly agreed to peace based on the 1967 borders, Israel has had to find other obstacles to sabotage the peace process. Pulling out of Gaza in 2005 was only a prelude to building more settlements on the West Bank—it was meant to kill the two-state solution, not support it. There is more than enough historical documentation to argue that Israel does not want a two-state solution because it does not want to give up the Palestinian territory it has already annexed.
But behind the conflict over land is the deeper and more intransigent issue of racism, and the apartheid state that Israel is building speaks volumes to the bigotry that lies at the heart of the zionist project. It is embedded in Israeli laws, is inculcated early in Israeli children, and the Israeli press reports that anti-Arab racism is making ideas like population exchange and racial segregation more acceptable to the Israeli population. This can only further the true Israeli agenda of pushing the Palestinian population onto Egypt and Jordan, or keeping it locked indefinitely within an apartheid state.
Gaza, and the Islamic Resistance Movement (aka: Hamas), are paying the price for 60 years of terror, dispossession, and duplicity on the part of Israel and its U.S. and European allies.
