Hatred, condemnation and propaganda

 

The Jewish Chronicle, the voice of British Zionism, started its leader this week with the words: “The story is depressingly familiar. Israel acts to defend itself and the response from many mainstream figures is to condemn Israel.” This is a paper widely read by the Jewish community in the U.K. and it starts by reasserting it’s familiar cry - ‘no matter what atrocities our side commits, don’t forget we are the real victims here’.  After I wrote last week about freedom of the press, or rather the lack of it, two events occurred that pretty much summed up why we should be very alarmed about our ability to find the truth. The Jewish Chronicle alludes to the first event and most of this article is going to be about the alleged Palestinian attacks that meant Israel, that poor beleaguered, friendless state in the Middle East had to defend itself.

But before discussing that I did not want to let this pass. On Tuesday, blogger Craig Murray was given an 8 month prison sentence for, according to The Guardian “repeatedly breaching a court order protecting the identities of women who accused Alex Salmond of sexual assault.”  The BBC, meanwhile led by saying that the “former UK diplomat has been jailed for eight months over blogs he wrote about the trial of Alex Salmond.” Neither of these erstwhile defenders of the liberal notion of a free press mentioned that the terms of his right to appeal included a revocation of his right to travel meaning that he could not give evidence in person in Spain in support of Julian Assange. I don’t know the ins and outs of the Alex Salmond case but I do know that he was found not guilty and that his defence consisted in part of an allegation that he had been targeted by political rivals. It was this defence that led to Craig Murray, a thorn in the side of the establishment since he revealed that the British army used torture, finding himself on the wrong side of the dock. I can’t say for sure that Craig has been targeted for revealing the use of torture or for supporting Julian Assange, but it’s one hell of a coincidence.

Palestinian Aggression

But, this week has also been characterised by an intensification of Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza, and the unconscious bias of the British media asserted itself once again. On Newsnight Emily Maitlis spoke to Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian Ambassador to the U.K. Her sole concern was that Mr Zomlot, a Palestinian, should condemn Hamas for retaliating in the face of intensified Israeli aggression which left 9 children dead. When he refused to do so, rather than entering into a debate, Ms Maitlis simply closed him down. The BBC can barely bring itself to mention Palestine so Husam Zomlot gaining five minutes of airtime to express his anger at the treatment of his people should be applauded, but that throughout that time he was continually berated as if defending yourself against an occupying army is itself an act of aggression rather supports the claim that I made last week that the BBC, together with most of the mainstream media, have a specific agenda, all be it an unspoken one. That agenda is to support the status quo and we should not forget that the weapons Israel uses are often provided by the United States. In February Israel confirmed the purchase of $9 billion of American weaponry. 

To be fair to Newsnight and to Ms Maitlis, and you might ask why should I give them a consideration they so often lack for others, they also interviewed the Israel Ambassador, Tzipi Hotovely. It was not a friendly interview but it is striking that there was no demand that Ms Hotovely should condemn Israeli aggression as if that was the main problem. There was no exasperation that Ms Hotovely kept referring to “Palestinian terrorism”. There was no questioning of Israel’s right to be occupying parts of the West Bank, no reminder to Newsnight viewers that Israel is in contravention of numerous United Nations resolutions calling on them to withdraw from the lands they occupy illegally. What Ms Maitlis was concerned about was that Israel should act “responsibly” and not respond with excessive force to the Palestinian provocation. There was also no mention of the ‘coincidence’ that Netanyahu, currently being investigated on corruption charges, lost the recent election leaving the balance of power in the hands of Raam, described by the New York Times as “an Islamist group with roots in the same religious movement as Hamas” 

This is how propaganda works. Not massive placards declaring that Big Brother is watching you, but by repeating slanders against one side, whilst always, apparently giving the other side a fairer hearing. It is a process known as ‘framing’, and it ensures that the propaganda is not readily apparent. Jason Stanley, a writer on propaganda, put it this way: “Propaganda arises even if no one intends it. And that’s because it’s a corporate media. There’s a relationship between the media and the government. The government won’t share secrets with the media if they don’t comply, like we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War.”  His point is that news media are forever chasing ratings but at the same time they have adopted a quite perverse view of balance. As Stanley says: “the purveyors of propaganda want you to think that in order to be real, we’ve got to counterbalance everything. We have to always have the “other” side, the other perspective, the other truth.” The result has been to allow conspiracy theorists and cranks equal billing with scientists, academics and those with a deep factual knowledge.

Dominant narratives

Whilst Jason is undoubtedly right, what it leaves out is that having both sides is not the same thing as treating both sides fairly. Most readers of this blog will recall Emily Maitlis turning to camera during an interview with Barry Gardiner and raising her eyebrows. This was a blatant display of bias, for which nobody at the BBC reprimanded her, because it was part of a dominant narrative which the BBC were promoting. In short Labour with Jeremy Corbyn as leader are untrustworthy. In terms of what is happening in Israel the BBC, like most of the mainstream media, simply choose not to report the daily acts of aggression against Palestinians. It is as if they never happened. But when Israelis were tragically killed in a religious festival that was widely reported. 

I am not saying that the deaths of Orthodox Jews do not matter. But, that was one tragic event. Every day a Palestinian family lose their home as the Israeli’s forcibly remove them and steal the land for themselves. As Mondoweiss reported in August at the height of the pandemic which was disproportionately affecting Arabs who were denied access to the vaccines which Israel was providing its own citizens: “On Monday, two Palestinian families in the Silwan and Jabal al-Mukkabir neighborhoods of the city were forced to demolish their homes, under the pretext that they were built “illegally.”Israel’s Jerusalem Municipality had given the family two choices: either demolish their homes themselves, or wait until Israeli authorities come to destroy them, and then incur the hefty demolition fee from the municipality.”  There is no justification for this. It is an illegal act carried out by an illegal occupying force and is ‘ethnic cleansing’. These daily acts of illegality only become news when those being brutalised fight back. At which point we are asked to condemn them for using violence.

As human rights activist Natalie Strecker told the Socialist Hour  podcast: “Who of us would tolerate a 14 year brutal blockade where our hospitals are failing, where there isn’t enough basic supplies, and where periodically we see the Israeli government doing what they do, which is mowing the lawn. Where they go in and they’re bombing civilian neighbourhoods. Who of us would tolerate 73 years of ethnic cleansing, of apartheid, of incremental genocide…Who of us would tolerate this. This is the thing, when we look at the situation and this whole condemn Hamas, well what would I do?”

When we die, we die together

The truth is that none of us really know how we would react. Because for most of us living in the comforts of Western Europe war and occupation are things that happen far away. We can express outrage but at the end of the day we can go to bed safe in the knowledge our homes won’t be blown to pieces during the night. By now most of us will have heard of the famous Israeli Iron Dome,  which intercepts over 90% of Hamas’s rockets. Meanwhile, a Palestinian Twitter user Eman Basher tweeted “Tonight, I put the kids to sleep in our bedroom. So that when we die, we die together and no one would live to mourn the loss of one another.” (Thanks here to Rachael Swindon who used this quote in her blog post). This is heartbreaking enough, but the truth is that the Palestinians have no defences against the Israeli bombardment. 

On Newsnight, as on most of the mainstream media the pounding of the Palestinians is presented as a “conflict”. According to my dictionary a conflict is “a struggle or clash between opposing forces”. This suggests some kind of symmetry between the two forces. What is happening in Gaza is not a struggle between two opposing forces. It is an assault by a well armed, aggressive army with tanks, guided missiles and jet planes and a civilian population armed with prayers and a few rocks from the rubble of houses destroyed by the missiles of their attackers.

Of course Hamas has rockets. At the last count they had about 2,000 home made short range missiles. Unlike the Israeli weapons they are countering these are not precision weapons. But, we should be clear, they are not fireworks either. If they hit they can do a considerable amount of damage. The problem for Hamas is that they don’t usually hit. One reason they tend to fire a barrage is that they know that the Israeli’s will intercept over 90% of the rockets Hamas launch. But these rockets can, and occasionally do, kill. Should we therefore condemn Hamas for launching weapons they know can kill and maim?

Who are the real victims?

The concentration on Hamas aggression is an attempt to paint the Israeli’s as victims. Therefore, whatever the Israeli’s do in retaliation is legitimate because they are defending themselves. But as Noura Erakat wrote in 2014 as an occupying force Israel has no right to “defend” itself. As he explains:

“A state cannot simultaneously exercise control over territory it occupies and militarily attack that territory on the claim that it is “foreign” and poses an exogenous national security threat. In doing precisely that, Israel is asserting rights that may be consistent with colonial domination but simply do not exist under international law.”

The problem with the Israeli victimhood claim is that it rests on a falsehood. As Husam Zomlot tried to explain to Emily Maitlis the media, in a typical ahistorical approach to any story, start from a point that paints one side as the aggressors. Before Hamas fired a single rocket Israel had launched an attack on a mosque. Gangs of Israeli’s were, literally, rampaging through Jerusalem shouting “kill the Arabs”. And this was not even the start of the Israeli aggression. Unseen by most people because the BBC don’t consider it news Israel have been slowly persecuting Arabs out of their homes and handing them to Israeli “settlers” for the past couple of years. Arab villages have been bull dozed. Palestinian youth have been used for target practice. Perhaps you knew this but not if you were relying on the BBC for your news.

As Jacobin Magazine report: “Since 2008, Israel has killed roughly 6,000 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians — 1,250 were children. By comparison, 251 Israelis have been killed in the same period. Since 2009, Israeli demolitions have displaced over 11,400 Palestinians, more than 2,600 of them in East Jerusalem. Almost 620,000 Israelis are settled on Palestinian land in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in violation of international law.” 

The death toll is not an accident, it is not, as the media constantly tell us, a reaction to Palestinian terrorism. Let’s be clear here. There are terrorists. Nobody should deny this. But they are not Palestinian, but come dressed in the olive green uniform of the so-called Israeli Defence Force. They are supported by a civilian population whose views were laid bare in a widely shared video from Empire Files in which young Israelis were unanimous in their belief that the appropriate response to Arabs was to ‘carpet bomb them’, because “we need to kill the Arabs”, as “the Jews have the right to hate them” . 

We shall overcome

A recent poll reported in The Times of Israel found that between 23-49%, dependent on religious group, expressed hatred for Arabs. As the paper notes: “Given that people often avoid admitting their hatred toward another group when responding to polls, the aChord study noted that the high rates “may show that expressing hatred is considered acceptable.””  Among Arab Israelis who were polled hatred toward Israelis was much lower, 12-23% depending whether they were asked about secular or religious Israelis. This culture of hatred toward Arabs is not the sole reason for the continued aggression, that is political and economic, but provides the backdrop for the widespread support amongst Israelis for the continued ethnic cleansing.

In 1935 the Nazis passed the Nuremberg laws which removed  Jews from German citizenship.   In 1950 South Africa passed the Population Registration Act which made blacks second class citizens.  In 2018, Israel passed the Nation State Law which made Arabs second class citizens.   In 1935 few outside of Germany reported what the Germans were doing or opposed it. In 1950 the world’s press regarded what was happening in South Africa as their business. In 2018 the World’s media paid little attention to the fact that Arabs had just been made second class citizens. In all three cases there were reports in the press but no outrage. For most people life went on as normal.

But by 1945, despite most of the British establishment having Nazi sympathies Germany was fought to a standstill. By 1990, the African National Congress, derided by the establishment (many of whom are still in Government) as terrorists and supported by millions of supporters around the World overcame apartheid. The message here for Israel is: you are not the victims. You picked this fight and millions of us around the World stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Palestine and in the words of the old song “we shall overcome”.