“My God, it’s like the military intervention in Rio’s favelas — only much worse.” That’s what The Intercept’s Cecília Olliveira said repeatedly in horror as we walked through Israeli military checkpoints and the barred streets of Hebron, the dystopian city that is the largest in the West Bank , Palestine, is.
Religious Israeli settlers often foreignborn, in countries like the United States are trying, house by house, inch by inch, to strangle and uproot Palestinian society in Hebron and take over the holy city. It is their “divine right,” they argue. International law and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem use a different vocabulary: illegal occupation, apartheid and crimes against humanity, among others.
The city’s segregated and militarized reality is shocking to any outsider, but conditions are much better than those for Palestinians living in Gaza, considered by human rights organizations to be the largest and most overcrowded openair prison in the world. with 2 million inhabitants.
On Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made openly genocidal statements: “We will turn Gaza into a desert island.” To the citizens of Gaza, I say: you must leave now. We will attack every single corner of the Strip.” Evacuate or be bombed except that the citizens of Gaza have no place to flee.
The national security minister who will help Netanyahu fulfill that promise is Itamar BenGvir, an extremist settler who was convicted by an Israeli court in 2007 of supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism against Palestinians.
In a series of military attacks on densely populated civilian areas in recent years, Israel has bombed water treatment plants, power plants, hospitals and schools in the Gaza Strip, closed its borders and ports, banned the operation of an airport and destroyed at least a third of Gaza’s urban farmland since 2000, when Illegal Israeli settlements in the area were evacuated. On Saturday, Israel launched another bombardment of the Gaza Strip, its eighth major attack since 2005.
The immediate cause was an unprecedented use of violence by the militant wing of Hamas, the political party that has ruled Gaza since the last elections in 2006 and enjoys the support of the Palestinian people. Dubbed “Operation Storm alAqsa,” this attack comes amid a series of aggressively provocative actions by the Israeli government in recent months which have generally been left out of reporting as well as 75 years of occupation and 16 years of embargo on tight quarters Gaza.
International observers, Palestinian leaders and Palestinian opinion polls have long signaled that a violent response to Israeli aggression was on the horizon, but Israel’s farright leadership never imagined a coup of this magnitude was possible.
So far, more than 413 Palestinians and 700 Israelis have been killed. There are still more than 2,300 injured on each side.
After ignoring the daily attacks against Palestinians, the world’s eyes are now on the ongoing tragedy in Palestine and Israel. And as one might expect, many of the same old distortions, lies and halftruths are being repeated in the corporate media and social media to legitimize Israeli violence and attack Palestinian resistance to colonization.
Below I list a selection of some of the most pervasive and damaging media narratives in both the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil, where the business press largely reflects American views on international affairs.
1. The “IsraelPalestine conflict” is a “war”
Referring to the Israeli occupation of Palestine as a “conflict” or the Israeli attacks as part of a “war” incorrectly serves to create a false equivalence between the two parties, as if they were equal and balanced.
Israel is an independent nation that invests R$120 billion annually in military and intelligence forces that are among the most advanced in the world. It controls the borders, skies, seacoasts, telecommunications and economy of Palestine, whose government has extremely limited autonomy. The Palestinian armed resistance has for years included knives, fireworks, homemade explosives and paragliders as essential parts of its arsenal. The Palestinians have no tanks, aircraft, warships, submarines or heavy artillery. In recent years they have received more foreign military aid still paltry compared to the might of the Israeli military.
Israel is not in “war” or “conflict” with Hamas or the Palestinian nation it is an illegal colonial occupation force that uses its powerful army to commit crimes against humanity on a daily basis to oppress the Palestinians, a people , that resists their racist colonization.
2. Israel is a “Western democracy”
Apart from a series of authoritarian political and legal decisions in recent years, Israel holds regular elections, has a parliament, a Supreme Court, a reasonably free press and all the institutions of a democracy. But one important thing is missing: the 5 million Palestinians under Israeli occupation do not have the right to vote. If everyone subject to Israeli authority had the right to vote, the majority would be Palestinian and Israeli politics would be completely different. If we include the millions of Palestinian refugees outside the country who would like to return to their homeland, the picture becomes even clearer.
In addition, the Zionist electoral majority has passed a number of discriminatory laws aimed at restricting the rights of nonJewish citizens of Israel. These are the main reasons why many international observers do not consider Israel to be a true democracy.
And while we know this is not the case in practice, we fundamentally expect Western democracies to at least pretend to respect human rights. Israel has not had this claim for years.
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3. The absence of the word “apartheid”
The United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and many other prominent organizations and scholars have described Israel as a colonial apartheid state. This means that the state practices systematic racial discrimination and segregation in inhumane ways to oppress certain population groups. The evidence is overwhelming and this is the reality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel and even more so for the Palestinian colonizers in the occupied territories.
This fact, denied by the Israeli authorities and often ignored or relativized by the press, is an important element of the Palestinian call for justice and selfdetermination and is crucial in showing why Palestinian resistance is a legitimate liberation struggle and not just senseless terrorism and antiterrorism is Semitism, as one would have you believe.
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4. “Israel responded to Palestinian aggression” (Palestine is always the aggressor)
Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians which constitute war crimes are almost always portrayed as a response to Palestinian provocations, thereby incriminating colonized Palestinians. This portrayal by much of the press helps to diminish Israel’s culpability and is generally an arbitrary portrayal that ignores Israelis’ criminal provocations against Palestinians often with the full knowledge that these actions will lead to a bellicose response .
Nothing unites societies better than a common threat, and in the past Israeli leaders have repeatedly been accused of deliberately provoking violent reactions to strengthen political cohesion and gain public support.
Hamas explicitly states that its actions today are an attempt to draw the attention of the international community to the plight of the Palestinian people. “We want the international community to stop the atrocities in Gaza, against the Palestinian people and at our holy sites like AlAqsa. “All of these things are the reason this fight started,” Hamas spokesman Khaled Qadomi told Al Jazeera.
Israel is currently led by the farright government in its history and is experiencing serious political unrest, including historic demonstrations that have brought millions of citizens to the streets to protest against new authoritarian reforms that weaken the power of the judiciary. This extremist government has been aggressively provoking tensions with the Palestinians for months, and Palestinian leaders have warned the international community that these provocations represented an escalation that would lead to further escalation.
Last July, Israel invaded Jenin, one of the largest refugee camps in the West Bank, killing 12 people and destroying 80% of the homes after bulldozing the streets. A government minister publicly declared that “there is no” Palestinian people and, following a massacre carried out by Israeli settlers in the Palestinian village of Huwara, said the place should be “obliterated” by the state.
The Israeli provocations are too numerous to list, but many have focused on Jerusalem’s AlAqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site. The mosque and its surroundings have been the scene of repeated and incessant acts of violence by Israeli security forces and ultraOrthodox Jewish settlers, who often chanted “Death to Arabs.”
“The daily attacks on holy and religious sites during the holy month of Ramadan are reprehensible and unacceptable actions that will inflame and drag the region into the abyss,” a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, which represents the Palestinian people internationally, said in April this year . The provocations continued and three days ago, ultraOrthodox Jews, with the help of Israeli security forces, entered the area around the mosque a serious and deliberate crime.
Israel has also recently restricted the rights of Palestinian prisoners, leading to a hunger strike by hundreds of prisoners and a protest in Gaza in which Israeli soldiers killed one protester and injured nine others. More than 5,000 Palestinians are being imprisoned by Israel, including many elected political leaders, such as popular Palestinian resistance hero Marwan Barghouti.
Add to that 75 years of occupation, a 16year embargo on Gaza, and rationing of basic goods from water and food to medical care that deliberately strangled the local economy.
Damage caused this Saturday (7) by an Israeli offensive in the city of Gaza, Palestine. Photo: Mohammed Abu Oun/Thenews2/Folhapress
5. Israel has the right to defend itself (Palestine does not)
Israel, its allies such as the US and German governments, and the mainstream media tend to repeat the same phrase just before Israel bombs civilian areas: “Israel has the absolute right to defend itself.” This is what British Prime Minister Rishi said Sunak on Saturday.
That nations can and should defend their sovereignty is widely recognized, but this concept does not apply to offensive actions or attacks against civilians. The press continues to portray Israeli attacks on Palestinians as legitimate “retaliatory” and “defensive” acts of war, as if any attacks they launch are “absolutely” justified, even if they are directed against civilians.
If violence were viewed in its full context, it would be more likely to be viewed as aggressive acts of violence designed to demoralize and divide a colonized people, even when using collective punishment, which is a war crime under international law.
While Israel is always (incorrectly) portrayed as defensive, Hamas is portrayed as belligerent and therefore its “absolute right to defend itself” is not even discussed. As momentum builds, the usual response is to label Hamas a terrorist force and state the impact its operations have on Israeli civilians arguments that would be weakened if not applied unilaterally.
Since Israel is theoretically responsible for the first act of aggression the occupation and is the occupying power with overwhelming military superiority, it should be viewed as a provocateur and also face more charges than a guerrilla movement of anticolonial resistance. In reality, the exact opposite happens in the mainstream press.
6. Hamas is a terrorist organization (but not Israel)
The United States government designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1997 and provides billions of dollars in aid to Israel each year.
According to the United Nations, before Operation Storm alAqsa, Israeli forces had killed more than 6,300 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, and injured another 150,000 since 2008. The Palestinians killed 308 Israelis 131 of them civilians and injured 6,307 others.
Israel has repeatedly been shown to specifically target civilians, hold children in solitary confinement for long periods of time, torture prisoners held without charge, shelter settlers as they ransack Palestinian villages, destroy homes, and ration water below minimum requirements set by the World Health Ministry lies organization and much more. Human Rights Watch even went so far as to call Israel’s actions a “crime against humanity.”
This is a very incomplete list of the Israeli state’s daily terrorism.
There is clearly a double standard at play, and this “terrorist” label is rhetorically important to accurately cover the atrocities committed by Israel.
We should all be horrified by terrorism. And therefore, condemning the actions of the weaker side and at the same time giving the colonizers a free pass, minimizing their crimes or, even worse, providing financial, political and rhetorical support, only serves to perpetuate the situation and encourage further acts of horror .
7. All Palestinian attacks on Israel are terrorism
International human rights conventions have repeatedly affirmed the right of colonized and occupied peoples to resist their colonization.
Several UN General Assembly resolutions “affirm the legitimacy of the peoples’ struggle for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial rule, apartheid and foreign occupation.” by all available means, including armed struggle.”
UN resolutions also explicitly state: “The denial of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to selfdetermination, sovereignty, independence and return to Palestine.” […]as well as [reconhecem que] “Repeated Israeli aggression against the region’s population poses a serious threat to international peace and security.”
The Geneva Conventions protect individuals who “struggle against colonial rule and foreign occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right to selfdetermination” a recognition of the legitimacy of such armed struggles.
The same conventions do not allow attacks on civilians, which include heavily armed illegal settlers or military reservists the majority of Israel’s adult population who are not actively involved in combat operations.
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8. “It’s a very complex topic”
This is a popular rhetorical tactic of liberal Zionists who do not want to openly defend war crimes and of people afraid of taking an unpopular moral stand. Of course, there are many details, facts and nuances.
But the bigger picture is even clearer: Israel is a colonial nation that has stolen Palestinian land with guns blazing and is carrying out an ethnic cleansing that continues to this day. It is therefore an immoral, genocidal, terrorist and illegitimate government, and Palestinian resistance is justified under international law and moral conventions.
Palestinian refugees around the world have the right to return home. The international community must take action to force Israel to accept a fair solution and prevent the bloodshed of innocent people and ethnic cleansing. The existence of an ethnoreligious state contradicts all modern liberal and democratic values.
9. “The TwoState Solution”
For years, the preferred political solution to the Israeli occupation of Palestine was the socalled “twostate solution,” in which historic Palestine was divided into two coexisting states, one predominantly Jewish and the other predominantly nonJewish. This would mean the end of the occupation and a chance for lasting peace.
The details of such a resolution were long negotiated and both sides came very close to an agreement in the 1990s, but that opportunity ended when a farright Israeli terrorist assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzka Rabin in 1995. Since then, the establishment of Israeli politics has been shaped. The country moved further to the right and Israel began to illegally occupy large parts of the West Bank, making any agreement effectively impossible. Today, threequarters of Palestinians believe that a twostate solution is no longer possible.
The only possible option at the moment is a onestate solution. And if that were to happen today, the Jews would be in the minority, which is why Zionists today prefer to maintain the status quo of a single state with occupied territories and apartheid and would not consider a democratic solution of a single state with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has full political rights.
Those still debating the possibility of a twostate solution are essentially buying time for the status quo as Israel expands its illegal occupation of territory and seeks to overtake the Palestinians in terms of population through return policies, immigration too increase birth rates in fundamentalist religious communities.
10. Criticism of Israel is “antiSemitic”
For many years, any criticism of Israel was labeled antiSemitism. This was particularly true in the United States, where many journalists were fired for making factual comments that were not sufficiently proIsrael. Extreme selfcensorship on this topic has become the norm in American newsrooms a reality I have personally experienced.
While antiSemites could of course criticize Israel, and criticism of Israel could be expressed in antiSemitic ways, this connection is often not present.
Ironically, the accusation that opposition to Israel is inherently antiSemitic is itself an antiSemitic concept, as it combines a diverse ethnoreligious identity into a single political position. It is as wrong and offensive as saying that all Muslims are terrorists because ISIS is “Islamic,” which is an Islamophobic sentiment cultivated in this polite society by some of the same people who argue that any criticism of Israel is antiSemitic.
The use of this cynical argument by proponents of a racist apartheid state actually has the effect of increasing antiSemitism in the world by telling nonJews that all Jews are equal and supporting the Israeli Zionist government’s terror policies. Among nonIsraeli Jews, especially younger ones, support for Zionism and Israel is falling precipitously every year and that worries the government.
Criticism of Israel is not antiSemitic.
11. Israel is a beacon of progressive values in a sea of regressive Islamic enemies
Israel is a nation of settlers in which an ideological movement of Zionist Jews, predominantly from Europe and North America, aims to establish a “homeland” for the Jewish people their Zion. The state was founded after the horrors of the Holocaust, but the settler movement predates it by half a century.
To create this state, Zionist Jews moved from other countries and systematically murdered the Palestinians living there long before the word “Zionism” was mentioned. They also created laws containing dozens of forms of legal discrimination against Palestinians to force them to leave the territory and have fewer children so that Zionist Jews could become the majority in the population.
Palestinians have lived under an ethnoreligious apartheid regime since Jewish paramilitary terrorist militias swept through historic Palestine on May 15, 1948. What the Israelis consider their declaration of independence, the Palestinians call the Nakba “the catastrophe”. At least 750,000 Palestinians, including Muslims and Christians, were forced to flee their homes, while forces determined to establish a “Jewish state” occupied 78 percent of the region, where many ethnic groups of different religions have lived together for millennia.
Around 530 Palestinian towns and villages were attacked and at least 15,000 Palestinians were killed in the Nakba. In subsequent military and paramilitary actions, Israel has occupied more and more land and established militarized colonies inhabited by religious fanatics born in various parts of the world who have no intention of giving up an inch of this land, considering their occupation as such see land as a prophecy. biblical.
And indeed, eliminating these religious fanatics will be difficult because the increasingly controlling and extremist Israeli government has a stockpile of nuclear weapons and continues to be supported by the United States government.