The Gaza Strip and the occupied Palestinian territories are currently the subject of two major offensives: the attack by the so-called “Israeli” Defense Forces (IDF) against the Gaza Strip and the harassment in the West Bank as well as the media offensive by the major Western media, allied with the powers that support the state of “Israel”.
This media offensive tries to place in the collective subconscious a group of “truths” that will help to understand current events from a vision favorable to “Israel”. Given this spectrum of readings and meanings, it is appropriate to question some of the fundamental stories or visions of these great media.
Hamas and the Palestinian resistance are terrorists
What happened on October 7th only makes sense from a historical perspective. In a lecture at the University of Berkeley on October 19 this year, the eminent anti-Zionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappé stated:
“The Palestinian people have probably been engaged in a liberation struggle since 1929. It is a fight against its colonizers and like any anti-colonial struggle it has its ups and downs, its moments of glory and its difficult moments of violence.” Decolonization is not a sterile, pharmaceutical process, but a messy affair. And the longer colonialism and oppression continue, the more likely the outbreak will be violent and desperate in many ways.”
The only way to understand the nature of the struggle waged by the Palestinian resistance, including its excesses, is to understand the history of decades of sustained dispossession and murder of the Palestinian people. Murder and expropriation, committed before the eyes of the international community, with the support of the main powers in the West and in the face of the inability of multilateral organizations to do absolutely nothing about it.
And exacerbated by the situation that the Gaza Strip in particular has been experiencing for 16 years, which is surrounded on all sides and in which the Israeli occupying forces even decide on the number of calories that pass through the few access points every day. An area where more than two million people are crowded together, regularly bombed and where “Israel” has gradually taken care to destroy all the basic infrastructure that ensured a minimum of livability in the enclave.
The brutality of the Palestinian actions of October 7th, which is overstated and distorted by the hegemonic media, is primarily the reaction of a people demanding their right to self-defense in struggle. Their excesses are the result of the brutal and unpunished harassment they have been subjected to for decades They are nothing compared to what “Israel” has committed for 75 years without even acknowledging the fragile morality that is being shaken by Palestinian actions today.
Characterizing Palestinian movements as terrorists allows them to be reduced to a stereotype that is widespread in the West, especially since the attacks in New York in 2001.. It is a permeable definition that ultimately summarizes and unifies all political forces opposing Western hegemony in the Middle East. It is also a useless category for analysis. It prevents us from understanding the complexity of processes like the Palestinian one, in which many political forces converge, united under a common agenda, which we could call, following what Ilán Pappé posited, an anti-colonial struggle.
The military power of Hamas or a war between equal powers
Constant media reports, directly on social networks or YouTube channels, in newspaper articles or on digital websites, emphasize Hamas’ alleged military power. Power, according to this story, rests on the abundant resources provided to it by Iran and Hezbollah, a vast network of tunnels beneath the Gaza enclave and a ready militia of tens of thousands of fighters determined to do anything for the cause give . .
Regardless of the degree of truth or speculation about Hamas’s power, the goal of this media story is to give the audience the impression that we are dealing with a confrontation of virtually equal forces. In other words: “Israel” must strike with all its might in Gaza if it does not want to be defeated in the bitter urban fighting against the Hamas militias.
It is a narrative that justifies and exonerates any Israeli actions from the outset. Not only are they the victims under attack, but they must also do their best if they want to survive and win. Hamas is portrayed as a “major enemy” (ignoring all other Palestinian groups that took part in the actions of the 7th), and they want to present a group that at best has some perfected missile capabilities, medium and irregular range combat weapons as Power similar to Israeli power, with thousands of Merkhava tanks, hundreds of thousands of highly trained and equipped soldiers, large and brutal secret services and around 300 nuclear weapons, as former US President Jimmy Fuhrmann recently recognized.
It’s a naive comparison, but in a media agenda that relies on intoxicating its audience, the old saying attributed to the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, holds true: “A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.”
“Both “Israel” and Palestine have committed war crimes.”
One of the most unfortunate roles in this conflict has undoubtedly been played by multilateral organizations. This is the case with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose New York headquarters was recently shocked by the resignation of a senior official, Craig Mokhiberg, who in a lengthy public letter denounced the inefficiency and double standards by which Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians have always been measured.
Finally, High Commissioner Volker Türk traveled to the Rafah border crossing to see what was happening on site. His statements, published on the United Nations news site on November 8, began by saying that both sides had committed war crimes.
After presenting the actions of Hamas and the IDF as equivalent, the High Commissioner declared: “We have fallen into an abyss and things cannot continue like this.” Finally, a ceasefire between the parties is called for.
For his part, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, stated this Wednesday, November 8, that the number of civilian deaths in Gaza shows that “something is clearly wrong with Israel’s operations against Hamas.”(5) As if it were possible, a nearly 365 square kilometer enclave in which more than two million people live crowded together and in which the Israeli army has fired more than 18,000 tons of explosives as of November 1, the equivalent of 1.5 times that much like the bomb that devastated the city of Hiroshima without causing significant casualties among the civilian population.
As already mentioned, the equation in this case distorts the situation. They are equated with a series of irregular groups fighting on behalf of a people without a state, with a modern state that functions as a genocidal machine. There is an attempt to compare the October 7 attack to a genocide that was perpetuated for decades as a state policy of the “only” (even while acknowledging that a large part of everything that was Israeli and pro-Israel propaganda was Hamas and attributes to other groups is true). Democracy in the Middle East.”
The hypocritical neutrality of international organizations would lead to cynicism and irony if it were not evidence of a terrible act that we are helpless to witness.: The United Nations and other organizations founded to prevent a repeat of genocide and barbarism after the experience of World War II are watching helplessly as what happens. And with a brutal dialectic we see how those who commit this genocide are those who give orders or command the terrible machines of deathare direct or indirect descendants of the survivors of the horrors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Dachau.
Before Palestinians are held accountable for their excesses, they must be held accountable by the death machine that has plundered and murdered them for 75 years. Establishing equivalence is the same as affirming that the indigenous peoples of Latin America must apologize to Spain and be held accountable for war crimes, at the same time or perhaps even before the ancient metropolis does so.. For representatives of some international organizations, victims and perpetrators appear to be on the same level.
Anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism
An important part of the propaganda these days aims to equate criticism of the Zionist state “Israel” with anti-Semitism. Although it seems easy to dismantle, the truth is that we have already seen governments and even international structures like the International Olympic Committee operate under this premise, punishing anyone who criticizes the actions of “Israel” as if they were committing a hate crime would have.
Zionism is an ideology that emerged in the 19th century as a reaction to the various nationalisms that emerged during this period of consolidation of European nation-states. Zionism brought together many different currents, including the socialist perspective. However, The barbarity of the Holocaust ultimately led to the imposition of the most violent and violent nationalist version, which was eventually embodied in the State of Israel and its colonial and genocidal policies towards the Palestinians.
Judaism as a culture and religion existed before the rise of Zionism and is intertwined with millennia of human history in the Mediterranean and then in the Americas, Asia and other realities. Being against the genocidal policies of “Israel,” even the very existence of this Zionist state formation, does not make someone an anti-Semite.
In a recent lecture, the famous Israeli journalist Gideon Levy defined his opinion Three fundamental causes that underpin the attitude of “Israel” today: the majority of Israelis firmly believe that they are the chosen people, the Israeli occupiers present themselves and see themselves as victims, and the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians that enables the Israelis Live in peace with everything that happens.
It is necessary to break the illusion underlying this barbarism and the media narrative that accompanies it. When thousands of children die before our eyes, when bombs destroy entire families and homes and the organized and systematic violence of an unpunished state deprives survivors of even the bare necessities, We all have a responsibility to speak out. Anyone who remains indifferent today is complicit in genocide.
(Taken from Al Mayadeen)