Gaza and the War of the Narrative
Talk at the Claremont Main Road Mosque on the 7th December 2023
We have for the last two months witnessed a war on Palestinians – both in Gaza and the West Bank, reminiscent of medieval barbarism. The secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland said that the “the pulverizing of Gaza now ranks among the worst assaults on any civilian population in our time and age. Each day we see more dead children, and new depths of suffering for the innocent people enduring this hell” (which has seen nearly 20 000 killed or missing, nearly 75% of whom are women and children). 1 in every person in Gaza has been murdered and 2 in every 100 is injured. The head of the ICRC called this a “moral failure in the face of the international community”. In a rare, powerful move, the UN secretary-general has invoked Article 99 – which is a diplomatic panic button, calling for an urgent, humanitarian ceasefire.
Aside from this brutal physical and psychological war on the people of Gaza, there is another brutal war which is unfolding. This is the war of the narrative, which is a big word for story. Which story is told; who gets to tell the story, who amplifies this story, who believes this story. Who speaks and who is silenced. As Arundhati Roy writes,” There’s really no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard”.
Truth as the first casualty of war is a trite phrase. Humanity follows closely behind.
One may ask, why is this war of the narrative so critical? Why is, how this story is told, so important?
1. The first reason is that when you wage a war against a population, like we’ve seen throughout history, you have to first dehumanize your victim, you’ve got to demonise them, make them less worthy humans, and thus deserving of enormous cruelty and brutality. Racism was invented for this purpose and was practiced by all colonial regimes – it painted the natives as primitive, barbaric, uncivilized, and sexual predators. The Nazis dehumanized the Jews by painting them as disloyal, greedy, conniving, controlling; the Burmese junta characterized the Rohingya as outsiders, as foreigners in our land; and the Hutus dehumanized the Tutsis. This prepared the ground for public opinion to see the genocide against victims as legitimate, as necessary and as moral. To quote Aldous Huxley: “The propagandists purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. By robbing them of their personality, he puts them outside the pale of moral obligation”.
2. The second reason is that in any democratic society any war must be sold to the publics in that country, who are generally averse to war. Thus, how do you get the publics to buy into a war, decide whether their sons and daughters must be sent to this war to kill and be killed, and whether taxpayers must fund this war. In democratic societies, and to a lesser extent in non-democratic societies, there must be varying degrees of consent of the governed. Walter Lippman first coined the term, later popularized by Noam Chomsky, ‘manufacturing consent’ –which refers to the idea that media and other institutions subtly manipulate public opinion, shaping it in ways that align with dominant interests. We saw this in the US invasion of Iraq how the political and intellectual elite, together with the media aligned to justify the illegal invasion and destruction of Iraq in a way that ‘manufactured consent’ of the publics to support the war, see it as necessary and a moral course of action.
3. The third is important for legal reasons. A defensive war is very different from an offensive war and thus both the US and Israel have constantly invoked the right of defence. Why is this important – one is that Israeli and the US face charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of genocide. The crime of genocide requires intent as the first criterion. So, controlling the narrative as a defensive war and a necessary war provides legal cover. Painting the entire community including civilians as part of a network of terror is part of this cover. Additionally the US is constantly providing Israel with weapons to execute its plans in Gaza. This is dodgy legal territory as the Leahy Law requires that the US government vet any foreign military unit receiving US training or arms in order to ensure it has not been responsible for “gross violations of human rights”. Furthermore, Section 620(i) of the Foreign Assistance Act prohibits sending arms to a country that prohibits or restricts the transport or delivery of humanitarian aid.
Thus the US has constantly invoked the notion of self-defense to provide Israel with money, arms, personnel and legal and diplomatic cover. In doing this the US is destroying a rules-based order by attempting to circumvent laws and rules, as they did in Iraq.
The second question is how is this done?
The first thing that Israel did was frame the 7th October Palestinian resistance attack within the trauma of the Holocaust. They claimed that this was the largest loss of Jewish lives in a single attack since the Holocaust – playing into Jewish fear and trauma, but also invoking western guilt for the Holocaust. The Holocaust is then bound up into Zionism and equated with anti-Semitism. So Israeli significantly justifies its existence based on the Holocaust; Thus, Zionism is constructed as a logical Jewish safe home; and any criticism of this home is deemed anti-Semitic.
Any attempts to frame this event in a historical context bring on accusations of anti-Semitisim (as not valuing Jewish lives). In doing so Israel’s supporters use despicable tactics to smear Israel's critics as anti-Semites, and in doing so exploiting a very healthy impulse to advance a profoundly sick impulse – a healthy impulse against bigotry is weaponized to advance an impulse to bigotry. In doing this they exploit another impulse – most of those who support Palestine are broadly on the left, and supportive of anti-racism and bigotry. They attempt to shame these progressives through fake claims, whilst cavorting with right-wing real anti-Semites, because the latter unquestioningly support Israel – reflecting the paradox of anti-Semitic Zionism (which btw is not a new phenomenon).
It then characterized resistance fighters as monsters by spreading fake stories. Some of these were outrageously bizarre, and all were debunked. The broader narrative is the the October 7th attacks were an existential threat to Jews, a blowback to the Holocaust, and again a uniquely evil event.
Some of these fakes stories which attempted to play in this narrative, and at the same time play on tropes of the colonized include:
1. The beheading of 40 babies by Hamas.
2. Babies were murdered and hung up on clothes lines.
3. Babies were incinerated in ovens.
4. Pregnant women had their abdomen ripped open and their fetus’s killed.
5. The latest is the untested allegations of mass rape or sexual violence – promoted by Israeli government agents.
6. They then attempted to cast doubt on the number of casualties in Gaza by claiming that the statistics provided by the Gaza ministry of health was inaccurate. This was proven to be false, and the statistics were remarkably accurate for a war zone.
7. The claim that pictures of dead babies were actually dolls imported from China.
8. The stripping down to underwear of Gazan men held hostage by Israeli soldiers was okay because it is very hot in Gaza.
9. In its attack on Gaza Israeli attempt to paint hospitals, schools, universities, refugee centres and mosques as Hamas centres or arms depots. Much of this debunked. But this gave them credence to target every civilian site, and every civilian and child became collateral damage. Fake images were planted to give this credibility – arms planted in hospitals, hospital basements cast as Hamas operation centres and a calendar promoted as a Hamas roster.
Many of these fake stories were relayed by Netanyahu to Biden, who faithfully mouthed them. Netanyahu’s wife wrote a letter to Biden’s wife appealing to her as a mother to take these stories seriously. Other western leaders and media, who are stenographers for empire, faithfully transcribed this fake news.
The truth according to Haaretz is that only one baby was killed, alongside her father in a settlement. The same Haaretz story continues: There is no evidence that children from several families were murdered together, rendering inaccurate Netanyahu’s remark to U.S. President Joe Biden that Hamas terrorists “took dozens of children, tied them up, burned them and executed them.”
Another story was that Netanyahu’s wife invoked in the letters related to a woman in her 9th month of pregnancy was abducted into Gaza, where she gave birth. The problem is that this hostage was not even pregnant.
Every one of these stories was debunked but only after they had grabbed western headlines, and transmitted by Israel’s troll armies.
On the other hand, it humanized Israeli victims by profiling them, their families, their children, their parents, loved ones …. in contradistinction to Palestinians who are rarely humanized, in life, nor in death.
To quote Ben Ehrenreich:
“Israeli propaganda can afford to be preposterous because racist dehumanization has already done the real work for them. If you accept that Palestinians are irrational and violent (“human animals”) and that Hamas is uniquely barbaric then even the flimsiest lies will do.
A missile launched against them becomes a missile that they launched, a hospital becomes a terror ward, an ambulance could only be a transporter of terrorists, a basement room clearly used as a shelter from bombs could only have held hostages because only Israelis can be victims.”
Unfortunately, this is effective not only among Israelis but for most of the North American and European media, beyond whose liberal principles lie the same racist structures of thought. They are not being cynical—they believe they are being responsible. (Most of them anyway.)
Israel also consistently downgraded their initial number of victims of the attack – from 1400 to 1200 to 1000. Haaretz did a detailed and attributed list of victims since October 7 which features about 1,257 names. Of these 374 were direct military personnel. (30%). Military personnel also make up a significant number of the 240 hostages.
Further many Israeli victims were killed by the IDF in keeping with the Hannibal doctrine – which permits Israeli military to prioritize killing militants even if hostages are killed. We have no certainty of this number.
Shayan Sardarizadeh, a BBC disinformation experts claimed that the The initial enormous spike in misinformation is “beyond anything” he’d ever seen before.
These stories became the talking points for Israel’s hasbara defenders.
A leading Israeli disinformation expert explained that
“fake news” is not imposters setting up news outlets to manipulate millions of people by pushing completely false stories. Fake news works because it is based on credibility and believability of the source.
Fake news is when people believe. Not because something is reality or not reality. The question is credibility. First you need credibility, and an aura of truth, and then you can manipulate.”
Now some of us laugh off this offensive fake news, because it is so patently absurd and incredulous. But one only has to see on social media the extent of traction of these stories– and are repeated ad-nauseum by propagandists and which take on a life of their own. But they are often believed by well-intentioned people who know no better. Palestine advocates spend an inordinate amount of time debunking these myths, which is deliberate strategy by Israel – it binds activists time in debunking myths, with less time to expose the genocide, war crimes and to organize. But is also muddies the water, cast doubt in the minds of the neutrals. Brandolini's law (bullshit asymmetry principle) states that the “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it”. Fake news takes 30s to produce but 30 days to debunk.
There’s a story from Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas, using this oldest and most effective trick in politics.
“The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumour campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
The pliant western media, including the New York Times, BBC, Guardian, repeated these stories, often sourced from the IDF, or Zionist media – who often control news emanating from the war zone. Not one of them refer to alternate news sources, or journalist based on the ground. Journalist who resigned from the NYT exposed the systematic bias of the paper, which is considered America’s paper of record.
Israel’s control of the narrative goes further – it banned foreign journalists from Gaza. This left local journalists carrying the burden. Israel then targeted Palestinian journalists – murdering them and their families. Over 60 journalists were martyred – more than the sum of all the conflict zones in the world. It destroyed the offices of media agencies in Gaza.
Reporters Without Borders stated that journalists were “explicitly targeted” by Israeli strikes. Tim Dawson from the International Federation of Journalists described the “most shocking and awful slaughter of journalists with the “real fear that there is a deliberate attempt to try and keep the world’s eyes off Gaza”.
To add insult to Palestinian injury the Biden Administration took a position during the pause in the war, that if journalists were allowed into Gaza there would be an “unintended consequence”; what would that be; and you cannot make this up: journalists gaining “broader access to Gaza, would serve as an opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there, and would influence public opinion against Israel”.
The corollary to this is that when the IDF entered Gaza they only permitted journalists who were embedded within their military and could vet every story, as Fareed Zakaria from CNN exposed. Even under normal circumstances the Israeli security established imposes severe constraints on journalists.
Just a few days ago, in another act of silencing, over a dozen US state attorneys general signed a letter directed toward media outlets encouraging them to “follow the law” when it comes to coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict and putting them “on watch” to ensure they don’t give “material support to terrorists abroad.” This assertion is ludicrous but is a demonstration of how an alt-reality is created to silence – to even silence media bodies like the New York Times and CNN, which are already largely pro-Israel, and to further curtail their very limited coverage of Palestinian stories.
So not only did Israel seek to control the narrative; plant fake news, they murdered Gazans who relayed the real stories of Gaza, and silenced major news sources in the world. As Georg Orwell wrote, “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.
Brave Gazan journalists however continue to relay their stories over social media – which for all its faults has also democratized media. This has released the stranglehold of corporate media, which however still wields enormous power. So while social media is a force for good, the corollary is equally true, as Israel’s defenders use it to produce and disseminate fake news.
But the most pervasive form of censorship is the worldwide campaign to silence Palestinian voices in every space – educational institutions, politics, civil movements, media, and professional bodies, though a sustained campaign of surveillance, bullying harassment, doxing, vindictiveness, threats, and adverse consequences. This has forced forced academics and senior executives out of their jobs, students losing job placements, and others being harassed. Israel has a number of bodies surveilling university campuses – such as Campus Watch.
Through this bullying we have silencing, conditioning of language and self-censorship which is worse than censorship. Self-censorship is not visible and thus difficult to fight against. Silence cannot be criticized. We are forced to re-frame issue to create some balance in our arguments and statements – giving a balance view means giving credence to the Israeli narrative. Universities are cautious about issuing statements that side with Palestinians because of the potential for funding loss.
In a study by Middle East Scholar Barometer, 81% of Middle East scholars say they have felt the growing need to practice self-censorship on Palestine since the Israel war for fear of offending students, or pressure from external advocacy groups. Most of the Middle East scholars polled said that anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian sentiments were far more prevalent on their campuses than anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments. Yet, University administrators have also faced criticism far more often in the past eight weeks for tolerating antisemitism on their campuses than for tolerating Islamophobia. Pro-Israeli advocates have filed a lawsuit against the University of Pennsylvania, claiming, in a combination of fake-news and hyperbole multiplied, that the campus has become ‘an incubation lab for virulent anti-Jewish hatred, harassment and discrimination’. This kind of outrageous lawfare may not succeed, but has a silencing effect. People would remain silent rather than run of the gauntlet of the Israeli lobby.
Thus what we are witnessing a sustained, organized and well-funded campaign to produce fake news, to disseminate this news, to bully news organizations, and to silence Palestine advocates through various coervice methods. Their intention was captured by the prophetic voice of Malcolm X.
Bottom of Form
“The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses … if you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
Let me conclude with the words of Sonya Renee Taylor “outrage without action is nothing but privilege comforting itself”, and Marcus Aurelius , “that you can commit injustice by doing nothing”.
And of course the inspiring Arundhati Roy:
‘Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe’.
8 December 2023