Israel’s current assault on Gaza in a twisted way is a reenactment of the genesis of the Zionist state itself. It seems that for the benefit of those who have missed the original, Israel has created a sequel, albeit a more dreadful and gory version of it.
The naked land grab applying the modus operandi of ethnic cleansing was at the heart of the first Nakba, as it is now the clear intent of the current Israeli assault on Gaza. It was clear from day one that the ultimate objective of Israeli military aggression was to acquire the prime waterfront real estate for future Israeli settlements. That in itself is a stepping stone towards carving greater Israel out of what Zionists believe to be the land between Jordan and the sea. Israeli officials - ironically much like Hitler revealing his program of Lebensraum in Mein Kemph - were quite open about their war aims: It was the destruction of Gaza, population included, ostensibly targeting Hamas. As one commentator aptly describes it: the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, with Hamas as the collateral damage. Both the scale and intensity of the Israeli operation clearly showed that it was no usual “mowing of the lawn”, a cynical description of Israel’s periodic military assaults on Gaza since its withdrawal in 2005. It is the season of uprooting the lawn itself. There are no pretensions of restraint, not even keeping appearances, just cold, methodic working out of what the very logos of Israel entails. It is as if Israel is telling the whole world that its very genesis is premised on the obliteration of people already living on the land, it covets, for centuries. So why should anyone be surprised when it acts true to its form? Let there be no confusion about what we are seeing unfolding before our eyes: both in word and deed, in the full glare of all the attention that 21st-century media could muster, a genocidal campaign by Israel. One “Dar Yasin” after another, in an unabated blood bath since October 7. A reign of terror unleashed not by the Sanscullote of the urban underclass of the Middle East, but by the full might of the state armed to the teeth by the United States against the mainly unarmed, and defenseless population confined to an enclave. One has to go to the rape of Nanking maybe to find some historical parallel, but even there it was a state against state.
Parallel to this grisly campaign and enabling it, hence deeply immoral, another campaign has been going on in the media ecosystem of those who claim to be at the apex of civilization, and represent its best values. One falls short of adjectives describing the cover the Western media is providing this genocide: double standards, hypocrisy, vile propaganda- all seem short of getting the essence of it. One word, evil, may express what a moderately decent and informed person should viscerally feel about it. Here one acutely feels the inadequacy of language to capture something so subtle and yet so obvious, so evil yet so benignly and nonchalantly presented.
Great German historian, Oswal Spengler, wrote his magnum opus, “The Decline Of The West”, after the carnage of the First World War; one is tempted to think that this Gaza moment is ripe for some later day Spengler writing “An Expose Of The West”. The emperor who has never stopped pontificating about the virtues of freedom, rule of law, and democratic values is now stark naked, without clothes.
What lies, subterfuges, gaslighting, distortions, false analogies, and sophistries are not employed by the Western media and governments to defend the indefensible?
From day one, the road to the killing fields of Gaza is paved with the false narrative and distortions of Western media. No less lethal than the actual bombs - for we live in an age of information and mind control- is the propaganda war conducted by influential media houses and the US government to provide cover to Israeli crimes against humanity.
As the secret of all propaganda is self-serving framing of the issue to construct a narrative, the whole conflict is framed in terms of Hamas’s action of October 7. Ever eager to jump to defend all Israeli actions, the media does not need much prodding to work itself up to “righteous fury” at Hamas’s attack cast in the darkest, barbaric terms. In an exercise in typical over-simplification - reminiscent of similar media role before the invasion of Iraq- October 7 was isolated from all historical context, Hamas’s actions were portrayed as an act of pure, inexplicable, cosmic evil that cannot be argued or compromised with, only to be extirpated root and branch. From the highest levels of government - with President Biden himself taking the lead on that- to the sundry anchors in mainstream media, the lies, later debunked, were peddled with a straight face and confidence. Media and officials reflexively and uncritically repeated IDF’s lies and talking points: the beheading of babies, torture and rape of women, and burning of children in the oven. The same media and officials later called for ironclad proof when pushed about the undeniable Israeli atrocities such as the wilful killing of thousands of civilians, journalists, health workers, and UN aid officials. Even the discovery of mass graves around hospitals with clear evidence of war crime would not elicit a clear response from the US administration, hiding behind the need for more “information”. There was a method to this brazen lying: it was to give carte blanche and cover to the premeditated genocidal campaign of Israel. The visuals of the killing fields not preventable in the age of social media, and the asymmetric nature of the conflict, where one side was armed with the most sophisticated weapons of the 21st century, and the other a rag-tag insurrectionary outfit could only be addressed with such a brazen disregard of facts on the ground.
Always selective in its memory, the propaganda mills have never stopped harping on October 7 as the Original Sin, leading to all the mayhem and bloodshed being visited upon the hapless Gazans. It never stopped to examine that neither Gaza nor the West Bank was in a state of heavenly bliss before that fateful day. More than 430 deaths of Palestinians alone in the year leading up to October 7 belie that simple formulation, let alone the brutal fact of blockade and occupation. In this parallel reality of official truths, the whole history Arab-Israel conflict seemed to start on this date. October 7 is now weaponized like those lies about Saddam’s WMDs. Even to ask a perfectly reasonable question about what led to Hamas’s action of October 7 would immediately invite the charge of anti-semitism or supporter of Hamas and terrorism. Even the Secretary General of the United Nations could not escape from this flail of October 7 used to browbeat all those who dared so much as question the entirety of the Israeli narrative. All mainstream media conversations have to be consecrated with this mandatory question thrown at any neutral or minimally pro-Palestinian guest with an accusatory tone: Do you condemn Hamas’s action of October? One is reminded of trials under Stalin's purges, a caricature of justice, where a simple loaded question is enough to condemn a person to a Gulag. Piers Morgan has even raised this tactic to an art form, insinuating Hamas’s culpability for all previous and present Israeli crimes, while shamelessly pretending to be fair. What kind of Wasteland of truth, and decency these characters inhabit!
Any enlightened and fair media would start by probing into the causes that led Hamas to an action that by all accounts was sure to carry the risk or rather the inevitably of an overwhelming Israeli response jeopardizing the very continuity of Palestinian life in Gaza. That is where the context is helpful, and it is the task, indeed the duty of the media in an enlightened society to provide that context to avoid simplistic explanations that can act as a grist for the propagandist mills. Even a cursory understanding of what Gazans had gone through under Israeli inhuman, and unshakeable blockade made Hamas’s action understandable, if not justified. It was an act of people living in a Ghetto who lost all hope of any escape from it. It is not for want of trying other means that Hamas finally resorted to this audacious and almost suicidal act. They tried peaceful protest and marches, only to be fired upon point blank by the Israeli soldiers. They petitioned, campaigned, and had international human rights groups pleading on their behalf, only to be ignored, and subjected to periodic Israeli brutality, cynically called “mowing of the lawns”. They tried to resist with ramshackle and primitive weapons they could lay their hands on, always confronted with disproportionate and brutal Israeli military response, with the whole world watching idly. In a word, Gazans had reached the end of their tether, and rather than dying daily, they opted for one bold dash to go down fighting. Was it not an American freedom fighter, James Madison, who said “Give me death or liberty”? Was not the Warsaw ghetto uprising an act of similar defiance, audacity and desperation, with the outcome never in doubt? Was not John Brown's slave insurrection against slaveholders an act of similar desperation whose rationale was immortalized in the words of its architect, “The sins of this land can only be purged with blood? Human history is filled with such acts of triumph and defiance of the human spirit, immortalized in the Biblical tale of David vs Goliath.
Nothing showcases the utter intellectual and moral bankruptcy of official Western opinion than that spurious historical analogies have been repeatedly invoked to obfuscate the clear ethical implications of this unequal contest of Biblical proportions. Hence, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor to German aggression is mentioned to characterize Hamas’s action and justify no holds barred Israeli response. In an exercise of shameless sophistry, low even by the standards of so-called fair Western media, what is essentially a movement of national resistance against occupation is compared to the military aggression of Germany and Japan, the formidable militarized states of their times ironically much like Israel of today. This equivalence based on the total inversion of reality is necessary to cast this conflict as a war, not what it is, a brutal assault on a defenseless population by an occupying power. This insidious and baseless parallel with the Second World War bombing of German cities is employed to justify the destruction of Gaza. Never mind the absurdity of comparing the might of the Third Reich and its mass bombing campaign against the Allies’s cities with the military capacity of the resistance movement without a state of its own. If any comparison is warranted, it is with the partisans fighting against the Nazi occupation, but even here it would show the Palestinians at a grave disadvantage since partisans hacd the full support of the mightiest states like America and Britain. Ironically this abuse of history is not any different from pseudo-historical tropes employed by Nazia propaganda to justify its atrocities against the Jews and weaker nations of Europe.
Another propaganda trope is to dogmatically and repeatedly assert, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, that while Hamas targets the civilians, Israel only targets the terrorists, with civilians only the collateral damage. One might ask how one can determine the intended target of any military campaign. One way is to examine the results on the ground. By this elementary criterion, thousands of Palestinian women and children killed make any Israeli claims of not targeting the civilians risible. When what is claimed by apologists as the most (im)moral army drops two thousand pound bombs on the most heavily populated urban enclave in the world, any claims about targetting only Hamas sound hollow. This comparison also ignores not only the huge difference in military capacity between the two sides but also the fact that since Israel has compulsory military service for all its able-bodied civilians, both men and women, there is no clear distinction between the civilian and military in the case of Israel. Every Israeli civilian of military age is potentially a soldier. Interestingly, this important consideration is never mentioned in Hamas’s action allegedly targeting civilians. The elephant in the room, namely, the complete military imbalance between the two sides is completely ignored in this discussion about the modalities of the conflict. It is obvious that Israel commanding precision weapons, regular air force and artillery has all the luxury of choosing its targets at will and from a distance, whereas Palestinians can only respond to this aggression by hitting targets of opportunity with whatever primitive and improvised weapons they could muster. One side a regular army of the state, the other a guerilla outfit. In Mao’s characterization, a guerilla is to the population as fish is to water. In other words, a popular resistance cannot survive without the support of the people. It follows from this that any unpopular occupation is by definition a war on the whole people. The blame for any civilian deaths on either side resulting from the resistance is squarely on the occupying power. Moreover, this right of resistance against unlawful occupation is enshrined in the UN Charter of Human Rights. If Israel wants a conventional, then it should allow Palestine a state, with an army, a navy, and an airforce. It cannot demand that Palestinians should fight on its terms. They cannot just take on Israeli F-16s and F-35s without any air defense, they cannot put tanks against tanks, and ships against ships. They would hit whatever targets of opportunity they could find to inflict a cost on the occupation. They need to preserve themselves while doing it: they just cannot roll over before Israeli might and die, fighting this unequal fight. Yes, there would be excesses and inevitable atrocities in the process, like in any fight for national liberation, but the root cause for that is the occupation, not the resistance. Don’t forget that ANC (African National Congress) fighting against Apartheid was at the time regarded as a terrorist organization by the West, but any violence resulting from its actions was ultimately caused by Apartheid, not the ANC. Similarly, any atrocities, even allegedly committed by Hamas, are the unfortunate result of occupation as their root cause. No amount of obfuscation and sophistry can hide this basic fact.
Would Israel succeed in its evil objective of ethnic cleansing? Would this holocaust of 21st century continue with the full support of so called enlightened Western countries? Where would all this end? No one knows for sure, but one thing is clear: neither the Middle East nor the smug confidence of being more civilized and moral by the West would ever remain the same.
The naked land grab applying the modus operandi of ethnic cleansing was at the heart of the first Nakba, as it is now the clear intent of the current Israeli assault on Gaza. It was clear from day one that the ultimate objective of Israeli military aggression was to acquire the prime waterfront real estate for future Israeli settlements. That in itself is a stepping stone towards carving greater Israel out of what Zionists believe to be the land between Jordan and the sea. Israeli officials - ironically much like Hitler revealing his program of Lebensraum in Mein Kemph - were quite open about their war aims: It was the destruction of Gaza, population included, ostensibly targeting Hamas. As one commentator aptly describes it: the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, with Hamas as the collateral damage. Both the scale and intensity of the Israeli operation clearly showed that it was no usual “mowing of the lawn”, a cynical description of Israel’s periodic military assaults on Gaza since its withdrawal in 2005. It is the season of uprooting the lawn itself. There are no pretensions of restraint, not even keeping appearances, just cold, methodic working out of what the very logos of Israel entails. It is as if Israel is telling the whole world that its very genesis is premised on the obliteration of people already living on the land, it covets, for centuries. So why should anyone be surprised when it acts true to its form? Let there be no confusion about what we are seeing unfolding before our eyes: both in word and deed, in the full glare of all the attention that 21st-century media could muster, a genocidal campaign by Israel. One “Dar Yasin” after another, in an unabated blood bath since October 7. A reign of terror unleashed not by the Sanscullote of the urban underclass of the Middle East, but by the full might of the state armed to the teeth by the United States against the mainly unarmed, and defenseless population confined to an enclave. One has to go to the rape of Nanking maybe to find some historical parallel, but even there it was a state against state.
Parallel to this grisly campaign and enabling it, hence deeply immoral, another campaign has been going on in the media ecosystem of those who claim to be at the apex of civilization, and represent its best values. One falls short of adjectives describing the cover the Western media is providing this genocide: double standards, hypocrisy, vile propaganda- all seem short of getting the essence of it. One word, evil, may express what a moderately decent and informed person should viscerally feel about it. Here one acutely feels the inadequacy of language to capture something so subtle and yet so obvious, so evil yet so benignly and nonchalantly presented.
Great German historian, Oswal Spengler, wrote his magnum opus, “The Decline Of The West”, after the carnage of the First World War; one is tempted to think that this Gaza moment is ripe for some later day Spengler writing “An Expose Of The West”. The emperor who has never stopped pontificating about the virtues of freedom, rule of law, and democratic values is now stark naked, without clothes.
What lies, subterfuges, gaslighting, distortions, false analogies, and sophistries are not employed by the Western media and governments to defend the indefensible?
From day one, the road to the killing fields of Gaza is paved with the false narrative and distortions of Western media. No less lethal than the actual bombs - for we live in an age of information and mind control- is the propaganda war conducted by influential media houses and the US government to provide cover to Israeli crimes against humanity.
As the secret of all propaganda is self-serving framing of the issue to construct a narrative, the whole conflict is framed in terms of Hamas’s action of October 7. Ever eager to jump to defend all Israeli actions, the media does not need much prodding to work itself up to “righteous fury” at Hamas’s attack cast in the darkest, barbaric terms. In an exercise in typical over-simplification - reminiscent of similar media role before the invasion of Iraq- October 7 was isolated from all historical context, Hamas’s actions were portrayed as an act of pure, inexplicable, cosmic evil that cannot be argued or compromised with, only to be extirpated root and branch. From the highest levels of government - with President Biden himself taking the lead on that- to the sundry anchors in mainstream media, the lies, later debunked, were peddled with a straight face and confidence. Media and officials reflexively and uncritically repeated IDF’s lies and talking points: the beheading of babies, torture and rape of women, and burning of children in the oven. The same media and officials later called for ironclad proof when pushed about the undeniable Israeli atrocities such as the wilful killing of thousands of civilians, journalists, health workers, and UN aid officials. Even the discovery of mass graves around hospitals with clear evidence of war crime would not elicit a clear response from the US administration, hiding behind the need for more “information”. There was a method to this brazen lying: it was to give carte blanche and cover to the premeditated genocidal campaign of Israel. The visuals of the killing fields not preventable in the age of social media, and the asymmetric nature of the conflict, where one side was armed with the most sophisticated weapons of the 21st century, and the other a rag-tag insurrectionary outfit could only be addressed with such a brazen disregard of facts on the ground.
Always selective in its memory, the propaganda mills have never stopped harping on October 7 as the Original Sin, leading to all the mayhem and bloodshed being visited upon the hapless Gazans. It never stopped to examine that neither Gaza nor the West Bank was in a state of heavenly bliss before that fateful day. More than 430 deaths of Palestinians alone in the year leading up to October 7 belie that simple formulation, let alone the brutal fact of blockade and occupation. In this parallel reality of official truths, the whole history Arab-Israel conflict seemed to start on this date. October 7 is now weaponized like those lies about Saddam’s WMDs. Even to ask a perfectly reasonable question about what led to Hamas’s action of October 7 would immediately invite the charge of anti-semitism or supporter of Hamas and terrorism. Even the Secretary General of the United Nations could not escape from this flail of October 7 used to browbeat all those who dared so much as question the entirety of the Israeli narrative. All mainstream media conversations have to be consecrated with this mandatory question thrown at any neutral or minimally pro-Palestinian guest with an accusatory tone: Do you condemn Hamas’s action of October? One is reminded of trials under Stalin's purges, a caricature of justice, where a simple loaded question is enough to condemn a person to a Gulag. Piers Morgan has even raised this tactic to an art form, insinuating Hamas’s culpability for all previous and present Israeli crimes, while shamelessly pretending to be fair. What kind of Wasteland of truth, and decency these characters inhabit!
Any enlightened and fair media would start by probing into the causes that led Hamas to an action that by all accounts was sure to carry the risk or rather the inevitably of an overwhelming Israeli response jeopardizing the very continuity of Palestinian life in Gaza. That is where the context is helpful, and it is the task, indeed the duty of the media in an enlightened society to provide that context to avoid simplistic explanations that can act as a grist for the propagandist mills. Even a cursory understanding of what Gazans had gone through under Israeli inhuman, and unshakeable blockade made Hamas’s action understandable, if not justified. It was an act of people living in a Ghetto who lost all hope of any escape from it. It is not for want of trying other means that Hamas finally resorted to this audacious and almost suicidal act. They tried peaceful protest and marches, only to be fired upon point blank by the Israeli soldiers. They petitioned, campaigned, and had international human rights groups pleading on their behalf, only to be ignored, and subjected to periodic Israeli brutality, cynically called “mowing of the lawns”. They tried to resist with ramshackle and primitive weapons they could lay their hands on, always confronted with disproportionate and brutal Israeli military response, with the whole world watching idly. In a word, Gazans had reached the end of their tether, and rather than dying daily, they opted for one bold dash to go down fighting. Was it not an American freedom fighter, James Madison, who said “Give me death or liberty”? Was not the Warsaw ghetto uprising an act of similar defiance, audacity and desperation, with the outcome never in doubt? Was not John Brown's slave insurrection against slaveholders an act of similar desperation whose rationale was immortalized in the words of its architect, “The sins of this land can only be purged with blood? Human history is filled with such acts of triumph and defiance of the human spirit, immortalized in the Biblical tale of David vs Goliath.
Nothing showcases the utter intellectual and moral bankruptcy of official Western opinion than that spurious historical analogies have been repeatedly invoked to obfuscate the clear ethical implications of this unequal contest of Biblical proportions. Hence, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor to German aggression is mentioned to characterize Hamas’s action and justify no holds barred Israeli response. In an exercise of shameless sophistry, low even by the standards of so-called fair Western media, what is essentially a movement of national resistance against occupation is compared to the military aggression of Germany and Japan, the formidable militarized states of their times ironically much like Israel of today. This equivalence based on the total inversion of reality is necessary to cast this conflict as a war, not what it is, a brutal assault on a defenseless population by an occupying power. This insidious and baseless parallel with the Second World War bombing of German cities is employed to justify the destruction of Gaza. Never mind the absurdity of comparing the might of the Third Reich and its mass bombing campaign against the Allies’s cities with the military capacity of the resistance movement without a state of its own. If any comparison is warranted, it is with the partisans fighting against the Nazi occupation, but even here it would show the Palestinians at a grave disadvantage since partisans hacd the full support of the mightiest states like America and Britain. Ironically this abuse of history is not any different from pseudo-historical tropes employed by Nazia propaganda to justify its atrocities against the Jews and weaker nations of Europe.
Another propaganda trope is to dogmatically and repeatedly assert, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, that while Hamas targets the civilians, Israel only targets the terrorists, with civilians only the collateral damage. One might ask how one can determine the intended target of any military campaign. One way is to examine the results on the ground. By this elementary criterion, thousands of Palestinian women and children killed make any Israeli claims of not targeting the civilians risible. When what is claimed by apologists as the most (im)moral army drops two thousand pound bombs on the most heavily populated urban enclave in the world, any claims about targetting only Hamas sound hollow. This comparison also ignores not only the huge difference in military capacity between the two sides but also the fact that since Israel has compulsory military service for all its able-bodied civilians, both men and women, there is no clear distinction between the civilian and military in the case of Israel. Every Israeli civilian of military age is potentially a soldier. Interestingly, this important consideration is never mentioned in Hamas’s action allegedly targeting civilians. The elephant in the room, namely, the complete military imbalance between the two sides is completely ignored in this discussion about the modalities of the conflict. It is obvious that Israel commanding precision weapons, regular air force and artillery has all the luxury of choosing its targets at will and from a distance, whereas Palestinians can only respond to this aggression by hitting targets of opportunity with whatever primitive and improvised weapons they could muster. One side a regular army of the state, the other a guerilla outfit. In Mao’s characterization, a guerilla is to the population as fish is to water. In other words, a popular resistance cannot survive without the support of the people. It follows from this that any unpopular occupation is by definition a war on the whole people. The blame for any civilian deaths on either side resulting from the resistance is squarely on the occupying power. Moreover, this right of resistance against unlawful occupation is enshrined in the UN Charter of Human Rights. If Israel wants a conventional, then it should allow Palestine a state, with an army, a navy, and an airforce. It cannot demand that Palestinians should fight on its terms. They cannot just take on Israeli F-16s and F-35s without any air defense, they cannot put tanks against tanks, and ships against ships. They would hit whatever targets of opportunity they could find to inflict a cost on the occupation. They need to preserve themselves while doing it: they just cannot roll over before Israeli might and die, fighting this unequal fight. Yes, there would be excesses and inevitable atrocities in the process, like in any fight for national liberation, but the root cause for that is the occupation, not the resistance. Don’t forget that ANC (African National Congress) fighting against Apartheid was at the time regarded as a terrorist organization by the West, but any violence resulting from its actions was ultimately caused by Apartheid, not the ANC. Similarly, any atrocities, even allegedly committed by Hamas, are the unfortunate result of occupation as their root cause. No amount of obfuscation and sophistry can hide this basic fact.
Would Israel succeed in its evil objective of ethnic cleansing? Would this holocaust of 21st century continue with the full support of so called enlightened Western countries? Where would all this end? No one knows for sure, but one thing is clear: neither the Middle East nor the smug confidence of being more civilized and moral by the West would ever remain the same.
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