Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is being acknowledged more widely, although the catastrophic tragedy of genocide continues to be inflicted with no reprieve to the innocent and rightful people of the land. Now, on November 14, ‘UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war’ in another damning indictment of the crimes of Israel, Zionism, and settler-colonialism.
- Denying basic human needs: “…Israeli officials have publicly supported policies that strip Palestinians of the very necessities required to sustain life — food, water, and fuel,”
- Blocking humanitarian aid: Shows “Israel’s intent to instrumentalise life-saving supplies for political and military gains”
- Targeted killings: “of civilians and aid workers”, and we know that journalists, doctors, paramedics, have all been targeted as well.
- Violating international law: Israel is proceeding “despite repeated UN appeals, binding orders from the International Court of Justice and resolutions of the Security Council”. Israel’s belligerence agsint the UN itself is brazen. It has tortured UNRWA staff, attacked Peacekeepers, and banned the Secretary-General from its territory.
- Genocidal actions: “Israel is intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury, using starvation as a method of war and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian population,”
This is just one of the many documentations of Israel’s Palestinian genocide that have emerged over the past year. Still, no major power has committed to intervening in a meaningful way. The world’s powers are ready to wash their hands off this travesty and pretend that lip service is enough. Governments in tandem with social media platforms work to suppress pro-Palestine speech and it feels that whatever we do get to see from the ground is allowed only because they see it as a way to weaken morale and induce exhaustion and vicarious trauma into the anti-genocide movement.
Freedom of the press or freedom to oppress?
If the bombs of genocide are manufactured in the weapons factory, then the consent for it is manufactured in the media factory.
On November 8, Israelis supporting the Maccabi Tel Aviv football club engaged in hooliganism and violence in the streets of Amsterdam. Drunk on the impunity they enjoy everywhere, they disrespected the minute of silence held for the Valencia flood victims in Spain, provoked Dutch fans, and shouted anti-Arab slurs and invectives while tearing down Palestinian flags where they found them.
When they encountered self-defence from others, they made a show of victimhood. Israelis were ‘evacuated’ by their government while the Dutch authorities, and Western media and leadership wept tears over so-called ‘antisemitic’ attacks, covering for Israelis yet again.
The polar opposite accounts of what happened further demonstrate the extent to which legacy media is compromised and has lost its credibility to the discerning reader. Every editor and newsroom in the world knows how to self-censor and bend over on the issue of Israel and Palestine. This fear and self-censorship is rife in the media community, although admitting to that would destroy the ‘free speech’ brand that supposedly differentiates the West from the rest.
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DB30VAaMZ_8/
One can see users literally ‘schooling’ major legacy news outlets on how to follow basic principles of reporting when it comes to the Gaza genocide which they deliberately underplay as just another “war”.
The NYT was lambasted for amplifying the false ‘Hamas rapes’ propaganda by citizen journalists like Zei Squirrel on Twitter in a major pushback against a narrative that was being parroted with the sole intent of stoking anger to manufacture consent for retaliation and punishment.
Who really “hates our freedoms”?
When the disastrous ‘war on terror’ was launched, the rhetoric was that those terrorists (code for Arab cultures) hated our American freedoms, which is why they attacked on 9/11. But recent events have given us so many reminders that these freedoms were only ever meant for a narrow section of political ideas and social groups (i.e., white men).
We had police officers raiding American universities and cops holding up a book with the title ‘Terrorism’ to the media in an attempted justification for dismissing student protestors as ‘outside agitators’, shattering decades’ worth of image-building as a beacon for liberal democratic freedoms.
As the genocide dragged on, the workings of the Western media appeared painfully similar to what I have seen in India over more than a decade. A particularly egregious instance is CNN deciding to push a sob story of Israeli soldiers’ trauma and inability to eat meat after they crushed living people under bulldozers, with not a peep of empathy for the hundreds of thousands of people brutalized thus far.
Remember Malcolm X: “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.”
Even as social media restricts or removes posts with ‘banned words’ like genocide, Palestine, Zionism, etc., other platforms of expression like Twitch have also recently updated rules to prevent Zionism from being criticised.
Users find workarounds and amplify each by gaming the algorithm, but the management and design of these sites is still meant to suppress these positions. This should come as no surprise since major tech companies engage in anti-Palestinian discrimination (Google, Google, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta)
The TV and print news refuses to name the genocide as such and attempts to intimidate pro-Palestinian voices. And this is not to hold journalists personally liable for the faults of their corporate employers. Earlier this month on November 2, 100 BBC staff wrote a letter to leadership, saying that “Basic journalistic tenets have been lacking when it comes to holding Israel to account for its actions”, and that the network is participating in the dehumanization of Palestinians with its biased coverage.
In Germany, peaceful protestors are carted off by police or choked by them for screaming ‘Free Palestine!’ and the harassment and blacklisting of any who oppose Israel is a given in the United States. Australia banned Hezbollah flags as Lebanon was engulfed in the sphere of the U.S.-Israel genocidal scheme.
Source: https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1815037379360551352
Police in London cracked down on anti-genocide protestors even as people from all backgrounds continued to rally for justice and humanity. Wearing a keffiyeh in public invites repercussions, legal or otherwise, while t-shirts with the rape threat ‘Your Body My Choice’ were sold on Amazon and worn freely by young men with no consequences.
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The Western establishment, irrespective of country, cannot brook the idea of Palestinian advocacy or opposition to genocide. It is fundamentally threatening to how their own societies were established or secured. As someone commented very rightly, relenting on Gaza will trigger a capitulation to all other fledgling anti-colonial resistance movements taking shape across the globe. Democracy ‘at home’ cannot coexist with imperialism and genocide abroad. Israel will take the West down with it.
Arjun Banerjee is a writer and political commentator. He is a postgraduate in English literature from the University of Delhi. He writes about current events and culture
