Israel and Palestine: The Battle for Narrative Supremacy
Þýðing: Jean-Rémi Chareyre
The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th and the subsequent retaliation by the Israeli army have cost the lives of about 1.200 Israelis and 13.500 Palestinians, in both cases civilians for the most part. The attack came at everyone’s surprise, and since then, bombs have been raining on the Gaza strip as a form of collective punishment, hitting hospitals and refugee camps among others. More than half of Gaza’s inhabitants have had to leave their homes, and in the course of only one month there have been more Palestinian casualties than during the last 23 years altogether. A lack of fresh water, food, fuel and electricity threaten the livelihood of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants as Israeli authorities tightened the blockade that has been implemented since 2005.
The response from U.S. authorities after the Hamas attack was quick. U.S. leaders expressed full support for Israel and sent a U.S. navy aircraft carrier and fighter jets to the area. The Secretary of Defense pledged increased support in the form of military equipment, as military support of the U.S. to Israel already amounts to 3 billion dollars a year.
While the Gaza strip is being bombed, another kind of war is taking place in the media and political world: a war of words. The fight for concepts and definition is paramount when it comes to framing a conflict: War? Invasion? Terrorism? Self-defense? War crimes? Genocide? Which party is guilty and which is the victim? Who is the aggressor and who is defending itself?
Many have balked at U.S. President Biden’s framing of the conflict after the events. A short analysis of Joe Biden’s speech on October 20th (after 13 days of non-stop bombing of Gaza) illustrates the U.S. authorities’ perspective. The narrative is remarkably one-sided: Biden starts off by mentioning the number of Israeli casualties and dwells for a long time on their suffering, while omitting to mention the number of Palestinian victims, in spite of the fact the number of casualties on the Palestinian side was already three times higher than that of Israelis when Biden’s speech was being delivered.
Biden recalls his personal experience when meeting Israelis “who had personally lived through horrific horror of the attack by Hamas.” Later on, about Palestinian deaths, he admits to being “heartbroken by the tragic loss of Palestinian life.” In other words, the deaths of Israelis are clearly the result of Hamas’s “horrific attacks,” while the deaths of Palestinians seem to be some kind of inevitable “tragedy” which no one is responsible for, some kind of unfortunate accident. Immediately, Biden adds that Israelis were not responsible for the attack on the Al-Ahli hospital on October 18th, in which hundreds of civilians died. However, neither Biden nor the Israeli authorities have provided proof that the attack was a misfire of a Hamas rocket, in spite of such accusations by both.
Attacks on civilians seem to be a legitimate form of self-defense where Israelis are concerned and that right to self-defense is repeatedly mentioned, but nowhere is Palestians’ right to self-defense against Israel’s land grabbing, oppression, segregation and blockading of the last decades mentioned. Hamas militants are reduced to “terrorists” who “have unleashed pure, unadulterated evil in the world” (is Israel “the world”?), but concerning Israel’s use of violence against civilians in Gaza, Biden has little to say except that “we mourn every innocent life lost,” as if their deaths were a minor detail of history.
Biden then proceeds to compare the Hamas attack on October 7th to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This seems like a very dubious comparison at most, as it turns the direction of history completely upside down. Israel’s invasion and colonisation of Palestinian land has been steady and well documented through many decades, and as of today, over 700.000 illegal Israeli settlers live throughout occupied Palestinian land. Their numbers have been steadily increasing since 1967. But even if Hamas had the ambition of invading and occupying Israel, as Putin did in Ukraine, such a project would be utterly unrealistic as the Israeli army is much more powerful both in terms of numbers and equipment, such as tanks, helicopters, fighter jets, warships and even nuclear weapons, all equipment that Hamas cannot even begin to dream about.
In fact, Hamas militants have already made it clear that the main goal of the 7th October attacks was to force Israel to give up their colonisation policy in the West Bank, as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition government has a stated policy of further accelerating the colonisation process in spite of repeated condemnation by United Nations resolutions. Of course, none of this is mentioned in Biden’s speech. Rather, Hamas’s only political aim seems to be doing evil for evil’s sake: “There is no limit to the depravity of people when they want to inflict pain on others.” Most reasonable analysts agree, however, that illegal settlements and the multifaceted oppression of Palestinians are the elephant in the room when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Antonio Guterres Secretary-General of the United Nations was one who thought that Hamas’s attack should be put into its historical context. “The attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres said, “the Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.” Unsurprisingly, Israeli officials accused Guterres of justifying acts of terrorism and even called for his resignation.
In his speech, Biden also mentioned paying a visit to Mahmud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, and stated that “the United States remains committed to the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and to self-determination.” But just as the condemnation of violence, support by the U.S. seems to have two very distinct meanings, depending on which side is receiving “support.” Israelis get high tech weapons, financial support and reinforcement, while Palestinians have to content themselves with a friendly pat on the back: “Good luck guys!”
Observers might wonder why Biden had a meeting with Mahmud Abbas, who presides over the West Bank, while neglecting to meet with Hamas leaders, who have controlled the Gaza-strip since they won elections there in 2006 and orchestrated the 7th October attacks? The reason is that the U.S. has categorised Hamas as a “terrorist organisation”, and according to law, U.S. leaders are not allowed to negotiate with such entities.
Such a policy should be questioned. Just like Hamas, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) repeatedly resorted to violence against civilians, killing about 2.000 during the “Troubles,” a conflict lasting from 1968 to 1998; just like Hamas, IRA militants refused to recognise the existence of Northern Ireland as a nation and expressed an ambition to destroy it, and just like Hamas, the IRA was categorised as a “terrorist organisation” by British authorities. However, in the end a peace deal was made, and peace in Northern Ireland could probably never have been achieved without the participation of the IRA. “Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it,” the philosopher said.
Here again, words and their definition matter: what is a terrorist organisation? There is no consensus on the definition of the concept of “terrorism,” and often who gets to be labelled a terrorist and who doesn’t seems to be mostly determined by the colour of their skin. In fact, the United Nations themselves do not have an agreed definition and instead, they have warned against politicians’ abuse of that concept: “The lack of a definition may facilitate the politicisation and misuse of the term” and such misuse can lead to states “violating the rights of their own or other States' citizens, such as those of international human rights law, in the course of their counter-terrorism efforts.” The United Nations have however repeatedly made attempts at defining the concept in their resolutions. One such definition is as follows (resolution 49/60):
“Acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes.”
Another common understanding of terrorism is that it involves “violence against innocent civilians.” The problem is that both of those definitions apply to some extent to acts of violence committed by Hamas, but also apply ‒ and even more so ‒ to the Israeli army’s acts of violence in Gaza and the West Bank during the last 75 years. In total, the Israeli army has killed many more civilians than Hamas, for the most part intentionally, and even before Hamas ever existed.
In fact, most resistance movements in the history of mankind have at some point resorted to violence against civilians: the French resistance under Nazi occupation repeatedly murdered citizens which they believed to be collaborating with the Germans, and even the ANC, the South African resistance movement lead by Nelson Mandela sometimes resorted to bombings which killed civilians. This is not to say that those methods were justifiable, but rather that the existence of such acts can not be used as an excuse to deny the legitimacy of grievances which those resistance movements were facing.
The main distinction between ANC’s struggle on the one hand, and the Palestinian resistance on the other (of which Hamas is only a part), is that while the international community supported the ANC’s cause for the most part, applying pressure on their opponents and thus making peaceful negotiations not only a possibility but also a necessity for the ruling party, in the case of Palestine, the same international community, and especially the U.S., seems to have utterly abandoned the Palestinian resistance, and instead choose to support Israel unconditionally. This means that Israel leaders have no incentive whatsoever to aim for peace negotiations, as a peace treaty would de facto put an end to Israel’s expansionist policy. Therefore, the Palestinian resistance has become weak, divided and powerless, as peaceful demonstrations, peace negotiations and appeals to international intervention, which have all been tried in the last decades, have invariably failed at improving their fate.
Through every attempt at peace negotiation, Israel has continued grabbing an ever bigger share of Palestinian land. It is now holding the citizens of Gaza in an open-air prison and has implemented what human rights organisations have called an “apartheid policy” in the occupied territories, without the U.S., that so-called “world police,” ever to even lift its little finger, except in order to provide Israel with more weapons.
“We are, as my friend Madeleine Albright said, the indispensable nation,” Biden concludes in his speech. “Tonight, there are innocent people all over the world who hope because of us, who believe in a better life because of us, who are desperate not to be forgotten by us, and who are waiting for us.
Obviously, this does not apply to the Palestinians, who have long since lost any hope of assistance from the United States.
The war of words has extended to the whole world, even reaching tiny Iceland. In an interview with a Norwegian journalist, the Icelandic Minister of Foreign Affairs Bjarni Benediktson decided to become more Catholic than the Pope and refused to call the Israeli Defense Forces’ operation on the refugee camp Jabalia an “attack,” even though the IDF itself had called it such. “It is a matter of how you approach it,” the minister said, as he believed the word to be an inaccurate description of what was actually happening. The minister was later forced to correct his declaration as it became obvious the IDF itself had used the word “attack.” This is, unfortunately, a tragicomic instance of Western leaders’ inexplicable bias in favour of Israel and their main enabler, the U.S.
Later on, we learned that Icelandic authorities had refused to vote in favour of a resolution calling for a humanitarian ceasefire at the United Nations. The justification was that the resolution did not include a condemnation of Hamas’s attack on Israel. But the willingness to only mention and condemn Hamas’s wrongdoing while ignoring and neglecting to condemn all of Israel’s previous misdeeds (in 2022 alone, 204 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers) shows once more the tendency to blame the violence on Hamas and whitewash Israeli authorities of any responsibility for the current situation.
Attempts at peace negotiations by “moderate” Palestinian leaders such as Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas have repeatedly failed. During the 1990s, U.S. authorities assumed the role of broker in negotiations between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister of Israel. The negotiations culminated in the Oslo Accords in 1993, according to which Arafat recognised Israel as a state in return for a promise that Israel would gradually return the land it had taken from the Palestinians. Israelis never kept their promise. Instead, the land grabbing continued without any reaction on the part of the Americans.
Peaceful negotiations proved to be an eternal dead-end for the Palestinians. Should it come as a surprise to anyone that at least some of them are now leaning towards more aggressive leaders such as Hamas? Those who have lost hope are always more likely to resort to desperate measures. We can condemn Hamas’s attacks on civilians all we want, but in the end, self-righteous leaders in the West should ask themselves:
“What would I have done if I had been in their shoes?”