On Spotting Israeli Propaganda
I mean it's pretty obvious but (Dispatch 7)
(tw: violent images)
“Thus to speak a true word is to transform the world”—Paolo Freire
“Whoever witnesses something evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is unable, then with his tongue; and if he is unable then with his heart—but that is the weakest form of faith.”—Forty Hadith of al-Nawawi.
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Thomas L. Friedman, who I found out has won three Pulitzer prizes, just wrote this piece for the New York Times a few days ago.
According to this strange piece of blatant propaganda, the U.S. is a lion - the self-proclaimed king of the jungle, Netanyahu is a lemur, always shifting sideways apparently (into fascism, or?) …but all of the Middle East? They are just a bunch of good-for-nothing insects! It’s not a suggestion, it’s a declaration of supremacy.
Friedman insists: “We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.” Right, because that’s also what makes sense in an environmental setting, right (it doesn’t) just blow the whole thing down… I’ve come to find that there are rarely really any logical explanations for a Zionist’s take. What’s shocking about this is not how adamant they are, but rather how accepting the international community is of the double standard that protects them from critique.
I have written for the New York Times a few times, I’ve even been profiled by them, as well. I know the process of both things is an arduous and bureaucratic event, with many different moving parts, involving many robust teams of people. So I’m assuming this story was also given that kind of close inspection, right? It’s fair to assume that newspapers like the NYT - that believe they are morally and intellectually superior, arbiters of democracy and freedom of the press - would have the same kind of calculations across the board, no matter the story or subject. That would be the logical conclusion…
In 2011, Less Than Human, a book about the psychology of cruelty by David Livingstone Smith, came out. In a review by NPR they wrote, “During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. Smith argues that it's important to define and describe dehumanization because it's what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.”
Perhaps Friedman avoids critique by centering the world in an animal king context. “We are still the king of the Middle East — more powerful than any single actor”—he writes, his story of self-mythology, where he and his kin of white male Zionists, are strong and majestic like a lion. Empires are built around the stories they tell themselves about who and what they are, but the great American Empire is no truer than the “king of the Middle East”… You aren’t something simply because you declare it so. Zionists might learn a thing or two when they begin to understand that they share this world with others, and it is not just their own side of the story that equates to history. But as someone said to me recently, this is the product of white supremacy, Zionists want the power that white colonizers have. They want to gloat with all their abuse of power. They don’t want to be fair, that’s not the point, they want to feel powerful, which means they must abuse it.
I, like many others, have always struggled with the veneer of somebody saying they are something versus what they are, truly, underneath it all. My mother was this archetype, she was sweet in public but caustic and violent behind closed doors, Dr Jekyll, Mr Hyde. These days, after 34 years of processing abuse, I understand my attraction to some narcissists in my life, and they’re always the people who say they’re one thing but act another way, which therein causes confusion. This means I’ve become well acquainted with duplicity. And yeah, I do think most Israelis I’ve witnessed are narcissists, it’s a product of trauma where your victimhood becomes the entire focal point of your being.
But for nation-states, it’s different, there should be more protocols for nation-states to be who they say are, it’s embarrassing to me that the U.S. is just a big bully and that’s kind of all you have to do to distract people - you just have to proclaim again and again that you are exceptional as you bludgeon peoples heads in with the idea. And because we are all too nostalgic for a place to call home we forget that there’s no real value in a border or land, especially if it’s stolen—and there’s nothing in saying that you are the greatest country in the world, especially if in actuality that is not true.
Unsurprisingly, this is from Friedman’s Wikipedia page. The last three sentences are the most important.
I think it’s important because there’s a trend here that I keep seeing of Zionists having positions of power where they are a) either lauded or upheld by U.S. public institutions like NYT or Pulitzer or Harvard which therein strengthens their positionality as spokespeople b) by protecting Israel’s honor they insist on using genocidal tropes and languaging to dehumanize Palestinians and by attempting to normalize this kind of behavior, they only just expose who they really are.
This is the case for Marty Peretz, former Harvard professor, publisher of the New Republic, and advisor to Al Gore, The Baffler once wrote of Peretz, “Though he has some appalling blind spots, most egregiously his racist contempt for Palestinians.” Then of course there’s Robert Goldberg, who is the current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and is publically Zionist. “Retroactively, when describing his first trip to Israel as a teen, Goldberg recalled the sense of empowerment he felt Israel embodied. He left college to move to Israel, where he served in the Israel Defense Forces during the First Intifada as a prison guard.”
These are just two examples off the top of my head, but after joining WAWOG (Writers Against The War on Gaza) a couple of months ago, learning about PACBI (and who is on the list), and most recently my involvement in boycotting PEN (both personally and publicly) I realized (through how much information I’m getting from other comrades) that many many many people in power would consider themselves Zionists. Even people who work in “leftist” organizations.
I miss the days when Jewish comrades like Rosa Luxembourg and Emma Goldman (a personal hero of mine, her biography by Vivian Gornick, is one of my favorite books of all time) understood class and racial solidarity - they understood that our common enemy was the white bourgeoisie, so the capitalists. Now those lines are blurred because everyone can be a capitalist, hooray!!! But let us not forget - we have a humanity and an earth to fight for. That takes collective power to resist the death cult that is capitalism. Trust me, I’m unlearning this every day.
Recently, in a summary of Frantz Fanon’s writings in The Wretched of The Earth, I found this particularly compelling explanation: “The coloniser often inscribes the colonised subject with ideas of backwardness and a lack of empathy and rationality. The colonial subject is therefore ‘dehumanized’ by colonialism to such an extent that ‘it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms,” writes Fanon. “It then becomes natural for the coloniser to deploy violence in the colonial context, because the dehumanised colonial subject will not respond to anything else.”
I think it’s important to note, that Friedman, having had incredible success in the U.S. still longs/ed for another homeland, maybe something akin to what Goldberg also describes, something that feels ancestral. As someone who has also been displaced due to migration, and is therefore forced to become a settler by birth, I also long for a homeland, but I’ve never felt compelled to take that from somebody else.
Bangladesh is said to be one of the first nations to go underwater in the next few decades. Who pays for the reparations of colonization? Who pays for the destruction of climate change? I see all these European nations continue to forgo responsibility for their plethora of sins and ignore their responsibility to the people they have colonized. But of course, the subject is rarely considered a human, and therefore, Europe and the West remain in its delusion. Who do you think Europe and the West colonized by the way? Oh, just Black, Muslim, Arab, Brown, and Indigenous people…
“When the Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen, or subhumans, they didn't mean it metaphorically,” writes Smith. "They didn't mean they were like subhumans. They meant they were literally subhuman."
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I think it’s important to understand the use of language in psychological warfare here, which is a consistent thread woven into everyday genocidal tactics—you dehumanize to conquer—and what else is this ‘war’ in Gaza other than a land grab, a conquest?
I recently came across two videos that are haunting me. The first is of an IOF soldier forcing blindfolded and captured Palestinian men to pledge that they are slaves. I posted it down below. What’s interesting is that a lot of IOF soldiers are posting these videos to their very own social media accounts, so they’re easily traceable, but that means that not only are they being emboldened to post and share these videos, but they must also assume that there’s nothing wrong with any of these actions… and from a psychological standpoint I keep thinking about the lasting impacts of genocidal intent in Israeli society. Will the Holocaust still hold the same weight, internationally, in a few years when we’ve all accepted and witnessed what some of its descendants have participated in?
Take, for instance, Yosse Gamzoo, who posted a photo (again to his own socials, if you click the link you can see the photo) of him torturing a fully naked Palestinian man who has an open wound on his leg. This man is in the West Bank, so this isn’t even in Gaza. Yet an IOF soldier feels as if it’s normal and OK to post such a photo. It reminds me of this infamous photo from the Iraq War. I think it was the moment that broke the veneer of respectability in international media, now there was suddenly hard proof that the war was as brutal as many of us presumed it was, and that the U.S. wasn’t this projected beacon of morality that it pretended to be. That in fact, the U.S. had entered Iraq under nefarious pretexts, emboldening the American public to feel that they had some superiority over those terrorists in that backward Muslim country over there… Sound familiar? The Islamophobia is ruthless.
I can’t stop thinking about the similarities between the two photos, maybe because of how brazen the Israelis continue to be. They are getting away with genocide, so they’re getting cockier and more repugnant. The death toll has risen past 27,000, and half of these numbers are still of children. Yet, we continue on, pretending every day that genocide isn’t happening on our dime, as many still refuse to call for a ceasefire, even though we keep having award shows and rich people keep applauding themselves.
Part of this brazen quality might be better explained to us by Phyllis Bennis, who is, according to Saul Williams: “a prominent American writer, activist, and political commentator who holds various influential positions. She is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and is a member of the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace. Her work centers around providing critical commentary on U.S. foreign policy, with a particular focus on the Middle East. She advocates for peaceful and pragmatic solutions to global conflicts.”
This is what she had to say in 2018. Make sure to watch the whole video, it’s not very long. But for those of you who can’t watch it, I’ll summarize. She explains that right now in Israel we have a coalition of the right, the far right, the extreme right and what Bennis carefully calls “the fascist right.” According to her, the younger you are, the more right you are. This is because Israel has “an incredibly successful, powerful and ideologically driven education system” that emboldens these young Israelis to act this way. Watching the number of Israeli teens blocking aid getting into Gaza this past week… we are witnessing this far-right ideology in action.
I keep thinking of what Refaat Alareer would say about how there is no existence of an Israeli left. Sure, some people protest the government, perhaps those who also disagree with the brutality being used in Gaza, but ultimately - they still believe in their right to occupation, and that will forever skew the truth because to justify occupation you have to do a lot of mental gymnastics, so it’s a reality that’s rooted entirely in your own sense of entitlement.
I’ve noticed that liberals or moderates often want to act like life is important - you know there is this charade of caring equally about both Palestinians and Israelis - and I do think it’s important to remember all human life is precious and equal - but when it comes down to it, you can see how little they truly care about Palestinians. It’s the whole “Do you condemn Hamas?” of it all, with no consideration with, if you must ask that then you must also ask: do you condemn occupation? Because you wouldn’t have Hamas without occupation. This is the math that Israelis keep blurring, but it’s very simple; Hamas is resistance.
This reminds me of something I read in a transcript between Mohammed El Kurd, the poet and writer, and Ahmed Al Naouq, the founder of We Are Not Numbers, recently. El Kurd explained: “They ask us these questions on whether we condemn Hamas to see whether YOU are condemnable. Whether they can condemn you or not. It's about, you know, dividing those who are with them or who they see as humans, and those who they don't see as humans. It's absolutely...”
“It’s a litmus test,” added Al Naouq.
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For years and years when I would hear Israel declaring that Hamas was using human shields, I believed that’s exactly what Hamas was doing, that these sick bastards were deploying innocent Palestinian civilians as targets. I once used to think Hamas was a terrorist organization as well, and like many people in a post-9/11 world, I had to unlearn my Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias. All it took was for me to read some books, imagine that! Anyway, that’s how Israel would always make it sound, like it was on the onus of Hamas to stop using foul tactics.
What I didn’t understand then is that what Israel was referring to is the fact that Hamas wouldn’t / won’t concede and therefore they hide in plain sight, amidst other Gazans, which is why Israel then justifies its indiscriminate bombing. If Hamas refuses to simply give up then Israel is in its full right to “defend itself.” So, it’s not their fault if they kill civilians because Hamas is using “human shields.” Even though Israel has the technology to bomb buildings with precision, and to kill as few civilians as they can, what they keep showing us, is they simply do not care. They want to kill all the Palestinians. Every last one.
What we’ve also been told is that both sides use propaganda. I’ve heard this many times throughout the years. Yet, as the last few months have gone by, I’ve seen the Palestinian commitment to truth, and integrity to facts, to numbers, and I have been moved. Palestinians don’t need propaganda, they have the truth. I follow trusted sources who know that one day, historical accuracy will matter. So they document everything. They’ve had to do this for the last 76 years, and they know the truth is on their side, so there’s nothing to exaggerate. As my father reminded me a few months ago, “When you speak about Palestine, speak with fact,” later explaining to me, that the facts of Palestine speak for themselves. I believe this to be true, as well. Palestinians speak for themselves, we are simply tasked to platform their voices so they can get louder and louder and further and further. This is a fight for truth, a revolution for historical accuracy, fairness, and justice for all colonized people.
This is an act of decolonization, to not fall prey to the colonizers’ tactics. Remember that playing fairly has a long game attached to it that an imperialist doesn’t have a vision for. They want the land now, they’re not thinking about the future. Yet, to spiritually edify yourself, you must remember that your word means something, and karma plays out in a multitude of ways. Societies built on fraudulence always collapse.
I remember, as I was taught, that to misuse truth is un-Islamic, it goes against the very principles of who we are as a people. The word Shahid in Persian means “beloved,” in Arabic, it means “martyr” or “witness.” They are all one of the same things. Be beloved, be a martyr, be a witness.
But the only way to do that is to tell the truth.