The Tectonic Shift: The Gaza Genocide and the Limits of Israeli Hasbara
Image by Dylan Shaw.
The ongoing war and genocide in Gaza is unprecedented. Nothing that Israel and its supporters can say or do will avoid the historical accountability of the extermination of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
The above assertion is critical, both for ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and achieving Palestinian freedom. This is why.
In all past wars and adjoining war crimes, Israel managed to push the reset button in its relationship with occupied Palestinians.
Following each war, the Israeli hasbara, propaganda machine, would start – utilizing the always-willing western mainstream media – to paint Palestinians in a negative light and to present Israel, a country that is supposedly in a permanent state of self-defense, as the victim, or even the lone defender of western civilization.
This campaign is always paralleled with the whitewashing of Israel in popular entertainment, from Hollywood movies to TV sit-coms, to magazine covers with such titles as “Gorgeous Photos Capture The Unseen Lives Of Female Soldiers In Israel”.
Generally, Western politicians of varied ideologies, along with intellectuals, news talking heads and church leaders all praise, in tandem, the miracle that is Israel.
At the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war in October 2023, for example, British playwright Tom Stoppard said that “before we take up a position on what’s happening now, we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilization and barbarism.” He, of course, leaned towards the latter.
This Israeli tactic always includes the demonization of Palestinians as well, where the victim becomes the ‘terrorist’ and those under siege become the besiegers. This last claim, in particular, was expressed in the words of former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright who said, in an interview with NBC in August 2000, that “the Israelis feel under siege from the Palestinian rock throwers and the various gangs that have been roaming around.”
Why will those same Israeli tactics fail this time? Indeed, they will fail, not due to Israel’s lack of trying. In fact, Israel is already bracing for the fight of a lifetime.
One new tactic that Israel is already employing in ‘friendly’ countries, like the United States, is the passing of laws to block the mere conversation on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, so that it will have exclusive access to the American public.
On November 14, the US House of Representatives passed two bills: H.R.6408 and H.R.9495. The latter, in particular, aimed at giving the Treasury Secretary the authorization to revoke an organization’s tax-exempt status and decide when the designation would end.
Once these bills pass the Senate and are approved by the president, the most democratic and peaceful expressions of rejecting the Israeli occupation of Palestine and demanding sensible US foreign policy will be equated to a direct violation of the law and, in some cases, to terrorism – as defined by the Department of Treasury, at the behest of the pro-Israeli lobby.
But even these desperate attempts will not quell the anger or distract from the conversation, for the following reasons:
One, not only did Israel commit genocide in the Gaza Strip, but this genocide and extermination are being investigated and are acknowledged by the world’s largest legal institutions, namely the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Two, unlike previous investigations, for example, the Goldstone Report probing the 2008-09 war on Gaza, the international community has already taken some practical steps to hold Israeli war criminals accountable, including an arrest warrant issued on November 21 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Three, those who routinely come to Israel’s defense, the US and other Western governments, are now directly clashing with the very international law they helped articulate after World War II, depriving them of any credibility as ‘neutral’ parties in this conflict.
For example, Biden said that the warrants were “outrageous” while the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs claimed that Netanyahu and other ministers enjoy immunity since Israel is not a party to the ICC.
Four, despite the inherent bias of western media, Palestinian journalists, isolated and killed in large numbers, managed to communicate the genocide to the rest of the world, making it impossible for Israel to hide its crimes.
Five, the impact of the Israeli genocide on Gaza has already penetrated the various layers of public opinion, unprecedented in history.
Typically, the conversation on Palestine is confined to specific strata of society, reaching academics, social justice activists and other groups interested in politics and global issues.
Today, ordinary people have been made aware of the conversation, to the extent that it is widely believed that anger over Gaza has contributed in determining the outcome of the latest US elections.
In Africa, the growing political and public interest in the Palestinian struggle have re-enlivened the spirit of anti-colonial, liberation struggles on the continent, bringing many countries, from South Africa to Algeria, back to the frontlines of global solidarity.
No amount of Israeli propaganda, unjust laws, unfair categorizations of Palestinians or the hardly-clad models of the IDF, will ever succeed in reversing these realities.
Now, there can be no reset buttons. Rather, the global momentum of Palestine’s liberation will accelerate in the coming months and years.
The price exacted from the Palestinian people for this earth-shattering moment has been high and painful, but the history of all national liberation struggles, Palestine included, demonstrates that the price for freedom is always high.
Piers Morgan – Normalizing Israel’s Genocide
Piers Morgan, Youtube screenshot.
Since October 7, 2023, white settler propaganda has ramped up through two insidious tactics targeting western audiences. The first rationalizes Israel’s brutality under the pretext of “self-defense” of a supposed “civilized” western democracy in a barbaric region, exploiting the conflation of Zionism with Judaism and dehumanizing all Palestinian people as “terrorists” to legitimize the ongoing genocide in Palestine and suppress dissent in the United States. The second aims to normalize genocide and Zionism, making mass violence more acceptable by breaking societal taboos, delegitimizing and attempting to destroy international law and weaving them seamlessly into the fabric of Western capitalist, liberal and consumerist culture.
Driving this normalization campaign is the mainstream media, with platforms like the talk show Piers Morgan’s Uncensored and the liberal Zionist outlet Haaretz playing pivotal roles.
The role of dehumanization in genocide
Recent research has advanced understanding of why people participate in genocide. Influences like peer pressure, group norms and obedience to authority often outweigh deeply held beliefs or ideologies. Class, economic inequality and lack of resources also make some individuals more vulnerable to coercion.
Several studies highlight the role of dehumanizing propaganda in promoting and shaping genocidal violence. While such rhetoric may not convince everyone, it shifts social dynamics by promoting the repression of dissent, normalizing violent ideas and emboldening those with pre-existing biases to act on them. This propaganda does not always create hatred though it can legitimize and create consent to deadly aggressive solutions, making them seem acceptable although they are illegal, morally abhorrent actions.
Dehumanization also plays a role after participation in violence. While many genocidaires initially experience intense emotional and physical distress, repeated acts of violence dull these reactions. Dehumanizing narratives then play a critical role in reframing and normalizing such actions, helping participants justify continued violence and view it as morally acceptable.
Spreading lies and debating mass murder
White settler societies, including Zionist society in Palestine, construct their identity through misinformation, dehumanization of “the other” and a commitment to expansion and dispossession, with media shaping public opinion and influencing policy to sustain these narratives. Since October 7, 2023, the mainstream media has perpetuated what may be one of the most elaborate and insidious misinformation campaigns in modern history. This includes the widespread dissemination of fictitious atrocity propaganda dehumanizing Palestinian people, such as claims of mass rape, beheaded babies, infants hanging on a clothesline, a baby baked in an oven and other fabricated horrors.
British media personality Piers Morgan has used his extremely popular News Corp platform to amplify debunked atrocity propaganda, facing no accountability. Through his debate show, he has provided a stage for Islamophobes, official Israeli state and military spokespersons and unapologetic antisemites to air their abhorrent, fascistic and bogus viewpoints. These reactionaries have been featured alongside anti-war, anti-apartheid, anti-genocide, pro-humanity, progressive, liberal and leftist activists, politicians and media personalities as a supposed counterbalance, muddying the waters of acceptable debate.
Morgan’s show trivializes atrocities by framing genocide as a topic for “debate” rather than the moral and legal outrage it is. This process of normalization, as defined by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, makes the inherently abnormal, illegal and repugnant apartheid, genocide and settler colonialism – seem ordinary and acceptable, while diverting focus from the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The BDS movement opposes normalization, viewing it as a tool used by oppressors to legitimize oppression and suppress resistance. Normalisation enables Israel to whitewash its apartheid, genocidal regime and weaken global solidarity with Palestinian liberation through manipulative rhetoric.
Programs like Morgan’s claim to be neutral platforms, yet his overt pro-Trump stance and role as a henchman for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Fox News expose the façade, steering the narrative behind his so-called “uncensored” approach. Similarly, another Trump aficionado, now appointee Elon Musk claims to champion “free speech” while actively suppressing dissenting voices on his increasingly reactionary X platform.
Morgan’s show exemplifies Orwell’s concept of “newspeak,” as described in 1984. This distortion of language, repackaged as seemingly innocent discourse, aligns with what Italian philosopher Umberto Eco termed “Ur-fascism,” warning in his 14th point that such manipulations can even manifest in the guise of popular talk shows. Morgan positions himself much like Israeli war-criminal Netanyahu and US President elect Trump, who embrace a cult of tradition, whether rooted in the myth of a once “great” America or an expansive Greater Israel, syncretizing diverse and often contradictory beliefs into an immutable “truth,” while rejecting modernism and intellectual, academic critique.
Haaretz and justice
The foremost liberal Zionist media outlet – Haaretz (“the land” in Hebrew) – serves a particularly noxious normalization function; to present Zionism as aligned with human rights, claiming to encompass a political spectrum from right to left, with democratic, progressive values and a commitment to peace and justice. This façade legitimizes a hollow “peace process” of fruitless negotiations, all while Israeli bulldozers and developers persist in stealing Palestinian land, with some of it even marketed in the U.S. at Zionist land sales cynically hosted in synagogues.
Much like its portrayal of the anti-Netanyahu protests in the spring of 2023 as indicative of Israeli so-called “democracy,” Haaretz obscures the genocidal foundation of Zionism by framing the intensified violence against Palestinians since October 7, 2023, as a symptom of the Netanyahu government’s extremism – a bug rather than a feature of Zionism. Additionally, similar to Piers Morgan’s program which fosters open collaboration with genocidal entities, Haaretz has featured reports from regime-aligned journalists embedded within the Israeli military. It played a key role in amplifying the fabricated Hamas mass rape narrative, among other regime agitprop.
Piers Morgan Uncensored and Haaretz are not merely examples of media manipulation; they are instruments of societal conditioning designed to sustain global systems of oppression. Resisting this insidious normalization demands critical engagement with media narratives and a steadfast refusal to accept these atrocities as unavoidable.
Reclaiming the language of justice is essential, standing in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation as a critical front in the global fight against white supremacist imperialism.
Netanyahu’s Diabolical Undeclared War Objectives in Gaza
Youtube screenshot.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel’s war on Gaza will continue until achieving what he terms “total victory.” Instead of critically examining Netanyahu’s vague and open-ended objectives, much of the Western media and many governments frame the onslaught as self-defense, and some even normalize the genocide as a “humane” attempt to “free” Israeli captives.
At the same time, the same pundits decontextualized the Palestinian right to self-defense by ignoring that the October 7 revolt was a direct response to over two decades of Israel’s imposed “starvation diet” blockade on Gaza. Exactly, as the West turns a blind eye, and continues to enable Israel’s theft of Palestinian-occupied land in the West Bank to benefit Jewish-only colonies.
Meanwhile, these media outlets downplay or dismiss Israel’s treacherous undeclared war objectives, even to the detriment of Israeli captives and the immense civilian suffering in Gaza.
For over a year, Netanyahu has prioritized an agenda to reoccupy and to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza rather than engage in negotiations for prisoner’s swap. Especially since the release of Israeli captives would undermine one of Netanyahu’s primary pretexts for pursuing his sinister objectives.
This is only possible in the wake of Western leaders embracing Netanyahu’s racist perspective, focusing only on the well-being of Israeli captives, while ignoring the over 10,000 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli jails, and the welfare of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. For instance, Joe Biden has expressed recently his concern over Netanyahu potentially delaying action to secure the release of Israeli captives until January 20, 2025, while expressing no sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians in 2024 and beyond.
With the conspicuous silence or impotence of world bodies, the Israeli captives became a convenient fig leaf under which Netanyahu saw as an opportunity to reoccupy Gaza. It is worth recalling that in 2005, Netanyahu resigned from the Israeli government in protest against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to “disengage” and remove the Jewish-only colonies from the Gaza strip.
Immediately following October 7, Netanyahu launched a genocidal war, disregarding the Palestinian Resistance’s proposal for prisoner’s exchange. His decision to pursue war instead of negotiations was motivated by several factors:
a) Deflect responsibility for the intelligence failure under his watch.
b) Evade scrutiny of his role in facilitating external funding to Hamas.
d) Execute a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing to reoccupy Gaza.
The strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza was openly advocated by Israel’s racist Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who three months following October 7 called for Palestinians to leave Gaza. The scion of an Ukrainian immigrant repeated the century-old European Zionist myth of blooming the desert⎯a narrative that not only ignores historical and geographical realities but also contradicts his own Old Testament that once described Canaan, the land of the Filastin (Palestine), as the “land of milk and honey,” before the ancient Hebrews migrated from their original homes to Palestine.
Further, and on January 1, 2024, Smotrich’s fellow racist National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, declared in a Knesset speech that Israel should never withdraw from any territory it occupies and explained that the establishment of new Jewish-only colonies in Gaza as “an important thing.” The following day, on January 2, Ben Gvir doubled down, stating that displacing “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians from Gaza would help pave the way for the creation of the new Jewish-only colonies.
More recently, on Monday, November 25, Smotrich declared to the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing the Jewish-only colonies in the occupied West Bank, “We can and must conquer the Gaza Strip.” He claimed there is “a unique opportunity” with Donald Trump’s election to halve Gaza’s population—a veiled euphemism for ethnic cleansing. On Thursday, November 28, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir echoed similar calls to “reoccupy the Gaza Strip.”
On the ground inside Gaza, the tools of occupation were more explicit in defining the meaning of Netanyahu’s ostensible mantra: “total victory.” Israeli soldiers posed before an orange banner that read, “Only (Jewish-only) settlement (in Gaza) would be considered victory!” Notably, the orange color harkens back to the banners used by the settler movement in 2005 to protest Sharon’s decision to evacuate the Jewish-only colonies from Gaza.
To this end, and starting October 1st, Israel initiated a new phase of targeted genocide by starvation, blocking food aid trucks from entering northern Gaza, particularly the towns of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and camp Jabalia. And where trucks were allowed in, food aid was swapped with sand bags. Starvation has become so widespread in these areas, women and children are forced to scavenge through mounds of trash for food.
On November 29, Ajith Sunghay, head of the U.N. Human Rights Office for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, stated after visiting Gaza that the “U.N. had been unable to deliver any aid to northern Gaza” due to “repeated impediments or outright rejections of humanitarian convoys by the Israeli authorities.”
Regarding the genocide by terror, U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk reported that residents of northern Gaza are subjected to “non-stop” bombing. Simultaneously, hundreds of thousands have been ordered to evacuate, likely to make way for new Jewish-only settlements.
As part of the forced depopulation of Gaza’s northern region—the most fertile land in the strip—Israel is constructing a topographic barrier to isolate this area from the rest of Gaza. Beginning in early October, Israel carried out extensive controlled explosions, demolishing multi-story buildings to clear a path for a 5.6-mile road cutting across the strip. This road divides Gaza City from the northern towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has characterized this widespread forced displacement as part of an official government policy amounting to “crimes against humanity.”
On November 30, former Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon confirmed HRW findings, stating that Netanyahu and “far-right” (racist) elements are waging a war of “occupation, annexation, and ethnic cleansing.” He added, “There is no Beit Lahia, there is no Beit Hanoun.”
The live documented ethnic cleansing in Gaza, much like in 1948, alongside the expansion of Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank, underscores the true undeclared objectives in Israel’s ostensible “total victory.” In this contest, Netanyahu’s deliberate undermining of U.S.-led negotiations for prisoner’s swap exemplifies his quintessential diabolical persona: exploiting the predicament of his own Israeli captives to further his cynical undeclared agenda of slaughtering the “Amalek,” and ethnically cleansing Gaza to pave the way for new Jewish-only colonies.
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