{"id":247352,"date":"2023-11-06T12:01:57","date_gmt":"2023-11-06T12:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=247352"},"modified":"2023-11-01T05:05:53","modified_gmt":"2023-11-01T05:05:53","slug":"gaza-in-real-time-geopolitics-vs-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/11\/gaza-in-real-time-geopolitics-vs-genocide\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaza in Real Time: Geopolitics vs Genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"

31 Oct 2023<\/em> – A modified version of this interview conducted by Daniel Falcone, with a long introduction, was published online in Truthout<\/em> on 29 Oct 2023. The situation in Gaza and its increasingly regional implications grow more humanly distressing and politically menacing with each passing day. Israel has succeeded in influencing the Global West and its corporate main media platforms to accept two interpretations of events following the Oct 7 Hamas attack that are at best highly contentious and controversial and, in my understanding, deeply misleading and distorting:<\/p>\n

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  1. that Hamas is nothing other than a group of terrorists engaged in barbaric crimes, and should be addressed in the same manner as ISIS and Al-Qaeda;<\/li>\n
  2. that it is legitimate in such a conflict to override normal rules of international law, even to the extent of engaging in genocidal means of ethnic cleansing.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In my view it is truer to the realities of its existence and behavior to regard Hamas as a political actor, freely elected and in charge of administering Gaza since 2007 despite an Israeli blockade and a pattern of punitive harassment.<\/p>\n

    Israel from the perspective of international law remains the Occupying Power in Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and as such is bound by the 4th<\/sup> Geneva Convention governing Belligerent Occupation. As a result it has extra legal obligations to protect the Occupied People and although entitled to maintain its security by reasonable means. It has no valid basis for claiming \u00a0self-defense as if Hamas was a foreign entity.<\/p>\n

    Israel\u2019s \u2018politics of deflection,\u2019 induce its own and world public opinion to overlook the true motivations and goals of Israel in mounting this genocidal response to the Hamas attack. The attack should be further contextualized by reference to the behavior of the extremist Netanyahu government that took over at the beginning of 2023, making issues other than the vengeful retaliation seem more illuminating: Given Israel tactics as articulated by its leaders, especially Netanyahu and Gallant, the behavior is not primarily about countering the Oct 7 attack. In other words it is less about restoring Israeli security<\/em> than it is devoted to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. If security was the core concern in the aftermath of October 7, would not Israel have emphasized its all out effort to correct the gaps revealed by the failure of its surveillance capabilities to warn and its military border strength to protect?<\/p>\n

    Don\u2019t other find it strange that the most obvious, least disruptive Israeli response would have been to restore its own border security with a sense of urgency, negotiating a prisoner exchange for the hostages, and agreeing to a long-term ceasefire with Hamas, which has been proposing for almost a decade?<\/p>\n

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    1. Can you talk about how misinformation and propaganda serves as an extra arm to overall the Israeli military policy?<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      FALK: <\/strong>Israel has long been a master of what is called in Hebrew hasbara,<\/em> that is the spinning, manipulating, and distorting of public discourse so that it either justifies what Israel is doing or diverts attention from the message of critics and skeptics to the supposedly questionable credibility of the messenger. \u2018The weaponizing of antisemitism\u2019 is a cynical example of the deployment of hasbara<\/em> stratagems designed solely to deflect criticism and shift the conversation to persons falsely accused.. \u00a0\u00a0Smearing reputable critics and discrediting objective criticism of Israel by giving voice to irresponsible allegations of hatred of Jews that is known by the Zionist apologists to be untrue is reflective of the hasbara<\/em> mentality. The hasbara<\/em> mission is to shield Israel from its critics, regardless of whether the criticisms are accurate or not. The quality of hasbara<\/em> discourse is not evaluated by their truthfulness, but solely by their effectiveness in changing the subject to an attack mode and inflicting a discrediting, undeserved punishment on their target. Such diversionary maneuvers are undertaken whenever substantive arguments in Israel\u2019s defense are weak or non-existent.<\/p>\n

      Asa Winstanley has written a powerful book on years of defamatory attacks on political figures or activist citizens who spoke positively about the Palestinian struggle in the UK and advocated that initiatives be taken to put pressure on Israel in influential opinion-forming venues or by way of activism as in the BDS Campaign. Winstanley compiles evidence showing that these tactics were being strongly and materially encouraged by Israeli officials and even subsidized by government money. The book carefully narrates the well-orchestrated campaign to destroy Jeremy Corbyn as a credible political leader of the Labour Party by widely disseminating knowingly false intimations of antisemitism of his part. [Winstanley, Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn<\/a>, (OR Books, 2023)].<\/p>\n

      Happening to know Jeremy Corbyn I can testify to his absolute acceptance and affirmation of the Jewish people, and his criticisms of Israel are directed at the objectional nature of their apartheid policies and practices, which have been confirmed in elaborate, documented reports of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.<\/p>\n

      The only reasonable conclusion is that hasbara<\/em> ethos, fully embraced by Israel\u2019s political leaders and pro-Israel lobbying groups around the world is \u2018anti-truth,\u2019 and not just \u2018post-truth\u2019 in the pre-modern sense of relying on beliefs more than empirical evidence.<\/p>\n

      Perhaps, as formidable as are these actual attacks on individuals or institutions are the intimidating secondary impacts on the mainstream media and public atmosphere to the effect that any public manifestations of pro-Palestinian views and acts of solidarity will be stigmatized and harmful to individuals in the workplace or social settings. Many persons are made reluctant to take public stands critical of Israel because fearful of Zionist pushbacks.<\/p>\n

      University administrators, at best a timid lot, withhold funds and even discourage the sponsorship of campus events opposed by unscrupulous pro-Zionist groups and individuals, including apolitical cultural gatherings deemed in some sense to be anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian. It would seem that the motivations for such mounting such hostile pressures is the belief that cultural expression humanizes \u2018the enemy\u2019 and renders less tenable the use of the terrorist label to dismiss Palestinian grievances. Wealthy individuals are aware of this sensitivity, and exert donor influence to achieve desired results with an overtness that erodes freedom of expression and rights of dissent in the midst of an ugly political confrontation, which calls for free discussion and a social atmosphere where dissident views are respected.<\/p>\n

      I have a young relative living in New York City who tells me that even her silence about current events in Gaza is interpreted by her Jewish friends as a covert criticism of Israel, and a colleague in the West who opposes what Israel is doing but keeps his mouth shut because it will harm his business relationships. As much as we in universities complain, we generally do enjoy the benefits of academic freedom not available in the corporate world, and so we have mostly ourselves to blame for not acting as citizens of conscience who express their beliefs rather than keep our true views closeted.<\/p>\n

      Although in academic settings, the last few weeks have seen university administrators run scared, and impose regulations that prohibit shows of support for Palestinian struggle amid some reports of threats against Jewish students. Given the unscrupulous tactics of hasbara practitioners suspicion about the source of such threats, but given what is happening in Gaza it would be irresponsible o ignore them. After 9\/11 an atmosphere of Islamophobia existed in the Global West, but it evoked little concern and what may be more relevant, no donor or community pressures.<\/p>\n

      The principal point is that the distorting impacts of manipulating the news are not just the spontaneous work of Zionist enthusiasts associated with NGOs and Jewish advocacy and lobbying organizations., They follow a deliberate effort by the most influential Israeli think tanks and the highest levels Israeli officialdom to influence, confuse, and if possible, shape public discourse. When in 2001 the International Criminal Court\u2019s decision authorizing investigations of well-grounded Palestinian complaints about Israeli war crimes post-2014 the technical arguments advanced by lawyers on jurisdiction attracted far less public interest than the outburst by Netanyahu that the ICC decision was a display of \u2018pure antisemitism.\u2019<\/p>\n

      Israeli strategic think tanks have long understood that controlling the main arenas of public discourse are as important as battlefield results and military capabilities, including intelligence. As Israel\u2019s regional security have weakened over the years, hasbara<\/em> has assumed an ever growing strategic importance in the conduct of Israeli foreign policy, which includes obscuring territorial expansionism and intensification of settler violence in the West Bank. This behavior has become more widely appreciated in the one-sided presentations and reactions to the current orgy of violence in Gaza unleashed by Israel after the Hamas attack, especially the defiant rejection of humanitarian claims by Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defense.<\/p>\n

      Both rely on false analogies between ISIS and All Qaeda to underpin their claim that their war is similar to that launched by the US after 9\/11 against terrorism and for the sake of security or more absurdly, to the US response against the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. All the while ignoring the elephant in the room, that the Hamas attack only occurred because of a barely believable lapse in Israeli security. It would not require a PhD to grasp the fact that Israeli security and reputation would have been dramatically enhanced by so responding, and in the process do something constructive in the face of Palestinian grievances and frustrations. This, of course, was not to be in part because this incredibly violent response, as barbaric, if not more so, than the events of October 7, serves other purposes, above all Israeli objectives of seizing land and dispossessing people.<\/p>\n

      Four elements differentiate Israeli hasbara<\/em> from standard forms of pro-war state propaganda in periods of intense conflict:<\/p>\n

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      1. Unscrupulous tactics to discredit views perceived as hostile consisting of lies, defamation, and subsidized campaigns;<\/li>\n
      2. \u00a0greater sophistication, including seeking the deflection of criticism by recourse to false allegations and misleading analogies rather than genuine efforts to defend policies under attack;<\/li>\n
      3. abundant public and private funding of Zionist anti-truth messaging, lobbying, and lawfare to win support and destroy adversaries;<\/li>\n
      4. an insistence that it is a justification of the Hamas attack to bring up the context of Palestinian long-term and recently acute victimization, which was the sin of Guterres, met with Israeli calls for his resignation.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Only during the height of the Cold War were criticisms of the American early role in Vietnam met with discrediting responses that such views were tacit endorsements of Communism and disloyal. By and large, efforts to oppose the latter stages of the Vietnam War or to support BDS as part of an anti-apartheid South Africa campaign were opposed by conservatives as impractical or inconsistent with foreign policy priorities, but not giving rise to punitive witch hunts that have been the experience of critics and activists supporting non-violent pro-Palestinian. initiatives. Nor did the governments of South Vietnam or South Africa get seriously involved in shaping the public dialogue within the United States on nearly the scale or style that Israel and its civil society ardent and well-funded Zionist infrastructure have in the main urban sectors of the Jewish global diaspora.<\/p>\n