The equanimity of lunatics
In
response to the conflict in Gaza, the international media has
systematically downplayed the severity of the events and aided in
Israeli obfuscation and falsehoods. Richard Seymour surveys the media's "lunatic equanimity in the face of barbarism".
I.
From the start, the framing has been wrong and misleading.
It begins with little things. Hamas’s attack in southern Israel, however grimly, predictably brutal, was not an “invasion” as it has widely been reported. For it to be an invasion, there would have to be a border, which would imply that there is already a two-state settlement. There are not two states, but one apartheid state, in which millions of rightless subjects are ruled, says B'TSelem, by a regime of “Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”.
Gaza is not a nation-state. It is not even an “open-air prison” as is often said. It is a fortified ghetto controlled by the state of Israel, and blockaded by the state of Israel, which allows only enough food into Gaza to provide the bare minimum calories for residents, and which has systematically “de-developed” Gaza to the point where more than half of people live in poverty and eighty percent are dependent on humanitarian relief. It is a regime of mandatory hopelessness. That is why Netanyahu favoured funding Hamas. That is what he thought he was paying for. Hamas was to run basic services, sparing Israel the responsibilities of an occupying power and allowing it a free hand to annexe the West Bank and “transfer” the population with pogroms.
The ubiquitous references to “invasion”, which by mere lexical fiat strikes so much recent history from the record, are not innocent. During the March of Return in 2018, for instance, Gazans advanced to the ghetto fence in an act of civil defiance against the regime. Israeli sniper squads cut them down with bullets, killing hundreds and injuring thousands more. Both the BBC and Westminster politicians referred to this as “border violence”. So did the international press from the New York Times to the Globe and Mail. In fact, Netanyahu set the tone, claiming that “our brave soldiers are protecting the border of Israel”. The purpose of asserting that there is a border between Israel and Gaza is to euphemise Israeli violence, and to represent the aggressor as engaging in self-defence.
During the attack on 7th October, Israel was not invaded; its ghetto regime momentarily broke down. The fact that Hamas fighters killed many hundreds of civilians, some in unconscionably sadistic ways, does not obliterate this obvious fact. Nor does it entitle Joe Biden, the Israeli government, journalists, magazines or columnists, to grotesquely compare their actions to the Holocaust. To do so – in full knowledge of the vastly greater amount of carnage wrought by Israel, and in awareness of its status as the occupying power, the aggressor, the purveyor of racist apartheid – is not merely to abuse Holocaust memory but to invert the real relations of power. It is to collude in Israeli representations of Palestinians as the “Nazis”, and of themselves as eternally on the cusp of annihilation, against which any atrocity might be condoned.
In aid of this obfuscation, both politicians
and the media have willingly circulated graphic and false Israeli claims
about what happened as fact. On CNN, for example, Sara Sidner reported
an Israeli media claim that Hamas had beheaded forty babies at the Kfar
Aza kibbutz in southern Israel. She was far from alone in doing so. In
the UK, the story was reported in The Times, The Telegraph, The Sun, the Daily Express and the Metro. Joe Biden
even falsely claimed to have seen photographs of this. This story
turned out to be a lie.
The Israeli government, naturally, claims it is “sick”
to argue about this, as though such details mattered in view of the
overall brutality of Hamas’s attack. If it didn’t matter, however, the
story would not have made the front pages. And if a false story can
command the front pages with seemingly scant or non-existent
investigation, this can’t be blamed on the usual online disinformation. It suggests something of the febrile and irrational climate of reporting and of the selective credulity of journalists.
What’s more, it leaves us in some doubt as to what to believe. For example, NBC news now reports that “top secret” Hamas documents prove that there was a plan going back years to attack children and “kill as many people as possible”. The documents were allegedly found on the bodies of Hamas fighters. Is this plausible? Would Hamas fighters with a reasonable expectation of being killed or captured have carried top secret documents around in their pockets? What else might be false?
II.
These
subtle and not-so-subtle dissimulations are the basis for the
unqualified international license extended to the state of Israel as it
readied its response. They are also the pretext for the Israeli
far-right, in command of government, to rehearse their lurid,
death-metal fantasies of racist massacre and torture. Intoxicated by
their own cruelty, they have gone beyond the usual cold, psychotic
bombast to clear expressions of genocidal intent. To which anglophone
media has generally responded with an understanding nod, a sigh for the
unfortunates “caught in the crossfire”, and tactful silence. It has
swerved effortlessly as it always does from banality to barbarism,
banalising barbarism, barbarising banality.
One could even admire such a glib segue, decorously omitting the opportunity to raise Israel’s habit of targeting homes, schools and hospitals, or anything about the criminal blockade of Gaza, or indeed anything the least bit challenging, if it had required the least bit of thought. To the contrary, it appeared entirely spontaneous, as mindlessly automatic as the Duracell bunny.
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