Shot Across the Bows of WW3: Contextualizing the Israel-Hamas War
Anyone else notice a colossal decoupling of old left and new right? Former adversaries allied against COVID have fallen foul to the oldest trick in the book – divide and rule.
Anyone else notice a colossal decoupling of old left and new right? Former adversaries allied against COVID have fallen foul to the oldest trick in the book – divide and rule.
On one side, erstwhile defenders of freedom joined forces with establishment mouthpieces in their condemnation of Palestine and endorsement of Netanyahu’s promise to raze Gaza to the ground.
The last time we saw an ideological rift of this magnitude was at the onset of COVID-19. What fresh hell awaits the people of Gaza is anyone’s guess. For the rest of the world, It feels like a shot across the bows of world war.
What remains conspicuously absent from most talking points is background, history, context, and nuance. It’s as if the weekend’s events existe entirely in a vacuum, mRNA immunised against decades of occupation, apartheid, besiegement, and displacement.
I am not for one minute defending the horrific scenes coming out of Israel yesterday. Civilians being brutalised and murdered is indefensible. I would question, however, the veracity of some of these images, and why in one day, we have seen more from Isreal than 20 months of war in Ukraine. As one astute commenter observed:
Images like this are very disturbing, eliciting powerful emotions. Innocent people have undoubtedly been killed, just as thousands of innocent Palestinians have been killed for decades. We know nothing about these images. Manipulating emotion is a powerful propaganda technique. https://t.co/VWXDEtPDQK
— InThisTogether (@_InThisTogether) October 7, 2023
In the spirit of a well-deserved reality check, it’s important to remember that social media was flooded with a deluge of propaganda eliciting similar powerful emotions on the precipice of the first lockdowns.
As I remarked in this article last year: “COVID largely happened on social media where our social networks were weaponised as echo chambers of the fear-narrative. It wasn’t so much a pandemic, but the social contagion experiment playing out in real time.”
In similar terms, the weekend’s events represent a new watershed in the power of social media to evoke powerful emotions with graphic imagery that in some cases have transformed people’s perceptions and driven a wedge between former allied communities – all in the space of 24 hours. As a rule of thumb, it’s important to remember the information war of the past few years and the weapons of propaganda and PSYOPs used to divide and indoctrinate.
Let’s also remember that social media played a crucial role in the Arab Spring. Many consider this an example of U.S. backed Black Op’s, with many activist groups sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation funded by the Department of State and USAID.
If the lessons of the past few decades are anything to go by, painting Palestinians as the bad guys and Israel as the victims, is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.
What’s for certain is that retaliation from Israel will result in genocide and human rights atrocities in orders of magnitude greater than the hundreds of Israeli fatalities.
Even Jordan Peterson of ‘just get the damned vaccine’ fame, encouraged Netanyahu to “give ‘em hell”, like many others, in spectacular ignorance of the context, nuance and background to these events.
Namely, that the Gaza Strip is the world’s largest open-air prison at 25 miles long and 5 miles wide. With 2 million inhabitants, half of whom are children, it’s one of the most densely populated places on earth. What Israel euphemistically calls a border is a heavily fortified and patrolled barbed wire fence, akin to the prison wall separating Guantanamo Bay from Southwest Cuba.
Even the most cursory look at the reporting of fatalities and injuries from the region since 2008 paints a very different picture to the idea these events were unprovoked.
According to the United Nations, for every Israeli murdered, twenty one Palestinians are slain; for every Israeli injured, there’s twenty four Palestinians casualties. It’s not so much an uneven playing field as it is a story of David and Goliath. At one end of the battlefield, you have one of the most militarised states on earth, on the other a bunch of goat-herders-come terrorists (or freedom fighters), depending on which side of the fence you’re on.
For those rallying around the self-defence card, even Wikipedia places the number of civilian to combatant deaths during, for example, the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict at almost 3:1.
Others with inimitable experience reporting on these events for decades suggest that the number of Palestinians killed and maimed, day after day, goes largely unreported.
War is an abomination, granted. The killing of civilians, indefensible. The brutal scenes out of Israel this weekend, reprehensible. But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s context and nuance as to why these events happen. The same folks emphatically defending Ukraine’s right to defend itself against Russia, will not grant Palestinians similar concessions against their occupiers.
What many talking heads fail to acknowledge is that Israeli settlements are built on stolen land very often confiscated violently by an apartheid state leaving a trail of dead, maimed and displaced Palestinians in its wake. It could be argued by Palestinians personally affiliated by this conflict that Israeli civilian settlers are in fact colonisers with as much blood on their hands as the IDF and Mossad.
Until you have boots on the ground breathing in the gunpowder drenched putrid air from both sides of Israel’s contested and militarised boundary line, then you don’t really have a point of view, you have content curated by the very interests benefitting from your ignorance.
And irrespective of the degrading scenes we witnessed on Saturday, the degradation goes both ways: see this.
An important point of reference to how the Israeli army controls every vector of Palestinian life in the occupied territories is this interview with former Israeli soldier Ori Givati.
Givati is involved with an organisation called Breaking the Silence that raises awareness of the dire consequences of prolonged military occupation.
The Israeli government may have just declared war, with the western establishment supporting its permissibility, but others closer to the occupation, including The Jewish Voice for Peace believe that the war on Palestine has been in full swing for 75-years:
“Israeli apartheid and occupation – and United States complicity in that oppression – are the source of all this violence. Reality is shaped by when you start the clock.
For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy with violent expulsions and home demolitions, mass killings, military raids on refugee camps, unrelenting siege, and daily humiliation. In recent weeks, Israeli forces repeatedly stormed the holiest Muslim sites in Jerusalem.”
With a unified media campaign attempting to promote these events as Israel’s 9/11, it’s important for right thinking folks who would ordinarily be mistrustful of corporate media consensus to validate their sources and ensure as much impartiality as possible.
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Not surprised to see neocons like Nikki Haley frothing at the mouth with anticipation of destroying Gaza and bombing Iran. But who's paying Jordan Peterson to spew such thoughtless and dangerous propaganda? Or is he really that stupid?