On Western media and the erasure of Palestine

BY HASHEM ABUSHAMA 

With every Israeli massacre in the besieged Gaza Strip, the double standards of Western media and governments become palpable. This time, however, the targeting of Palestinians and their supporters, especially across Europe, seems to be more violent and coordinated than ever before. 

On October 10th, the UK Home Secretary sent a letter to Chief Constables in England and Wales, encouraging the police to broaden the grounds on which they can arrest Palestine supporters. The letter encourages the police to consider chants such as ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ as an “expression of violent desire” and Palestinian flags as “intended to glorify acts of terrorism.” Yesterday, the German police attacked supporters of Palestine on Sonnenallee, arresting some of the protestors. In Vienna, the police banned a Palestine protest and issued fines to as many as three hundred protestors. In France, the police banned Palestine protests. 

This coordinated violence across the continent occurs in parallel with the Israeli besiegement and bombardment of the Gaza Strip, its shooting of Palestinians in the West Bank, and its theft of land across 1948- and 1967-occupied lands. Thus far, the Israeli settler colonial regime has killed roughly 1,500 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and injured more than 6,000, as its brutal shelling has wiped entire families from the public record. And the death toll is only starting to mount. 

The Israeli settler colonial state has tightened its blockade on the Strip, holding its entire population hostage, refusing requests to bring food and medical supplies into Gaza, and has paralyzed the enclave’s already-overburdened and under-resourced health system. One is compelled to wonder how, in the midst of this calculated and systemic violence, can media organizations and governments in Europe and its offshoots (the United States, Australia, among others) choose to proactively pluck the Palestinian violence against the Israeli settler state out of context, selectively framing it as the root and cause of the unfolding atrocities. 

This ahistorical framing, coupled with a legal push in the higher power echelons to criminalize support for Palestine, contributes to the unfolding violence against Palestine and the Palestinians. The fact that the Western media only uses the register of violence to speak on Palestine feeds on a colonial, racist, patriarchal, and capitalist discourse that aims to justify the Israeli settler colonial erasure of Palestine.  

Since the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip started, I have been reviewing British media and its everyday items, such as the newspaper, phone, posters, and TV channels that seep into the public’s consciousness. Without the critical tools and education to puncture through their framing, we become complicit and easily intimidated. Some media outlets have gone as far as spreading misinformation, which surely would have been considered a hate crime in other contexts. Both the Daily Telegraph and The Times chose this misinformation as the headline for their October 11th issues. Although some (not all!) of those newspapers have already retracted their original false claims, the damage has already been done.  

The Guardian chose to adorn its main headline for October 12th with the words ‘Israelis suspended between fear, grief and foreboding.’ The Daily Mail selected ‘The King Calls Them Terrorists, Why Can’t the BBC?’ Marching to the same beat, the Daily Telegraph opted to plaster the Royals’ condemnation of Hamas on its front pages. Survey the pages of the newspapers, and the stories eliciting support and empathy for Israel abound, making it clear who the perpetrators are and that vengeance against them is justified. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are only evoked through the register of terrorism and violence.

Even those headlines, which are shy in their coverage of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, intentionally omit the perpetrators: the Israeli army and state. They are designed to neglect the root and cause of the violence: Israeli settler colonialism. By settler colonialism, we mean the gradual transfer of European Jews to the land of Palestine, the coercive displacement and dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population, and the imposition of a coordinated and sustainable system that turns this displacement into a continuous process. 

Western media relies on racial, gendered, and colonial tropes to describe the atrocities in Palestine. It instrumentalizes white female faces to elicit support for Israel. Such a tactic simultaneously serves racism, patriarchy, and colonialism. It relies on notions of white female ‘innocence’ and ‘victimhood’ to justify the continuous erasure of Palestine. In a headline by the Daily Telegraph about a British IDF female soldier, below, we are shown a smiling white female soldier wearing military attire and a keffiyeh on her head. Neither the photograph nor the article questions why a British citizen is justified in enlisting in a settler army elsewhere, let alone the same army that is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. 

To the contrary, the article frames such enlisting as voluntary and dignified. These strategies bring to mind 9/11, Laura Bush, and the weaponization of white feminism in the service of imperialist and colonial expansion. Black and Brown feminist scholars and activists, including Lila Abu Lughod, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde amongst others, have long debunked and punctured through such strategies. It is this same white feminism that has been utilized by the media and governments to justify the intensification of Israeli brutality against the Palestinian residents of Gaza. 

There is a hierarchy of life and suffering at the root of this. And it is this hierarchy that the ahistorical and manipulative comparisons between the Nazi pogroms and Palestinian armed resistance against the Israeli settler colonial state aims to hide. A comparison that U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has used in his speech alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on October 12th. A comparison that not only obfuscates the colonial nature of the ongoing atrocities against the Gaza Strip but works to silence and intimidate any contextualization or criticism of said colonial atrocities. Nazism is a European sin, one that Europe chose to resolve through its colonial support for an ethno-nationalist settler colonial project on the land of historic Palestine. Europe has not dealt with Nazism, its roots (the racial logics of Europe, fed and bred in the colonies), and its ramifications

This is all evidenced by the rise of neo-Nazi groups in some European countries in the last few years. The establishment of Israel as a settler colonial project remains a desperate attempt to rationalize the racial logics of Europe rather than abolishing them. Is not that the root of all of this? That Europe killed, oppressed, and racialized its Jews until it came up with a racist solution to dispossess the Palestinian people and put the European Jews in their place? That Europe chose to offer reparations for the Holocaust by establishing institutional, legal, discursive, political, and military support for the Israeli settler state?  

BY HASHEM ABUSHAMA 

This selective offering of reparations by Europe to its white victims is already indicative of the racial nature of the Israeli state. It is not a surprise that the only reparations Europe and North America have offered to the descendants of the enslaved and colonized are performative placards placed inside and outside buildings and statues built through the blood and sweat of black and brown people. 

Only the European, white, male Jew could make a historical and political claim on Europe, and that claim was racist and colonial in its essence: to ask for reparations through the establishment of an exclusionary, ethno-nationalist state on a distant, colonized land. This is, then, the same Europe that is arresting protestors for Palestine today. To state the obvious: Europe has not been decolonized. Despite all the news titles, university reports, and academic books and articles that evoke this terminology, Europe has not been decolonized. It does to the Palestinians what it has always done to colonized people: relegating their suffering to the sphere of unintelligible and nonhuman. 

While violence against the Palestinians is specific, it does not occur in isolation from what is happening elsewhere in the world. Black and brown people are racialized everywhere in Europe and North America, and that racialization contributes to the demonization of Palestinian people. Our suffering is seen as illegitimate and unworthy of attention—let alone justice—because we are, quite literally, not seen as humans.  When it comes to Palestine, this racial violence becomes more exact and brutal. 

And that is precisely because of the power of the Palestinian cause: it puts into question the entire world order—in its racialization of black and brown people, its denial of the constitutive and active role of colonialism, and its coordination of violence and exploitation. Palestine brings to the forefront the racist, patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial relations that underpin today’s world and that Europe and its offshoots work tirelessly to hide. This is precisely why we need staunch support for Palestine and the Palestinian right to self-determination at this moment. Because, without exaggeration, a better world depends on that support.  

Source: mondoweiss.net