Employing fear and imagination in Israeli discourse to counter Al Aqsa Deluge Operation

Author:

George Abu El-Denein

As soon as the Israeli occupation entity fell under the influence of the attack carried out by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, the leaders of the first rank came out with a speech directed towards the Western world in particular. The civilized world, according to the words of the head of the Israeli emergency government, Netanyahu, contains a lot of crying, complaining, and lamenting, using lot of incorrect information and data and immoral and inhumane accusations against the resistance fighters who entered the settlements (settlements) of the so-called “Gaza envelope” and its cities in the occupied territories, such as accusing them of beheading children, raping women, and kidnapping families, likening what happened - as they claim - to what ISIS did in the Arab countries where it resided as a heavy guest for quite a while.

What the leaders of the first ranks of the occupation did by fabricating such lies falls within the framework of an introduction and preparation to obtain a license, justification and blessing from the major powers, and the West in particular, to carry out the bloody massacres that were planned to be committed in the Gaza Strip. By demonizing the Palestinian resistance and creating distorted awareness about it; So that what happens to it and to the citizens in its places of activity is acceptable despite its deviance from human values and international human rights law in war, which is a method that the United States of America has used, more than once, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  I am almost certain that media minds specialized in directing public opinion came together quickly, and in 24 hours, to build an imaginary aura around these lies, represented by foreign journalists and Israeli soldiers portraying, via social media, the matter as if it were a state of “pleasure in killing” experienced by Palestinians who They were in these settlements. This media strategy succeeded in directing public opinion and creating a direct initial reaction. It quickly began to decline, as days passed and images of slaughter and destruction resulting from the heinous Zionist practices of bombing from the sky, land and sea spread.

A question arises in this context: Why did the Israeli entity resort to using ISIS and using words that express the practices of its members in the Arab countries that befell them? Was this hiring arbitrary, or the result of coincidence?

We all know that Europe, the United States, and others have suffered and are still suffering today as a result of Islamophobia, the fear of Islam. Or the Islamic personality that the media of the colonial countries promoted when producing “ISIS” and used it to control Arab resources and destroy the countries there by hijacking their revolutions and wealth. This experience created in the minds of the entire world horrific images of killing, destruction, cutting off limbs, slaughter, beheading, and other behaviors. Which the human mind cannot accept or come to terms with. It is linked to a certain charisma of the person who can carry out these actions, the most important of which is that he is framed in an “organization” that practices “terrorist” military action without belonging to a “political system.”

Knowing that the media machine and the builders of local and international public opinion in the occupying state were aware of this state of mind of the West in particular, they employed a set of expressions containing countless lies, in order to provoke the preconceptions dormant in the Western mind and bring them to the surface once again. To tell them that what you saw over previous years in terms of events in Syria and Iraq in particular, is happening to us now, from people who resemble these “terrorists.” Just as you - the colonial countries - eliminated these "terrorists", you must help us eliminate a group that is just like them, and will attack you after they finish attacking and eliminating us. This is similar to what Ariel Sharon did after the September 11 attacks, when he held a press conference in which he said: “What is happening in America now is similar to what we are experiencing here in Israel.” Building this approach between demonizing the honorable resisting Palestinian, and the satanic acts that are universally agreed upon as such, is a method that did not escape the occupation leadership, except that it took a more extensive path in their war on Gaza during the “Al-Aqsa Flood.”

The success of the Israeli entity in this media speech that it addressed to the West in various languages and in an intense manner - in addition to the high media efficiency of its media machine - is due to what happens to the recipient when the “narrated” collides with the “imagined” and the “preconceived mental image.” This is what I would call, in the field of building and manufacturing public opinion - from the perspective of sociolinguistics - the production of new awareness of the interaction between the old truth and the new illusion. That is, using a group of lies or false facts, and mixing them with a group of old facts that were supposed to be left in distant memory, with specific images and perceptions loaded with usually negative psychological and emotional charges, provided that the motor, vocal, and event elements of the lies overlap with these old facts, resulting in A new awareness that is more emotionally provocative than it was before, ensuring the success of the impact and achieving the goal of the message.

However, this success cannot be entirely related to what I mentioned. There is a peculiarity to some experiences of Western countries. For example, Germany, which is considered one of the countries most supportive of the occupying entity and the closest to the United States of America, lives on a guilt complex as a result of what Hitler did to the Jews in the Holocaust. In this regard; Israel used the term "Holocaust" and described the resistance as "Nazi" in the media directed to the German media, and in interviews conducted by front-line leaders with some German satellite channels, such as ZDF and DW, which provided the appropriate opportunity for the Israelis to address a profound speech to the public in Germany in both languages. Arabic and German.

These two words, “Holocaust” and “Nazism,” have a role in directly directing German public and political opinion, prompting them not to think about anything, except standing by “Israel” in “self-defense,” in order to compensate for the guilt complex and get rid of it. From the stigma of Nazism being a purely German production. The Israeli discourse constituted a permanent and historical accusation against the Germans of being perpetrators of massacres, and this obligated the Germans to defend themselves constantly, over time, and in the future. This time, Germany raised Israeli flags on party headquarters and in government buildings, banned demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza, and gave Israel two military marches for the war in Gaza, and this is a habit that the Germans cannot abandon. In 2013, they placed the Israeli flag on the players’ shirts alongside the German flag in the European Under-21 Championship.

How did Israel control the Germans' reaction? By linking between what the Germans have in mind about the Jewish Holocaust, and the feeling of guilt towards the Jews in the world, on the one hand, which is what Israel has maintained by commemorating the Holocaust annually, to ensure that this event is not forgotten, and what the Germans believe that the Jews were subjected to at the hands of the Palestinian resistance. In the "Gaza envelope". The receiving mind in Germany produces broad fantasies that balance the images of burning and beheading, on the other hand. I focused on the German case because, in addition to what I mentioned, it carries within it what it shares with the West, in terms of Islamophobia, especially after its suffering as a result of the kidnapping of Germans more than once at the hands of ISIS, the execution of some of them, and the display of recordings related to that.

The days after the beginning of the aggression against civilians in the Gaza Strip revealed that the occupation realizes the real period during which this discourse can succeed in convincing the world that it is a victim, and that period is very short. This image quickly disappears on the popular level, after images of destruction, martyrs including children, women, and body parts spread. He is well aware that he will not win popular public opinion, but he adheres to the solidarity of the political level with him. To compensate for this void that will appear after the emotional aura of Israel’s crying lies disappears, he is quick to invite European and American leaders to visit “Israel” and come there to confirm support and solidarity. Here - and I may be wrong - Israel is taking advantage of the sirens that sound in the skies of occupied Palestine when the resistance missiles pass, to put the political leaders in a state of fear and panic over themselves, so that they can experience for themselves “what Israel, its leaders and its people are suffering from” of panic, panic, and difficulty in living, to deepen. The solid state has a sense of solidarity and a belief in the necessity of eliminating the Gaza Strip, stone by stone, human by human, so that Israel can live in peace. We saw the intensity in the German Chancellor's speech in the speech he delivered at the press conference, after landing on the grounds of Lod Airport, the moment the sirens sounded, before leaving to complete his tour in support of the perpetrator over the oppressed.

Referring to the occupation’s rhetoric exploiting Western fear of the manifestations of the “terrorist” personality that the media has created for people; In our analysis of the Israeli crying discourse in the beginning, we do not lose sight of the fact that the role of the media discourse is to exploit human nature in shaping behavior towards a specific issue or situation. One of the things that the media most seeks to exploit in shaping public opinion behavior is fear.

  Fear is a very powerful engine for humanity. Because of it, civilizations and inventions were built. Because of it, humans produced myths and believed them, and then shaped social behavior because of them. The myth that Israel spread to the world about the Palestinian resistance stirred fear among the unconscious society towards the issue and reality. This is what led him to take inappropriate behavior at times, such as US President Biden’s speech at the beginning of the events, and then quickly retracting this speech. After he came up with words that were not based on deliberation and fact-finding, which is what many foreign journalists were upset about at the beginning of covering the events.

Finally, my message that I am directing, based on the above, is that we - Arabs and Palestinians in particular - are living in a battle of awareness with the world, in which those who are able to form self-, regional and global awareness will succeed, through intelligent media, official, political and field discourse capable of touching the mental structure of societies. This is what the Israeli entity’s media machine has excelled at from decades ago until today, which weakens our ability to reap the fruits of our ongoing struggle for freedom, and to obtain our basic and simple right to determine our destiny and our lives.

George Antoun Abu El-Denein: Researcher in issues of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

Source: Institute of Palestinian Studies