Update: Recent Videos and an Article on the Israel/Palestinian Conflict

(Warning: graphic photo)

Greetings from the Midwestern heartland of the world’s leading imperialist power. For the past couple of weeks, although I haven’t written about it here yet, I’ve been writing and doing videos about the latest escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict that began on October 7, which thus far has cost about 1200 Israelis and nearly 4000 Palestinians their lives, and I wanted to let you know about what I’ve been up to. On October 8, I posted a video on my YouTube channel titled Israel/Palestine: Western Progressives' Double Standards in which I discussed the reactions of Westerners who are, broadly speaking, on the left to the Palestinian military action. All too often, the reaction was either one-sided support for Israel and condemnation of the Palestinian uprising, or simply condemnation of both sides. Deliberate killings of innocent civilians—which appear to have occurred on both sides, although the Israeli side has committed far more—should be condemned regardless of who commits them. However, simply leaving it at that, while ignoring the overall context of Israel being a colonial occupier and Palestinians being pushed off their land and otherwise denied fundamental human rights, much as was the case in apartheid South Africa or the United States during the era when Native Americans were relentlessly ethnically cleansed or killed, misses the forest for the trees. Yet, that is exactly what many Western progressives are doing.

The two livestreams I’ve done and the article I’ve written since then have explored the issue of why this has been the case. Ultimately, it boils down to the careful manner in which Israel and its Western backers have burnished its image as a shining island of progressivism and democracy in a sea of Arab backwardness, savagery, and terrorism. Even writers for the New York Times, generally a staunch supporter of the Israeli government, have written about “pinkwashing,” the practice of presenting Israel as a bastion of tolerance for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people (even though Israel still hasn’t legalized gay marriage and of course has homophobia like everywhere else) in order to deflect attention from the fact that Israel occupies Palestinians’ land, steals their resources, and engages in a very disproportionate level of violence against them compared to the extent of Palestinian violence against Israelis. There is also the language used to describe Palestinians in contrast to the

manner in which Israeli Jews are described. Israel continually demonizes Palestinians, characterising them as “terrorists” or subhuman (whereas, on the contrary, Jews are portrayed as the “chosen people,” superior to Palestinians), while conversely portraying Israel as the victim of Palestinian terrorism. And, consistent with that perspective, Israel and its Western defenders focus on Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians while ignoring, downplaying, or rationalizing Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians.

But they go much further than that, promoting and endlessly repeating claims about Palestinian violence against civilians for which evidence is minimal or nonexistent. In the aforementioned article (Atrocity Propaganda: Mass Rape Allegations Weaponised to Demonise Palestinians) and videos, I discuss two instances of this in the present conflict, the claim that Hamas combatants perpetrated a mass rape at a music festival near a major battle site and the claim that they beheaded 40 babies. Much like the claim during the NATO bombing of Libya that Libyan troops had been given Viagra and encouraged to rape women and the claim prior to the first Iraq War that Iraqi troops had pulled babies out of incubators and killed them, these claims have thus far not been substantiated, not even by the Israeli military (the original source of the second claim). Yet, as I discuss, I observed that a particular constituency, Western feminists, seemed to widely accept these claims and to generally side with Israel. They were not the only ones, of course. A poll that came out shortly after my piece was published found that 50% of Americans thought that Israel’s military response to the October 7 Hamas attack—which has involved carpet-bombing of Gaza as well as a complete cutoff of food, water, electricity, fuel, and medicine—was fully justified, and another 20% thought it was partially justified. Such is the power of propaganda. As both laboratory experiments and real-life historical examples such as the almost universally-believed (among Americans) claim that Saddam Hussein’s government had “weapons of mass destruction” suggest, frequently-repeated claims tend to be believed even if there is no evidence to substantiate them.