This will be my last piece about the Israel-Palestine conflict for Splice Today. I’m old enough and wise enough to know that no one has ever changed their mind because of something they read on the internet.
People have opinions. They wear their opinions like badges. Their sense of identity is tied up with their opinions: their sense who they are. Take away their opinions, question them, and it’s like you are questioning their very identity. They become agitated and will hold onto what they believe with even greater ferocity, especially when the cognitive dissonance kicks in and it starts to look as if their thoughts may have been manipulated. No one wants to admit that they’ve been subjected to forces beyond their control.
I believe most people are sincere. They think they’re working for the good. The problem is that, in this age of mass media, amidst the vast ocean of misinformation and misdirection that characterizes the internet, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not, what’s truth and what’s propaganda. It’s particularly hard when the legacy media is owned and controlled by a very small number of uber-wealthy individuals who, broadly speaking, identify with the Israeli project. They also own and control much of the internet, which is awash with propaganda. We absorb all of what we see and hear unconsciously. We build up a picture of the world that fits in with what our rulers require, and we stitch this onto our sense of ourselves, onto our identity.
Israel has one of the best, most sophisticated propaganda networks in the world. Organizations like AIPAC in the United States, or the Labour and Conservative Friends of Israel in the UK (separate organizations but with the same purpose) are embedded in the political process. Often their funding sources are obscure, but can be traced back to Israel. There are Zionists in every newsroom, in every TV studio, throughout the western world. Not all of them are paid agents of the Israeli state—though many of them are—but if you want to get anywhere in the western media, it helps if you at least understand the world from the Israeli point of view: better still if you can learn to repeat Israeli talking points as if they were your own.
Our media manipulators are very clever. They know that people aren’t swayed by facts. Humans relate to story-lines more easily than we do to chaotic reality, and the facts can be twisted to tell whatever story is required. So a narrative is constructed, a Hollywood Western version of reality, with good guys and bad guys, easily identifiable by the color of their hats. So it was after October 7, 2023.
We all remember the horror stories that dominated the airways in the days and weeks following the events of that day. Mass murder of children. Beheaded babies. Babies in ovens. Babies on washing lines. Fetuses cut out of the mother’s womb. Torture. Mass rape. Unimaginable scenes of cruelty and barbarity described to us in horrifying detail. It doesn’t matter now that none of that was true, or that a significant number of Israelis were killed by their own side. What matters is that we absorbed those stories, they created a picture in our heads, and that this has allowed us to go along with what followed.
Even today you hear people repeating the mass rape story, for example, as if it was an established fact, when it has been questioned a number of times. That story came out later than the baby-atrocity stories. Israel needed a new narrative-line to boost its campaign. The New York Times duly obliged with its famous piece in December 2023: ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7. It did what it was supposed to do. It galvanised public opinion in favor of Israel once more, at a time when the world was beginning to grow weary of the scenes of horror and suffering emerging from Gaza. What the story purported to show was the systematic use of rape and sexualized violence by Hamas fighters as a weapon of war. But the findings are disputed. Much of the evidence came from questionable sources whose previous testimony, of baby-killing and mutilation, had already been shown to be false. In one particular case claims of rape were denied by the victim’s own family. Much of the evidence is circumstantial, and certainly not proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Hamas themselves deny the allegations, saying that their fighters are good Muslim men who wouldn’t engage in sexual violence. It’d be easy to scoff at this, but in the midst of battle how many fighters have time to drop their trousers to engage in sexual congress? Hamas have also called for an impartial investigation of the claims, something that Israel has consistently blocked.
This isn’t to say that rape did not occur. There was a second wave that swept into Southern Israel after the Hamas forces had brought down the fences. Most of these were civilians and a number of crimes were committed, but what hasn’t been shown is systematic rape. On April 24th, 2024 the UN refused to acknowledge the rape allegations against Hamas and didn’t include the group in the blacklist of parties guilty of sexual violence, due to the lack of credible evidence.
There’s also another explanation for the atrocities committed on October 7, provided by Norman Finkelstein, the great Jewish scholar and historian. He suggests the analogy of a slave revolt: people who had spent 17 years locked up in a cage and systematically abused, taking revenge upon their tormentors. He cites the example of Nat Turner’s Rebellion of 1831, in which atrocities occurred. It’s easy enough to condemn perpetrators of violence without looking into the background, but who are we to say what people who’ve suffered gross ill-treatment and humiliation over an extended period will do when released from captivity? Might we not do the same?
The one program I’d urge you to watch is Gaza by the Al Jazeera Investigations Unit. These are the same people who brought you October 7, a forensic analysis of everything that happened on that day. What’s remarkable about these films is that the material is freely available for all to find, including mainstream journalists in the legacy media. Why none of them have undertaken their own equally in-depth investigations is a question worth asking.
The Al Jazeera Investigations Unit is led by Richard Sanders, a documentary filmmaker who’d previously worked for Channel 4 in the UK. He’s thoroughly mainstream. You can watch him in conversation with Peter Oborne in this video. Oborne’s also about as mainstream as you can get, formerly the chief political commentator with The Daily Telegraph. These aren’t far-left agitators calling for the violent overthrow of the established order. They’re working journalists, trying to do their jobs.
The Gaza documentary is a catalogue of war crimes that’ve been openly committed by Israeli troops in Gaza. Not only did the soldiers commit these crimes, but they recorded themselves doing so, and then posted the videos on TikTok. Often the films are set to music, as if they were music videos, obviously for the entertainment of people back home.
The Israeli Defence Force (so-called) is one of the most advanced, high-tech armies in the world. They’ve used AI technology to pick their targets. The reason they’re employing AI, according to active members of the military speaking to 972 magazine, is to maximize their kill rate. The AI program, known as “Lavender,” will look at everything about a potential target—who they speak to, what they say on social media, who they consort with, who may be in the vicinity—and then give that person a number between 1-100. If the number’s above a certain figure, that person is listed and will be targeted.
Attached to this program is another. This is the program that decides where that person can be killed. The program is called “Where’s Daddy?” According to the theory, it’s easier to assassinate someone when they’re home than when they are out on the street. So the program will monitor the person’s cell phone, and when it arrives at the location that’s been determined to be his home, it will ping a message to the kill operative, who can then target that person’s house, bringing it down around their ears, regardless of who else is in the house with them. No doubt the name “Where’s Daddy?” was picked on purpose. There’s a certain grim irony to it. By killing the fathers they’re ensuring that their wives and children are slaughtered as well, and that no future generations of potential enemies will survive the attack.
This is a cynical move, about as far from conventional warfare as you can imagine. In a conventional battle, two armies fight it out in the field, both sides risking their lives. In this version of war, a person deemed a terrorist by some artificial points system can be remotely shredded, like an avatar in a computer game, along with his entire family, by someone sitting in an office somewhere several miles away, risking no more than a sore thumb.
I dare you to watch this program and not cry. I dare you to see the distress on the children’s faces and not feel your heart wrenched from your body in sorrow and anger. I dare you to see the mothers and the fathers in their anguish and fear for their children’s lives and not imagine yourself in their position. There’s one sequence in particular. A frightened baby is lying on a hospital table, crying, clearly traumatized, covered in dust. The father sings some soothing verses from the Koran, quietly stroking the baby’s chest, till the crying stops. It’s a moment of tenderness and warmth amidst the horror of war and it almost makes you believe that, as it says in our sacred books, love will win in the end. How many times has this scene, or scenes like it, been played out in Gaza this past year—people comforting each other in their distress, or saying their last goodbyes to their loved ones; children screaming, mothers wailing, fathers in despair; funerals for dead relatives, whole lineages being wiped out in a single blast, the endless search for bodies in the rubble—day in, day out, hour after hour after hour.
The people of Gaza are now the most traumatized, the most physically and psychologically abused people on earth. In other parts of the world, in other wars, people can at least flee to safety. In Gaza there’s nowhere to run: no place that can’t be bombed, no refuge, no asylum, no safety, no security. Safe zones are declared, and then violated. Tent cities of war-ravaged refugees are set alight in hospital grounds and schools in areas previously declared safe.
Israel is targeting not just Hamas, but journalists, aid workers, doctors, even children. On July 25, 45 American physicians, surgeons and nurses who’d volunteered in Gaza since October 7 wrote a letter to President Biden. “Every one of us, on a daily basis, treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest,” the letter says. This is happening all over the strip and suggests that, rather than it being the work of a few rogue killers on the loose (a common occurrence in war) it’s systematic and deliberate, a policy decision taken at the highest levels of the Israeli military itself. The film documents a number of examples of snipers shooting unarmed civilians.
The film also debunks the often-repeated claim that Hamas uses civilians as human shields. There’s no evidence of that. There are, however, many documented cases of the IDF using Palestinians as human shields, and several pieces of film that make that clear. If by “human shield” you mean the fact that people who Israel deem to be Hamas fighters are often in close proximity to civilians, this is because there’s no room in Gaza for them to be anywhere else. It’s one of the most densely populated regions on the planet. But Israel, too, often locates its military installations in civilian areas. The Mossad building, for example, is in a built up area of Tel Aviv with many civilians living nearby. By the same logic, this would allow us to claim that Mossad uses civilians as human shields. No doubt, were Hezbollah to target the Mossad building and kill civilians in the process, Israel would say that they were targeting civilians. Meanwhile Israel targets supposed Hamas fighters even when they aren’t fighting, knowing that civilians are nearby and that many of them will be killed. How often, after reports of another tragedy in which dozens of people are incinerated in their tents, do we hear the Israeli spokesmen saying that they were “targeting Hamas”? After October 7 the political establishment and the western media declared unanimously that Israel had the right to defend itself. But what about the Palestinians? Don’t they have right to defend themselves too?
I’ll leave the last words to Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian writer who appears in the film. This is what she says: “Palestinians are aware that they have been abandoned, that the world that speaks of human rights and international law is lying, that those concepts are meant for white people, or for westerners, that accountability is not meant to hold their oppressors to account, that they have been… discarded, like rubbish… The West has spent decades creating this rules-based order, and it’s finally been laid bare as a big sham, as just a way to further western interests. This is the jungle. This is the new order, where it’s just out in the open that those with power can do whatever they want.”
—Follow Chris Stone on Twitter: @ChrisJamesStone
