Bayreuth, Germany (Special to Informed Comment- Feature) – Lisa Hajjar has compared what is happening in Gaza to the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Yet where she argues that “Unlike the Khmer Rouge, the Israeli government’s exterminationist policy is not fueled by an ideological vision to remake Gaza anew. Total destruction is the goal.” As has been made evident by many Israeli social media posts and government officials, the goal is to remake Gaza minus the Palestinians. It is expansionist colonialism with religious overtones more akin to ISIL’s theoretical religious justification of their crimes or the Manifest Destiny that allowed the United States to break international law when it sought to subsume and delegitimize the nations of indigenous peoples.
In the face of this assault, the atrocities in Gaza are broadcast to the entire world and the similarities to other genocides are hard to ignore. At the time of this writing, unknown thousands of Palestinians are buried in rubble and tens of thousands have been injured including many children who have had a limb amputated. Over 40,000 people have been killed with the exact number of the dead is yet unknown although it has been reported that tens of thousands of children have been orphaned. In an echo of the attempted ethnic cleansing of the Americas, CNN reported months ago that many Palestinians have been reduced to eating grass and drinking polluted water in an attempt to stay alive.
In the days after South Africa showed proof of genocidal intent to the ICJ, the international court would argue that Israel may be committing genocide. The court ordered Israel to take immediate steps to prevent genocide. A week later nearly 900 Palestinians were killed in the weeks immediately following the ICJ’s opinion.
More damning than even these deaths, has been the induced famine that Palestinian families are enduring. Gaza has been cut off from clean water since 2023 with over half its water infrastructure broken. Additionally, the Israeli state and/or a handful of Israelis halt the deliveries of food aid to those in Gaza. Prior to October 7th, 500 trucks per day entered Gaza in 2023, according to the New Humanitarian. After October 7th , 2023 to January 2024, only 59 trucks per day were allowed into Gaza. Then there are the massacres of bread that have taken place when Israeli soldiers fire into crowds of the starving that surround the rare aid truck. Nor is leaving an option for the vast majority of Gaza’s residents. They are kettled in Gaza, unable to pay the $10,000 per person being charged at the Egyptian border. Save the Children has warned that deaths from starvation and disease could overtake those caused by bombs.
These losses are not accidental or incidental. In 2007, Israel announced Gaza was to be considered a “hostile entity.” As such, the amount of food allowed into Gaza was limited to a “humanitarian minimum.” In terms of food assistance, that humanitarian minimum looks like an average of 150 trucks per day.
Al Jazeera English: “Doctors from Islamic medical association document trip to Gaza”
Normally, the struggle inherent in declaring an action, especially in war, to be genocidal is wrapped aound providing evidence of intent. Yet, Israeli statesmen’s statements calling Gazans animals or “Amelek” twinned with their bombing that targets the medical and civil infrastructure of Gaza, the kettling and starving of civilians, and the abandonment of Newborn Intensive Care Unit babies all scream genocide. The Israeli protestors blocking aid trucks, too, declare genocide arguing with their actions that they would see the many suffer for the crimes of a few. The international community standing by and allowing genocide to occur. Are they affirming genocide, too?
This is not a new question nor is it exclusive to the travails of the Palestinian people. Many other peoples’ have suffered under the indifferent gaze of an international public. At times, the international public is directly complicit in great losses that occurred as a result of sanctions, for example, though these losses may not be genocide in nature or intention. More recently, global media and intelligence networks have provided an open window into the genocides of the present. Yezidi survivors were buffeted by the media and then abandoned to their fate. Social media has been directly implicated in the genocide of the Rohingya. Then there are the other great atrocities. The people of Yemen suffered an incredibly devastating famine for years. Then there are the Tigray, the Sudanese, and the DRC. Not all of these cases have been genocidal and what’s happening in Gaza has been genocidal. That extra thrust of violence that seeks to destroy the lives, culture and heart of a people as a whole. They have all been harrowing, however.
That we live in a world where we watch news report after news report of extreme suffering and do little is an indictment of our international order and, perhaps, also our media. Scholars like Judith Butler have pointed out how media framing allows only some losses to be considered grievable. Jasbir Puar has noted that much of our current narrative around mortality fails to take into consideration the debility and slow deaths that occur off-camera. Steuer and Wallis have investigated the use of dehumanizing rhetoric around how Islam and the Middle East in the aftermath of the second Iraq War. A demonization so complete that even the relatively non-aligned Qataris would see the entirety of their culture declared an abomination in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup.
The lynchpin inherent in all these analyses is the otherization of the ungreivable, the debilitated and the dehumanized.
Otherization is akin to dehumanization in that distances individuals, peoples and nations from each other and unlike dehumanization it is not always overt. Otherization is in the silences as well as the slurs. It is in the careful rendering of words to make someone and some peoples’ ungreivable. It is in the camera angle that hides the ongoing crisis as it happened in Yemen and Haiti.
It is inherent in the narratives that are built around those “over there.” In his work on language influencing violence Baele notes that, “scholarship agrees on three major aspects of narratives. First, they are “selective,” that is, they include certain events while ignoring others… Second, the diachronic character of narratives create […]anticipations about the future on the basis of the events contained and ignored by the narrative. Ricoeur[…]explains that narratives’ directedness entail “expectations concerning the outcome and the completion of the entire process, [ . . . ] the story’s conclusion is the pole of attraction of the entire development.” As such, political actors strive to build “strategic narratives” that aim to build, among their audiences, a specific understanding of the past that encourages a particular set of preferences for the future… Narratives, […]are in this way “necessarily normative”; the inclusion of symbols in the storytelling reinforces the narrative’s build-up toward its culmination[…]. Third, narratives are inevitably populated by archetypal actors, either nefarious or admirable, each playing its own function in the unfolding of events…”[1]
These are the style of narratives that have been created around the Palestinians and indeed, great swathes of the world, long before the Nakba or catastrophic expulsion of Palestinians by Zionist gangs in 1948. The marginalizing and othering aspect of Orientalism was one that Said criticized in his seminal work noting those impacted were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analysed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined or—as the colonial powers openly coveted their territory—taken over.” In terms of Palestine, this marginalization followed the Nakba as the disposed who were driven from their lands became refugees and internally displaced, reliant on aid and in the silence of the Red Cross during the Nakba itself lest the Red Cross be castigated as well, perhaps, as they should have been by Jewish survivors or relatives of survivors for doing so little during the Holocaust. This is not to say it has been a one-sided affair with Palestinians as angels above othering. Nor does this disregard the several wars that have occurred after the Nakba. It is to acknowledge the long history of otherization that Palestinians have faced in not only Israeli media where it is to be rather expected but from the anglophone[i] media as well.
Indeed, in the aftermath of 9/11, Western media more generally set itself against a vaguely Muslim foe who was imagined in the Anglophone media as either (south) Asian or Middle Eastern. The Canadian scholars Steuter and Wills, in their work on Canadian, UK and American press coverage following 9/11 found “a disconcerting degree of racism which permits terrorists to be consistently described as vermin, rats, snakes or cockroaches. Most importantly, this language expands in its application from encompassing individual agents to encompassing whole entire nations, entire peoples.”[2] More recently, the Australian scholar Isakhan found that media narratives in that country not only stereotyped, homogenized, and dehumanized people of Middle Eastern descent or of the Islamic faith, they also relied on “a rich tapestry of pre-existing notions about the non-Western world” to do so and in the process often reduced individuals and peoples to the role of the “folk devil.”[3]
Palestinians, with their unique visibility of being of the Holy Land and long derided by Israel as enemies, were neatly folded into or imagined alongside other narratives of the time. Narratives that often although not always fell in line with Ingram’s crisis/solution model of propaganda even when the reporting itself was not overtly dehumanizing. Thus, saying that Israelis were killed whereas Palestinians died, as many US news outlets have been criticized for doing follows Ingram’s model which states that crisis/solution, “ buttresses the innate positive traits and actions of the in-group and the negative traits and actions of the out-groups.”
In addition to his pivotal work on the otherization inherent in Orientalism, Edward Said asked the most important question about otherization: How to halt its use. In his own words, “By surviving the consequences humanly, I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division, say, of men into “us” (Westerners) and “they” (Orientals). For such divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of the distinction between some men and some other men, usually towards not especially admirable ends.”
And while the roadmap to genocide has been studied and defined in the years following the Holocaust, with influential scholars like Gregory Stanton formulating the useful but oft-ignored Ten Stages of Genocide, less attention has been paid to the hows of unraveling the otherization that allows genocide to occur within a county or with the tacit acceptance of an international order that only safeguards some lives; some of the time.
[1] Baele, S.J., 2019. Conspiratorial narratives in violent political actors’ language. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 38(5-6), pp.706-734.710-711.]
[2] Steuter, Erin & Wills, Deborah: At War With Metaphor: Media, Propaganda, and racism in the war on terror, xvi]
[3] Isakhan, B., 2010. Orientalism and the Australian news media: Origins and questions. Islam and the Australian news media, pp.3-25.4.
[i] English is the native language or lingua franca of several countries including the UK, US and Canada, Austraula and New Zealand and India.
© 2024 All Rights Reserved