Editors’ note: Since this article was written, the imperialists have launched a criminal, unprovoked, aggressive war against Iran. In this context, there has been a rush to whitewash Israeli crimes, to bury once again the truth about the Gaza genocide, and to present the zionist leaders as rational and principled actors. How long this narrative can be sustained in the face of reality remains to be seen.
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As this article was being written, 604 days had passed since Israel began its latest barbaric assault on Gaza, presented as a ‘response’ to the Palestinian resistance’s Al-Aqsa Flood operation on 7 October 2023. Every single one of those days has seen atrocities committed by the zionist regime – atrocities the imperialist media have either ignored, sanitised or justified.
From day one, the Israeli bombardment has been framed across the west as a ‘response to terrorism’, reducing a genocide to a supposed ‘act of self-defence’. Western media deliberately erase all context, presenting the conflict as something that begins and ends with ‘Hamas’.
‘Do you condemn Hamas?’
Rather than addressing the political, economic and historical root conditions of the conflict, media talking heads feign mock outrage and subject even slightly pro-Palestine interviewees to the now notorious loyalty test: “Do you condemn Hamas?”
No context is provided. No mention is made of over a century of colonial violence and subjugation. No mention of the repeated rounds of ethnic cleansing and illegal occupation. No mention either of any of the other strands of Palestinian resistance (whether communist, secular or islamic). As far as the imperialist narrative is concerned there is only one resistance organisation, ‘Hamas’, and only one way of describing its activities – ‘terrorist’.
This aggressive technique is used to deflect attention away from the crimes of Israel, which, if they are ever mentioned, are presented as either ‘unproven’ or a ‘painful but necessary response’. All focus is instead placed on the supposed crimes (mostly exposed as being fabricated but still endlessly repeated) of the resistance.
The question is particularly hard to answer clearly for those living in a country, like Britian, where Hamas itself is a proscribed organisation. Overt support for ‘Hamas’ can get you arrested, sacked and jailed, even though Hamas is the elected government of the Gaza strip, with many of its officials dealing in civilian administration far from the resistance activities of its armed wing. In fact, armed resistance to illegal occupation is a right enshrined in international law and repeatedly recognised in United Nations resolutions over the decades, and British law itself is in violation of this precept.
Not that you would know that from reading British media.
This trickery is one of the tools used to manufacture consent for imperialist-backed genocide – or at least to create confusion and apathy amongst the British population. If you say you do support Hamas, you can be arrested. If you say you don’t, you have immediately conceded that Israel has some basis for its genocidal actions.
Israel routinely and systematically targets hospitals, clinics, schools, universities, journalists, health workers, scientists, water plants, power stations and mosques. It blows up entire residential blocks and flattens neighbourhoods. All of which is presented by its spokespeople (who are then parroted in British media) under the blanket label of ‘striking Hamas targets’.
Of course, since ‘Hamas’ activities could be deemed to include everything involved in maintaining civil society in Gaza, according to the twisted logic of the zionists, that does indeed make teachers, journalists, street sweepers, irrigation workers and hospital staff (and all their friends and extended family members) ‘military targets’.
When Israel conducts its massacres, it claims it is killing terrorists – and the west nods along. Those who argue are immediately branded ‘supporters of terrorism’.
“Do you condemn Hamas?” has been a favourite weapon of media mouthpieces like Piers Morgan. While boasting that he is happy to “offer a platform” to pro-Palestine voices, Morgan has repeatedly browbeaten all such guests, putting them on the defensive from the off and making it very difficult for them to talk about the real facts of the matter.
One such guest, Dr Abdul Wahid, described the events of 7 October as “a very welcome punch on the nose” against the illegal occupation. Morgan immediately used this to launch a smear campaign that aimed to get Dr Wahid struck off the medical register.
Cracks in the narrative: the truth will out
Yet now even the mainstream imperialist media have begun to shift their tone – not because they suddenly gained a conscience after 20 months of endless slaughter, but out of necessity.
The imperialist bloc is not winning this war. Neither on the battlefield, nor in the court of global public opinion. The zionists were driven out of Lebanon, humiliated by Iran and Yemen, and have utterly failed to break the Palestinian resistance.
The genocidal destruction of Gaza has not secured Israeli supremacy – only guaranteed global disgust in perpetuity. The suppression of dissent across the west has not quelled mass support for Palestine – only granted hero status to those who continue to advocate for justice in the face of such repression. And the settler-colonial state itself is bankrupt and on the brink of social and economic meltdown.
With popular outrage continuing to grow, and the war to crush all middle-eastern resistance movements failing, the imperialists are desperately seeking a way out that might allow them to retain their regional domination – ideally by somehow keeping Israel itself alive. But if any such face-saving, colony-preserving deal is to be arrived at, there will need to be an accepted narrative regarding who is responsible for all the terrible crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of ‘stopping Hamas’.
Suddenly politicians and talking heads who yesterday were aggressively insisting on Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ ‘by any means necessary’ are distancing themselves from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, from his closest and most rabidly genocidal cabinet colleagues, and from the most obviously egregious of Israel’s crimes.
Everyone now wants it to seem that they are personally opposed to the present starvation siege and continued massacre of innocents (even as the bombs continue to flow). Nobody wants it remembered that these crimes could not have been perpetrated without western bombs and planes, western military and intelligence cooperation, western manipulation of supposedly ‘international’ institutions (notably the International Court of Justice) and western media support.
Having done everything possible to facilitate the genocide in Gaza for a year and a half, no one wants to find themselves in the firing line if and when a peace process is instituted that has to at least appear to address the question of justice and accountability.
The shameless Piers Morgan is now among many who have started denouncing Israeli atrocities, particularly the killing of children, and who have begun to grill Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely in ways previously reserved for those trying to expose her country’s crimes.
Documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux has released a film called The Settlers. Though heavily sanitised, the programme does expose some of the realities of settler extremist violence and racism – and it has been aired by the notoriously pro-Israel BBC. A year ago, that would have been unthinkable.
Of course, what is missing when ‘right-wing lunatics’ are blamed for the crimes in Palestine (or, indeed, Ukraine) is the role of Anglo-American imperialism in creating these forces in the first place. Zionism is an ideology that was artificially created by British imperialism, which weaponised Judaism to serve its interests in the middle east. Not only was the ideology created in London, but the zionist movement has been funded and promoted by British and US finance capital for more than a century.
This is the true source of the apparently inexhaustible funding of the ‘Israel lobby’.
It was British imperialism that funded and backed the creation of the zionist settler-colony in Palestine, and US imperialism which took over the main role of keeping the colony armed and funded after the Suez crisis of 1956. Zionist supremacist fundamentalism may be the proximate cause of the troubles in Palestine and across the region, but Anglo-American imperialism is the ultimate cause – and the true culprit for every crime committed by its Israeli proxies.
This truth has been repeatedly recognised by leaders of middle-eastern resistance movements, from Iran to Lebanon, and from Palestine to Yemen.
The crisis of legitimacy
The shift we are now seeing in western media narratives is not indicative of a moral awakening. It is a tactical adjustment. The imperialists fear losing their grip, and the cracks in their narrative reveal the deeper rot in their system itself.
The wall of silence is cracking not because the system cares, but because it has realised it is losing. The resistance of the Palestinian people, not only in the last year and a half but across the last century, has brought us to a point where the brutality of imperialism is being fully exposed for the world to see. For once, a genocide is being documented in real time and followed by millions of people – as opposed to being gradually exposed decades later to the small numbers who are engaged enough to take an interest in such matters.
The media is scrambling not to save lives, but to save face. Meanwhile, our job is to help the working class recognise the umbilical cord that connects zionist atrocities with British imperialism; to popularise the understanding that if we want to rid the world of such abominations as we are seeing in Gaza today, we must oppose and destroy the imperialist system itself.
