Israeli Terrorists, Palestinian Victims and the Masters of PR
by Michael A. Hoffman II
Think of the name Palestinian and what comes to mind? Terrorism.
Conjure the word Israeli and what do you think of? Victim of terror. The
images are searing: skeletal Jerusalem buses with shards of flesh and
twisted metal hanging from the twisted wreckage; detailed accounts of
the misery and suffering of Israeli families caught in a suicide
bombing; graphic photos of the Israeli dead and injured, the funerals,
the anguished faces and the heart-breaking weeping of the survivors.
But while these episodic bombings were being inflicted by Palestinian
kamikazes, the Israeli military was routinely terrorizing the civilian
population of Gaza and slaughtering hundreds of Palestinian civilians.
Yet not a cubic centimeter of the scope of this Israeli terrorism was
reported in America. For all Americans know, a few dozen Hamas
terrorists have died in pinpoint "targeted killings" (assassinations)
and a handful of Palestinian civilians have been "regrettably" killed,
"caught in a crossfire" or "collaterally damaged" in an air-strike.
The media's descriptions of the combatants is also instructive. Israeli
terrorists are called "troops" and "helicopter pilots" while every
member of the Palestinian resistance is a "gunman." In a battle between
"troops" and "gunmen" the criminological connotations of the latter will
engender automatic sympathy for the former.
The casualty figures, which are almost never referenced by the US media,
tell another story, however. According to data compiled by Amnesty
International, during the whole of 2003, Israeli terrorists ("troops,
pilots") killed at least 600 Palestinians, including more than 100
Palestinian children "in random and reckless shooting, shelling and
bombings."
In the same period, as a reaction to the Israeli occupation, the
Palestinian resistance killed 200 Israelis, including 70 soldiers and 21
children. The Israelis killed almost five times as many children as
Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Overall, for every Israeli killed, three
Palestinians were killed.
There will be those who will say that this is an arithmetic of slaughter
that can have no meaningful symmetry; that terrorism on the Palestinian
or Israeli side is equally monstrous. But an "equality of monstrosity"
is not present in American reporting. The clear impression conveyed by
the Establishment media is that most of the monstrosity is on the
Palestinian side.
Moreover, if both occupier and occupied are equally monstrous, if both
the aggressor who has the means to withdraw and end the conflict, and
the victim of occupation who is nearly powerless against a relentless
military machine, bear equal guilt and responsibility, what happens to
the sacred mythology the West has built around the conflict with Nazi
Germany, in which any act of terror committed against German armed
forces or German civilians was not only justified as necessary but
celebrated as a glorious act of liberation?
However much Israelis may be offended by the analogy, the fact is, the
Palestinians see their struggle in precisely these terms. As the Arab
Knesset member Taleb a-Sana remarked with regard to the most recent
Israeli slaughter of Palestinians earlier this month, "What happened in
Rafah proves that you don't have to be German to be a Nazi."
If "Jews" in the Warsaw ghetto were entitled to resist the Nazi
occupiers by any means at hand, however bloody or indiscriminate, why is
this holy Allied doctrine voided when it comes to the Palestinian
resistance to Zionist occupation of the Gaza ghetto? "
The Israeli public relations (PR) masters have artfully transformed the
slow motion genocide against the Palestinians into "the war on terror."
This transvaluation is made possible in part because gruesome images of
Palestinian children shot in the head or blown to bits by Israelis are
seldom plastered across the pages of USA Today or Newsweek, or broadcast
on the major American TV networks. On the rare occasion when they are
shown, they are depicted only fleetingly.
The operant PR tactic here is amnesia: past Israeli war crimes are
virtually never recalled. The mass murder and destruction in Rafahs Tel
Sultan neighborhood in May 2004 is not placed in the context of the mass
murder and destruction in Jenin in April of 2002. The systemic nature of
Israeli war crimes and collective punishment of an entire people is
thereby missed and the masses are led to believe in the accidental or
unavoidable (collateral) nature of every Israeli attack on civlians.
Israeli crimes appear to have no track record and are perceived as
momentary indiscretions rather than policy.
The American people have no way of knowing that as a matter of halacha
(religious law) the influential chairman of the Yesha rabbinic council,
Rabbi Dov Lior, has ruled that the IDF (Israeli army) are allowed to
hurt so-called innocent civilians.
Even when Israeli crimes are mentioned in the news they are often
bedecked in ambiguous moral shades of gray and shoulder-shrugging about
a "war zone" and the "difficulty in distinguishing civilians from
combatants." The larger questions -- of a states deliberate intent to
punish an entire nation of people collectively; of Judaisms injunction
to exterminate Amalek and its identification of the Arabs with Amalek;
along with the propriety of devastating whole cities as a police action
against selected perpetrators -- are never asked.
Hundreds of civilians were killed by the US military in the Iraqi city
of Falluja last month, ostensibly as part of a search for a few dozen
miscreants responsible for the deaths of four US "contractors." But the
slaying of hundreds of Arabs does not register on the scale of moral
outrage of most Americans. When al-Jazeera attempts to cover the
bloodbath with the same level of intensity Fox News accords Israeli
casualties, the Arab medium is scorned and derided for its "outrageous
propaganda."
"Terrorist" has become a brand name in the grand American PR tradition
of Kleenex and Xerox. Branding ensures that it is difficult to think of
a generic item without conjuring the name of a particular product
intended to dominate the category. The same process has been imposed
upon the Middle East, where a terrorist can only be thought of as a
Muslim or an Arab.
Public relations determines what is real in America and the Israeli PR
machine, aided by their brethren in New York and Hollywood, continues to
maintain the hallucination of exclusiveIsraeli victimhood, even as Arab
civilians die at the hands of state-sanctioned terrorists out of all
proportion to Israeli casualties.Last year over a hundred Palestinian
children were dispatched to early graves by the Israeli armed forces,
yet it is only their parents and siblings who bear the stigma of
terrorist.
This is the genius of the masters of perusasion, where any delusion
can be sold through the wizardry of PR.
Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated
Press and co-author, with Moshe Lieberman, of "The Israeli Holocaust
Against the Palestinians" (Independent History & Research, 2002). |
