A better angle was needed. And it was this: the BBC reported that the
brother was increasingly wondering whether it was safe for him to
remain in Britain. This was a sentiment shared by many other Jews,
according to the report.
Paradoxically, the implication was that for British Jews it might be a
safer alternative to move to Israel, despite weeks of western coverage
highlighting Israelis’ fears about their vulnerability following Hamas’s
attack. Did this British man really think he would be more secure in
the same state in which his brother had just been killed in a mass
atrocity? The BBC’s reporter did not pose the question.
Hierarchy of concern
So what evidence did the brother cite to justify his fears? He told
the BBC that he found the marches in the UK for Gaza upsetting and
intimidating. Chants like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” were, he observed, evidence of deep-rooted and growing antisemitism in British society.
The problem is not just that many British Jews assume the UK has an
antisemitism problem based on a highly dubious interpretation of the
chant’s meaning. It is that establishment media organisations are
echoing that misunderstanding and treating it as more newsworthy than
Israel killing Palestinian babies, with the UK government’s blessing.
It is just one illustration of a pattern of reporting by western
media outlets skewing their news priorities in ways that reveal a racist
hierarchy of concern. Jewish fears are of greater import than actual
Palestinian deaths, even babies’ deaths.
The hypocrisy is especially hard to stomach, given a central Israeli
justification for its subsequent genocidal rampage through Gaza. Israel
promoted the claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 Israeli babies on 7 October - a story that was widely reported as fact, even though no evidence was ever produced for it.
In media coverage, the roles of occupier and occupied, of predator and prey, of abuser and victim, have been reversed
The media has revisited the events of 7 October for weeks,
desperately trying to find fresh angles to maintain a sense of “balance”
in the suffering of both sides. But, as the downgrading of the al-Shifa
babies story underscores, coverage of Israel’s trauma often comes at
the expense of reporting on the far worse, and current, torment faced by
Palestinians.
On the BBC news on 20 November, for example, a story about the
agonies of the families of the Israeli hostages had three times as much
time dedicated to it as the plight of Palestinians in Gaza - on a day
when Israel attacked another hospital, the Indonesian, and rained down
more bombs on Palestinian civilians.
Also strangely, when media outlets consider the suffering of the
hostages, they barely even allude to the fact that the most terrifying
part of the hostages’ ordeal is being subjected to the same Israeli
bombing campaign as that faced by Palestinians.
The intense focus on the plight of the hostages held by Hamas
contrasts strikingly with the complete lack of interest, both historic
and current, in Israel’s own hostages: the Palestinian women and
children, often seized by masked soldiers in the middle of the night,
who are locked up in Israeli jails, where they are rarely, if ever, able
to see family.
Though the media refer to them simply as “prisoners”, they have been
either jailed without trial or prosecuted in military courts with an
almost 100 per cent conviction rate.
Another unmentionable is that western war correspondents, so ready to
risk their lives for a story in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, are
keeping out of Gaza, or embedding with the Israeli army – and not just
because Israel orders them to stay outside. If they wished, they could
find a way in.
Their news outlets refuse to let them in because they know that
Israel’s bombing campaign is so ruthless, so untargeted, so
unpredictable, that there would be too much danger of their reporters
being injured or killed.
That very fact ought to be part of the news story. But that would
require turning upside down the narrative framework underpinning western
reporting.
These editorial decisions make sense only because a manufactured
political climate dominates in the West. Israel and Israelis, even
Israeli soldiers enforcing apartheid rule, are treated as innocents,
while ordinary Palestinians, even babies, are portrayed as complicit in
the mindless barbarism Hamas stands accused of.
The very premises of western coverage wipe from the slate decades of
brutalising Israeli occupation and illegal Jewish settlement of
Palestinian territory, as well as an inhuman 16-year siege of Gaza. In
media coverage, the roles of occupier and occupied, of predator and
prey, of abuser and victim, have been reversed.
Hate chants?
This is also the only way to make sense of the continuing furore over
the chant that was considered more newsworthy than Israel’s reckless
abuse and endangerment of premature babies.
Shortly before she was sacked as home secretary, Suella Braverman
called for the government to criminalise as hate speech slogans such as
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. She had earlier
called for the banning of the Palestinian flag at demonstrations.
Hers is far from a rogue view. The government was reported this month to be seriously considering outlawing slogans protesting against the bombing of Gaza, classing them as support for terrorism.
Lord Carlile, who oversaw the drafting of the 2006 Terrorism Act,
threw his weight behind the idea, arguing that protesters who chant
“From the river to the sea” ought to be prosecuted.
Predictably under Labour leader Keir Starmer, there is bipartisan
support for repressing any signs of solidarity with Palestinians. MP Andy McDonald was suspended
from the parliamentary party for calling for equality for Israelis and
Palestinians, presumably because he added the phrase “between the river
and the sea”.
Apparently any mention of that phrase, in any context, equates to support for the extermination of Israelis or Jews.
Even supposed “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk, owner of X
(formerly Twitter), fell for this canard. He called phrases like “From
the river to the sea” a “euphemism”, adding that they “necessarily imply
genocide”. He threatened to suspend users repeating the slogan.
This line of reasoning is completely preposterous - as well as grossly inconsistent.
Dehumanisation
The truth is that the phrase has been adopted for many decades by all
those in the region, on both sides, who envision a single state in the
region - for good or bad.
This brings us to another of these plentiful media paradoxes.
There has been strong pushback in the media against calling Israel’s
actions genocidal. For decades, however, the official charter of the
ruling Likud party in Israel has referred to the area “Between the Sea
and the [River] Jordan”.
The demand that freedom come to 'Palestine', rather than Israel, does
not imply Israelis will be harmed. It offers a vision of equality for
both peoples in the same land
And unlike the Gaza protesters, the Likud charter does imply genocidal intent, especially given Israel’s current rampage. It declares: “Between the Sea and the Jordan, there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
This is at the root of the dehumanising language used by Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers. They have called the
Palestinians “human animals” and “Amalek”, the enemy of the Israelites
who had to be destroyed, including women and children.
When protesters chant "From the river to the sea", by contrast, they
reject not Israelis or Jews but the apartheid nature of Israel. They
recognise that Israeli governments have already created a single state
across the lands that were historic Palestine, and one in which
different ethnic groups are segregated and accorded different rights.
The demand that freedom come to "Palestine", rather than Israel, does
not imply Israelis will be harmed. It offers a vision of equality for
both peoples in the same land, superseding a state of Israel born as a
European colonial project, one designed to oust Palestinians from their
homeland.
The chant acknowledges that there is no possibility of making peace
with Israel because of its structural embodiment of ethnic supremacism.
Instead, it calls for a process of decolonisation - a dismantling of
illegal settlements and the revoking of segregated rights - as happened
with the end of white rule in South Africa. It recognises that
decolonisation is incompatible with the ideological premises on which
Israel is founded.
The Gaza protests are not hate marches. They are marches to end
decades of Israeli colonisation that have culminated in the
dehumanisation of Palestinians and a genocide in Gaza.
Smear campaign
It would be preferable to think that the efforts to criminalise
solidarity with Palestinians as they endure ethnic cleansing and
genocide derive from confusion.
The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. In his tweet,
Musk identified not just the chant but any effort towards
“decolonisation” - in its simplest sense, the tearing down of illegal
Jewish settlements built on occupied Palestinian land - as a euphemism
for genocide.
In this stark zero-sum assessment, apparently shared by media like
the BBC, as well as the UK government and the Labour Party, dignity and
freedom for Palestinians are seen as incompatible with the survival of
Israelis.
This is part of a pattern too. Even before 7 October, Britain’s
political and media class had waged a campaign against solidarity with
Palestinians, equating it to antisemitism.
The non-violent movement to boycott Israel - to end the Jewish
supremacism embodied by the Likud charter and forestall the events we
see today in Gaza without resorting to rockets and guns - was labelled
as antisemitism.
Pointing out that Israel is an apartheid state ruling over Palestinians, as all the leading human rights groups now acknowledge, was also tarred as antisemitism.
That campaign reached its nadir with the malicious smearing as antisemites of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and hundreds of thousands of Palestinian solidarity activists in the UK.
More clearly than ever, this recent history should profoundly disturb us.
It has a parallel with events in Gaza itself. For years, Palestinians
there tried non-violent ways to protest against their encagement. They
massed at the fence symbolising the siege of their enclave, but were met
with sniper fire from the Israeli army. Their protests were called
terrorism
They sent over that same fence flaming balloons that set fire to
neighbouring fields on the lands Palestinians were cleansed from decades
ago to create what we today call Israel. This plea for visibility, this
nuisance act to grab attention, was denounced as terrorism too.
And all the while, the people of Gaza watched as the Palestinian
Authority in the West Bank failed dismally in its efforts at
international diplomacy. Attempts to take Israel to the International
Criminal Court for war crimes, including by building illegal
settlements, were condemned. They supposedly posed an existential threat
to Israel.
Fomenting division
It was the blocking of all non-violent means for Palestinians to
liberate themselves from an ever-deepening, ever more violent occupation
that led to the 7 October breakout from Gaza. That prison break may
have been bloody, it may have included many atrocities, but it was
entirely predictable.
Chiefly responsible for it are Israel, and the western political and
media class, who ignored and smeared Palestinians, human rights groups
and solidarity activists, as they now smear an innocent chant.
Premature babies, evacuated from Gaza City's al-Shifa
hospital, are readied for transfer from a Rafah hospital in the southern
Gaza Strip to Egypt, on 20 November 2023 (AFP)
There
is a goal here. A very ugly one. The campaign to delegitimise any
solidarity with Palestinians - classifying it as hate - is meant to
foment polarisation and escalation. At its starkest, it requires of us
that we side with those who are murdering babies.
Israel, aided by western establishments, has intentionally driven
supporters of justice for Palestinians, on one side, and much of the
Jewish public on the other, into entrenched, oppositional camps. Each
feels victimised. One side feels frustrated, vilified and angry. The
other feels fearful and unforgiving.
This is not accidental. It reflects a desire by western
establishments to create the very internal divisions, hatred and
instability they claim to be trying to avert. The aim is to ensure that
Israel remains an untouchable ally, able to project western power and
influence into the oil- and gas-rich Middle East.
The problem is not a chant. The problem is not marches opposing a terror campaign of bombs and the murder of babies.
The problem is our susceptibility to the endless lies and deceptions
told by western establishments to promote their narrow interests over
our shared humanity.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.