Blanket sympathetic coverage of the death of 6 Israeli hostages contrasts sharply with the scant regard for Palestinian humanity over ten months of bombing, writes Brian Kelly. And it obscures a series of important developments in historic Palestine, including major fissures in the ranks of Zionism.
For anyone whose heart has been broken, over and over again, or whose sense of outrage has been repeatedly pushed beyond limits by the relentless barbarism inflicted on Palestinian civilians in Gaza—and now the West Bank—the barefaced racism and hypocrisy marking the outpouring of grief over six Israeli hostages found dead in Rafah is hard to stomach. Virtually the whole of the western corporate media, which has bent over backwards to censor pro-Palestinian voices and given crucial cover at every juncture for the ongoing genocide, has decided that there are human beings, after all, who deserve our sympathy, and whose deaths qualify as tragedy.
A corporate media which has never feigned even the slightest interest in the humanity of Palestinians desperately trying to survive ten months of relentless bombardment has somehow discovered its ability to humanize victims: among the Israelis found dead were a ‘father’ and a ‘nature lover’, according to detailed vignettes appearing in the Washington Post; ‘Catastrophe is a bulldozer that flattens its victims,’ Franklin Foer writes in The Atlantic, oblivious to massive evidence of Israeli forces deliberately bulldozing both the living and the dead. ‘But [hostage Hersh Goldin-Polin]’s parents ‘insist that the world know their son as a full human being’. What an extraordinary aspiration! Could it be that there are any among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians dead and maimed whose families might want the same?
CNN tells us that September 1st was ‘one of the most devastating days of the last 11 months’—not because of the dozens killed on that same day in targeted Israeli bombings in Beit Lahia, or the Safad School and the Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, or the killing of more than two dozen Palestinians in expanded assaults on Jenin and Tulkarm in the West Bank. September 1st qualifies as ‘devastating’, it seems, only because six Israeli lives were lost.
One inconvenient fact omitted from virtually all western coverage is that of the six now deceased hostages, ‘at least four’ had been on the list for release in an exchange for Palestinian prisoners meant to take place after talks in July—negotiations very deliberately sabotaged by Netanyahu and his cabinet, and given cover by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
The most sickening hypocrisy around recent developments comes straight from the top: from those who have directed, supplied and carried out a brutal genocide. The butcher Netanyahu, who has overseen the deliberate mass murder of upwards of 40,000 Palestinians and the repeated displacement of millions more, vows now (now!) to ‘settle the score’ with Hamas and—in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary— tries to blame the absence of a ceasefire on the Palestinian resistance. Biden, who can barely put two sensible words together and can’t find Gaza on a map, issued a statement saying he was ‘devastated and outraged’, and would see that ‘Hamas leaders’ paid the price. Kamala Harris, who has vowed to ‘keep America lethal’ after her own complicity in genocide, has the gall to complain that ‘Hamas [has] American blood on its hands.’ US Senator Lindsey Graham, who months ago called openly for using nuclear weapons in Gaza and who now advocates war on Tehran, is somehow ‘heartbroken, devastated, mad’ over the hostages’ deaths. To be fair, no one doubts he is mad.
The orchestrated grief from the ranks of the war criminals and their enablers, the sudden discovery of sympathy for victims across wider circles of western opinion-making, has been nauseating. But it is not only hypocritical: the coverage has been deeply misleading. Crucially, it directs attention away from three major developments that demand close attention from everyone keen on building Palestinian solidarity and ending the genocide: the deepening crisis within Israeli society; the large-scale expansion of the Israeli war on Palestine into the West Bank (about which the US has been completely silent); and the growing possibility for a potentially devastating regional war across the Middle East.
Deepening Crisis in the Zionist State: Causes and Limitations
One of the most noticeable aspects of Israel’s war from within the ranks of Zionism has been the ongoing tensions between hostages and their families on one side and Netanyahu and his far-right cabinet on the other. At several key junctures hostages released after negotiations have gone out of their way to criticize the government’s approach, to object to their exploitation by the Israeli right and a domestic media that has fanned the flames of genocide, and even on occasion to speak out in defense of the humanity of their captors. The most recent example was Noa Argamani, who complained publicly after Israeli media twisted her words to make it appear Hamas had beat her and cut her hair: instead, she insisted, her injuries came after Israeli jets targeted the building she was being held in.
The mass strike and demonstrations that have erupted after the retrieval of these six hostages reflect profound tensions between the Netanyahu cabinet and many of the families of the hostages, who have been adamant that the government has chosen endless war over the return of their loved ones. Netanyahu’s determination to sink the last round of negotiations, which we now know would have brought the safe return of at least four of those found dead in Rafah—has brought these tensions to a boil. “We are getting body bags instead of a deal,’ the head of the Zionist labor federation, Histadrut, has declared. ‘[O]nly our intervention might move those who need to be moved.’
The divisions now exploding into the open reflect both tactical differences over conduct of the war on Gaza and more fundamental, long-term shifts in Israeli society. Netanyahu’s bedrock support among a far-right base driven by openly genocidal settlers reflects the rise and consolidation of power of fundamentalists bent on endless expansion, a final solution of the ‘Palestinian problem’ (through expulsion), and the dismantling of any vestiges of Israel’s ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ façade. They view the largely secular, Ashkenazi Jewish elite who built the post-1948 state, commanded its military and oversaw more than a half century of occupation as a fifth-column whose influence must be curbed.
The anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappé has noted the ongoing confrontation between ‘two rival camps’ in Israel—one of ‘secular, liberal and [mostly] middle-class European Jews’, formerly hegemonic; and a rising fundamentalist element, whose ‘influence in the upper echelons of the Israeli army and security services is growing exponentially.’ This latter faction, embrace by Netanyahu, ‘wants Israel to become a theocracy that stretches over the entirety of historical Palestine’. These fracture lines underpin the tensions now obvious on the streets, and potentially they could be fatal to the cohesion Zionism requires to carry on it project. But as of now, these tensions are sharply limited in their potential for transforming the situation on the ground for Palestinians. Sadly (but unsurprisingly), the so-called ‘peace camp’ within Israel has largely collapsed, partly through repression but also down to a sharp political retreat in the aftermath of October 7th.
More than that, tensions within the Zionist camp are being deployed by sections of the western establishment to absolve themselves of culpability for the ongoing genocide. The notion that the relentless barbarism we have witnessed over the past ten months is all down to Netanyahu and his far-right cabinet, or that Israel would somehow ‘return’ to peace-making and democracy if only he could be pushed aside (as the Democratic Party establishment in the US likes to suggest), is beyond cynical. Certainly extreme Zionists have welcomed support from the global far right, and are happy to rub shoulders with the political inheritors of those who oversaw the death camps of the 1930s. But overwhelmingly the genocide in Gaza has been overseen not by fascists, but by self-proclaimed guardians of the ‘liberal democratic order’.
The alternative leaders promoted by the Biden administration in trying to concoct a ‘humane’ face for Israeli society (like Defense Minister Yoav Gallant) are fully committed to occupation, and have been prominent in prosecuting genocidal war. The broader ‘liberal’ element that they represent in Israeli society may seek to curb the ‘excesses’ of Netanyahu, but as Pappé has noted, their ‘advocacy of “liberal democratic values” does not affect their commitment to [Israel’s] apartheid system[.] Their basic wish is for Jewish citizens to live in a democratic and pluralist society from which Arabs are excluded.’
Palestine Solidarity: No Time to Let Up
The long-term tensions that the current crisis has exposed in the ranks of Zionism are not going away any time soon: instead they are likely to intensify, and may generate serious ructions within Israel. But the political limitations of the movement emerging in opposition to Netanyahu’s endless war mean that Palestinians and their supporters around the world must look elsewhere for the leverage than can bring this dark chapter in human history to an end, and which holds out genuine prospects for Palestinian liberation. The developments of the past week—US presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s pledge to double down on the cynical brutality overseen by the Biden administration; Israel’s major escalation in taking its murderous war into the West Bank; and the growing likelihood of regional war—mean that this is no time to let up.
As horrific as the war on Gaza has been, our rulers appear no less willing or able to act decisively in ending the genocide than they have been any time over the past ten months. They feel compelled by public opinion to lie through their teeth, as the Irish government has done over weapons transfers and military flights making use of our airspace. But they will not move unless they are forced to. There is no saviour from within the global ruling classes—or closer to home among the Irish establishment—riding to the rescue. The only silver lining in all that has happened is the emergence of a vibrant, deeply-rooted mass movement in solidarity with Palestine in every corner of the world. Everywhere the movement exists we need to build it bigger and deeper, to call out those who enable the slaughter, and to escalate our actions to the point where the price for carrying on becomes too high for those who have overseen the great crime of our age. Only a movement that marshals the power to stop them in their tracks can redeem this broken world.
