IF WE cannot easily see what is really happening in Palestine, then Israelis — with the possible exception of the Israeli Defence Forces soldiers searching the ruins of Gaza City for these elusive Hamas militants — are in a state of contrived ignorance.
In our country, the early media representations of Israel’s terror bombing of Palestinian territory were always presented in terms of a response to the breach of Israel’s security perimeter.
This was accomplished without setting the context in Israel’s decades of territorial acquisition, ethnic cleansing and brutal and systematic repression.
That the institutionalisation of Israel’s rule has now solidified into an almost perfect facsimile of apartheid as pioneered by the racist South African regime is today buttressed by a media narrative in which Israelis are allowed only to see the deaths of thousands of Palestinians in a rough equivalence to the deaths of hundreds of Israelis.
In the domestic arena, the Netanyahu government has to contend with a powerful movement of families of the hostages held in Gaza who value the lives of their loved ones as equal if not greater than the strategic aims of the Israeli military command.
In this, they may be under an illusion. Israel already has a well-established Hannibal directive — a military doctrine which holds that Israelis at risk of becoming hostages are to be eliminated by armed force to prevent their capture, thus depriving the Palestinian resistance of a bargaining counter to match that held by Israel’s constantly replenished administrative detention of hundreds of Palestinians.
If the pressure these families exert on the Netanyahu regime does effect a change in the disposition of Israel’s military forces then it will be yet another manifestation of the different values that are placed on the lives of Israelis and Palestinians.
The killing of the three Israeli hostages executed by the IDF highlights the deadly effect of Israel’s institutionalised racism towards Palestinians.
When confronted by three civilians waving a white flag the IDF soldiers assumed they were Palestinians and thus summarily executed them. Three Israelis thus acquired a new status as honorary Palestinians.
As we have been exposed to images of the carnage visited on the people in Gaza, the spoken narrative — incongruously conditioned by the repetition of the redundant phrase “Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by the British government” — continues to dance around the unspoken and unspeakable truths about the nature of the zionist regime.
At the same time, it raises important questions about how our mass media functions.
It is to Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish Marxist intellectual, that we owe the insight that technological advances — in this case, the electro-mechanical reproduction of images depicting real events, through their swift reproduction and dissemination — transform our understanding of meaning.
Despite the institutional and ideological framework in which our media, especially TV, operates, we have begun to understand more clearly, and in ways that subvert the previously dominant narrative, the nature of the Israeli state and the forces that sustain it.
To our sympathy and solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinian people, we can add our appreciation of those elements in Israeli society who act on the understanding that until the Palestinian people gain sovereignty over a land they can call their own, peace and security are nowhere assured.
This is not a question that concerns only the people who today live on the historic lands of Palestine.
That world opinion is divided between the governments of the US and Britain versus the rest, shows that the broader question is how to end the domination that imperialism exercises over the region.
