Educational Material Regarding the Violence in Gaza

The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing

- Malcolm X in 1964

It’s December 8th, 2023. I have been wanting to write this for weeks, and today finally I begin to commit these long-marinating observations and analyses to words [Note: it took me some more weeks to get this document to a publishable form on Dec 26]. My wife and I just sat with our infant baby and opened the second-day Hanukkah present his grandparents gifted him. Now she’s on the phone with her sister. They are recounting the fun Hanukkah songs they used to sing as kids (I hear sing-songy Oh Hanukkah, oh Hanukkah come light the menorah). New Haven’s heavenly Arethusa chocolate ice cream is in the freezer currently, and will be on my plate in a little while. Life is beautiful, more or less.

But of course that is a reality seen only from where I am standing in the present moment. Over the past decade I have become more and more aware of the tremendous, multi-layered inequalities and power asymmetries that permeate our world. I now have a constant (and often exasperating) sensitivity both to how terrible and horrible life is for hundreds of millions of our fellow people, and to the stressful precarity of the situations of the rest of us who are at some ease right now. The tumultuous arc of the story in the Italian movie La vita è bella (“Life is Beautiful” in its English-dubbed version) comes to mind. I watched that film long back, when I was in medical college in India. While Spielberg’s Schindler’s List had exposed me to the brutal cruelty of the early twentieth-century European assault on the Jewish people, Life Is Beautiful made me aware of the notorious “banality of evil” that pervaded Europe and the broader “West” at that time.

We are now well in the thick of the early twenty-first century. While the world has dramatically changed, its morals have decidedly remained the same. We are into the third month of people across the so-called civilized Western world, as well as ostensibly “earliest-civilized” peoples like those in India, either egging on or being nonchalant about the horrific hourly and daily attacks by the Israeli government and military on the people of Gaza. As the atrocities, dead bodies, fragments of limbs, cracked open skulls, flattened buildings, and evaporated families keep piling, so do the justifications and aggressive assertions that all of that is actually right, even good, accompanied with sweet-sounding phrases like “voluntary migration”.

Folks who have been paying attention have seen bloodcurdling, terrifying photos and videos populate our screens each minute. We need no Spielbergs or Hollywood movies to illuminate either the brutal cruelty of Israeli actions or the ways in which the banality of evil pervades the larger world today. Interestingly, Spielberg did speak on current events, but in a twisted irony he bothered to register only the October 7th Hamas attack in his public statements, even as the Israeli regime’s cruelties carried out both after and before and on October 7th — cruelties the cold-bloodedness of which remind many of the stark, realistic portrayals that characterize Spielberg’s shinema — get bloodier and murkier with each passing day.

But Spielberg is not alone. Many around us — a lot of really decent people in fact — have been surprisingly supportive (in varying degrees and forms) of the military action and mass violence perpetrated by the Israeli government and soldiers in moral and material collaboration with the likes of the US, UK, Canada, Germany, et al. I was pushed into writing this primarily to address that shocking reality. In much of EuroAmerica, many mainstream media outlets are frequently perpetrating disingenuous acts of commission and omission in how they present and analyze the events and the overall situation. A situation which can most properly be described as the current iteration of the decades-long Israeli and Euro-American war on Palestine.

As someone who has already gone through his share of falling into mainstream media traps (especially in the run-up to the 2014 Union government elections in India), I have, once-bitten-twice-shy, developed over time several strategies and habits of mind to look at the world from more grounded, more power-conscious, and more ethical lenses than offered by conventional public discourses. These past two months have been such a tremendous revelation. We have witnessed, in real time, how mainstream news and analyses refracted through the prejudices, biases, and propaganda of those with power and clout, can cast a spell on entire groups of people, leading them to voluntarily reject the evidence of their eyes and ears and hearts (to paraphrase George Orwell). Personally, I am among so many of those around the world (and this includes a lot of conscientious Jewish individuals and groups), who found the actions of the Israeli regime and the twisted justifications of its supporters both morally reprehensible and plain balderdash since the beginning. At the same time, the more I have learned about and understood the situation and its history, the more impatient I have become with journalists and influencers who continue to take the Israeli regime’s propaganda and misinformation at face value, while ignoring its transparently genocidal language and actions.

To quote from the tweets of journalist Sana Saeed just a few days after Israel [hereafter when I say “Israel” I refer to the Israeli state and military regime] started murdering Palestinian children and other civilians under the pretext of “targeting” Hamas militants:

The footage coming out of Gaza is horrifying. Bodies being pulled out of rubble, screams of people recognizing the dead; sirens blaring in the background. Our media & political establishments have ensured there is no sympathy or empathy for the bombed & besieged “human animals”. Civilian lives only seem to matter when those who don’t routinely experience violence — esp when the violence that does exist, exists to protect them — start to [experience it]. Israelis are given inherent humanity. Palestinian humanity is made dependent on their compassion for their occupiers.

And so what follows is a curated collection of dozens of articles, reports, social media posts, and other informative material from the perspectives of those whose voices are erased, sidelined, ridiculed, insulted, subjected to racist suspicions, or unfairly disputed in mainstream discussions. We live in a hyperdynamic digital media-centered world where it is becoming essential to rid ourselves of our older habits of consuming and processing news and analyses. This document will show, through examples rather than precept, how one can make that jump to a smarter form of media literacy for the current age. I sincerely hope that the new facts, details, and perspectives people will learn from this document will nudge them to take seriously the need for us to be better media-literate and to develop strategies and habits of mind that will prevent us from falling into the sophisticated traps of implicit and explicit propaganda, whether mundane or mammoth.

One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.
- Omar El Akkad (Oct 2023)

[Note on Dec 26:]

It was Christmas Day yesterday. For days people have been talking about the brutal killings by the Israeli regime of Christians in Gaza, and the possibility of the annihilation of Palestinian Christians as a group. I must admit I never knew that the traditionally accepted birthplace of Jesus Christ, Bethlehem, is located within the State of Palestine (currently the so-called West Bank territory). It was surreal to learn that Christmas had been canceled in this town: “Christmas celebrations have been cancelled across the Holy Land this year as the region mourns the estimated 20,000 Palestinians killed… Manger Square, next to the church of the Nativity, which was built on the spot where Jesus is believed to have been born, was grey and sad without decorations. For the first time in living memory there was no traditional Christmas tree at its centre.”

Also for the first time in living memory, an extraordinary Christmas sermon was delivered in Bethlehem, frankly discussing genocide and complicity. Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, spoke with power and empathy on December 23 (watch the video here). Below are some excerpts [highlights are mine]:

Christ under the rubble. We are angry. We are broken. This would have been a time of joy. Instead, we are mourning. We are fearful. More than 20.000 killed. Thousands are still under the rubble. Close to 9000 children killed in the most brutal ways. Day after day. 1.9 million displaced. Hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed. Gaza, as we know, it no longer exists. This is an annihilation. This is a genocide. The world is watching. Churches are watching.

The people of Gaza are sending live images of their own execution. Maybe the world cares, but it goes on… We are tormented by the silence of the world. Leaders of the so called free lined up one after the other to give the green light for this genocide against a captive population. They gave the cover.

This war has confirmed to us that the world does not see us as equal. Maybe it’s the colour of our skins. Maybe it is because we are on the wrong side of a political equation. Even our kingship in Christ did not shelled us. So they say if it takes killing 100 Palestinians to get the single “Hamas militant”, then so be it… The hypocrisy and racism of the Western World is transparent and appalling. They always take the word of Palestinians with suspicion and qualification. No, we’re not treated equally. Yet on the other side, despite the clear track record of misinformation, lies, their words are almost always deemed infallible.

To our European friends, I never ever want to hear your lecture us on human rights or international law again. And I mean this. We are not white I guess, it does not apply to us according to your own logic. In this war, the many Christians and the Western World made sure the Empire has the theology needed. It is thus self-defence, we were told, and I continue to ask, how was the killing of 9000 children? Self defence? How was the displacement of 1.9 million Palestinians? Self defence.

Let it be clear friends. Silence is complicity and empty calls for peace without a ceasefire and end to occupation and the shallow words of empathy without direct action, all under the banner of complicity. So here is my message. Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world. Gaza was hell before October 7th and the world was silent. Should we be surprised that they’re silent now?

Housekeeping: This is a dynamic document. I am publishing the first version of it on December 26, 2023, and thenceforth I will keep adding new details as I find time and energy. The bulk of what you see here comes from meticulous bookmarking and screenshotting of all the new or significant material I have come across since October. I have learned many new things and got to know about many new people (scholars, journalists, activists, and others) — I did not know, for example, about Refaat Alareer or Rachel Corrie before. The more I learn, the more disgusted I become with the window-dressing of “democracy”, “freedom”, “equality”, “justice” and other so-called “Western values” that Euro-American leaders continue to brandish. It’s so surreal, the kinds of bubbles they are living in. Joe Biden, for example, with his cliched claims and statements about American “leadership” and “protection” of democracy etc., seems less like a grounded 2020s politician and more like a misfitting transplant from 1990s Roland Emmerich movies.

Anyway, I present here all the stuff which I have found helpful in understanding the current situation in Gaza. I have filed the material under different categories with self-explanatory titles. There is no other specific pattern to this document. It is neither chronological, nor comprehensive, nor authoritative. Still, I will say that this document — which will continue to expand in coming weeks — will introduce you to a good amount of new, important stuff: stuff that you may never have heard or thought about before.

At this point it is essential to point out that when we think just in terms of the violence and bloodshed involved, what’s happening in Gaza and against Palestinians is not very different from what several other persecuted groups in different parts of the world are experiencing today or have in the past. The reason Gaza and Palestine are exceptional is not the violence per se — which, of course, must be and is being opposed tooth and nail by so many of us — but the despicable ways in which powerful elites in EuroAmerica are committing, justifying, supporting, encouraging and/or celebrating the brutalities. My effort here is to help counter, by exposing and laying it out as comprehensively as possible, this widely prevalent vileness in how we discuss Palestine, Palestinians, and their persecution.

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
And in order to hear the birds
The warplanes must be silent.
- Marwan Makhoul

Browse the material in the document through these categories:

Everyday Cruelty; Or What You Must Know Before You Support The Israeli Regime

Everyday Suffering & Murdering; Or Look At The Hamas Terrorist We Just Eliminated

​History And Politics; Or “You’re Just Watching It From This Season”; Or Gaslighting Galore

Media; Or Manufacturing Consent; Or Hating The Oppressed, Loving The Oppressor

List Of Some Headlines From The Satirical Website The Onion

My Violence Noble, Your Violence Terrorism; Or “The Most Moral Army In The World”

Weaponizing Antisemitism; Or, Your Slogans Hurt Us More Than Our Bombs Hurt You

Conscientious Jewish Organizations and People

College Etc.; Or The Kids Are Alright

Big People With Big Hearts; or Celebrities on the Right Side of History

Big People with (?) hearts; or Celebrities on the Right Side of Savagery