How the war on Gaza exposed Israeli and western fascism

Material and rhetorical support for the genocide of the Palestinian people is everywhere. It's time to ask why

Sep 13, 2024

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[First published by Middle East Eye]

Nearly a year into the world’s first live-streamed genocide – which began in Gaza, and is rapidly expanding into the occupied West Bank – the establishment western media still avoid using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s rampage of destruction.

The worse the genocide gets, the longer Israel’s starvation-blockade of the enclave continues, the harder it gets to obscure the horrors – the less coverage Gaza receives.

The worst offender has been the BBC, given that it is Britain’s only publicly funded broadcaster. Ultimately, it is supposed to be accountable to the British public, who are required by law to pay its licence fee.

This is why it has been beyond ludicrous to witness the billionaire-owned media froth at the mouth in recent days about “BBC bias” – not against Palestinians, but against Israel. Yes, you heard that right.

We are talking about the same “anti-Israel” BBC that just ran yet another headline – this time after an Israeli sniper shot an American citizen in the head – that managed somehow, once again, to fail to mention who killed her. Any casual reader risked inferring from the headline “American activist shot dead in occupied West Bank” that the culprit was a Palestinian gunman.

After all, Palestinians, not Israel, are represented by Hamas, a group “designated as a terrorist organisation” by the British government, as the BBC helpfully keeps reminding us.

And it is the supposedly “anti-Israel” BBC that last week sought to stymie efforts by 15 aid agencies known as the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to run a major fundraiser through the nation’s broadcasters.

No one is under any illusions about why the BBC is so unwilling to get involved. The DEC has chosen Gaza as the beneficiary of its latest aid drive.

The committee faced the very same problem with the BBC back in 2009, when the corporation refused to take part in a Gaza fundraiser on the extraordinary pretext that doing so would compromise its rules on “impartiality”.

Presumably, in the BBC’s eyes, saving the lives of Palestinian children reveals a prejudice that saving Ukrainian children’s lives does not.

In its 2009 attack, Israel killed “only” 1,300 or so Palestinians in Gaza, not the many tens of thousands – or possibly hundreds of thousands, no one truly knows – it has this time around.

Famously, the late, independent-minded Labour politician Tony Benn broke ranks and defied the BBC’s DEC ban by reading out details of how to donate money live on air, over the protests of the show’s presenter. As he pointed out then, and it is even truer today: “People will die because of the BBC’s decision.”

According to sources within both the committee and the BBC, the corporation’s executives are terrified – as they were previously – of the "backlash" from Israel and its powerful lobbyists in the UK if it promotes the Gaza appeal.

A spokesperson for the BBC told Middle East Eye that the fundraiser did not meet all the established criteria for a national appeal, despite the DEC's expert opinion that it does, but noted the possibility of broadcasting an appeal was "under review".

Pulling punches

The reason Israel is able to carry out a genocide, and western leaders are able to actively support it, is precisely because the establishment media constantly pulls its punches – very much in Israel’s favour.

Readers and viewers are given no sense that Israel is carrying out systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, let alone a genocide.

Journalists prefer to frame events as a “humanitarian crisis” because this strips away Israel’s responsibility for creating the crisis. It looks at the effects, the suffering, rather than the cause: Israel.

Worse, these same journalists constantly throw sand in our eyes with nonsensical counter-claims to suggest that Israel is actually the victim, not the perpetrator.

Take, for example, the new “study” into supposed BBC anti-Israel bias, led by a British lawyer based in Israel. A faux-horrified Daily Mail warned over the weekend that the “BBC is FOURTEEN times more likely to accuse Israel of genocide than Hamas … amid growing calls for inquiry”.

But read the text, and what’s truly stunning is that over the selected four-month period, the BBC associated Israel with the term “genocide” only 283 times – in its massive output across many television and radio channels, its website, podcasts and various social media platforms, which serve myriad populations at home and abroad.

What the Mail and other right-wing attack-dog media don’t mention is the fact that none of those references would have been the BBC’s own editorialising. Even Palestinian guests who try to use the word on its shows are quickly shut down.

Many of the references would have been BBC News reporting on a case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, which is investigating Israel for what the world’s top court termed in January to be a “plausible” risk of genocide in Gaza.

Regrettably for the BBC, it has been impossible to report that story without mentioning the word “genocide”, because it lies at the heart of the legal case.

What should, in fact, astound us far more is that an active genocide, in which the West is fully complicit, was mentioned by the BBC’s globe-spanning media empire a total of only 283 times in the four months following 7 October.

Campaign of intimidation

The World Court’s preliminary ruling on Israel’s genocide is vital context that should be front and centre of every media story on Gaza. Instead, it is usually unmentioned, or hidden at the end of reports, where few will read about it.

The BBC infamously gave barely any coverage to the genocide case presented in January to the World Court by South Africa, which the panel of judges found to be “plausible”. On the other hand, it broadcast the entirety of Israel’s defence to the same court.

Now, after this latest campaign of intimidation by the billionaire-owned media, the BBC will likely be even less willing to mention the genocide – which is precisely the aim.

What should have stunned the Mail and the rest of the establishment media far more is that the BBC broadcast 19 references to a Hamas “genocide” in the same four-month period.

The idea that Hamas is capable of a "genocide" against Israel, or Jews, is as divorced from reality as the fiction that it "beheaded babies" on 7 October or the claims, still lacking any evidence, that it committed "mass rape" on that day.

Hamas, an armed group numbering thousand of fighters, currently pinned down in Gaza by one of the strongest armies in the world, is quite incapable of committing a “genocide” of Israelis.

This is, of course, why the World Court is not investigating Hamas for genocide, and why only Israel’s most fanatic apologists, including the western media, run with fake news either that Hamas is committing a genocide, or that it is conceivable it may try to do so.

No one really takes seriously claims of a Hamas genocide. The tell was the world’s stunned reaction when the group managed to escape from the concentration camp that is Gaza for a single day on 7 October and wreak so much death and havoc.

The idea that Hamas could do anything worse than that – or even repeat the attack – is simply delusional. The best Hamas can do is wage a guerrilla war of attrition against the Israeli military from its underground tunnels, which is precisely what it is doing.

Here’s another statistic worth highlighting from the recent “study”: in the same four-month period, the BBC used the term “crimes against humanity” 22 times to describe the atrocities committed by Hamas on one day last October, compared with only 15 times to describe Israel’s even worse atrocities committed continuously over the past year.

Allowable thought

The ultimate effect of the latest media furore is to increase pressure on the BBC to make even larger concessions to the self-serving, right-wing political agenda of the billionaire-owned media and the corporate interests of the war machine it represents.

The state broadcaster’s job is to set limits on allowable thought for the British public – not on the right, where that role falls to papers such as the Mail and the Telegraph, but on the other side of the political spectrum, on what is misleadingly referred to as “the left”.

The BBC’s task is to define what is acceptable speech and action – meaning acceptable to the British establishment – by those seeking to challenge its domestic and foreign policy.

Twice in living memory, progressive left-wing opposition leaders have emerged: Michael Foot in the early 1980s, and Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s. On both occasions, the media have united as one to vilify them.

That should surprise no one. Making the BBC a whipping boy – denouncing it as “left-wing” – is a form of permanent gaslighting designed both to make Britain’s extreme right-wing media seem centrist, and to normalise the drive to push the BBC ever further rightwards.

Over decades, the billionaire-owned media have crafted in the public’s mind the idea that the BBC defines the extreme end of supposedly “left-wing” thought. The more the corporation can be pushed to the right, the more the left faces an unwelcome choice: either follow the BBC rightwards, or become universally reviled as the loony left, the woke left, the Trot left, the militant left.

Bolstering this self-fulfilling argument, any protests by BBC staff can be deduced by the journalist-servants of Rupert Murdoch and other press tycoons as further proof of the corporation’s left-wing or Marxist bias.

The media system is rigged, and the BBC is the perfect vehicle for keeping it this way.

Pressing the button

What the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media are downplaying are not just the facts of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but also the obvious genocidal intent of Israeli leaders, the country’s wider society, and its apologists in the UK and elsewhere.

It should not be up for debate that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, when everyone from its prime minister down has told us that this is very much their intent.

The examples of such genocidal statements by Israeli leaders filled pages of South Africa’s case to the World Court.

Just one example: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the Palestinians as “Amalek” – a reference to a biblical story well known to every Israeli schoolchild, in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people, including their children and livestock, off the face of the earth.

Anyone engaged on social media will have faced a battery of similarly genocidal statements from mostly anonymous supporters of Israel.

Those genocide cheerleaders recently gained a face – two, in fact. Video clips of two Israelis, podcasting in English under the name “Two Nice Jewish Boys”, have gone viral, showing the pair calling for the extermination of every last Palestinian man, woman and child.

One of the podcasters said that “zero people in Israel” care whether a polio outbreak caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water, sewage and heath facilities ends up killing babies, noting that Israel’s agreement to a vaccination campaign is driven purely by public relations needs.

In another clip, the podcasters agree that Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons deserve to be “executed by shoving too large of an object up their butts”.

They also make clear that they would not hesitate to press a genocide button to wipe out the Palestinian people: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza – every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow – I would press it in a second … And I think most Israelis would. They wouldn’t talk about it like I am, they wouldn’t say ‘I pressed it’, but they would press it.”

Relentless depravity

It is easy to get alarmed over such inhuman comments, but the furore generated by this pair is likely to deflect from a more important point: that they are utterly representative of where Israeli society is right now. They are not on some depraved fringe. They are not outliers. They are firmly in the mainstream.

The evidence is not just in the fact that Israel’s citizen army is systematically beating and sodomising Palestinian prisoners, sniping Palestinian children in Gaza with shots to the head, cheering the detonation of universities and mosques, desecrating Palestinian bodies, and enforcing a starvation-blockade on Gaza.

It is in the welcoming of all this relentless depravity by wider Israeli society.

After a video emerged of a group of soldiers sodomising a Palestinian prisoner at Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp, Israelis rallied to their side. The extent of the prisoner’s internal injuries required him to be hospitalised.

In the aftermath, Israeli pundits – educated “liberals” – sat in TV studios discussing whether soldiers should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether to rape Palestinians in detention, or whether such abuses should be organised by the state as part of an official torture programme.

One of the soldiers accused in the gang rape case chose to cast off his anonymity after being championed by journalists who interviewed him. He’s now treated as a minor celebrity on Israeli TV shows.

Polls show that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis either approve of the razing of Gaza, or want even more of it. Some 70 percent want to ban from social media platforms any expressions of sympathy for civilians in Gaza.

None of this is really new. It all just got a lot more ostentatious after Hamas’s attack on 7 October.

After all, some of the most shocking violence that day occurred when Hamas fighters stumbled onto a dance festival close to Gaza.

The brutal imprisonment of 2.3 million Palestinians, and the 17-year blockade denying them the essentials of life and any meaningful freedoms, had become so normal to Israelis that hip, freedom-loving Israeli youngsters could happily hold a rave so close to that mass of human suffering.

Or as one of the Two Nice Jewish Boys observed of his feelings about life in Israel: “It’s nice to know that you’re dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless, sitting in a tent.” His partner interrupted: “Makes it even better … People enjoy knowing they [Palestinians in Gaza] are suffering.”

'Heroic soldiers'

This monstrous indifference to, or even pleasure in, the torture of others isn’t restricted to Israelis. There’s a whole army of prominent supporters of Israel in the West who confidently act as apologists for Israel’s genocidal actions.

What unites them all is the Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism.

In Britain, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not spoken out against the mass slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza, nor has he kept quiet about it. Instead, he has given Israel’s war crimes his blessing.

Back in mid-January, as South Africa began making public its case against Israel for genocide that the World Court found “plausible”, Mirvis spoke at a public meeting, where he referred to Israel’s operations in Gaza as “the most outstanding possible thing”.

He described the troops clearly documented committing war crimes as “our heroic soldiers” – inexplicably conflating the actions of a foreign, Israeli army with the British army.

Even if we imagine he was truly ignorant of the war crimes in Gaza eight months ago, there can be no excuses now.

Yet, last week, Mirvis spoke out again, this time to berate the British government for imposing a very partial limit on arms sales to Israel after it received legal advice that such weapons were likely being used by Israel to commit war crimes.

In other words, Mirvis openly called for his own government to ignore international law and arm a state committing war crimes, according to UK government lawyers, and a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court.

There are apologists like Mirvis in influential posts across the West.

Appearing on TV late last month, his counterpart in France, Haim Korsia, urged Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza, and backed Netanyahu, who the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor is pursuing for war crimes.

Korsia refused to condemn Israel’s killing of at least 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, arguing that those deaths were “not of the same order” as the 1,150 deaths of Israelis on 7 October.

He clearly meant Palestinian lives were not as important as Israeli lives.

Inner fascist

Nearly 30 years ago, Israeli sociologist Dan Rabinowitz published a book, Overlooking Nazareth, that argued Israel was a far more profoundly racist society than was widely understood.

His work has taken on a new relevance – and not just for Israelis – since 7 October.

Back in the 1990s, as now, outsiders assumed that Israel was divided between the religious and secular, the traditional and modern; between vulgar recent immigrants and more enlightened “veterans”.

Israelis often see their society split geographically too: between peripheral communities where popular racism flourishes, and a metropolitan centre around Tel Aviv where a sensitive, cultured liberalism predominates.

Rabinowitz tore this thesis to shreds. He took as his case study the small Jewish city of Nazareth Illit in northern Israel, renowned for its extreme right-wing politics, including support for the fascist movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Rabinowitz ascribed the city’s politics chiefly to the fact that it had been built by the state on top of Nazareth, the largest community of Palestinians in Israel, specifically to contain, control and oppress its historic neighbour.

His argument was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were not more racist than the Jews of Tel Aviv. They were simply far more exposed to an “Arab” presence. In fact, given the fact that few Jews chose to live there, they were heavily outnumbered by their “Arab” neighbours. The state had placed them in a direct, confrontational competition with Nazareth for land and resources.

The Jews of Tel Aviv, by contrast, almost never came across an “Arab” unless it was in a servant’s role: as a waiter or a worker on a building site.

The difference, noted Rabinowitz, was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were confronted with their own racism on a daily basis. They had rationalised and become easy with it. Jews in Tel Aviv, meanwhile, could pretend they were open-minded because their bigotry was never meaningfully tested.

Well, 7 October changed all that. The “liberals” of Tel Aviv were suddenly confronted by an unwelcome, avenging Palestinian presence inside their state. The “Arab” was no longer the oppressed, tame, servile one they were used to.

Unexpectedly, the Jews of Tel Aviv felt a space they believed to be theirs exclusively being invaded, just as the Jews of Nazareth Illit had felt for decades. And they responded in exactly the same way. They rationalised their inner fascist. Overnight, they became comfortable with genocide.

The genocide party

That sense of invasion extends beyond Israel, of course.

On 7 October, Hamas’s surprise assault wasn’t just an attack on Israel. The breakout by a small group of armed fighters from one of the largest and most heavily fortified prisons ever built was also a shocking assault on western elites’ complacency – their belief that the world order they had built by force to enrich themselves was permanent and inviolable.

7 October severely shook their confidence that the non-western world could be contained forever; that it must continue to do the West’s bidding, and that it would remain enslaved indefinitely.

Just as it has with Israelis, the Hamas attack quickly exposed the little fascist within the West’s political, media and religious elite, who had spent a lifetime pretending to be the guardians of a western civilising mission – one that was enlightened, humanitarian and liberal.

The act worked, because the world was ordered in such a way that they could easily pretend to themselves and others that they stood against the barbarism of the Other.

The West’s colonialism was largely out of sight, devolved to globe-spanning, exploitative, environmentally destructive western corporations and a network of some 800 US overseas military bases, which were there to kick ass if this new arms-length economic imperialism encountered difficulties.

Whether intentionally or not, Hamas tore off the mask of that deception on 7 October. The pretence of an ideological rift between western leaders on the right and a supposed “left” evaporated overnight. They all belonged to the same war party; they all became devotees of the genocide party.

All have clamoured for Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself” – in truth, its right to continue decades of oppression of the Palestinian people – by imposing a blockade on food, water and power to Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.

All actively approve arming Israel’s slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All have done nothing to impose a ceasefire apart from paying lip service to the notion.

All seem readier to tear up international law and its supporting institutions than to enforce it against Israel. All denounce as antisemitism the mass protests against genocide, rather than denouncing the genocide itself.

7 October was a defining moment. It exposed a monstrous barbarity with which it is hard to come to terms. And we won’t, until we face a difficult truth: that the source of such depravity is far closer to home than we ever imagined.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]