Eyeless in Gaza

The death of context in an online hall of mirrors.

In this 2009 photo, a Palestinian kid flips the bird at two Israeli soldiers across the Gaza border fence. (Flickr/mmansour)

I’m still processing the horrific atrocities in Israel and Palestine and have been struggling to write something that hasn’t already been said ad nauseam, and isn’t just a knee jerk both-sidesy reflection on how we all just need to get along.

Part of the challenge has been the layers upon layers of disinformation permeating online like never before thanks to the interventions of the man baby who rebranded Twitter as X.

There’s an exhausting helplessness that comes with not knowing what’s real or not.

This is particularly so for friends and families of Palestinians in Gaza who are being bombed into oblivion by an Israeli government that isn’t even pretending to abide by any international laws or norms, not to mention the record-high 1,100 Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons without charges; or the comrades and kin of those who were butchered and kidnapped in southern Israel, and the young soldiers who are being fed into the meat grinder, awaiting orders to avenge war crimes by committing war crimes.

You don’t need to keep up to date with every single alleged atrocity to know one simple truth — the violence needs to end immediately and its root causes must be addressed. We cannot let context become a casualty in the fog of war.

Propaganda’s purpose — exacerbated by social media algorithms that promote the most inflammatory claims — is to draw people to the opposite conclusion: that the violence must escalate immediately.

Hearing reports of babies beheaded at Kfar Aza kibbutz on Oct. 7, 2023, which President Joe Biden said he saw images of before the White House clarified he hadn’t, and the Israeli military won’t confirm the existence of, I can’t help but think of the lead up to the Gulf War.

Oct. 10, 1990, a teenage Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah testified to U.S. Congress that Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces, which had invaded Kuwait that summer, removed Kuwaiti babies from incubators and threw them to the ground.

This claim, which helped fuel support for U.S. intervention in the Gulf War, was a total fabrication cooked up by the PR firm Hill and Knowlton. Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant and his forces committed horrible atrocities. But this wasn’t one of them.

The perils of wartime propaganda is also worth keeping in mind when hearing about mass rapes allegedly committed by Hamas fighters, which have been regurgitated endlessly by pro-Israel organizations, politicians and media. The Israeli army told Jewish news outlet The Forward that they have no evidence of any sexual assaults.

Pro-Israel influencer Hen Mazzig, who circulated a video that purports to show a captured Hamas assailant confessing that they’re kidnapping women and children to rape them, didn’t respond to The Forward’s inquiry about the video’s origins. Given that Mazzig appears to spend every waking hour online, it’s hard to believe he didn’t receive the inquiry.

What we do know about the Hamas attacks is atrocious on its own. Engaging in unverified speculation about the nature of these crimes is incredibly cruel to the families who are trying to figure out what happened to their loved ones.

But when you’re trying to justify a war, it’s not enough to depict your enemies as evil based on confirmed reports; they have to be subhuman, capable of unimaginable acts.

“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” said Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, in announcing his government’s “complete siege” of Gaza — “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”

This remark, with the ghastly intent behind it, is reminiscent of former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin’s description of Palestinians as “beasts on two legs” during his 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which killed thousands — mainly civilians.

In both cases, apologists say that they were referring only to Palestinian terrorists, which is an entirely moot point when you consider that the policies this language sought to justify were gross forms of collective punishment.

The Lebanon invasion was morally indefensible on its own terms, culminating in the September 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre, in which Israel’s Maronite Christian allies massacred 1,700 Palestinians while Israeli troops stood guard. It was as horrific as anything Hamas has been accused of conducting on Oct. 7, including accounts of pregnant women being sliced open and having the fetus removed from their wombs.

But it was also a colossal strategic failure. Instead of eradicating the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which moved its headquarters to Tunisia, the Lebanon invasion contributed to the breakout of the first Palestinian intifada in 1987 and the formation of the Iran-backed Shia militia Hezbollah, which has proved a far more formidable fighting force than the PLO, in 1992.

Israel, to its credit, held a public inquiry into its forces’ role in facilitating the massacre — one of the benefits of being permitted to have a functioning state. It found General Ariel Sharon to be “personally responsible” for the atrocity. In 2001, after the outbreak of the far deadlier second intifada, Sharon was elected Israeli prime minister in a landslide.

In an effort to undermine the secular nationalist PLO during in the late 1970s, by the way, Israel began giving tacit support to an offshoot of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood led by a disabled cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, allowing him to establish mosques, libraries, schools and kindergartens in Gaza, and propagate his theocratic vision. In 1987, Yassin founded Hamas. The Israeli government continued engaging with the movement until it launched its first attack on Israelis in 1989.

Whenever you see anything in the media about foreign conflict, you must ask yourself, ‘How did we get here?’”

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As a descendent of Holocaust survivors who were staunchly Zionist, I was raised to believe that Israel was the Jewish people’s second chance at life — the only way to prevent another Shoah.

It’s us against the world and any violence against Israel, or condemnation of it in international fora, was a manifestation of the same old antisemitism. PLO leader Yasser Arafat, by this logic, was simply Hitler reincarnated.

I went to a private Jewish day school where this Manichean worldview was drilled into our heads from the earliest age. I remember the warm and fuzzy joy I felt when I first travelled to Israel in the summer of 2000 — right before the second intifada broke out. There was nothing bad you could tell me about Israel that I would have believed.

Israel brutally crushed the second intifada, Arafat died and that was that. The next Hitler was defeated.

This worldview was punctured during Israel’s second invasion of Lebanon in 2006. As my political consciousness began developing, I couldn’t reconcile the fact that George W. Bush, whom by that time I loathed as a warmonger, was calling for a ceasefire while the Israeli government, which I was led to believe wanted nothing more than to live in harmony with Arabs, insisted Israel must continue the onslaught that was killing mostly civilians.

The Israeli propagandists’ refrain that it tried its darndest to avoid civilian casualties, but Hezbollah was placing all its weapons in their vicinity to make them kill civilians struck me as all too convenient. Israel boasts of having the most advanced military technology in the world. How is it not able to avoid killing mostly civilians?

I began reading up on the conflict with a critical lens. It turned out that Israel, like every country, has its own founding mythologies.

I learned how the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine necessitated the expulsion, or “transfer” in the words of the early Zionists, of its Palestinian population, which began before a single surrounding Arab state intervened.

I read about how the Yom Kippur War, which was taught to me as the height of Arab brutality for attacking the Jewish state on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, was provoked by Israel’s refusal to negotiate the return of Egyptian territory occupied in 1967, with Prime Minister Golda Meir opting instead to build settlements in the Sinai.

I learned that the peace treaty Israel signed with Egypt at Camp David in 1977, which resulted in the evacuation of Israeli settlements and return of the Sinai to Egyptian control, allowed Prime Minister Begin to focus his efforts on entrenching Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza while pulverizing the PLO in Lebanon unencumbered by the threat of an Egyptian intervention.

I learned that the unilateral 2005 Gaza disengagement, which was presented at Zionist summer camp as a painful concession for peace, allowed Prime Minister Sharon to focus on greatly expanding settlements in the West Bank while choking off Gaza from the rest of the world to serve as an example to Palestinians.

By the first invasion of Gaza in 2008, it was clear to me that it was an act of Israeli aggression. Israel holds all the cards against the people whose borders, coasts and airspace they control and the destruction wrought on Gaza paled in comparison than anything Hamas could have done. The same lopsided dynamic was on display again in 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021.

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This time felt different, at least initially. In a single day on Oct. 7, Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, which is especially shocking given how lopsided the conflict has been in my lifetime and warrants condemnation on its own terms.

Everybody knew what was going to come next from the Israelis, because that’s been its sole strategy towards Palestinian violence throughout the course of its history. “Arabs only understand the language of force,” goes a common Israeli refrain.

The same dynamics of previous conflagrations persist — a nuclear power with a higher GDP per capita than Japan, billions in unconditional military aid from the U.S. and full diplomatic backing from Western powers is unleashing all hell on one of the most densely packed places on earth, populated by refugees who used to live in towns Israel wiped off the map between 1947 and 1949 to create a Jewish-majority state.

If we look at this graph from the Financial Times of Israeli and Palestinian casualties in every month since January 2000, there’s an unprecedented increase in Israeli casualties in October 2023, but it’s still less than those on the Palestinian side, which are growing by the hour.

Israeli actions, however, are always depicted as retaliatory in nature, as governments and media only start counting the dead when Israelis are killed, perpetuating an assumption that Israeli lives are simply more valuable than Palestinians’. The question then becomes one of whether Israel has gone too far in its noble mission to protect its citizens, removing any questions of cause and effect from discussion.

There’s no geopolitics, with actions and reactions — just good guys (us) and bad guys (them). You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.

The sheer scale of the Hamas attacks bolstered this deceptive narrative this time around.

Those who say the 1,200 dead is the greatest number of Jews killed in a single day since the Shoah, such as Holocaust historian and U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, are engaging in heinous emotional manipulation, obscuring the root cause of Palestinian violence while paving the way to justify Israel’s onslaught.

The goal is to make Jewish people all over the world afraid that we are on the precipice of another Shoah, so we must blindly support whatever Israel does to keep us safe.

Thus Hamas and Hezbollah’s call for an Oct. 13 “Day of Rage” of protest across the Muslim world transformed into a call to attack Jewish people all over the world, leading to the closure of Jewish day schools and community centres based solely on the wartime propaganda spread by the Israeli government.

Comparing Palestinian violence to Nazism invites comparisons of Israel’s far more deadly violence to Nazism.

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Beyond its sheer human toll, Hamas’s massacre gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his openly exterminationist government the pretext it sought to ethnically cleanse Gaza. It’s hard to interpret Netanyahu’s vow to turn Gaza into a “deserted island,” insisting that civilians relocate to Egypt while bombing the only crossing into Egypt, and then demanding that the entire population of its northern half relocate south within 24 hours, any other way.

This ethnic cleansing tactic was used by Azerbaijan, which purchases upwards of 60% of its weapons from Israel, in its recent assault on Nagorno-Karabakh. Also under the guise of counter-terrorism, the Azerbaijani government urged the region’s Armenian population to flee to Armenia, continuing its attacks even as the roads to Armenia were jammed with traffic.

Netanyahu saw that the world responded with a collective shrug.

That Netanyahu may have repeatedly ignored intelligence from the military junta in Egypt, its ally in keeping Gaza under siege, of “something big” being planned in Gaza raises some disturbing questions.

Like 9/11, which Netanyahu called “very good” for Israel, the Netanyahu government’s failure to prevent the 10/7 attacks could be regarded as simply a colossal intelligence failure. But in both cases, these ostensible failures were used to justify pre-existing policy goals of the government under whose watch it occurred, whether it was invading Iraq or making Gaza completely unliveable.

It’s hard not to engage in a little conspiracism by asking whether Netanyahu, who’s faced unprecedented weekly protests against his far-right government, allowed these attacks to occur.

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Like the hysteria permeating after 9/11, anyone who question the consequences and ethics of any actions made in the wake of this ostensibly senseless tragedy is lambasted as Neville Chamberlain reincarnated, an enemy of Western civilization, Islamic fundamentalist, terrorist, antisemite, Holocaust denier, rape supporter and/or baby killer.

You’re only allowed to have one opinion.

Israel has a right to defend itself.

Those who breach decorum and say anything else, even so much as insinuating Palestinians might have been long suffering, are quickly vilified by those who purport to represent the entire Jewish community, despite having no democratic mandate to do so.

Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi made a completely innocuous statement on Oct. 8, which noted the “deep impact” international events have on Edmontonians:

The attacks taking place in Israel and Gaza targeting innocent civilians are horrific. I know that many Edmontonians have friends and family in these areas, and I am extending my support and empathy to them. We stand with you and share in your hope for a just and lasting peace in the region.

In a cartoonishly unhinged response, the Jewish Federation of Edmonton called Sohi’s remarks a “disgraceful false equivalency to equate #Israel’s right to defend itself with #Hamas terrorists’ deliberate rape, murder and kidnapping of innocent civilians.” They went so far as to demand a “retraction and apology” for acknowledging Palestinian, as well as Israeli, suffering.

Sohi issued another statement, explicitly denouncing Hamas violence, but that still wasn’t good enough for the fed, who called his remarks “deplorable & disgusting,” for again refusing to pretend only Israeli lives have any value.

Mount Royal University (MRU) political scientist Duane Bratt appeared on Global and CTV to scold Sohi for alluding to Palestinian suffering at a time when Israelis are grieving, despite the fact that Israel had begun bombing Gaza by that time.

How long do Palestinians have to wait before they’re allowed to object to Israel bombing ambulances and razing apartment buildings?

Bratt has a perfectly capable Palestinian MRU colleague in Muhannad Ayyash, whom he could have guided reporters towards. But Bratt decided instead to discuss a topic he knows little about, referring in his Global interview to the “creation of Gaza and the West Bank after the Yom Kippur War.”

You don’t need to be an expert in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to know that the Yom Kippur War occurred in 1973, six years after it seized control of the West Bank and Gaza, which were very much in existence.

To his credit, Sohi refused to retract or apologize for his wholly anodyne remarks.

Ontario NDP MPP Sarah Jama went further than Sohi, calling for an immediate ceasefire and noting that the “violence and retaliation [is] rooted in settler colonialism” and apartheid — a claim echoed by Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organizations.

For this thoughtcrime, she was accused by Ontario Premier Doug Ford of “publicly supporting the rape and murder of Jewish people,” who called for her removal from caucus, echoing pro-Israel lobbying outfits the federation-funded Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), B’nai Brith and Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies (FSWC). Federal Conservative strategist and frequent CBC talking head Anthony Koch told her to “go back to Somalia.”

Showing unbelievable cowardice, Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles demanded Jama apologize and “retract” her statement, and so Jama apologized — just as Jama was forced to do last year when she tied Israeli brutality against Palestinians to police brutality in Canada. CIJA, B’nai Brith and FSWC say that isn’t enough. They want her removed from political life.

Nothing but pure obedience will never be enough for those who seek to shut down any critical discussion of Israel’s systemic human rights abuse against Palestinians.

Just as Netanyahu used the Hamas attacks as a pretext to unleash hell on Gaza, his international fan club of so-called Jewish leaders has a pretext to advocate for the suppression of any speech that involves more critical thinking than the magic words — Israel has a right to defend itself.

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History didn’t begin on Oct. 7.

Pointing out that the 10/7 attacks were provoked, just like 9/11 was, and that the effects of what we do now will reverberate for generations, isn’t the same as justifying those attacks.

Nor is protesting in support of Palestine as Israel tears Gaza to shreds the same as celebrating Hamas’s horrific atrocities, no matter how loudly Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Premier Ford, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, Calgary Herald scab Don Braid and their ilk say it is.

Acknowledging that Palestinians have a right to armed resistance against an occupation — just as Ukrainians do — doesn’t mean you believe massacring civilians falls under this umbrella.

While we ought to condemn Hamas atrocities, we can’t lose sight of the daily reality for Palestinians who live under various configurations of Israeli rule and statelessness.

Yet politicians who have nothing to say about the daily brutality meted out by the Israeli occupation — the abductions, torture, home demolitions, beatings, killings, harassment, burning olive orchards, segregated roads and checkpoints — compete among themselves to see who can most sanctimoniously denounce Palestinian violence when it erupts.

Talk to any Palestinian and they will tell you they are tired of having to demonstrate their humanity to Westerners as buildings light up across the world in blue and white to honour Israel’s dead as it openly commits an unspeakable campaign of revenge and collective punishment in Palestine.

Anytime a Palestinian person speaks, they’re expected to denounce the acts done in their names. The same is never expected of Jews or Israelis.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in U.S. Congress, was chased through the halls of Congress by Fox News propagandist Hillary Vaughan, demanding Tlaib disavow decapitating babies.

I know a Palestinian journalist at a mainstream news outlet — a very good journalist and person — who avoids telling people he’s Palestinian because he doesn’t want people to assume he’s an antisemitic terrorist, instead saying he’s from another Arab country. How can this not make anyone’s blood boil? Such is how deeply anti-Palestinian bigotry is embedded in Canadian society.

While Palestinians are afraid to even publicly identify as such, deputy Conservative Party leader Melissa Lantsman, who proudly posed for a photo with the leader of an Israeli settler NGO that has said there’s “too many Arabs in Jerusalem,” promises to immediately push back once “calls for de-escalation and proportionality start” to uproarious applause at pro-Israel rally.

Does anyone doubt that this explicit endorsement of escalation and deliberately disproportionate violence would be roundly condemned if made from a Palestinian perspective? The only consequence Lantsman will ever face for these remarks is a high-profile cabinet portfolio once Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre forms government.

If we’re to be morally consistent, we must condemn all violence against innocents — not just physical but structural.

Israel is a settler colonialist project at its core, one which was founded upon removing 700,000 Palestinians to socially engineer a Jewish majority.

It’s undeniable that an Indigenous person in Canada who has no access to clean drinking water has more in common with a Palestinian in Gaza than a Jew from Brooklyn who lives in a West Bank settlement.

You can obscure this reality by pointing out how far back the Jewish connection to Israel goes, but early Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky were under no such illusions.

Zionism is a different type of settler colonialist project, however, than the French in Algeria for two reasons.

First, while the French primarily sought to subjugate and exploit the local Indigenous population, the Zionist project, like its Canadian and U.S. forebears, seeks to conquer and eliminate the Indigenous population.

Additionally, while pied noirs in Algeria could simply go back to France, Israeli Jews don’t have that option.

They’re there to stay. Any just solution to the conflict will recognize that reality. But it too must recognize the reality that Palestinian lives are of precisely equal value to those of Israelis.

Those in positions of power, for the most part, are as quick to insist on the former as they are to reject the latter.

The Oct. 7 massacre, more than anything, reveals that this status quo is unsustainable.

In the Book of Judges, Samson, after being exiled in Gaza, brings down the Philistines’ temple, killing them and himself in the process.

I fear that if Israel continues on its current trajectory, it will reach the same fate.

This piece has been updated to reflect the fact that Fred Hahn of CUPE Ontario’s Oct. 7 tweet praising “resistance,” which many interpreted as a defence of Palestinian armed resistance, didn’t even mention Israel or Palestine.