THE PEDDLING OF PROPAGANDA NARRATIVES
THE PEDDLING OF PROPAGANDA NARRATIVES
Virtue-signalling, he keeps saying about protests against the ongoing genocide.
It's ALL the Arab countries with their enormous populations against little, lonely Israel, he implies and proves it with a map. Israel: the underdog with its top-notch army, its iron-grip even on the few remaining Palestinian territories, its unconditional backing from the world's biggest power (not God, no: the US) and its alliances with -tadaa!- several Arab rulers.
Blood libel! he accuses me of, when I refer to Israel's colonial origins rather than some God-given Biblical right to a "homeland" usurped from others who have subsequently been diminished to subhuman status and inhuman conditions, even when the war is not rolling over their heads.
Hamas is the Palestinian people's worst enemy, he claims time and again. Actually no. Israel is much mightier than Hamas, and Israel is the actor carrying out the genocide: not because Hamas MADE them do it, but because Israel CHOOSES to do it.
Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year?
Israel is army and settlers and jailers. Israel is apartheid and twisted, never-ending revenge: not so much for 7 Ocober as for what was done unto the Jewish people ... in Europe!
Not that he likes Netanyahu's politics, he assures me. But this goes far beyond politics and far beyond Netanyahu or the supposedly extra wicked Eastern European Jews. And far beyond this impossible dialogue between friends over the fence.
This is an inventory of some of the elements in a propaganda narrative that pretends to lend an ever more improbable shine of righteousness to cold-blooded killing by the thousands -of civilian men, women, and children-, forced deplacement, wounded prisoners used as human shields, the destruction of arbitrarily detained men and boys, and as the foundation underlying it all: a racism as mean and murderous as the one that turned the Jews into victims in the past.
