This is a story about an apparently invincible fortress: the west’s official narrative about Israel’s war on Gaza. No matter how depraved the atrocity, or overwhelming the evidence, or confessed-to the crime, the fortress will not crumble. In fact, even when Israel flagrantly insults its main sponsor, the US, as it did this week, nothing changes.
The case in point here starts with a letter that the US sent to Israel last month, which set out in detail how life-saving aid was being systematically blocked from entering Gaza and threatened undefined action if specific demands to reverse the siege were not taken within 30 days. As the Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen suggested, the letter was a political ruse to woo voters in the run-up to the election (given most Democratic voters correctly believe that Israel is committing genocide).
And what happened? Despite a coalition of aid agencies concluding Israel “failed to meet any of the specific criteria set out in the US letter”, and indeed “took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground”, offering a score card that detailed Israel’s overwhelming non-compliance with supposed US demands, the deadline passed on 12 November and the US did nothing. “US says no policy consequences for Israel despite lack of Gaza aid”, as a headline in the Washington Post succinctly put it.
An official narrative isn’t a conspiracy put together in smoke-filled rooms. It is a form of groupthink, forged in elite political, policymaking and media circles, cementing clear parameters on what is deemed respectable, mainstream and credible, and what is not. The narrative that prevails today in countries such as the US, Germany and Britain is that Israel is a western-style democracy that has a “right to defend itself” from terror, with a permissible side discussion about whether the response is “proportionate”. Politicians will indulge in some platitudinous handwringing about civilian suffering, and make abstract references to the need to abide by international law, without ever identifying any of the rampant, egregious violations.
This narrative bears no relation to the facts, which have pointed to one of the great crimes of our age ever since Israeli leaders and officials variously promised to deprive “human animals” of the necessities of life, impose collective punishment, remove “all the restraints” on soldiers and cause “maximum damage” to Gaza. Two months ago, it was revealed that both the US Agency for International Development and the state department’s refugee bureau had concluded by April that Israel was deliberately blocking aid to Gaza. According to US law, this necessitated an arms embargo on Israel, but the Biden administration simply ignored their assessment.
Israel appears to be able to do anything without the fortress falling. It could safely ignore the tears of British doctor Nizam Mamode yesterday as he told MPs that Palestinian children were deliberately being shot in the head “day after day” by Israeli snipers and drones, a testimony effectively corroborated by dozens of US-based medical professionals who served in Gaza. Mamode had worked in Rwanda during the genocide, but declared he had never witnessed any horror on the scale of Gaza.
The narrative withstands the UN’s most senior humanitarian official, Joyce Msuya, declaring, “The entire population of northern Gaza is at risk of dying.” It endures without a scratch when an IDF spokesman declares that violently displaced survivors will not be allowed to return there. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in an editorial, even stated that the “Israeli military is conducting an ethnic cleansing operation in the northern Gaza Strip”, but the de-facto cartel of western media outlets and politicians keeps the hideous truth at bay.
Nothing leaves a dent. Not UN analysis finding that 70% of verified violent deaths in Gaza are women and children, with the age most represented between five and nine. Not 710 babies killed by Israel’s military in Gaza by this September. Not Israel wiping out a minimum of 902 entire families by last month, with whole lifelines, from days’ old infants to great-grandmothers, permanently erased from the civil registry.
Starvation, butchering children, ethnic cleansing, violently erasing a healthcare system: all done deliberately by a state whose leaders have not even pretended not to believe in the collective guilt of a civilian population. If the official narrative lined up with reality, it would go like this. Israel is a state perpetrating a genocidal bloodbath involving not just bombs and bullets but alleged torture and sexual violence. Those who defended or belittled this abomination would be publicly disgraced, those who facilitated it would face arrest. There would have been a deafening chorus from our politicians, media and public figures many months ago, demanding something, anything, to make this end.
But no matter what the people of Gaza endure, the narrative prevails.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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