Israel’s quest to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians through expulsion or extermination keeps getting interrupted for photo ops of aid airlifts or a few aid trucks to satisfy feigned Western grievance, writes Joe Lauria.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the General Assembly’s 79th session on Sept. 27, 2024. (U.N. Photo/Evan Schneider)
Winning the public relations war is proving to be a lot more difficult for Israel than the genocide against the Palestinian people.
As the conscience of Western publics pushes their governments to stop supporting Israel’s historic crimes, U.S. and European governments are forced to make displays of scolding Israel.
But that act is getting old. The money and guns keep flowing as the killing and starvation keeps growing.
Western allies want Israel to make a gesture that it still has a shred of humanity left. At various junctures during the slaughter, U.S. and European governments have disingenuously leveled criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians to keep their own populations at bay.
For instance, during the last U.S. presidential campaign, with a large number of Democrats condemning Israel for their actions, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris had to issue criticism of Israel while insincerely repeating that they were working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire.
This was fake because if the Biden or now Trump administrations really want to stop the killing they can do it almost immediately: tell Israel no more guns and money if the killing doesn’t stop.
The German authorities, who seem to relish the opportunity to enforce a new genocide, could do the same, as Germany is Israel’s second largest arms supplier after the U.S.
Losing on the PR Front
Whenever Western governments start feeling the heat they tell Israel to cool it for a while and stage some kind of show of humanitarian aid.
Israel usually complies because they are fighting two wars: one of ethnic cleansing and/or extermination of the Palestinians, and the other a public relations war with the Western public, particularly its youth.
As Consortium News reported last week, Israel is inviting over 500 delegations of social media influencers to tour Israel and learn the right message to spread to their millions of followers because Israel realizes it is losing the PR war.
The daily Haaretz reported:
“Foreign Ministry officials say the tour delivers significant media, advocacy, and diplomatic benefits – and represents a strategic shift, as traditional outreach is no longer sufficient to shape public opinion. … We’re working with influencers, sometimes with delegations of influencers. Their networks have huge followings, and their messages are more effective than if they came directly from the ministry.”
On Friday, Britain, France and Germany issued a joint statement saying the Gaza “humanitarian catastrophe must end now.” They said Israel must “immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid.”
“The humanitarian catastrophe that we are witnessing in Gaza must end now,” the joint statement says. “Withholding essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable.”
Italy separately said, “We can no longer accept carnage and famine.” Barack Obama chimed in too, also on Friday. On Monday, Donald Trump said: “There is real starvation in Gaza — you can’t fake that.”
France said it would recognize the State of Palestine, a step too far for Britain, Germany and Italy, and which the U.S. condemned.
These leaders’ consciences would be shocked if they indeed have a conscience. They’ve seen reports like this one from the BBC confirming that desperately starving people have been shot and killed as they try to reach the only food aid distribution points by the Israeli forces and private U.S. contractors.
And yet they keep sending 2,000 lbs. bombs and F-35 spare parts.
Nevertheless, Israel realizes it must win the PR war fought not against the Western leaders who back them, but against the Western public. (Western leaders are engaged in their own PR war with their people.) Thus on Sunday Israel announced it would begin an airlift of food into Gaza.
It’s surely part of a genocidal plan to occasionally respond to this criticism, hold some fire and make a big show of letting in aid before resuming the gruesome task. It sure makes finishing a genocide more difficult.
The Hard Part
For Israel this is the hard part: completing a genocide while making it look like you are not completing a genocide. In an age of mobile telephone cameras and wireless transmission of images from virtually anywhere by anyone, genocide while few are looking is a thing of the past.
One way to mislead the public is to kill at a pace intended to fool them into thinking there is more or less routine combat going on in Gaza and an unfortunate number of civilians are just being killed in the crossfire. (There was an uproar over the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last week ignorantly reporting the deliberate murder of unarmed, starving civilians at the aid distribution points as having died in “the crossfire.”)
So Israel needs to keep the official daily death toll in Gaza to around 100. Don’t start wiping out entire encampments, killing thousands a day. Make it look more or less like a normal war. Leave doubt in people’s minds. Netanyahu did say this would take a very long time.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz openly says the plan is to concentrate the entire 2 million plus population of Gaza in a camp in the south to ready them for expulsion. And if Egypt and others refuse to take them? The rate of killing in this concentration camp may well explode if Western governments keep tolerating this evil.
But for now, the rate of killing allows a propagandist like Bret Stephens to argue in The New York Times that it can’t be genocide because the killing is too slow. He actually wrote this:
“If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans — why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths, has cited so far in nearly two years of war? It’s not that Israel lacks the capacity to have meted vastly greater destruction than what it has inflicted so far.”
Quick, somebody show the Genocide Convention to Stephens. It defines genocide in black and white:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Stephens falls prey to a common misconception of genocide, namely that it depends on the number of people killed. Acts must be “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part.”
The hardest part of proving genocide is intent. Israeli leaders have provided folders full of statements of genocidal intent. It was then followed by actions that systematically destroyed the conditions of life for the Palestinians of Gaza.
One by one they wiped out the infrastructure of Palestinian culture and civilization: schools, universities, mosques, churches, museums, theaters, libraries, hospitals and incalculable residential buildings, while people were still living in them. There has been a wholesale assassination of journalists, artists, academics and doctors — and an imposed starvation.
This is textbook genocide.
The Big Lie sent out from Israel, parroted almost word-for-word by the likes of Stephens and Alan Dershowitz, Israel-defender supremo, and by an Israeli zealot who appeared on Piers Morgan’s show last, week with piercing, fanatical eyes is this: This is war, unfortunately civilians get killed and there is no army in the world that takes greater care to avoid civilian casualties than Israel’s, none.
The zealot with Morgan went a step further to say he was “proud” of the conduct of the IDF in Gaza, to which Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, also on the panel, said, “I’m sorry, only Nazis spoke like that.”
There is also a Big Truth. If Western governments and media repeated it and more crucially acted upon it, it would cause Israel to lose both wars: public relations and the elimination of the Palestinian people.
The world is waiting.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
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