[News] Israel's blonde bombshells and real bombs in Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Israel's blonde bombshells and real bombs in Gaza
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10119.shtml

Yosefa Loshitzky, The Electronic Intifada, 5 January 2009

[]

Gaza's suffering is sanitized. (Hatem 
Omar/<http://www.maanimages.com/>MaanImages)

"I reiterate that we will treat the population [of Gaza] with silk gloves"

- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

I am not sure that most people understand the meaning of the name 
"Operation Cast Lead" chosen by Israel for its murderous and criminal 
attack on Gaza. The name is borrowed from a Hebrew nursery rhyme 
which was (and may still be) very popular among Israeli children in 
the 1950s. In this song, a father promises to his child a special 
Hannukah gift: "a cast lead sevivon." Sevivon, in Hebrew (A dreidel 
in Yiddish) is a four-sided spinning top, played with during the 
Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Somebody, in the Israeli army, who 
apparently feels nostalgic about his childhood, decided that if 
Israeli kids would enjoy a sevivon cast from lead there is no reason 
why Palestinian children would not appreciate it too. After all 
Operation Cast Lead is not the first (and unfortunately, will not be 
the last) of Israel's cruel war games.

The cynicism embedded in the name, selected for what Ari Shavit, one 
of Israel's most celebrated commentators, called "an intelligent, 
impressive operation," is symptomatic to the cold, meticulous and 
calculated cruelty with which this attack was "designed," "executed" 
and "marketed" to the world. As the perpetrators themselves proudly 
boast, Operation Cast Lead is not only a great military victory but 
also a success story of Israeli hasbara (meaning in Hebrew, 
explanation, but practically referring to misinformation, spin and lies).

This great victory, as some (but not enough) noticed, prominent among 
them, Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human 
Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is targeted against 
the "wretched of the world." They are first, second and third 
generation refugees (originating from the area currently being 
rocketed from Gaza), the poorest people in the world, crammed in one 
of the most densely-populated areas on the planet, already starved 
and weakened by months of Israeli blockade. The sanitized language of 
the western media calls it "a disproportionate reaction." But the 
ground zero that it creates for the Palestinians, who, over the last 
decades, have achieved the dubious honor of becoming the world's 
quintessential victims, should be a "shock and awe" for any person 
who has not, as yet, lost his or her basic humanity and sense of justice.

Israel's oiled propaganda-machine was further lubricated by its 
self-acknowledged decision to select women as their masbirim 
(misinformation spokespersons) so as "to project a feminine and 
softer image." To add some cool glamour to Israel's hot lies, Tzipi 
Livni, the state's foreign minister and a natural blonde, announced, 
in response to calls for truce: "There is no humanitarian crisis in 
the [Gaza] Strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian 
truce." The blonde offensive, led by the rising star of Israeli 
politics, was fortified by a team of peroxide blonde Israeli women, 
whose sex, lies and video games decorated TV screens worldwide. They 
explained to the sympathetic world the hardships endured by the 
nuclear-armed Israelis threatened by the crude rockets. After all, 
one Israeli was killed in the last six months, while three other 
Israelis (one of them a Palestinian citizen of Israel) were killed by 
rockets since Gaza has been turned into a slaughter-house by the silk 
gloves of the Israeli army.

Quick to join this sugar-coated team of blonde bombshells were 
Israel's most celebrated and translated writers abroad, Amos Oz and 
David Grossman. The two project to the international community (i.e., 
the so-called liberal west) what it regards as Israeli political 
conscience and moral voice. Both are given a special stage by 
prestigious western media platforms to express their opinions 
regarding major political events involving Israel. They are Israel's 
hamasbirim haleumim (the national spokespersons) a euphemism for 
national (or international) deceivers, who whitewash Israel's dirty 
laundry in the global launderette.

Grossman (slightly more to the "left" than Oz) has obtained an extra 
moral authority after his own tank commander son was killed in 
Israel's murderous attack on Lebanon in 2006. In a militaristic 
society, centered on the cult of the fallen soldier, a bereaved 
father (av shakul in Hebrew) enjoys a special status. One could have 
expected Grossman to "cash" in this newly gained status and come out 
with a more courageous stance, one that would criticize Israel's 
immoral massacre, rather than re-play the eternal Jewish victim, 
pleading "to halt" Israeli fire while promising Hamas that: "Even if 
you continue to fire on Israel, we will not respond by resuming 
combat. We will grit our teeth, just as we did throughout the period 
before our attack."

Israelis, in Grossman's self-adulatory discourse, are rahmanim bnei 
rahmanim (merciful sons of merciful fathers), dignified and righteous 
victims. Perhaps this is what Olmert meant when he talked about the 
silky touch of the Israeli gloves caressing "ordinary," non-militant 
Palestinians in Gaza.

One could think about a braver bereaved parent, Smadar Elhanan-Peled 
for example. A mother who, after losing her daughter in a suicide 
bomb attack in Jerusalem, publicly and openly put the blame for her 
daughter's death on the Israeli government and its cruel policies 
towards the Palestinians. Her teenage daughter, unlike Grossman's 
son, was not a tank commander, not even a soldier but just an ordinary girl.

The well-orchestrated propaganda machinery was also equipped with 
Israel's most successful "secret weapons" of mass deception: playing 
the role of the victim again. It is not an accident, therefore, that, 
as the Israeli spin doctors themselves explained in an interview to 
The Jewish Chronicle, that: "The international media were directed to 
a press center set up by the foreign ministry in Sderot itself so 
that foreign reporters would spend as much time as possible in the 
main civilian area affected by Hamas rockets." The scenes of crying, 
panic-stricken Israelis added some excessive emotionalism which 
counter-balanced, but nicely complemented, the team of the icy blonde 
offenders.

The designation of the Gaza Strip and south Israel as a "closed 
military zone," and the ban on media coverage of the Gaza carnage 
contributes to the sanitized view of the Gaza story as manufactured 
by Israel. The real horror and gore is reserved for the Al Jazeera's 
spectators, particularly the Arab ones. Ghetto-under-siege Gaza 
remains almost silent and partly invisible to the rest of us. We 
hardly hear or see in mainstream media, testimonies from the ground.

But we are bombarded by statements and "explanations" given by 
Israeli officials and "international experts" who discuss the 
"situation" calmly and "logically." After all, unlike the hysterical, 
always shouting and crying Gazans, they have not been bombarded by 
for nine days straight. They are interviewed in their comfortable 
(probably leather-clad) offices. They look and sound like respectable 
westerners, just like "us," and their foreign minister is very calm 
and cool as her blonde hair obliges.

A pioneering study by the Glasgow University Media Group on media 
coverage of conflicts, taught us that if you look respectable and 
calm you must be right. The Palestinians, by contrast, usually 
interviewed when they are in a state of shock, look disheveled, 
disoriented, slightly hysterical. And they are always surrounded by 
chaos and disorder. The buildings around are destroyed, debris is 
scattered everywhere, and the noise is unbearable (not to mention 
that they speak this incomprehensible language). Is something wrong 
with them? Also, even when they are not "extremists" they are always 
on the defense, almost apologetic, trying to convince us that they 
are not terrorists, not even militants, just ordinary people who want 
to survive, if not to enjoy this life. This makes them look even more 
suspicious.

After all, if they are not terrorists, what are they doing in Gaza? 
Gaza, we should remember, was declared as "hostile entity" by Israel 
in September of 2007. And since only the powerful have the power to 
define, even if their definitions amount to tautologies or oxymorons, 
they are still the accepted ones. According to this perverse logic, 
produced in Fortress Israel and marketed to the whole world, any 
Gazan deserves to die. Furthermore, despite the fact that Israel 
claims to attack only Hamas and not the Palestinians (conveniently 
oblivious to the fact that, as David Boardman reminds us, the 
majority of Palestinians voted democratically for Hamas), it still 
clings to its old law of blood, according to which, as John Berger 
observes: "One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives." So 
if in the course of the last six months, one Israeli died as a result 
of a Hamas rocket attack, it is perfectly logical that in a week 500 
Palestinians will lose their lives and thousands more will be 
injured. This is what the Israelis view as a policy of deterrence.

We should not forget, however, that behind this cruel apparatus of 
sex, lies and video war games, a more "primitive," "organic," and 
tribal cruelty, usually well hidden from the scrutiny of the outside 
world, is operating. Most people in the west do not realize the 
indifference, and more disturbingly, the joy with which Israelis 
receive news about the suffering of Arabs and particularly 
Palestinians. It is more common in the west to see Arab and Muslim 
crowds "dancing on the roofs" when missiles or rockets hit Israel (as 
was the case during the 1991 Gulf War) but it is less common to see 
or hear Israelis cheered at the plight of suffering Palestinians and 
Arabs. More than once, I have encountered a jovial taxi driver 
applauding the good news that he has just heard. "Let them all die in 
agony" was a standard reaction that I have become accustomed to hear 
on a day-to-day basis while I was still living in Israel.

It was also not uncommon in my Jerusalem neighborhood -- even prior 
to the onset of the second Palestinian intifada -- to see Israeli 
Border Police brutally harass poor old Palestinians who came to 
collect some "valuables" from the garbage bins of the affluent Jews. 
Time and again it happened in front of a popular Jerusalem cafe, 
where people were sipping their lattes, completely oblivious to the 
unfolding drama. Nobody, among these beautiful people, seemed to be 
bothered by these scenes, or to suffer from some disturbing 
reflections on the transfer of guilt.

Israel's cruelty -- manifested through its use (or rather abuse) of 
language, and creative "strategy" of "re-branding" its continuous 
assaults on the Palestinians as a war of defense, using their 
tautological logic to justify the extermination of an "entity" which 
they designate as "hostile" -- should be interpreted in the spirit of 
Giorgio Agamben. The influential Italian philosopher argued in 
relation to the Nazi death camps that the "correct question to pose 
concerning the horrors committed in the camps is, therefore, not the 
hypocritical one of how crimes of such atrocity could be committed 
against human beings" but what were "the juridical procedures and 
deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely 
deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed 
against them could appear any longer as a crime."

We may well ask the same question today when listening to Israel's 
blonde bombshells explain the bombs tearing apart the people of Gaza.

Yosefa Loshitzky is Professor of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at 
the University of East London.  Her most recent books are 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0292747241/theelectronic-20>Identity 
Politics on the Israeli Screen (2001) and (as editor) 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0253210984/theelectronic-20>Spielberg's 
Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List (1997).



Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20090105/39d4e59e/attachment.htm>