[News] Israel’s violence is open terrorism — stop calling it ‘clashes’

Fri Apr 7 11:16:16 EDT 2023

 Israel’s violence is open terrorism — stop calling it ‘clashes’

*Worshippers in Al Aqsa attacked, Gaza bombed again. But the Western media
still equates the neck and the guillotine.*

Belén Fernández
<https://www.aljazeera.com/author/belen_fernandez_201163082655120314>

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/4/7/israels-violence-is-open-terrorism-stop-calling-it
<https://www.aljazeera.com/author/belen_fernandez_201163082655120314>
Published On 7 Apr 20237 Apr 2023
<https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Faje.io%2F3s8xa3>
<https://twitter.com/share?text=Israel%E2%80%99s%20violence%20is%20open%20terrorism%20%E2%80%94%20stop%20calling%20it%20%E2%80%98clashes%E2%80%99&source=sharethiscom&related=sharethis&via=AJEnglish&url=https%3A%2F%2Faje.io%2F3s8xa3>
[image: Israeli police are deployed at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the
Old City of Jerusalem, Wednesday, April 5, 2023. Palestinian media reported
police attacked Palestinian worshippers, raising fears of wider tension as
Islamic and Jewish holidays overlap.(AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)]
Israeli police deployed at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of
Jerusalem, Wednesday, April 5, 2023. Israel's police raided the mosque
twice, attacking worshippers [Mahmoud Illean/AP Photo]

Here we go again. The state of Israel is committing unchecked barbarism
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/6/middle-east-round-up> against
Palestinians and the Western corporate media has decided it all comes down
to “clashes”.

The latest round of so-called “clashes” – sparked when Israeli police
decided to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan by repeatedly attacking
Palestinian worshippers
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/5/al-aqsa-mosque-compound-and-recurrent-ramadan-tensions>
at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque – has produced predictably disproportionate
casualties.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested and wounded as Israeli forces
have once again flaunted their handiness with rubber bullets, batons, stun
grenades and tear gas. In return, the police have suffered minimal
injuries, while also undertaking to accompany illegal Israeli settlers into
the mosque compound.

And apparently not satisfied with simply unleashing violence in Jerusalem,
Israel has also launched a barrage of air strikes on the Gaza Strip and
southern Lebanon following reported rocket fire.

As with all previous instances of Israeli-Palestinian “clashes”, the
media’s choice to deploy such terminology serves to obscure the Israeli
monopoly on violence and the fact that Israel kills, maims and mutilates at
an astronomically higher rate than its supposed counterpart in “clashing”.

It also obscures the reality that Palestinian violence is in response to a
now nearly-75-year-old Israeli policy defined by the ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians, the occupation of Palestinian land and the periodic
perpetration of massacres – pardon, “clashes”.

Take your pick of contemporary, Israeli military assaults and you’ll find
manoeuvres like Operation Protective Edge, the euphemism for the 2014
slaughter of 2,251 people in the Gaza Strip, including 551 children. Over a
period of 22 days starting in December 2008, Operation Cast Lead
<https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/1/19/operation-cast-lead-five-years-on-we-are-still-demanding-justice>
took
the lives of some 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza; three Israeli civilians died.

“Clashes” also abounded in 2018 when, in response to the Gaza border
protests, the Israeli military killed hundreds
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/11/12/gaza-protests-all-the-latest-updates>
of Palestinians and wounded thousands. And in May 2021, an 11-day Israeli
rampage titled Operation Guardian of the Walls killed more than 260
Palestinians, approximately one-fourth of whom were children
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/10/families-gaza-still-grieve-year-israeli-offensive>.
As
it so happens, this last operation was set off by – what else? – “clashes”
at Al-Aqsa Mosque
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/7/jerusalem-dozens-of-palestinians-hurt-in-al-aqsa-clashes>
.

This bit of trivia has prompted certain news outlets to fret about what the
current “spiralling bloodshed
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/10/dozens-injured-in-clashes-over-israeli-settlements-ahead-of-jerusalem-day-march>”
between Israelis and Palestinians may portend – another media catchphrase
that ultimately whitewashes Israel’s predominant role in the shedding of
blood.

It is difficult, of course, to find any linguistic or moral equivalent to
the media obsession with reporting Israeli savagery as “clashes”. One would
not perceive an elk as “clashing” with a hunter’s rifle, just as one would
not perceive a “clash” between a human neck and a guillotine.

Nor would one describe the United States’s lethal 2015 bombing of a
hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan as a “clash” between a medical facility and
an AC-130 gunship.

But while clearly unethical, the Western media’s obsequiousness vis-à-vis
the Israeli narrative is nothing new. Much of this has to do with the
fervent backing of the US, in particular, for the Israeli point of view,
which casts victimisers as victims and slaughter as self-defence.

Perhaps the very founding of the state of Israel in 1948 – which saw
thousands of Palestinians massacred and more than 500 Palestinian villages
destroyed – was in the end nothing more than one big “clash”. To be sure,
Israel’s long-term propaganda campaign to conflate Palestinians with
terrorism continues to pay considerable media dividends.

This is the case even among ostensibly more progressive venues that are
willing to call out Israeli crimes but that still can’t quite manage to
place Palestinians on the same level of humanity as Israelis. In February
of this year, for example, The New Yorker magazine’s Lawrence Wright tweeted
<https://twitter.com/lawrence_wright/status/1625225014978002944> a video of
Israeli soldiers shoving and kicking Palestinian peace activist Issa Amro
while Wright was interviewing him in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.
The New Yorker writer’s takeaway: “I can’t stop thinking how dehumanising
the occupation is on the young soldiers charged with enforcing it”.

In other words: Israeli soldiers are victims of moral degradation and
dehumanisation while Palestinians don’t really ever get to be humans in the
first place.

Now, as Israeli security forces proceed to dehumanise and be dehumanised in
Jerusalem and Gaza, the whole jargon about “clashes” only validates the
idea that Israel is fundamentally justified in its violence, which is cast
as merely part of a fair, tit-for-tat competition between two equitable
sides.

In August 2022, a three-day assault by the Israeli army on Gaza killed at
least 44 Palestinians, including 16 children – the bloodiest episode since
Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021. Exactly zero Israelis were
killed as a result of the August affair and yet, the Western media were
still standing dutifully by with breathless reports
<https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/07/middleeast/israel-gaza-islamic-jihad-ceasefire-intl/index.html>
of
“clashes”.

As I noted in an article for Al Jazeera
<https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/8/12/israel-normalising-terror-one-dawn-at-a-time>
at
the time, the online version of the Cambridge Dictionary defines terrorism
as “(threats of) violent action for political purposes”. And the more often
we remind ourselves that Israel is literally terrorising Palestinians, the
sooner, perhaps, we can put a stop to all this talk of “clashes”.

*The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.*
------------------------------

   - [image: Belén Fernández]
   <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/belen_fernandez_201163082655120314>
   Belén Fernández
   <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/belen_fernandez_201163082655120314>
   Al Jazeera columnist
   Belén Fernández is the author of Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s
   Largest Immigration Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite:
   Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and
   Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), Martyrs Never Die: Travels through
   South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and The Imperial Messenger: Thomas
   Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). She is a contributing editor at Jacobin
   Magazine, and has written for the New York Times, the London Review of
   Books blog, Current Affairs, and Middle East Eye, among numerous other
   publications.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20230407/9574a730/attachment.htm>