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<h1>Israel’s violence is open terrorism — stop calling it ‘clashes’</h1><p class="gmail-article__subhead gmail-css-1wt8oh6"><em>Worshippers in Al Aqsa attacked, Gaza bombed again. But the Western media still equates the neck and the guillotine.</em></p><p class="gmail-article__subhead gmail-css-1wt8oh6"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/belen_fernandez_201163082655120314">Belén Fernández</a></p><p class="gmail-article__subhead gmail-css-1wt8oh6"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/belen_fernandez_201163082655120314"><font size="1">https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/4/7/israels-violence-is-open-terrorism-stop-calling-it</font></a></p><div class="gmail-article-info-block gmail-opinion-info-block gmail-css-ti04u9"><div class="gmail-article-b-l" style="border-color:rgb(250,144,0)"><div class="gmail-article-dates" style="border-color:rgb(250,144,0)"><div class="gmail-date-simple gmail-css-1yjq2zp"><span class="gmail-screen-reader-text">Published On 7 Apr 2023</span><span aria-hidden="true">7 Apr 2023</span></div></div></div><div class="gmail-social-share-buttons"><a class="gmail-social-share-button" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-label="Share on Facebook" href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Faje.io%2F3s8xa3"></a></div></div><a class="gmail-social-share-button" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-label="Share on Twitter" href="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"></a><div class="gmail-article-info-block gmail-opinion-info-block gmail-css-ti04u9"><div class="gmail-social-share-buttons"></div></div><div class="gmail-responsive-image"><img src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/AP23095147201493.jpg?resize=770%2C513&quality=80" alt="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)" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="261"></div>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]<div class="gmail-wysiwyg gmail-wysiwyg--all-content gmail-css-ibbk12"><p>Here we go again. The state of Israel is committing <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/6/middle-east-round-up" target="_blank">unchecked barbarism</a> against Palestinians and the Western corporate media has decided it all comes down to “clashes”.</p>
<p>The latest round of so-called “clashes” – sparked when Israeli police decided to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan by <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/5/al-aqsa-mosque-compound-and-recurrent-ramadan-tensions">repeatedly attacking Palestinian worshippers</a> at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque – has produced predictably disproportionate casualties.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/1/19/operation-cast-lead-five-years-on-we-are-still-demanding-justice" target="_blank">Operation Cast Lead</a> took the lives of some 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza; three Israeli civilians died.</p>
<p>“Clashes” also abounded in 2018 when, in response to the Gaza border protests, the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/11/12/gaza-protests-all-the-latest-updates">Israeli military killed hundreds</a>
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 <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/10/families-gaza-still-grieve-year-israeli-offensive">one-fourth of whom were children</a>. As it so happens, this last operation was set off by – what else? – <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/7/jerusalem-dozens-of-palestinians-hurt-in-al-aqsa-clashes">“clashes” at Al-Aqsa Mosque</a>.</p>
<p>This bit of trivia has prompted certain news outlets to fret about what the current “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/10/dozens-injured-in-clashes-over-israeli-settlements-ahead-of-jerusalem-day-march" target="_blank">spiralling bloodshed</a>”
between Israelis and Palestinians may portend – another media
catchphrase that ultimately whitewashes Israel’s predominant role in the
shedding of blood.</p>
<p>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.</p><p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://twitter.com/lawrence_wright/status/1625225014978002944" target="_blank">tweeted</a> 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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/07/middleeast/israel-gaza-islamic-jihad-ceasefire-intl/index.html" target="_blank">reports</a> of “clashes”.</p>
<p>As I noted in an <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/8/12/israel-normalising-terror-one-dawn-at-a-time" target="_blank">article for Al Jazeera</a> 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”.</p>
<p><em><strong>The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.</strong></em></p>
</div><hr><ul class="gmail-article-author"><li class="gmail-article-author__item"><a class="gmail-article-author__link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/belen_fernandez_201163082655120314"><img class="gmail-article-author__image" src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/belen2.png?resize=96%2C96&quality=80" alt="Belén Fernández" width="60" height="60"></a><div class="gmail-article-author__info"><div class="gmail-article-author__name"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/belen_fernandez_201163082655120314">Belén Fernández</a></div><div class="gmail-article-author__title">Al Jazeera columnist</div><div class="gmail-article-author__desc gmail-css-1wt8oh6">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.</div></div></li></ul>
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