The Israel-Palestine Narrative Has Evolved
The building housing the offices of the Associated Press and other media in Gaza City collapses after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike, May 15, 2021.
Sarah Leah Whitson writes in The American Prospect May 18, 2021
On Saturday, May 15, Israel bombarded a 15-story building in Gaza City, the main media building housing local and international journalists alike, including Al-Jazeera and the Associated Press. While this was not the first time Israel had deliberately attacked journalists, Saturday’s attack neatly symbolized Israel’s desperate efforts to silence the mushrooming discussion of all that is wretched about the Israeli government’s policies both inside Green Line Israel and in the occupied Palestinian Territories. The strictly controlled public narrative, handled in the United States not only by Israeli government spokespersons but the lobbying group AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League cheerleaders in America, has snowballed out of their control.
The images of charred bodies of children in Gaza—59 of the at least 212 Palestinians killed by Israeli bombs as of Monday—flattened and smoldering apartment buildings, traumatized families fleeing their homes with salvaged valuables tucked in their hands: These are not new. They have accompanied so many of Israel’s wars in Gaza (and Lebanon), and frankly are not much by way of competition with the relentless images of devastation and destruction from the Middle East with which we’ve been saturated, even emotionally immunized from, for the past decade from Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and Egypt.
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What is new and qualitatively different is the vigorous and unapologetic analytic criticism of Israel—and U.S. policy that has provided it with billions in annual, unconditional military support for the past several decades—that has seeped into mainstream discourse. From national broadcasters to Washington think tanks, from the floor of the U.S. Congress to street protests in Boston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and even Miami, Puerto Rico, Cleveland, and Oklahoma, the conversation has shifted far, far away from the regurgitated, stale defenses of “Israel’s right to exist,” “terrorists,” and “anti-Semitism” to a new recognition of Palestinian rights. Protesters are bringing words to the fore like ‘apartheid,’ ‘land theft,’ and ‘ethnic cleansing.’
Even before the attack on Gaza, the global conversation had been moving away from the Israeli government. In April, Human Rights Watch released a meticulously researched report concluding that Israeli authorities are guilty of the crimes of apartheid and persecution, finding elements of the crimes not only in the occupied territories but within Israel’s borders. This was the first time an international, rather centrist rights organization had issued such a conclusion, building on the work of Palestinian and Israeli organizations that had issued the same analysis over the past few years. Global coverage of Israel’s heavy-handed, violent assault on protesters at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, along with protests that erupted in several Palestinian towns inside Israel, in the face of naked efforts to evict Palestinians from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, compounded the public relations disaster. These images showed the world what apartheid looks like in practice.