“BRILLIANT, AMAZING”
How do you make sense of what’s happening? What I’m seeing are officials, news reporters, and protesters alike quick to demand folks draw a strong distinction between Hamas and Palestine, the people of Palestine and the terrorist wing of Hamas. What we have here are “a few bad apples”, or so they say. But notice this proclamation isn’t anything like a principle the folks offering such believe in or run with in other contexts. In fact, they’re perfectly happy painting whole nations or peoples or groups with one brush while also actively endorsing and even engaging in collective punishment.
BETWEEN WHO?
To see what I mean you only have to consider the rest of the official statements, reportage, and bleating about the current situation. To begin with, notice that most reporters and media outlets, from Al Jazeera to CNN and beyond, have taken to calling the current conflict the “Israel - Hamas War”. Is there anyone calling it the “Palestine - IDF War” or the “Likud - Gaza War” or the "Arab/Muslim - Israel War"? No one. Curious, that. And why not, exactly? And how would folks respond if they did? But I thought we were seeking precision. Don't we wish to highlight only those parties directly responsible? So why none of that, ever?
Paired with this, we constantly hear of “collective punishment”, “apartheid”, “ethnic cleansing”, and “genocide”. And who is doing all of this and to whom? Well, we all know this is perpetrated against (all) Palestinians (everywhere on Earth) by Israel (the whole of the nation and every-one and -thing therein, even corporations from elsewhere who do business in Israel, and even Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, and Cambodian students, workers, and tourists). And this framing and phrasing is deemed perfectly sound, again, even by media outlets and personalities professing their accuracy and integrity. And yet, can you imagine the CBC or BBC or ABC reversing the terms, or merely reporting on someone else doing so, to speak of Palestine (or Palestinians or Gazans and not far narrower and exclusionary "military wing of Hamas") having engaged in a collective punishment or attempted ethnic cleansing of Israelis (and any Peruvians, Romanians, and Thais who may have gotten in the way) on October 7th? You cannot. And you cannot, even while knowing those with political control over Palestine (and broad support from Palestinians and cheering, frothing mobs across and beyond the West) have this as foundational policy statement, a policy also endorsed by nations in the region, many of whom have previously fought wars of attempted extermination and who, even today, attack Israel from all sides. Right. That strikes me as an odd contrast even if you only take into account the realities we all agree upon. But it gets far weirder still.
