Pro-Israeli Government Voices and History That Keeps Rhyming
We’ve been here before… about twenty-three years ago.
“I’m exhausted”, said one Medium writer, “It’s been six months since I mobilized into “defend Israel mode.” Let me be clear: I still support her. But I’m weary from it. I realized the extent of this weariness today after hearing the news about the seven aid workers killed yesterday in an IDF airstrike. I’m sure the IDF probably did not mean to hit the humanitarian aid trucks.”
They didn’t seem angry with the Israeli government, more just dejected that the government’s actions had inadvertently popped another coin into the Juke Box that plays that song about how they are fighting an inhumane war of death, cruelty and crimes against humanity. It sounds like the Israeli government did nothing wrong, it’s just the critique of the Israeli government’s choices that this will provoke. That’s what got this writer down, so.
Another writer referred to “armchair humanitarians”, who wish the destruction of the Israeli state. This is an avenue of thinking I have seen a lot: wanting a ceasefire is wanting to rob the Israeli government of power to defend itself and, thus, wanting the Israeli people to be obliterated.
I’m glued to videos of you and your fellow Hamas supporters screaming for the annihilation of my people. You gleefully call for our deaths, you celebrate the vicious attack of October 7th without expressing a any concern for the 220+kidnapped hostages being kept in a spiderweb network of underground tunnels, among them babies, children, and elderly citizens. And you demand a ceasefire from Israel because NOW you’re worried about the Gazans. (source)
What I want to observe is that there are so many errors in argument being presented in these, and similar, opinion pieces. They’re full of straw men, referring only to nebulous “others” without quoting anyone in particular. They make use of false dichotomies; in this case that there is only a choice between letting a state do literally whatever it wants or siding with the terrorists who want to kill the people living in said state.
They’re full of pre-tinned “what-about” arguments, citing pariah states with appalling human rights records and demanding to know why I only care about the Israeli government. The authors then tune out the very simple answer: nobody is asking me to support Syria, or Sudan, or Yemen, or Iran but I am being asked, by my state (Britain) and my national media to support the Israeli government.
Then come the ‘motte-and-bailey’ arguments, where the pro-Israeli-government voice can effortlessly flit from the secure motte of “the Israeli state has a right to punish Hamas” to the less-defensible bailey of “and kill as many Palestinians as they deem appropriate”, and then retreat back to the motte when critiqued.
There are the endless appeals to authority, like this report from West Point. The entire article is the work of two people who were given “unprecedented access” to the Israeli Defence Force. The two authors came away with a glowing report. They provide no evidence, just insist that we take their word for it that the IDF are almost saintly in their judicious application of safety, care and protection of life.
The US is one of the Israeli government’s strongest supporters and, like the Israeli government, is not a signatory to Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.
But then, perhaps we should not take the word of a country with a list of 21st Century war-crimes longer than Britain’s. The UN, HRW, WHO, Amnesty and every other major NGO under the Sun has said what’s going on in Gaza is a crime against humanity.
Ah, but those agencies must be biased, or telling half-truths, or just out-and-out promoting propaganda. We’ll just quietly forget the Israeli government members and public figures who said the quiet part out-loud about annihilating Palestine (under “Vox Populii from the Region”).
Then there are the appeals to spite, that supporting the Israeli government sticks it to regimes and organisations we don’t like. How can something like murdering civilians be wrong if it’s only upsetting them and their sympathisers?
I saw one writer state, with a callousness that took my breath away, that:
Israel’s tragic killing of about 20,000 civilians (not 30,000 which includes the 10,000 Hamas fighters killed) is not a genocide. It is only 10% of the deaths of other regional wars such as Syria and Yemen, and overall the Palestinian population is going to remain, and has actually grown rapidly over the years. (source)
Describing the people there like mice, or termites… something you can kill thousands of in pursuit of a greater good, then write it off as a small price to pay.
It is couched in terms like this, best beloved, that I am told that the Israeli government has no choice but to pursue Hamas… before the writer adds, sotto voce, “as though the rest of Gaza were empty of civilians”. That this war may require the brutal murder of every living Palestinian… but that’s Hamas’ fault. Also all the Palestinians are Hamas, even the babies. And anyway the USA said it was OK. And besides, Iran did war crimes, so why can’t Israel? In any case, the Israeli state has a right to defend itself — no matter how broadly they choose to interpret that.
This is a line of reasoning that leads me to propose a thought experiment: if a madman, wielding an axe, kills your best friend and then says he’s going to kill you, do you have the right to shoot him? What if he is stood behind your next-door neighbour, his wife, and their two kids? Is your right to defend yourself justification to mow them down, too, then say it was the madman’s fault that you killed them?
I’ve summarised what the NGOs, charities and other organisations were saying, on the ground, in my previous article “All This Was a Lie, Then?”. I shan’t bother recounting it all here. What I will say is this:
I don’t know if the pre-tinned nature of some of these talking points comes from online discussion happening elsewhere, or if they’re being suggested by the Israeli government’s online workers — teams of people who, obviously, we also have equivalents of in Britain, and America, and Russia and so on. All states have some level of paid activism online to steer discussions — it’s not a peculiarity of Israel and I don’t want to imply that it is.
To be honest, it doesn’t matter whether it comes from state actors or not. They’re using rhetorical foolishness to disrupt critique of what is happening: reducing everything down to “well obviously the Israeli government way is the only way” and that just isn’t true. And all those people dying, and those still kept hostage, and all those who died in October 7th and everyone currently starving, dying of thirst or disease are the human beings paying the price for this.
I’m an “old millennial”, best beloved. I’ll be forty-two next year, and I was exploring online spaces back in the late 1990’s. I became a proper netizen back at the turn of the century. I’ve spent over 25 years online.
Man alive, the Internet was different then. We had bulletin-boards, where people would talk about their favourite shows or hobbies. Online shopping was in its infancy. Most websites didn’t have SSL / HTTPS. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, no ad-tracking. Loads of people didn’t use Google — at all! Instead, we had “Ask Jeeves”, Lycos, HotBot and Yahoo!. A proper little marketplace of ideas and competitors.
God Christ almighty do I miss that place. It was all so much more innocent in so many ways. But then the money and Big Tech just swallowed the lot, whilst governments were still dithering over what to even class the Internet as. Before they could legislate de jure, Meta and Alphabet and all the others had legislated it for them de facto.
But, during that little golden-age, when the Internet was a grab-bag of interconnected sites and links all run by little independent webmasters and small companies, we had September 11th, The Iraq War and the Afghanistan War.
I remember I was online when the World Trade Center was attacked — I was wondering where everyone was! Nobody was posting on the bulletin-boards, was it a holiday or something? Then I switched on the news and saw the plumes of smoke billowing out over the Hudson, just before the second plane strike.
I’m British, not American, but I could see the agony in the eyes of people in the US when the TV cameras caught them. The confused, panicked, distraught and directionless disbelief. The mainland USA had never been attacked like this, and it was new and terrifying for everyone there.
And I was there, online, for the heated, passionate, incensed arguments that followed — before and during the second Gulf War (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and the invasion of Afghanistan. I was part of the crowd calling for peace, who recognised that vague, unsubstantiated threats about “WMD” weren’t enough to justify war. We questioned what Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, had to do with Al Qaeda. We pointed out that senior figures in the US government — George Bushes Snr. and Jnr., Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney et al — had sold weapons to the Taliban, had extremely cordial personal relationships with the rulers in Saudi Arabia (who had funded the Sept. 11th attacks), had supported Saddam through all his violence, war crimes and crimes against humanity until he threatened their interests in the region.
It was my privilege to see several users, a little older than me, who had been or were studying debating technique; rhetorical style; logical reasoning and critical thinking. I watched and learnt as they repeatedly cut through the increasing jingoism and patriotic war-mongering.
I learnt to think rationally with the help of those users. When I see a claim, I stop and check the source. I try to corroborate it. I ask myself what agendas it may be linked to. I ask whether it holds up to scrutiny or logical reasoning.
Now, here we are, a quarter of a century later and the exact same thing is playing out in the debates over the Israeli government’s ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza and the crimes against humanity being committed against the Palestinian people.
We never did find those weapons of mass destruction. And nobody was held to any account for it. Not Bush, Blair or anyone. They all got rich, and many thousands died, and we never found those WMD.
I protested against Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it is a stain on my country — one that is in good company, with the way Britain has behaved over the centuries. I hold my country to account for the evil, cruelty and callousness it has perpetrated in pursuit of its own ends.
I hold the Israeli government to the same standard. The Israeli state doesn’t have a right to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants to whomever it wants.
At the risk of spoiling the outcome of the Israel-Hamas war, I’ll share with you the twist ending: just as “WMD” was the perfect reason to invade Iraq, the brutal October 7th attack by Hamas was the perfect reason for the Israeli government to flatten Palestine.
Netanyahu spent years scuppering moderate leaders and back-handedly encouraging Hamas (source: The Times of Israel). Now, thanks to them, he’s got his war. He can clamp down on dissent (source: The Guardian), round up the usual suspects (source: Times of Israel )and grab power even more firmly (source: Vox).
At the end, when all these intellectually vacant rhetorical justifications are forgotten, there will only be the bodies of those thousands of kidnapped Israeli citizens, killed by Hamas after October 7th. There will be the thousands of bodies of Israeli people that Hamas murdered in other raids and attacks. There will be the bodies of tens-of-thousands of Palestinians.
We never found the WMD, and we’ll never find a justification for all the blood spilt in this war.
