The devaluing of Palestinian life is not a supposition, it is a statistical fact. According to a new study of coverage in major US newspapers, for every Israeli death Israelis are mentioned eight times – or at a rate 16 times more per death than that of Palestinians. An analysis of BBC coverage by data specialists Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava found a similarly devastating disparity, and that humanising terms such as “mother” or “husband” were used far less often to describe Palestinians, while emotive terms such as “massacre” or “slaughter’” were almost only ever applied to the Israeli victims of Hamas’ atrocities.
Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, while laying out South Africa’s case against Israel in the international court of justice, described this as “the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something.” For younger generations exposed to numerous video clips of screaming mothers clutching the lifeless corpses of their newborns, this whole episode has proven instructive.
What do these young people then make of media coverage, or the statements of politicians, that don’t seem to treat Palestinian life as having any worth at all? What conclusions are being drawn about the growing minority populations of western countries whose media and political elites are making so little effort to disguise their contempt for Palestinian life as it is extinguished on such a biblical scale?
But if you call Israeli’s colonisers you get told you are antisemitic?
It’s been a century-long propaganda campaign to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, despite the fact that anti-Zionist Jews exist and antisemitic Zionism exists. In fact, I suspect there are more antisemitic Zionists in the world than pro-semitic Zionists. There are a quite a lot of Americans with antisemitic sentiments who subscribe to Christian Zionism.
I suspect that the rebranding of Zionism to be ‘philosemitic’ started in the mid or late 1940s, shortly after the Shoah ceased. Then telling Jews to fuck off to Palestine was no longer seen as an act of hostility but of compassion instead, since they would supposedly be ‘safer’ there. It is similar to how some Zionists are trying to rebrand the expulsion of Gazans as an act of compassion.
It’s a recent development. The fact of the matter is that Zionists have always been unafraid of associating with antisemites, a trend that continues today albeit more subtly. On the other hand, not only are there plenty of anti‐Zionist Jews, but thanks to the black sheep effect anti‐Zionist Jews may well be the harshest critics of Zionism, which is part of the reason why I made an effort to exclusively quote Jews when looking at people comparing the Zionist enterprise to the Third Reich.