The aim of this essay is to expose and critique mediated representations of the Israel-Palestine conflict as examples of media necropower; and how the deliberate and sophisticated management of media messages control the affective dynamics of a primed public to further the aims of military occupation and a settler colonial regime.

On the 14th May 2018, United States President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, opened the American Embassy in Jerusalem alongside Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Western media have been divided in their reportage of this watershed moment, with some condemning Donald Trump’s action in Israel as inflammatory (Bolton, 2018), and others celebrating it as biblical prophecy realised (Thomas, 2018).

In the Opinion sections of United States mainstream media, many column inches have been spent shifting the debate away from the symbolic political brutality of the Jerusalem embassy’s opening ceremony – and the date selected for it – and onto the Palestinian protests of the embassy’s relocation. In doing so, the media discourse was diverted from the embassy’s impact on any real or imagined peace process to the more affective political discourse of terror and security; war and fear. Within this discourse, Palestinians are being discursively disembodied from their land, their sovereignty, their humanity, and even civilisation itself, through the framing of dehumanising stereotypes that paint them as the sole agents of their Israeli-enacted punishment.

The relationship between the United States and Israel is a carefully constructed one. For the United States, Israel is a proxy nuclear superpower in the Middle East and is therefore a strategic and ideological ally that militarily supports United States economic interests in the region. For Israel, the United States is their primary source of foreign aid, and, according to a 2001 secret recording of Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, it is an easy ally to manipulate to Israel’s political will. He claims, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction” (The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States, 2016).

The manipulation of the public opinion of United States citizens towards Israel has been an active and ongoing propaganda process, known as Hasbara, that has had social and political implications for both countries. Over time, Israel directed and utilised a consolidation of American political, media, and religious voices as conduits and receivers of newly framed spectacles of war and terror in Israel. In an Orwellian twist, Israel realised it had a public relations problem as United States media discourse was more critical of the Israeli occupation after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In 1984, The American Jewish Congress published in a comprehensive report of their four-day conference, which had the task of remedying Israel’s public image (Spielvogel, 1984).

There was no discussion of the morality of their occupying strategy, no changing of policies, only discussion on how to advance positive media representations. It was here that the Hasbara industry was born, and by 2009, an American pollster and political consultant perfected the language of Hasbara, presenting a program on how to alter the narrative by polling audience reaction as either condoning or condemning Israeli actions based on how the question was phrased. Through polling, Dr. Luntz was able to identify words and phrases that work, and that don’t work, when attempting to change public opinion in a way that is carefully and effectively directed (Luntz, 2009).

As political and media support shifted back to Israel, opportunistic religious leaders, sensing their own strategic gains, engaged in religious discourses around Israel and Palestine. Their rephrasing and cherry-picking of the bible using Hasbara techniques was successful in constructing evangelical theology as a more participatory biopolitical force, that is inextricably intertwined with uniquely American propagandised discourses of shared Judeo-Christian values. But, as Adam Zagoria-Moffet argues, “[d]espite its omnipresence in political discourse, I believe that the concept of Judeo-Christian tradition is bizarre, imprecise, and most importantly – dangerous” (Zagoria-Moffet, 2014).

Within this discourse, Palestinians are framed within the subjectivities of the terrorist Other. They are not represented as an occupied people, subjugated by violence and gross injustice; the victims of ethnic cleansing from a land they have inhabited for millennia by illegal foreign settlers. They are stereotyped as a primitive and barbaric people who single-mindedly hold allegiance to a controlling terrorist organisation, Hamas, and are operating for the sole irrational purpose of Israel’s destruction. It makes no difference if a Palestinian is also a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim: their bodies are highly racialised as Arab and therefore assumed to be Muslim.

The date of the United States Embassy’s move to Jerusalem was situated between Jerusalem Day and Nabka Day. The selection of this date to officially materialise the United States recognition of Jerusalem as the official capital of Israel can be interpreted as a supporting action to Israel’s practice of necropolitics against the Palestinian population. The date and the event send the message that Jerusalem Day is legitimate, and Nakba Day is not. “This narrative creates a feedback loop between Israeli state violence and the talking points used to gird it […]. Both assume that it is possible, and indeed reasonable, to use force and falsehoods to uproot an entire population” (Roth, 2018).

American evangelical Christians tend to be the strongest supporters of Donald Trump’s Israel policy, which they see as deeply religiously significant in that it will facilitate ‘end times’ prophecy fulfilment. But voices in America’s centre-left media platforms, such as The Hill, have also succumbed to Israel’s framing of Palestinian protests as “Hamas-led clashes”, denouncing any human rights narrative that the resistance is equal to the United States civil rights movement. “What the Palestinians call the “March of Return” is not the March on Selma, Alabama. This is a violent confrontation encouraged and led by Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza and is bent on Israel’s destruction” (Wallance, 2018). Wallance goes on to say he pities the Palestinians in Gaza but blames their horrific living conditions on the idea that “they are led by a ruthless terrorist organisation that prefers to expend resources on terror tunnels instead of improving Gazans’ lives.”

In Goldie Osuri’s discourse on media necropower, she paraphrases a 2003 necropolitics thesis by Cameroonian intellectual, Achille Mbembe, stating that “[i]n this context, the concept of necropower accounts for the ways in which ‘in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of the maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the living dead” (Osuri, 2006, p. 6). One wonders how Hamas might improve Gazans’ lives given the Israeli-enforced conditions of their living, and of their dying.

The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos and who has business interests in Israel, also furthered the narrative of blame for Palestinian deaths squarely onto Hamas. “Don’t blame the embassy opening for the violence in Gaza. Blame Hamas”, reads the op-ed headline to the article (Boot, 2018). This view has been carried by most western mainstream media and there are few who question it, despite the source of the claim being the Israeli government, and the death toll being the highest in a single day since 2014.

Israel, on the other hand, despite evidence to the contrary, is positioned as the victim of terror, not the callous and violent usurper of territories. It situates itself in the western mind as a terrorised nation that must protect its borders. Using the language of borders and security, Israel secures America’s ‘kindred’ support. It promotes itself as democratic, modern, civilised – in other words, it is also “western” and it is surrounded by the dangerous Oriental Other. It has rights that are divinely bestowed in Zionist rhetoric, and its survival is paramount to biblical prophecy fulfilment, and this alone is justification for its colonising violence. Gods must have their devils, David needs his Goliath, and both America and Israel believe themselves to be chosen and favoured by God.

Despite moderate religious leaders within the United States expressing pro-Palestinian sympathies, a radicalised public will often rebut with outrage in the “comments section”, quoting cherry-picked bible quotes, and receiving many “thumbs up” and “likes”. Examples of pro-Israel apologetics that completely erase an entire population from their discourse can be found on almost every Christian YouTube broadcast. “There are verses in the Bible clearly stating God, despite Israel’s unbelief in the Lord, is working with them and they currently have the right to the land and it is God who placed them there in 1948” (CB, 2017).

In Israeli schoolbooks, the erasing of Palestinian culture and bodies from pedagogical texts, except as only vague sketches that don’t quite fit, establishes in the young Israeli child’s mind a kind of ghosting of Palestinian identity. As Osuri asserts, “it situates the cultural intelligibility of a subject’s identity quasi-prior to the arrival of the subject”, and “this modality ‘enunciates the disarticulation of identity from the juncture: body/subject” (Osuri, 2006, p. 16). Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli professor of language and education, and author of Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, argues that school textbooks actively marginalise Palestinians, and in doing so they legitimise Israeli military action, and prime Israeli children for military service (Peled-Elhanan, 2011). In this way, ideology and representation express themselves in media necropower in multiple intermedia texts, across generations.

The Israeli hasbara program is the inter-generational and intermediated governmentality of a colonial authority as expressed by the ruling right-wing Likud Party, of which Benjamin Netanyahu is currently the leader. Netanyahu is intuitively adept at stroking Donald Trump’s ego, and Donald Trump is eager to appeal to the powerful American evangelic vote. Their alliance has arguably strengthened and intensified both countries bio and necro political aspirations as dominant players on the world stage. Their mutually expressed common values and existential challenges, no matter how mythical, is a useful invocation of security and freedom as discourses that allow “state of exception” practices of detention, torture, and killing as necessary necropolitical tools.

To openly challenge Israel’s colonisation as based on myth and brutality is to court accusations of antisemitism, which has become a frequently used technique for shutting down any criticism of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. In a modern context, antisemitism shall forever be linked with Nazism and the Holocaust, which makes it particularly effective as a weaponised accusation, as it taps into a collective historical guilt that is deeply affective.

The intermedia elements bring together the ancient through Talmud and Bibles, school textbooks, policy edicts from the highest political offices of two powerful governments, multiple electronic media platforms that are both interactive and non-interactive, news delivery services, motivated religious sermons, and a canon of Hollywood stereotypes to ideologically support the ethnic cleansing of the terrorist or refugee Other. The affect on the western mind and the undesirable Other’s body is deliberate, carefully scripted, and enacted as legitimate options of control reconstituted as freedom; brutality retheorised as security.

For an occupier to colonise the thoughts held in a political ally’s mind, and to control the body of a racialised Other in a contested space, the occupier must employ the discourses of violent warfare and tactical colonial complexity, but reimagine and reissue them as protection of family and values in a legitimately appropriated space.  By doing so, public sympathies will be granted to the coloniser, not the colonised. The colonised will be believed to vanish, fade away, in time; their bodies justifiably broken.

 

Bibliography

Bolton, K. R., 2018. US Recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital: A Travesty of History. [Online]
Available at: https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2018/05/24/us-recognition-of-jerusalem-as-israels-capital-a-travesty-of-history/
[Accessed 20 May 2018].

Boot, M., 2018. Don’t blame the embassy opening for the violence in Gaza. Blame Hamas. [Online]
Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/dont-blame-the-embassy-opening-for-the-violence-in-gaza-blame-hamas/2018/05/16/02d3081e-5943-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html?utm_term=.7ff67fec1e51
[Accessed 18 05 2018].

CB, 2017. Should We Side with Israel or Palestine? // Ask Pastor John. [Online]
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA5yTNiPq3c
[Accessed 23 May 2018].

Kellner, D., 2004. 9/11, Spectacles of Terror, and Media Manipulation. Critical Discourse Studies, 1(1), pp. 41-64.

Luntz, D. F., 2009. The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary. [Online]
Available at: https://www.transcend.org/tms/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sf-israel-projects-2009-global-language-dictionary.pdf
[Accessed 18 05 2018].

Osuri, G., 2006. Media Necropower: Australian media reception and the somatechnics of Mamdouh Habib. Borderlands e-Journal, May, 5(1), p. 5.

Peled-Elhanan, N., 2011. YouTube [Interview] (23 November 2011).

Roth, N., 2018. Why the Jerusalem embassy opening was a fitting way to mark the Nakba. [Online]
Available at: https://972mag.com/why-the-jerusalem-embassy-opening-was-a-fitting-way-to-mark-the-nakba/135361/
[Accessed 19 05 2018].

Spielvogel, C., 1984. The American Jewish Congress. [Online]
Available at: http://mefdownloads.s3.amazonaws.com/Hasbara_Conference.pdf
[Accessed 20 05 2018].

The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States. 2016. [Film] USA: Media Education Foundation.

Thomas, G., 2018. Judge Jeanine Pirro: Trump Fulfills a ‘Biblical Prophecy’ by Moving US Embassy to Jerusalem. [Online]
Available at: http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2018/may/judge-jeanine-pirro-trump-fulfills-a-biblical-prophesy-by-moving-us-embassy-to-jerusalem
[Accessed 20 05 2018].

Wallance, G. J., 2018. Opinion: Civil Rights. [Online]
Available at: http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/388020-the-hamas-led-clashes-at-gaza-israel-border-are-not-a-peaceful-civil
[Accessed 20 05 2018].

Zagoria-Moffet, A., 2014. The Myth of a Judeo-Christian Tradition. [Online]
Available at: http://www.stateofformation.org/2014/04/the-myth-of-a-judeo-christian-tradition/
[Accessed 22 05 2018].