The Great Palestine Lie
And other false narratives you've been spoon-fed
We’re told that Israel is at war with Hamas, not Gaza, and that this is an important distinction.
Sound familiar? I remember when America wasn’t at war with the Iraqi people, but with Saddam Hussein — ackshually, we were on the side of the Iraqi people, we liberated them from this Stalin-admiring Arab-socialist military dictator. That the Iraqi people felt differently is a minor detail.
Many such cases.
The “Government not the people” lie
I submit to you that not only is this a lie in these particular cases, but that all statements of the form “we’re at war with the government not the people” are lies, propaganda, and cheap propaganda at that.
When Caesar conquered the Gauls, he did not call himself a liberator of the Gallic people from the tyrannical Vercingetorix — instead he enslaved the people of Gaul as if they were themselves combatants. Why?
It was understood in Caesar’s time that the default mode is for governments to have the consent of the governed, that the exceptions are rare and corrected quickly via internal revolution. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”
This has not changed. It is still the way the world works. However, in the democratic era, the West is able to tell this lie more convincingly by falsely conflating “Consent of the governed” and “democratic political system” when in fact these are orthogonal. Some examples to illustrate this orthogonality.
Back to Israel / Palestine
Q: How do we reconcile that Israel is at war with Hamas, not the Palestinian people, yet is killing so many Palestinians via collateral damage?
A: Palestinian “civilians” are sheltering Hamas combatants in places like “hospitals”1, etc. to force Israel to kill innocent people and make for bad headlines in doing so.
Q: How is it possible that Hamas has maintained power and recruited many soldiers from the regions it occupies, if it does not have some broad popular support?
A: Hamas does in fact have popular support.
Both sides are lying to us
Remarkably, both Israel and Hamas lie to the west when they make the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people — they tell us the same exact lie, too!
Israel benefits from the notion that they are at war with Hamas not Palestine in two ways:
It gives the opportunity for the Palestinian people to wash themselves clean, to throw off Hamas and surrender — this is the outcome they are angling for. It is a tactic to create internal discord.
It provides a justification to carry out attacks that kill civilians via collateral damage while not looking like a genocide.
Hamas also benefits from the notion that they are a terrorist group not representative of the Palestinian people
It allows Hamas to carry out asymmetric warfare attacks on the Israeli people while limiting culpability to “a few bad apples” and making an ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip by Israel look wildly disproportionate.
It preserves the notion of an “innocent victim people” — a powerful narrative for drawing the support of an anti-colonial west.
What’s the solution?
Deportation
One scenario is that Israel deports, resettles the population of the Gaza strip elsewhere safely and humanely. Unfortunately, that is dependent on another country being willing to accept the population of Palestine — unlikely.
Forcible Assimilation
Another option for Israel is to occupy the Gaza strip and over decades or centuries, assimilates its people and destroys the Arab identity without committing genocide outright. This could like what the Chinese are doing in Xinjiang — re-education camps, ethnic Israeli men taking ethnic Palestinian women for brides, but more likely it would have to be a lot more subtle, more Western and modern in its nature. If anybody can figure out how to make this work, it’s Israel.
Status Quo
Alternatively, Israel can keep making upgrades to the Iron Dome, tunnel detection, and continue to contain the Hamas threat with vigilant security and retaliatory strikes. This is the most likely option, and I think the best — it doesn’t solve the problem, but with the current pace of technology, these petty human conflicts may not last too long in any case. Better to wait and see a while longer before proceeding with a risky long-term plan.
A military base may have a few hospital beds, but honest people wouldn’t call it a hospital.