1984 is Now: Newspeak and the Denial of Genocide

In late March, the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a report affirming what genocide scholars, reporters on the ground in Gaza, and nation-states at the International Court of Justice have argued for months about Israel’s war on the enclave:  the onslaught of Israel against the people of Gaza has met the threshold of genocide.  Entitled, “Anatomy of a Genocide,” the Report describes in broad outline and graphic detail what has emerged as the most destructive military onslaught waged against a territory and its people since World War II.  This Israeli assault has resulted in the killing of over 34,000 Gazans including more than 14,000 children; the destruction of hospitals, schools, and all of Gaza’s Universities; the leveling of 75% of Gaza’s housing stock and civilian infrastructure including water desalination plants and electrical power stations; the destruction of food-producing outlets such as bakeries and farms; and the obliteration of cultural symbols notably mosques and churches.  Alongside this carnage, as the Report notes, the State of Israel has engaged in a deliberate effort to eradicate the people of Gaza by preventing the necessities of bare life – food, water, fuel, and medicines -- from entering the territory and has even killed of hundreds of aid workers trying to deliver emergency shipments to the Gazan people. 

For its part, the United States Government is enabling this savagery and is complicit in it.  Ever since Israel’s vengeful campaign began in the aftermath of October 7, the U.S. has not only provided Israel with weekly deliveries of weaponry for this massive assault, which in early April included 25 F-35 fighter aircraft, 500 MK 500-pound bombs, and 1800 MK 84 2000-pound bombs capable of destroying entire city blocks.  The U.S. has furnished the State of Israel with the diplomatic cover at the United Nations to continue the bombardments despite worldwide condemnation of the carnage, and global calls for a ceasefire.

On another level, what is so depraved about this American-enabled, and Israeli-conducted military offensive are the overt denials of reality cast into the public sphere by officials in both Israel and the U.S. to justify the destruction and deny its genocidal character.  At a time when the brutality of Israel’s attacks on Gaza is so widely disseminated, from Aljazeera English to outlets such as Twitter and Tik Tok, not to mention the lurid videos uploaded by Israeli soldiers themselves boasting of their violent exploits and mocking their Palestinian victims, the denial by Israeli and American officials of what the world can plainly perceive constitutes a macabre kind of spectacle.  In this sense, a palpable disconnect exists between what our reason and our senses tell us about the unmitigated savagery of this campaign, and the ongoing assurances by Israeli officials that “Israel does not target civilians of Gaza.”

Such denials become even more vexing alongside the ongoing declarations of these same officials of their aim to starve and annihilate the people of Gaza.  For their part, American officials have created their own inversions of reality in defending their ally.  For months, officials at the U.S. State Department, Defense Department, and the President himself have publicly affirmed Israel’s compliance with International Humanitarian law covering civilians in warfare.  During the first week of April, in the immediate aftermath of Israeli’s much publicized killing of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, the U.S. State Department once again came to the defense of the Jewish State.  On April 2^nd, in remarks that will surely be replayed to audiences worldwide, State Department spokesman John Kirby scolded members of the press corps for daring to raise questions about the genocidal character of Israel’s war.  “Let me remind you,” he said caustically, “we have not found any incidents where the Israelis have violated international humanitarian law.” 

There is something disturbing and even sinister about these overt denials of reality.  Perhaps the best metaphor reflecting statements of Israeli officials in denying the targeting of civilians, and their American counterparts in defending this conduct, comes from the famous painting of René Magritte entitled, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe).  Such surreal rejection of what is obviously true is part of a traceable lineage leading back in time to an English novel depicting a dystopian world.

René  Magritte, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (1929). Source: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The Newspeak of Human Shields

In 1918, in the midst of World War I, California Senator Hiram Johnson famously noted that “the first casualty of war is truth,” but arguably the most trenchant observation of this impulse occurred later in George Orwell’s classic, 1984.  In this enduring work, Orwell coined a term – newspeak -- to describe the deliberate falsification of reality by those in power in an authoritarian state.  So pervasive is newspeak as a propaganda tool in Orwell’s dystopian society that it assumes the status of a lingua franca, a language of lies forged by authoritarian rulers to justify constant militarism, domestic oppression, and concealment of truth in which “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”

The axis around which the State of Israel has crafted its inversions of truth to justify its genocidal conduct focuses on its characterization of Gaza’s civilians as “human shields,” a campaign carefully documented in “Anatomy of a Genocide.”  Prior to October 7^th, Israel was already enlisting this notion in an effort to claim that Hamas routinely embeds itself among the people of Gaza, and used this idea to justify numerous military assaults on Gaza from 2006-2021, most notably Operation Cast Lead (2008-09) and Operation Protective Edge (2014).  In both of these cases, Israeli officials insisted that civilian fatalities in the thousands were unintended but necessary because Hamas was operating in, and concealing itself among the civilian population.  “We never deliberately target civilians” was the oft-heard phrase repeated at all levels of the Israeli government and society that explained away civilian deaths in these assaults.  In an even more daring distortion, the State of Israel blamed these civilian fatalities directly on Hamas, claiming that these deaths were caused by the armed group itself hiding among Gaza’s civilians.

After October 7, Israeli officials intensified this discourse to rationalize the unprecedented scale of civilian destruction in Gaza by demonizing Hamas as an entity akin to ISIS, and by turning the entire population into human shields behind which Hamas was hiding.[1]  In order to protect Israeli citizens against this malicious adversary, officials from the Jewish State have constantly emphasized the necessity of destroying Hamas wherever it is, regardless of the civilians caught in the onslaught.  By November, as chronicled in the UN Report, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was referring to the entirety of “the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields” who were providing protection, if unwittingly, for the ISIS-like terrorist combatants.  In this vein, Israeli authorities characterized hospitals, churches, mosques, schools, UN facilities, and universities, as bases of military operations thoroughly infiltrated by Hamas, to reinforce the idea of an entire society ‘complicit’ with a terrorist entity and thus “killable.”  The multiple assaults and total destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital is perhaps the most convincing evidence of this orientation.  In this way, Israel transformed all of Gaza, into legitimate “destroyable targets.” 

What is most startling about this discourse used by Israel to exonerate itself from its genocidal conduct is that alongside its disavowals of deliberately targeting civilians, and its denunciations of any suggestion that it is carrying out a genocidal campaign, Israeli officials at all levels have cast into the public sphere unabashed exhortations of genocidal intent.  Such open admissions of genocidal aspirations are critical because the Genocide Convention states clearly that those guilty of the crime must not only commit acts stipulated in the Convention as genocide (actus reus).  These acts must show intent (mens rea) to commit genocide.  The South African filing with the International Court includes a 6-page subsection documenting these Israeli incitements while the UN Report concludes: “High-ranking Israeli officials with command authority have issued harrowing public statements evincing genocidal intent.”  

On October 10, in what has been reprised countless times on YouTube and Twitter, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel would cut all food, water, fuel and electricity to Gaza in a surprisingly open admission of Israeli aims to violate the Genocide Convention by denying civilians in Gaza the necessities of bare life.  Far from isolated utterances, such admissions, thoroughly documented in the South African filing and in “Anatomy of a Genocide,” reveal a pattern of intent not only to eradicate Palestinians in Gaza and render the territory uninhabitable.  Such threats of withholding essentials from the people of Gaza,  endorsed widely throughout the public sphere in Israel, have turned to celebrations of the “Gaza Nakba,” to annihilate life in Gaza and empty the territory of Palestinians, admitting to a broad-based campaign to flaunt the Genocide Convention.  In this way, the State of Israel is engaged in a bizarre assault on truth in which it both denies genocidal conduct, and celebrates its own genocidal aspirations.

If there is one example from the Israeli side certain to qualify as truly Orwellian, it would be the televised briefings of IDF spokesperson, Daniel Hagari.  “Israel is at war with Hamas,” says Hagari on November 2^nd of last year.  “Israel is not at war with the civilians in Gaza.”  To prove his point, Hagari, with a straight face, insists: “We are facilitating the entry of water, food, medicine and medical equipment into Gaza.” One month later, he tells the world that Israel is conducting its war against Hamas “in accordance with international law…while minimizing harm to the civilians that Hamas places around them as human shields.”  Hagari then amplifies the point about human shields.  “Hamas deliberately embeds itself in civilian populations,” he charges, “so that Gazans will bear the costs of Hamas’ atrocities.  “Every civilian death is a tragedy,” Hagari notes, “a tragedy that the IDF does not want.”  Against the backdrop of Israel’s apocalyptic destruction of Gaza, such performative spectacles are a good reason why many would regard this kind of propaganda as the incarnation of 1984.[2]

Defending the Indefensible

In its role as Israel’s unwavering accomplice, the United States has rationalized and justified Israel’s murderous conduct in creating its own replica of newspeak.  This American pattern of fabrication is most clearly discernible in the double standard it has established for the Israeli war on Gaza and the Russan military campaign in Ukraine. Russia is committing war crimes, goes this American discourse, while Israel, inflicting the most murderous mayhem against a civilian population in this century, “is defending itself.”

Shortly after the Russian campaign commenced, Antony Blinken in a speech about Mariupol, signaled how the U.S. would assess guilt for war crimes.[3] “Russian forces bombed a theatre where hundreds of civilians had taken shelter,” Blinken noted, and he decried how Russian warplanes ignored the word “children” written in large white letters outside the building warning of the civilians and juveniles inside.  “Russian forces, he continued, “opened fire on 10 civilians waiting in line for bread,” and noted how these incidents were part of a pattern of attacks on civilian, not military targets, “including apartment buildings, public squares and last week a maternity hospital.”  Anybody who saw these scenes, he lamented, “would never forget them” and he implicitly referred to the Genocide Convention in making the point: “Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime.”  All of this was evidence for the main point of his speech -- Russia was guilty of war crimes in Ukraine!

It was in a speech the day before, however, that Blinken proffered a more explicit assessment of “genocide” in explaining why the Burmese military was guilty of humanity’s worst crime.  “I have determined that members of the Burmese military committed genocide and crimes against humanity against the Rohingya,” Blinken announced.  He recounted how the Burmese military’s attacks in 2016 forced 100,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh, and how in 2017 these attacks killed more than 9,000 Rohingya, and again forced 740,000 to flee to across the border, emphasizing the widespread and systematic nature of these assaults which he insisted, “is crucial for reaching a determination of crimes against humanity.”  In elaborating on the intent of the Burmese military to commit the crime of genocide, Blinken could not have provided a more parallel comparison for the very same atrocities committed by Israel.[4]

The evidence points to a clear intent behind these mass atrocities… That intent has been corroborated by the accounts of soldiers who took part in the operation…such as one who said he was told by his commanding officer to, ‘shoot at every sight of a person,’… Intent is evident in the racial slurs shouted by members of the Burmese military as they attacked Rohingya, the widespread attack on mosques, the desecration of Korans.  Intent is evident in the soldiers who bragged about their plans on social media,… Intent is evident in the military’s efforts to prevent Rohingya from escaping, like soldiers blocking exits to villages before they began their attacks, sinking boats full of men, women, and children as they tried to flee to Bangladesh.  This demonstrates the military’s intent went beyond ethnic cleansing to the actual destruction of Rohingya.

Indeed, in this quotation, if “Israeli military” was substituted for “Burmese military,” and if “Palestinians in Gaza” was substituted for “Rohingya,” it would align perfectly with what is occurring in Gaza.  Virtually all the abuses ascribed by Blinken to the Burmese military as proof of genocide, along with what he said about Russia the day after, are being committed in Gaza by the Israeli military. The one difference is that Israel is committing these acts on a scale that dwarfs the other two supposedly genocidal belligerents.  Israel’s killing of over 14,000 children alone gives pause.

Despite the huge trove of evidence brought to bear in the South African submission to the ICJ about Israel’s conduct -- evidence consistent with what Antony Blinken has argued about Russia and the Burmese military -- the American Secretary of State denounced the South African case and proclaimed to the world: “The charge of genocide [against Israel] is meritless.”  Oft-repeated in subsequent State Department briefings on Gaza, and by officials in the Biden Administration, this assertion of Antony Blinken on the merits of the South African submission to the ICJ is in keeping with another crucial element from Orwell’s 1984.  The most effective lie is a big lie which repeated often enough, becomes truth. 

History Buried and Forgotten

One of the central claims of Israel is that it is fighting a defensive war against an implacable terrorist adversary that launched an unprovoked attack on the Jewish State on October 7.  Both the South African submission and the Human Rights Council Report challenge this claim by referring to what is always deliberately omitted by Israel and its American ally: there is a history to October 7th. In an implicit nod to the noted theorist of settler colonization, Patrick Wolfe, the Human Rights Council Report writes that “genocide is a process, not an event.”  It is the process of settler colonialism, and the place of Israel / Palestine in this narrative, that provides context for the event. 

After publication of Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (1896), the Zionist movement embarked on a project of colonizing Palestine with the aim of transforming it from an overwhelmingly Muslim and Christian society into a “Jewish State.”  Indeed, Zionists of that time described their aim as colonizing and settling.  In this sense, Zionist aims were little different than other colonial ventures, from the Anglo-American conquest of Amerindians, to similar examples from Algeria, Australia, South Africa, and beyond.  By the time of the Second Wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine (1904-1914), the Zionist movement was already signaling the exclusionary type of society it intended to establish in Palestine when the movement promoted the slogan, “Hebrew Land, Hebrew Labor.” The idea behind the slogan was not only to secure land in Palestine for Jewish settlement, but to create exclusively Jewish spaces on the landscape by evicting any Palestinian tenants who were working that land, and employing only Jewish labor on it.  From this crucible, the exclusionary foundations of the future Jewish State began to emerge and take shape.[5]  

By the 1930s, the idea of remaking Palestine as an exclusively Jewish territorial space by evicting the Palestinians – transferring them – had gained sufficient currency to become the dominant perspective within the Zionist movement.[6]  Zionist leaders all the way up to David Ben-Gurion spoke of the need to transfer Palestinians in order to consummate the Jewish State.  During the war of 1947-49, Zionist militias and the military forces of the fledgling Jewish State made transfer a reality, forcing 750,000 Palestinians or 80% of the Palestinian population from their homes and farms in what became the State of Israel and rendering them as refugees, prohibited by the State from ever returning.

This idea of establishing a pure Jewish State did not end in 1949 but has instead animated Zionism to present-day.  In 1967, when the State of Israel launched a pre-emptive attack against its Arab neighbors resulting in an overwhelming miliary victory, the Jewish State conquered those areas of historic Palestine that it failed to incorporate into Israel in 1947-49.  It retains control of these vanquished territories (the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights taken from Syria) to this day in what is the longest military occupation in modern history.  What the State of Israel has implemented in these areas of conquest since 1967 is a program of ongoing colonization and settlement, taking control of an ever-expanding share of the Palestinian landscape.  Those Palestinians protesting this ongoing conquest and dispossession form a huge inventory of thousands languishing as political prisoners in Israeli jails.  

Gaza:  Assaulting the Imprisoned

This project of colonization assumed a particularly draconian character in Gaza where the population, made up overwhelmingly of refugees dispossessed by Israel in the conflict of 1947-49, were far more resistant in their opposition to Israeli settlement policy than in the rest of Palestine. As a consequence, the State of Israel began experimenting in the 1990s with a system to enclose the territory with fencing interspersed with surveillance towers in an effort to confine the population and prevent it from circulating freely.  By 2002, fencing had given way to a more foreboding enclosure infrastructure marked by concrete walls, especially along the northern perimeter.  A strict system of permits for exit and entry under the control of Israel turned Gaza into an open-air confined space so that even Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron described the Gaza Strip as “the world’s largest open-air prison.” 

Gaza Imprisoned (2017):  North Wall near Erez Checkpoint seen from inside Gaza. Photo by author.

In 2005, the State of Israel began to restrict the allotment of basic provisions it allowed into Gaza.  After Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza elected Hamas as the majority party in the Palestinian Parliament in 2006, the Jewish State initiated a far more onerous system of restricting what and who could come in and out of Gaza, and in the following year, imposed a formal blockade on the territory.  Even the former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Abba Eban in a speech in 1967 to the General Assembly explaining the basis for Israel’s attack on Egypt and its other Arab neighbors, conceded that a blockade is an “act of War.”  Moreover, contemporary international law regards a blockade, when the targets are civilians to be an act of war.   If therefore, a blockade is effectively a declaration of war, as Abba Eban and modern international law affirms, then one can only conclude that for the past seventeen years, the State of Isarel has imposed a state of war on the people of Gaza.  In such a case, would it not be moral and indeed legal for the people being blockaded to retaliate?  “If a foreign Power sought to close Odessa or Copenhagen or Marseilles or New York harbor by the use of force,” Eban asks in his UN speech, “would there be any discussion about who had fired the first shot? Would anyone ask whether aggression had begun?”[7]  

Through this blockade, Israel, has turned Gaza into what the UN describes in numerous reports as an “unlivable place.”[8] By constantly withholding the flow of goods into Gaza, the Jewish State has rendered most of the population completely impoverished, without basic necessities such as clean water, tottering constantly on the precipice of malnutrition and disease, without access to many of the most basic medicines and health care services.  In 2008, Israeli officials conveyed to their American counterparts the aim of the Jewish State to keep Gaza “on the brink of collapse functioning at the lowest possible level without quite pushing it over the edge into a humanitarian crisis” and American officials admitted to these Israeli aims in a series of internal diplomatic cables.  “The idea,” acknowledged Dov Weisglas, advisor to then PM Ehud Olmert, “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”[9]

In 2012, the UN was already asking whether Gaza would be a livable place by 2020 but in a follow-up Report five years later, admitted that Gaza had deteriorated so markedly that it predicted an unlivable environment would engulf the people of Gaza before the 2020 date set in the earlier Report.  Since 2017, little has changed.  The blockade on Gaza has continued unabated and is still in place today as it is being bombarded by the Israeli military – with the Palestinians of Gaza captives in a ghetto-like environment, literally unable to flee the carnage.  In what is truly a lurid irony, the Jewish State, that claims to be the heir of those who were victimized in ghettos by the Nazi Holocaust, is essentially engaging in a process of liquidating the ghetto it has made of Gaza.

*  *  *

For Israeli and U.S. officials, the breech of the fortified perimeter around Gaza by Hamas and affiliates on October 7, and the violence against Israelis that followed just beyond this closed encampment, is the starting point for assessing culpability for all that has ensued from this event.  Deliberately oblivious to the facts of the blockade, these officials have created a discursive frame consisting of a “completely unprovoked attack,” and the moral justice of retaliatory self-defense by Israel in “a war it did not want.”  In this discourse, October 7 looms as an inexplicable if unparalleled event that, in the parlance of Joe Biden, justifies a response with no red lines.  If what Abba Eban says about blockades is true, however, Israel started this war seventeen years ago, if not longer, a war that appears increasingly part of a long-term Zionist vision of ridding Palestine of its Palestinian inhabitants.  Nevertheless, despite all the references by officials from both Israel and the U.S. to the unique brutality of October 7, there is a way this event converges with a comparable episode from American history, a comparison capable of changing the meaning of what Hamas and its affiliates did last Fall. 

In 1831 in Virginia, a slave by the name of Nat Turner led a rebellion against what is now universally condemned as the cruel and inhuman system of slavery in which Turner and fellow rebels killed sixty-five whites in Southampton County where the revolt took place.  It was the largest slave uprising in the United States resulting in more white fatalities than any similar revolt.  Interestingly, for all of the violence used by Turner and his roughly fifty followers during the revolt, the legacy of the event, with the passage of time and the movement for civil rights, is far from condemnatory and leans instead toward understanding the causes of the uprising.  Turner himself hoped, perhaps naively, that the revolt might awaken White society to the brutality of the slave system.  Instead, the rebellion elicited a climate of vengeance in which black slaves who did not even participate in the uprising were killed and many beheaded by local militia and vigilantes, the severed heads mounted on local roads with one road in Virgnia called “Blackhead Signpost Road” after it became the site of one such display.

Months before the rebellion, William Lloyd Garrison, the celebrated white abolitionist and the founder of The Liberator, a newspaper that called for the immediate end to slavery, prophesied that the system of slavery was making inevitable a violent kind of revolt.  Already by this time, there were numerous examples of slave uprisings and in January 1831, in the second issue of his newspaper in a prescient warning, Garrison wrote, “if any people were ever justified in throwing off the yoke of their tyrants, the slaves are that people.”  He goes on to explain how it is the slaveowners themselves, not abolitionists, who were making inevitable an uprising.  “It is not we, but our guilty countrymen [slaveowners], who put arguments into the mouths, and swords into the hands of the slaves.  Every sentence that they write—every word that they speak—is a call upon their slaves to destroy them.” 

In the aftermath of the revolt, Garrison reminds his readers that what he wrote earlier about the slaveowners creating the uprising was foretold.  “What we have long predicted,” he wrote, “has commenced…. The first step …to shake down the fabric of oppression, has been made. The first drops of blood, which are but the prelude to a deluge from the gathering clouds, have fallen.”[10]  In the same way, October 7 was predictable.  Where there is oppression there will be resistance.  Only when Israel and its American patron jettison their brand of newspeak and recognize the role of the colonizer as a co-creator of October 7,  and make this recognition part of an acknowledgement that Palestinians are deserving of the same rights as other peoples, can there be any hope of a just world for all people in the territory.