The great hypocrisy in Gaza – a deadly instrumentalization

By Heinz Steiner

The many civilian victims – including, according to the terrorist organization Hamas, 3,000 children – as a result of the Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip are not only causing outrage in the Islamic world. But the outcry is just hypocrisy. What about the victims of US sanctions against Iraq (from 1990) or Afghanistan (since the Taliban came back to power in 2021)? The Palestinians are being exploited for political purposes. But that does not automatically make Israel an innocent lamb. There are hardliners who rely on escalation on both sides.

One can view Israel’s harsh military response to the Hamas attack as one wishes, with around 1,400 Israeli casualties, including 1,300 civilians. For some people, the retaliation, which is now said to have killed more than 7,000 people – around 3,000 of whom are said to be children – in the Gaza Strip is a justified measure by a nation that has to defend itself against constant attacks. Other people see this as an exaggerated action by an ethno-suprematist, nationalist government, whose representatives only see the Palestinians as animals and not as people .

Hardliners on both sides

The Palestine conflict, which has been ongoing since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 and has claimed countless lives since then, is a “never-ending story.” Hardliners on both sides are preventing a lasting solution that would allow all parties in the region to coexist peacefully. At the same time, many people forget that in geopolitics the right of the stronger/more assertive continues to prevail over the right of the law and international agreements. Israel has great influence in the West thanks to the widely integrated, large, politically, economically and socially influential Jewish diaspora. The Muslims, who for the most part have only integrated to a very limited extent into the societies of Western countries, do not represent a really successful minority on a political and economic level either.

Palestinian propaganda omnipresent on social networks

However, the current escalation in the Levant is primarily playing into the hands of the Palestinians. Thanks to social media, images and video footage of the destruction caused by Israeli airstrikes are spreading rapidly. Recordings of allegedly murdered children, which are presented in the media, included. For the Israelis, this propaganda war (as is always part of any military or political conflict) is a horror. This even went so far that the European Union, for example, was forced to intervene and forced X (the former Twitter) to take appropriate censorship measures. Of course, under the usual guise of wanting to combat “disinformation” (although both sides use disinformation as part of their own propaganda).

Another problem in this war of narratives – at least for Israel – is the wrong targeting of the diaspora. While Jewish organizations focus on the tiny minority of anti-Semitic right-wing extremists, they ignore the much larger anti-Semitic left (and the BDS movement ), which shows solidarity with the Palestinians and Hamas . For many on the left, Israel is a racist, ethnocentric apartheid state that opposes multicultural utopias. The attacks on Jews are often portrayed by the media as acts of the “anti-Semitic right,” even though they are carried out primarily by Muslims, but increasingly also by anti-Israel leftists. But the mainstream tends to be blind in the left eye.

Worse still, dead children in the Gaza Strip are being deliberately used to stir up anti-Israel sentiment. 3,000 dead children (if Hamas claims are to be believed). That’s a sad number, absolutely. But such a breakdown is only made because the Palestinians have been a pawn of the Islamic states for decades. Harsh words, I know. But where were and are the mass Muslim protests over the countless dead children as a result of US sanctions and US wars across the region? How many children died as a result of American sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq starting in 1990? How many in the wake of all the US bombings during the two US wars of aggression against Iraq? What about all the children in Afghanistan who are now suffering from US sanctions against the Taliban? How many of them will die miserably in the coming winter of hunger?

Hatred on both sides

This also shows the absolute hypocrisy of the Arabs and other Muslims. This is pure instrumentalization of the Palestinians, just to further advance the spiral of violence in the conflict with Israel and prevent peaceful solutions. Violence begets counter-violence, hate begets more hate. On all sides involved. Every war causes immeasurable suffering among the people affected; this cannot be prevented. But the responsible political leaders of all parties involved are to blame. Because they don’t want to agree, so many people have to suffer and die. People who cause suffering and death to each other even though they don’t know each other. And the Israelis are also hypocrites. Ever-increasing territorial expansion with new settlements in Palestinian areas does not ensure an easing of the situation. Pulling bulldozers through Arab villages to make room for such settlements just causes bad blood.

But even if Israel (especially its political leadership) is certainly not an innocent lamb, Hamas’ major attack on Israel and the taking of other people hostage was a completely unnecessary provocative act. It was clear to the Hamas terrorists and their foreign supporters from the start that this will result in a huge bloody reaction from the Israelis with countless deaths. This makes it all the more clear that the deaths in the Gaza Strip are a deliberate act of acceptance simply to portray Israel as a “terrorist state” and a “child-murdering state”. And the more deaths there are – especially children – the better for the Islamic propagandists and the worse for Tel Aviv’s media defense strategy. Everything is well calculated. The Muslim community cares just as little about the Palestinians themselves as it does about the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Somalis or other Muslim nationalities. The agitators are only interested in ideology and the fight against Israel. The Palestinians are just pawns on the chessboard that can be sacrificed to the cause. Recognizing this could be a first step toward lasting peace in the region.

 

Originally published: https://report24-news.translate.goog/die-grosse-heuchelei-in-gaza-eine-toedliche-instrumentalisierung/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=de&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp