Palestine : Against conflation
Why moral clarity goes with language clarity
Given how quickly things are moving in Palestine, it seems futile trying to update current events, and so I’m trying to simply give an appraisal of my thoughts.
In broad terms, the Israelis have now killed 8000 Palestinians in Gaza, while a further hundred have, since everything escalated in early October, been murdered by settlers in the West Bank. The latest West Bank killing was a Palestinian farmer, harvesting his trees, and a known face in Ramallah, where he used to sell herbs. These stories are important because they show the full-frontal war Israelis are waging against Palestine. The fact that the West Bank is controlled by Fatah, not Hamas, also reveals the falsehood that this is exclusively or even primarily about Hamas, rather than ongoing expulsion and murder of Palestinians. More important still is that the lives cut-short by such murders are stories that humanise Palestinians.
Of course the media follows the bombs, and scores more Palestinians were killed overnight in Gaza bombing. The Israelis in-advance blew up the last internet connections, meaning their war crimes could not be documented or seen internationally. The Israelis also began some limited ground invasion, a move that will spur the same heavy Israeli losses they always have done, which is why they prefer the cowardly aerial bombardments we have seen for the last three weeks. Again, in media blackout, it is hard to see the losses the Israeli military are incurring through their escalation, as well as the far greater loss of life faced by Palestinian civilians.
The Israeli state has already cut electricity and water in Gaza, having before that throttled it for 16 years. To then drop bombs on the besieged refugees inside Gaza fits all definitions of genocide, a label that is quite clearly being earned, but Israeli lobbyists are fighting hard not to see deployed. Willing apologists are helping to obfuscate these crimes, and academics and editors have lost their jobs for speaking out.
Against this carnage, and the moral atrocity that is Western support for Israeli crimes, my thoughts have constantly moved back to the subject of conflation.
The 1400
It is a cliche to remark that the first casualty of war is truth, though nowhere is this adage more true and warranted than dealing with the Israeli state and Western reporting of their conduct. One of the greatest assets in deconstructing truth is conflation, because - rather than commit an outright lie - conflations allows you to slip through the porous membrane of reality and into deceit without having to do so.
Conflation is not only deployed in language. Geographical conflation also exists. An example of geographical conflation might be Israeli insinuations that militants operate near hospitals, thus steadily legitimising the many fatal Israeli air strikes conducted near and on Palestinian hospitals.
Another conflation is numerical. Western readers and audiences have been left with the consistently cited number of 1400 dead Israelis after the October 7th attack carried out by Hamas. Within this number, which has been repeated until it has taken on semi-mythical proportions, there are further conflations and questions that - especially in a time of conflict - it would be normal to ask.
Firstly the figure, with Hamas taking over multiple Israeli positions, certainly includes military casualties. It is not normal to list civilian casualties and military casualties as the same figure, especially one so oddly, conveniently, round.
There is an irony to this numerical conflation, too, because there is a (extreme) position that - given the fact that the Israeli state, especially through its violent settler movement, uses its population to seize and occupy Palestinian land - all Israelis become legitimate targets in the conflict, and so there is no such thing as an Israeli civilian. I have never heard even the most ardent supporters of Palestinian rights sincerely make this claim, and yet the statistical conflation of obvious military casualties, with civilian casualties, in a round-about way means Western media is doing exactly this; making Israeli soldiers and civilians one and the same.
The lack of moral consistency, or abidance by norms of war, is all the more apparent given that the early days of the conflict saw no mention of the Hamas militants - some 1500 of them - who had been killed in fighting outside of Gaza. This refusal to count Hamas militant fatalities as fatalities at all, as if they were not nonetheless dead people, corresponds to the wider dehumanisation of all Palestinians, and especially those who resist Israeli occupation. The value judgment is all the more glaring if we are treating Israelis as one and the same, whether soldier or civilian.
There is one other numerical detail it would be useful to establish. Aside from the testimony from freed Israeli hostages that attests to being treated humanely rather than monstrously, survivors of the Israeli ‘rescue’ efforts now speak of many Israeli deaths under Israeli fire when the military moved in, or even shelled military positions, killing militants and hostages alike. Hard though they might be to know or record at this time, deaths under friendly-fire would be a statistic to offer further understanding of what actually happened on October 7th.
Against conflation
The main point I have concerning conflation is a hard one to make because it involves talking precisely about Hamas, something that, especially at the current time, it is almost impossible - but by the same token essential - to do.
The unfortunate fact is that Hamas could be the name of an ice cream manufacturer or a fruit & nut wholesaler, and right now the word would still set-off the exact same alarms in Western (and Israeli) heads, because we have been programmed by relentless propaganda to respond in such a way. This programming draws heavily on Western prejudices against Arabic, Arabic script, Muslims and Arabs. Again, conflation.
It is telling that the other example of a name that we have been programmed to respond to in this way is Hezbollah, and that a similar treatment would have been given to the very names of the two groups that have offered meaningful resistance to the Israeli state and its violation of international law in both Palestine and Lebanon, so that now the names themselves elicit a certain response. Trying to speak plainly about the group attached to the word now carries an enormous social stigma.
The fact of the matter, and it should not be surprising, is that Hamas is not a homogenous movement. Much like the distinctions of the IRA and Sinn Fein that people in the UK are familiar with from The Troubles in the north of Ireland, Hamas has both a political and a military wing. Its political wing is primarily based, given the likelihood of Israeli attack, in the Gulf; generally Kuwait or Qatar. The military wing that carried out the October attack is based in Gaza, had apparently kept its political wing in the dark so as to preserve secrecy.
Because the military wing lives in the besieged refugee camp of Gaza, while the political wing of Hamas is accommodated in Gulf hotels, there are inevitable frictions within the group along these lines. Armed resistance in Gaza is not - despite the homogenous way in which the word is used - only the prevail of Hamas, either, with Palestine Islamic Jihad occasionally getting attention, and having in previous years being contained by Hamas when the group were working closer with the Israelis.
Within the military wing of Hamas we might equally talk more specifically of the Al-Qassam Brigades. Hamas as a group has had its own moderates, who put forward a 2017 redrawing of its constitution, accepting the Israelis on 1967 borders (the Israelis rejected the offer). It is a group that was delisted as a terrorist organisation by the European Union in 2014, before being re-listed in 2017.
To some extent, each of these things taken in isolation is by-the-by, but overall what is more important is the need to build a picture of complexity that we would hardly think surprising for most organisations, but which is rejected, and deliberately obscured, when we hear the word Hamas. This complexity is vital because, especially given the extent of the fake news attached to the October 7th attack, it is important to recognise that there are elements in Hamas that could be - or have been in recent years - pointed towards diplomacy and a resolution. Whether or not you agree with Hamas methods, it is very specifically a national liberation movement for Palestine, not a theocratic one, so quite apart from the fact it destroyed ISIS when it appeared in Gaza, the efforts to conflate Hamas with ISIS are yet more Israeli propaganda.
Resisting conflation is important most of all because, when we are given a paradigm of light and dark, of good versus evil, of “human animals”, in the very genocidal language that Benjamin Netanyahu and so many Israeli politicians have now deployed time and again, problematising is essential. It is essential because nothing in this world, and especially not in this moment, is a cause of good/evil or light/dark. Often, and especially when armed with such lethal weapons as the Israelis, it should be the ‘side’ that invokes this very paradigm of ‘us and them’ that comes in for condemnation, should be the least-trusted, and quite possibly represents the very darkness they see in others.
Plain speaking
Whatever my support of the Palestinian right to resist the cruel occupation they have endured at the hands of the Israelis, I do not specifically insist on this clarity in speech or definition for the good of Hamas or Hezbollah. I insist on it because the habit of conflation, and the rejection of precision, is a dangerous one that will spread far outside of those bounds in which it begins.
When all is said and done, conflation is an enemy of accuracy and an asset of the propaganda that we see the Israelis manipulate constantly and to suit their own ends. Many of these methods are already familiar to us. Hamas are evil, Hamas are terrorists, Palestinians are Hamas, all Palestinians are terrorists. The thin, permeable walls of these conflated definitions destroy the idea of Palestinian civilians, and with it the idea that Palestinians could ever be innocent, the result of which is a claim - again - that denies Palestinians their very humanity.
Sometimes the Israelis might realise they have gone too far, or they are required to make some admission of the existence of Palestinian civilians, but this status is quickly revoked because perhaps they once voted for Hamas as the best way to end the occupation of Palestine, or because they as Palestinians wanted to resist their 75-year dispossession and murder at the hands of the Israelis. Again, this quick recategorisation of Palestinians, once they step out of Israeli-approved lines, is made possible by a general culture of conflation.
Nor, however, does this stop at Palestinians or at the borders of Palestine. Because at some point Palestinians are Hamas becomes Hamas are Muslims and Hamas are Arabs and Hamas are Muslim Men so that Muslim Men become Hamas and Arabs are Hamas, and so the conflated stereotypes that the Israelis and their willing media are pumping in industrial quantities into the public cannot be confined to any one geography. These conflations end up working their intended smears against communities around the world; communities who have the right to live free from such prejudice every bit as much as Palestinians have the right to resist Israeli brutality without being cast as evil for demanding their freedom, a freedom the Israelis have failed to restore to them through peaceful or diplomatic means.
It is for this reason most of all, because it does not stay in Palestine, that we must oppose conflation, and - when things are so fraught and so much already lost - speak clearly.