Things have moved on since the last time Israel was bombing Palestinians, even though it still controls its own people and its propaganda with mantras.
According to the mantras, which pro-Israelis passionately believe with religious conviction, every single civilian casualty in Gaza is not their fault. Mantras will include “snipers firing at them from the same building” they just killed women and children in. The phosphorus burns came from “weapons Hamas was storing in the same buildings”. The hospitals targeted had “Hamas sheltering in the basement” and so on. When women were waving white flags and trying to carry children out of buildings just blown apart, they were shot in the head because “Hamas snipers were in the vicinity”. When the Israelis tried to bury sheltering families alive in rubble using bulldozers it was because the houses were “storing Hamas weapons”. The UN buildings and the Media tower were all attacked because of “snipers” or was it “storing Hamas weapons”. In fact it doesn’t matter which mantra the Israeli propaganda machine used, they all blur into one and are repeated as if they are ‘fact’ without any evidence to corroborate them.
In other words, there was never a single acceptance that Israel was ever at fault at any time. Indeed, anybody putting the mantras under scrutiny becomes subjected to the mantra “anti-semite” in an attempt to silence them.
An illustration of just how strong the belief in the mantras is, can be seen from the footage of a Gazan doctor (who worked to save lives in Israel) being shown on Israeli TV completely distraught from having just that moment had his home blown to pieces and three of his daughters heads crushed in the rubble. The poor poor man, instead of sympathy, pity or respect, got an Israeli woman screaming, shouting and spitting in his face that he must have been storing weapons and how terrible it was that her own son (who was alive) had had to join the IDF and go into Gaza. I personally found the pictures of this woman screaming in this doctor’s face some of the most disgusting and vile I have ever seen. They will haunt me.
However, and this is my main point, I was able to see the pictures. Despite Israel not allowing international media into Gaza in their attempt to control and censor the flow of information out from the region, pictures are getting out. So is information. There are Twitter users and bloggers saying what they see, taking short videos and zapping them round the world free from sanitisation. Yes, there are now real witnesses to what’s happening in Gaza. Us.
Conventional media struggles to abide by the reporting restrictions which are in force even for reporters stuck in Israel and not allowed into the war zone, and can only file summaries of what it’s being told. In the case of the pro-Israeli Western media (most of American privately owned TV) this will of course be slanted with the propaganda angle that Israel requires, including the many mantras we’ve already discussed. Meanwhile, ordinary people are filing their reports, usually just from a humanitarian perspective, using new media. Youtube carries the graphic raw pictures, not subjected to an editor’s eraser. Voices and accounts are ‘out there’ faster than the controlled media. Yes, in amongst this constant huge stream there are the opinions and rants both pro and con. Some are using the Israeli mantras and of course, some are using pro-Palestinian mantras. This means having to dig out what’s really there from all the ‘noise’, but it’s there. And even with the Israeli censors chasing after posters trying to get the information removed it’s too late; it’s replicated, copied, and redistributed and kept alive virally.
I suspect that Israel will have lost this war and retreated as it has under its unilateral ‘ceasefire’ because the truth had a conduit and an audience they couldn’t control. Maybe next time they will work out how to control and stop it, but for now the world has real access and therefore eyes and ears able to see, thanks to new media, the truth conventional media won’t tell us.
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