Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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Anyone who says Gaza will be at peace if Hamas just surrenders and releases the hostages is either knowingly sowing disinformation or ignorantly sowing misinformation. We need to make sure everyone’s clear on this so nobody can say they didn’t know after history unpacks this one.
Netanyahu has made it completely and unambiguously clear that even if Hamas surrendered today and released every single hostage, Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan will still need to be implemented as a precondition for ending the mass slaughter. To be absolutely 100 percent clear, Trump’s plan for Gaza is that “all” Palestinians be removed on a “permanent” basis, never allowed to return.
There is no way to permanently remove all Palestinians from a Palestinian territory without material coercion — meaning more mass scale violence and siege warfare. There is also no way to argue that this mass displacement would be voluntary even without further violence, since Israel has been deliberately and systematically making the Gaza Strip uninhabitable by destroying civilian infrastructure. Forcing them to choose between starvation in an uninhabitable wasteland or submit to ethnic cleansing is exactly the same as forcing them out at gunpoint.
It was obvious that this was Israel’s plan for Gaza in October 2023; plans to move the civilian population out of the enclave were already being circulated within days of the onslaught. But that wasn’t Israel’s official and openly stated policy until the Trump administration; now that Israel is clearly and explicitly stating this agenda in public, there is absolutely no excuse for anyone to continue circulating the lie that the suffering of the people of Gaza ends if Hamas surrenders. What happens is that their homeland will be permanently taken away from them as they are shipped off to a foreign land, and Gaza will cease to exist as a Palestinian territory.
That’s not peace. Or if it is it’s the peace of an empty room; the peace of a room full of corpses. Saying you made peace by removing the Palestinians from Palestine is like saying you settled an argument by decapitating one of the arguers.
That’s the only “peace” the people of Palestine will experience if Hamas lays down its arms. Losing everything they’ve ever known forever, on pain of death.
That is the inconvenient truth people are trying to hide when they say “This all ends when Hamas surrenders and releases the hostages.” That is the deception they are sowing.
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Israel bombed the home of two married doctors in Gaza on Friday, killing nine of their children and critically injuring their sole surviving son. The father of the children was also severely injured in the attack, while their mother, while still working at the nearby hospital, received the charred bodies of her children. They were too badly burned to be recognized.
This one incident, just by itself, is vastly more newsworthy and deserving of attention than two Israeli embassy staff members being killed in Washington. But news coverage hasn’t reflected this, because Palestinians aren’t regarded as human beings in the mainstream western press.
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The Guardian has published an opinion piece by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett titled “As Gaza’s children are bombed and starved, we watch — powerless. What is it doing to us as a society?”, which is noteworthy because it somehow never mentions the word “Israel” or “Israeli” one single time throughout the entire article. It doesn’t even mention Netanyahu.
This is a particularly glaring example of the way the western press have been discussing the Gaza holocaust as some kind of unfortunate tragedy that is just passively happening to the Palestinian people, as though it’s a natural disaster or something. It’s like bombs and siege warfare are just the weather over there. Like “Oh it’s a bit bomby and faminy in Gaza today, and it makes me feel sad!”
This genocide is exposing the mass media like nothing else in my lifetime.
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Israel supporters have different packages of apologia for each ideological group, with different narratives explaining why Israel’s abuses are justified to all the different groups in language designed to appeal to each faction.
Are you a progressive humanitarian? Israel apologists have a narrative package custom designed to appeal to your support for the Jewish people and the revulsion you feel toward their historic persecution.
Are you a conservative who’s fearful of Muslims and terrorism? Israel apologists have a completely different package of narratives designed to appeal to your fears and explain why Islamic extremism must be defeated to protect western civilization.
Are you a fundamentalist Christian? There’s a whole other package of narratives designed to explain why support for Israel is actually commanded by God in the Holy Bible.
Are you a fascist who thinks Arabs should be wiped off the face of the earth? Boy howdy do the Israel apologists ever have some narratives for you.
Israel apologists understand that different political factions are responsive to different types of messaging, so each political faction gets its own messaging package.
The only ones they can’t effectively target with carefully constructed narratives are the groups who are already forcefully pro-Palestine, predominantly on the leftmost end of the political spectrum. So they just work on silencing, stigmatizing and marginalizing those groups instead.
It’s all about controlling the narrative. Israel apologists understand the power of narrative control better than perhaps any other major ideological faction on earth, and you see it at play throughout every facet of our society. That’s one of the many reasons they were so successful at manufacturing support for Israel in the west up until history’s first live-streamed genocide caused them to finally start losing control of the story.
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Feature image by Dan Scavino via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).
