Palestine/Israel: Image vs. Reality Part One

Have you ever noticed that the broadcast and print media rarely, if ever, show a detailed map of Israel/Palestine when doing a report on the conflict? This coupled with such nuanced phrases like “the Palestinians must pull back”, leads the audience to believe it is indeed the Palestinians encroaching Israeli territory, not the other way round.

Whose purpose does this serve?

Now, of course, this is intended for a number of reasons but the two that glaringly obvious are to obscure the conflict in such a fashion in our minds that it appears too complex to resolve thus maintaining the status quo – that is the Palestinians living under a constant state of military occupation by Israel.

The second is that it hides the methods of control Israel is using over millions of occupied people. As to show a detailed map would risk revealing the complex network of Israeli garrisons, the rising number of illegal settlements within Palestinian territory, the use of military checkpoints that brings Palestinian day-to-day life to an utter standstill, furthermore, how the checkpoints are used to push and lock in Palestinians within sealed prison-like enclaves. Which is controlled from the outside by the Israel army who then, of course, enter them at will whilst completely restricting the free movement of Palestinian people, goods and services thus destroying the Palestinian economy.

It is not for nothing that the late Israeli academic, Tanya Reinhart, defined Gaza and the West Bank as being the largest open air prison in human history.

The censorship of geography, in the most geographic of conflicts, has allowed a separation wall, something which Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu define as being an ‘apartheid wall’, to be built around the West Bank that has been allowed to go unnoticed and unpunished which Israel has used to annexe more than a quarter of the West Bank.

However, it is not only territorial greed that defines the route of the apartheid wall, geopolitical realities such as the need to be in control of the aquifers in the West Bank are another prime motivating factor for Israel. These lands sit on the western part of the Mountain Groundwater Basin, a large reservoir within the West Bank. The Mountain reservoir provides around 600 million cubic metres of water annually.

So naturally it seemed logical, to Ariel Sharon, for the route of the apartheid wall to criss-cross around aquifers that were once in Palestinian territory and now in the charge of Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, which subsequently gave Israel total access to this much-needed resource.

Israel now creams off 500 million cubic metres of water from the Mountain Groundwater Basin.

My second point highlights something more sinister at work here; that is the total complicity of western media outlets in Israel’s illegal activity.

It is slightly more than a mere coincidence that a detailed map has rarely ever been published or shown on television by the mainstream media, when addressing this conflict. Consequently consolidating Joe Average’s confusion on this issue.

The risk of revealing the true nature of Israel’s subjugation of Palestinian self-determination will lead to the weakening of Israel’s vice-like grip on the moral argument and reveal it for what it is; an asymmetrical conflict. A conflict fought by stone throwers on the one side and one that has complete control of the land, the sea and the sky on the other.

This type of information must be withheld and if it is ever ‘revealed’ must be in such a way that it is spoon-fed to the audience in tiny doses without sentience or detailed imagery.

This complicity has allowed the Palestinians to be held captive within a complex system of prisons, that detach and dislocate one Palestinian area from another, in addition, designed to coop them up in areas barely fit for animals, which in effect are like bantustans. Which were indeed used by the apartheid regime in South Africa to subjugate the self-determination of the indigenous population there.

This Zionization of our media, a media that only allows the narrative of the Israelis whilst demonizing the narrative of the Palestinians, is an abominable shame to our democratic values and goes against the norms of press freedoms and must be resisted.

Just like young Palestinians tired of the daily injustice and repression they experience offer courageous resistance in the face of a demeaning fate meted out to them not just by Israeli soldiers armed and equipped by its American financier but, also, by other treacherous Arab states. A type of resistance that only has one message. A message so eloquent that it need not be spoken in words – that you may murder, maim and kill as many of my people as you desire but my idea of statehood where I am free will continue to live on long after you kill me.

A Question of (In)Security?

A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Islam, in the shape of the veil.

Mehdi Hasan, of the New Statesman, argues that nothing seems to provoke more suspicion of Europe’s 15 million Muslims than the face veil worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women.

In recent months, several European governments have begun to legislate restrictions on the niqab, a face veil that leaves the area around the eyes clear and is usually complemented with a full body covering.

The widely regurgitated argument by policymakers is the “national security” card and then the vacuous use of assimilation is quickly bandied around to help mobilise support for this policy.

However, one can easily see this is more a question of identity, of the self and of the nation, and the unanswerable questions and insecurity that emanate from this. As Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe, how else can Christian Europe stem this 'scourge'?

In April of this year Belgium, despite the political upheavals afflicting the country, found the time to become the first European country to pass through legislation that imposes a nationwide ban on anyone wearing a full face veil in public.

In real terms, less than 0.01% of Belgium’s 600,000 Muslim population wear the veil, out of a total population of just under 11 million people. The chances of the average Belgian bumping into a niqab-clad woman is virtually zero.

So where’s the logic behind the ban?

The French security services estimate that 2,000 out of around 2 million adult Muslim women in France wear the full face veil, of which a third of whom are thought to be converts to Islam.

Yet despite these lowly figures the French government have acted swiftly to impose bans on the face veil and have been extremely vocal in expressing their vitriolic sentiments, with President Nicolas Sarkozy declaring the burqa is “not welcome” in France and denouncing it as a symbol of female “subservience and debasement”.

In France, the fine for those that flout the new law will be €150 for a first time offender and a man who is found to have forced a woman to wear a full-length veil by “threats and/or violence” will be punished with a €15,000 fine and could face imprisonment.

This and Sarkozy’s comments are particularly revealing.

The idea that millions of Muslim women are being forced into wearing a piece of cloth to cover their faces is nothing but an erroneous belief that is not supported by a shred of empirical evidence.

However, the idea that the white man, and only the white man, can save and liberate the mysterious exotic woman from the depraved heresy of the barbaric savages and the uncivilised primitively-minded men of the East, with their fine clothes and enlightened beliefs is nothing more than an extension of colonialism. As this is consistent with traditional imperialist thought.

Then we come to the contradiction of punishing and criminalising women for choosing to maintain their modesty with a single piece of cloth to cover their faces. Which is, indeed, ironic and paradoxical, using the threat of prison to free women from the seemingly imprisonment of the burqa is illogical and lacks reason.

In Britain, numerous parliamentarians have publicly stated that they would refuse to see women wearing a face veil within their respective surgeries.

One M.P. went as far as to say that he would tell the woman to go home and correspond with him via another medium. Despite tending to ones constituents being a parliamentary duty.

So much for secular and pluralist societies safeguarding the wants and needs and protecting the rights of minority groups.

The champions of fear and hate within Western societies argue that Islam is, and has always been, a threat to enlightened democratic societies of this world. The dominant fallacy is that practitioners of Islam are nothing more than divisive misogynistic parasites hell-bent on destabilizing freethinking liberal Western democracies from within.

Note the type of language used to describe either group. Which is, of course, nothing new. They can easily be found in the much-lauded works of Lewis, Naipaul, Huntington and Hitchens to name but few.

One could argue that this pervasive fear of Islam is merely notional. If Islam was this monolithic beast blinded by rage and feeds on the blood of non-Muslims, namely Westerners, where was this beast in the 50 years between the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the Berlin Wall?

Broadcasters and human rights organisations the world over have denounced the policy of banning of the veil as being fuelled by the ignorance of racism and Islamophobic by design. Which go against the norms of a supposed progressive society.

Unfortunately in this post 9/11 era these attitudes expressed of Islam and Muslims have become commonplace.

In spite of this, the ‘straw man argument’ put forward by proponents of this ban must be debunked in order to preserve the tolerant nature of our society.