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.
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