What happened in 1947-1948?
Context
This post is about the subtle power of dark free speech. That includes demagoguery, propaganda, lies, slanders, crackpot reasoning, and irrational emotional manipulations such as appeals to bigotry, racism or intolerance, false or exaggerated allegations of threats by out-groups, dehumanizing hate, etc.
How the Israeli government pulls it off
What Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank is horrible. The violence fits the definition of genocide. Genocide is is one or more specified acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected human group. That includes mass killings, war, and severe oppression. Bad as it is, the Israeli government has normalized the horror using years of sophisticated, focused propaganda. The propaganda has been a amazingly successful in view of the ongoing horrors. How is that possible?
An opinion in the NYT, Israel’s Elimination Project, describes the situation in the West Bank in depressing detail. It was written by by Yuli Novak, executive director of the human rights organization B’Tselem. Ms. Novak focuses on how such horrific violence is spun into highly effective narratives of something unpleasant but necessary for safety and self-defense. The horror is morally justified and sanctified by narratives of threats, real, fake or exaggerated.
The opinion describes West Bank home burnings and demolition, uprooting of communities, killings of children, blocked roads, aerial bombardment, widespread destruction, mass displacement, and official assertions of Jewish supremacy in all of it. The package includes violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, destruction of Palestinian social and political life, and ethnic cleansing coupled with territorial takeover.
For many or most Israelis, years of Israeli propaganda has effectively made the reality of demolished homes, forced expulsions, social destruction and settler violence as necessary or natural. What Israel is doing to Palestinians is not seen as genocide or merely unjust domination. It is propagandized as morally justified self-defense. The actuality of (1) violent domination was normalized and justified as “security,” (2) forced dispossession via settler colonialism or occupation was turned into “settlement”, and (3) large-scale West Bank violence was softened into comforting “self-defense”.
Novak argues that Israeli political language manipulates and distorts the situation by dehumanizing Palestinians, collapsing all of them into a threat. Violence is justified to control and oppress the entire population. Novak argues that is how apartheid works. Novak writes:
The politics have shifted over time, but the underlying logic has remained the same: Israel has preserved a political order that places Jews above Palestinians in rights, power and control over the land.
Happy-face Jewish soldier and Palestinian woman
MAGA propaganda compared with Israeli propaganda
There are differences and similarities. The similarity is with mind manipulation using dark free speech. Both MAGA and Israeli propaganda (1) use the law as partisan weapon, (2) make exceptional, exaggerated security claims, (3)cast unwarranted dehumanizing suspicion on whole groups, (4) attack democratic mechanisms of accountability so there is little to no way to punish law-breakers for their crimes, and (5) normalization of violence, oppression, and intolerance through carefully chosen softening language.
The central MAGA-Israeli government commonality is authoritarian legalism. Both retain elections, courts, statutes, police, and administrative processes, but they redirect them to protect preferred in-groups, punish or marginalize out-groups, and insulate leaders or allied power centers from accountability.
The Israeli government has conned much or most of Israeli society into believing narratives as false as most the narratives that MAGA routinely uses against Americans. The mindsets are authoritarian, supremacist and generally very much alike. What differs greatly is circumstances. The two operate with different scales and kinds of coercion.
In the West Bank, coercion is physical and violent. In the US, MAGA coercion is still mostly a matter of mental manipulation to con the American people into a slew of false beliefs about things important for their power and protections. Trump and MAGA elites have not yet crossed a threshold from mostly poison propaganda to mostly physical force. That's the big difference.
Q: Are Israeli and MAGA propaganda and mindsets significantly similar and comparable, even if the methods, Israeli physical violence and propaganda vs MAGA propaganda, are significantly different? If not, what is the evidence for that?
Some info sources:
The Uses and Abuses of Language in Israel’s War on Palestinians -- Israel and its allies have deliberately crafted language not only to justify their actions but also to persuade taxpaying publics at home and abroad of their moral correctness.
Jews have historical ties to Palestine. Israel is still a settler-colonial project -- For many supporters of Israel, this ["settler colonialism"] is a difficult characterization to accept, in part because they see it as imposing a rigid division: The Palestinians are natives, the Israelis are settlers.
The Elimination Project: Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Collective Life in the West Bank -- Since the current Israeli government took office at the end of 2022, and even more so since October 2023, Israel has dramatically escalated its assault on all aspects of Palestinian life in the West Bank.
THE PALESTINE QUESTION: A BRIEF HISTORY -- ..... except for the Crusader interregnum, Palestine was ruled by Arabs and then by Turks for over 1,300 years following the Byzantine era. The population of Palestine was mostly Semitic Arab, both Moslem and Christian. There were also small numbers of Semitic Jews. Both the Arabs and the Ottoman Turks accorded the Jews the right to continue to worship and to keep alive the Jewish spiritual link with Palestine.
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