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THE MISSING NEWS ABOUT GAZA
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Alexei Sisulu Abrahams
February 26, 2024
The Nation [[link removed]]
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_ To understand Palestine and Israel, we need more coverage of the
everyday structural violence of occupation. Disinformation involves
lying by commission. Decontextualization, on the other hand, is about
lying by omission. _
A 12-year-old Palestinian boy named Hasan Abu Emune collects
recyclable materials such as paper, metal, and glass to contribute to
his family’s livelihood as daily life continues under difficult
conditions in Khan Yunis, Gaza on April 24, 2023., (Abed Zagout /
Anadolu Agency // The Nation)
The violence unfolding across Palestine and Israel over the past four
months has been accompanied by a near-real-time deluge of information.
Some of this information has been false, and fact-checkers have had
their hands full. But beyond the issue of disinformation (trafficking
falsehoods), I worry as a media researcher and a longtime scholar of
the Palestinian struggle that decontextualization (selectively
presenting truths) is the more ubiquitous and elusive threat to our
collective understanding.
Disinformation involves lying by commission. Decontextualization, on
the other hand, is about lying by omission. While much has been made
of the differential coverage of Palestinian versus Israeli suffering
over the past several months, by far the greater asymmetry is to be
found when comparing coverage of the weeks of kinetic violence after
October 7 with that of the decades of structural violence before.
The reason for this asymmetry runs far deeper than political agendas.
News networks cover bombings, shootings, and other forms of kinetic
violence because they are loud, finite events that seize our
attention. By contrast, the everyday structural violence of Israel’s
occupation and apartheid is comparatively uneventful. Instead of loss,
it inflicts absence. Instead of killing, it simply aborts. Its first
casualties are dreams and destinies. Even its victims cannot offer a
full accounting, because how can you miss that of which you were
always deprived? Yet the two are inextricably linked. Decades of
structural violence give rise to weeks and months of kinetic violence.
To cover the latter while neglecting the former is, in a word, to
decontextualize: to show audiences the symptoms while depriving them
of the underlying causes.
All of the narratives spun by the Israeli government to justify its
murderous bombardment of the Gaza Strip draw centrally on the facts of
October 7. And while there have been some embellishments that have
rightly drawn scrutiny, those core facts are not in dispute, and they
are awful enough in their own right as to offer prima facie
credibility to Israel’s war narratives.
The deficiency is not so much to be found in the information they
present, but rather in the information that is left absent. Using
Media Cloud, a database that has tracked news worldwide for around a
decade, I found all the news articles published by American, Canadian,
or British news outlets during 2023 that mentioned either “Gaza”
or the “West Bank,” and generated this chart:
The coverage of both Gaza and the West Bank after October 7 dwarfs
everything published in the comparatively stable nine months preceding
it. The coverage of Gaza after October 7, meanwhile, consistently
exceeds that of the West Bank, where kinetic violence was also
happening but at orders of magnitude below its sister territory.
I say “kinetic violence” for the sake of distinguishing it from
its complementary concept of structural violence. Whereas bombings or
shootings are examples of kinetic violence, structural violence is
exemplified by walls, barbed-wire fences, or systems of discriminatory
laws. When a bomb goes off, it is a discrete event that can be
reported or remarked upon. Structures of violence, by contrast, are
continuous features that rend reality in two.
To get a glimpse of what it means for Palestinians to be the victims
of structural violence, we can turn to the great Palestinian writer
Ghassan Kanafani, who once wrote that “our lives are as a straight
line that marches in shame and silence beside the line of our destiny;
but the two lie parallel, and shall never meet.” In Kanafani’s
telling, the life that Palestinians were meant to live haunts their
every footstep. It runs parallel to their actual life, and in full
view of their imagination, a daily reminder and humiliation next to
which they trudge in silence and shame. As the Palestinian national
poet Mahmoud Darwish alternatively phrased it, to live in the shadow
of a wall, or on the wrong side of a fence, or on the receiving end of
a discriminatory system, is to live “in the presence of absence,”
to be haunted by the ghost of one’s potential self—the person you
would have become were it not for this wall, this fence, this law,
this structure.
This is the agony of the structural violence with which Palestinians
were living throughout 2023, and for the long years and decades before
that. Blockades and military occupations lead to declines in GDP or
employment, which seem boring and statistical and simply lack the
visceral horror of a suicide bomb or an airstrike. But behind those
percentages are real people whose dreams have been crushed and who may
succumb to depression, substance abuse, and death many years before
their natural time. But all of that is deemed so indirect, obscured,
and probabilistic that it just does not resonate with audiences as
strongly.
The asymmetry with which kinetic violence is covered relative to
structural violence has implications for how international audiences
perceive Palestine-Israel and other civil conflicts. Eventually, after
many years of daily indignities and frustration, a breaking point is
reached and a rebellion forms. The rebels are much weaker than the
state, however, and cannot wield structural violence. Instead, their
primary tool is kinetic violence. And because kinetic violence is
newsworthy, the first time many outside observers really pay attention
to the conflict is when they see masked rebel gunmen killing and
terrorizing people. Indeed, if you analyze the coverage of rocket fire
and airstrikes over the Gaza Strip in the late 2000s and early 2010s,
you will find over and over again that it is usually Palestinian
militants who appear to have broken the “calm.” And yet, if you
look closer, you will find that nearly every rocket attack was
preceded by Israeli provocations—bulldozed orchards and structures,
restrictions on freedom of movement, and so on—that blended into the
day-to-day humdrum of structural violence.
The kinetic violence of October 7 cannot be understood without the
structural violence of October 6 and all the days before. If you
recklessly burn fossil fuels for decades, you risk hurricanes and
wildfires. And if you indefinitely postpone the political process of
relieving structural violence, you risk outbreaks of kinetic violence.
For all of these reasons, decontextualization is an enormous challenge
to our understanding. To undo it will require more than fact-checking.
We will need compassion and patience, and to reflect upon our own
biases and blind spots. We will need all of these instruments to see
absence.
_[ALEXEI SISULU ABRAHAMS leads the digital trace team at the Media
Ecosystem Observatory, McGill University.]_
_Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* West Bank
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* Occupied Territories
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* Jewish settlements
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* IDF
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* Palestinians
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* Rafah
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* Gaza City
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* Israel
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* news
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* News coverage
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* disinformation
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* decontextualization
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* structural violence
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* Israeli Occupation
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