On Bad Faith Arguments as Propaganda
what is your “well actually,” actually doing?
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We begin, once again, with an Instagram story.
This time, to my personal account, where I shared this post:
(via @palestineonaplate)
I’m more vocally leftist than a lot of my peers, especially on a space like Instagram where people often craft their content based on how they’re afraid people will misunderstand them, so I liked that this cut the heart of the “conflict”1 in a way my (fellow western, white) friends probably aren’t considering.
I was right. Soon after posting, I got a message from a white queer2 woman I’ve known since childhood.
“This isn’t accurate,” she said. “Because while Hamas exists, Jews are in danger…I can’t support the killing of anyone by any power structure.”
I will not deny the threat of antisemitic backlash, just as I cannot deny the threat of Islamophobic backlash.
But where does this no killing anyone policy fit in with the 1,000 child death toll from the air strike on Gaza Israel3 began on Oct. 7? Are they not people being killed by the power of Israel–backed by the power of the United States? Focusing on Hamas every time the liberation of Palestinian people is brought up is just the newest iteration of post 9/11 American Islamophobia. Take this statement from US President Joe Biden:
"‘History has taught us that when terrorists don't pay a price for their terror, when dictators don't pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction,’ he said. ‘They keep going, and the cost and the threats to America and to the world keep rising.’"
What about the brutal conditions Palestinian people are surviving within–and have been since Al Nakba (“the catastrophe”) in 1948? What about the fact that private homes within civilian infrastructure can be considered legitimate targets? What about when Israel cut off the power and water in Gaza? Or when the 1.1 million inhabitants of the Gaza strip were told to “evacuate” [more on that language below] within 24 hours or they would be presumed to be a member of Hamas?
How do convince ourselves that these are the people who must “pay the price for their terror” when they are the ones being slaughtered? When does condemning anyone for killing for any reason turn into blaming the brutalized for their own brutalization?
And while it might be simple, I don’t believe the statement I shared was inaccurate. Because Israel is not fighting Hamas–they’re engaging in collective punishment4 of all Palestinian people. That’s not even editorializing–take this statement (emphasis mine):
“Israeli President Isaac Herzog said this week that, as far as the military is concerned, there is little difference between Gaza’s civilian population and Hamas.”
The collective retaliation against all Palestinians people isn’t incidental; he believes the people of Gaza were all responsible for not stopping Hamas:
“‘It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians [being] not aware, not involved,’ Herzog said in the middle of an unprecedented Israeli bombing campaign in retaliation for Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians last week. ‘They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.’”
Not only is this effectively a declaration of war against civilians, it also erases the ways in which Israel helped sustain Hamas’s power (emphasis mine):
“Hamas, in that sense, has been a convenient presence for Israel, whose leaders have favored the militant group over the Palestinian Authority, or PA, the pseudo-government established during the Oslo peace process to administer the Palestinian territories until the details of a sovereign Palestinian state could be negotiated. While Hamas has been enemy No. 1 in Israeli rhetoric for years, offering a cover for Israel to maintain its blockade and periodically kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, it has also offered Israel an alibi to avoid abiding by its supposed commitment to Palestinian statehood.
…Indeed, some Israeli officials have at times been explicit about their preference for Hamas over the PA. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the most extremist members of the most extremist Israeli government coalition to date, offered an unusually frank assessment of the government’s approach to Hamas in a 2015 interview.
…Others have long held the same view but expressed it more discreetly. A 2007 diplomatic cable reveals that’s been Israel’s tacit position since Hamas took control of Gaza. According to the cable, then-Israel Defense Forces intelligence chief Amos Yadlin — who this week said that Hamas “will pay like the Nazis paid in Europe” — said at the time that “Israel would be ‘happy’ if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.” That is effectively what happened.”
My childhood acquaintance continued on,
“…Where you lose me is ‘If Israelis stop fighting, there will be peace.’ I don’t think it’s accurate. I think that while imperialism, white patriarchy, and colonialism are the major global structures, hate and violence will persist, including both antisemitism and Islamophobia. …I sadly don’t think an end to the occupation of Gaza will mean the safety of all people. I believe it’s rooted deeper in the human psyche than this conflict.”
Of course there is nuance and history not explored in the two sentence post–but its purpose was to succinctly illustrate the power imbalance between Israel and Palestine, not to propose a political strategy. It was saying Israel is a settler nation fighting to retain supremacy, and Palestine is an indigenous nation fighting for survival under a brutal occupation.
I don’t think all violence will end if the occupation ends, she’s correct there. A century of violence won’t have an easy end. Racism, nationalism, islamophobia, antisemitism–these things obviously won’t go away even if Palestine is liberated. The call is to end a genocide now. Do victims of genocide only have a right to life if their existence will end all violence across the world? That seems like an awfully high bar.
When the only time we focus on nuance is at the expense of the oppressed, our “discourse” becomes another way to aid the propaganda machine.
Where was this commitment to nuance when it turned out the story about Hamas decapitiating 40 babies wasn’t actually true, but a planted story? Why haven’t any of these people committed to being specific with our language shared videos like this one:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Or this one:
Calling for nuance in the context of genocide is weaponized intellectualism. As my sister and business partner
said: you can’t start the clock in October 2023 and claim an anti-violence rhetoric. What about the nearly century of violence Palestinian people have been fighting against? (Even that is starting the clock a little late.) Take this quote from Jonathan Cooke:“No one really cared when it emerged that Gaza's Palestinians had been put on a "starvation diet" by Israel - only limited food was allowed in, calculated to keep the population barely fed.
No one really cared when Israel bombed the coastal enclave every few years, killing many hundreds of Palestinian civilians each time. Israel simply called it "mowing the lawn". The destruction of vast areas of Gaza, what Israeli generals boasted of as returning the enclave to the Stone Age, was formalised as a military strategy known as the "Dahiya doctrine".
No one really cared when Israeli snipers targeted nurses, youngsters and people in wheelchairs who came out to protest against their imprisonment by Israel. Many thousands were left as amputees after those snipers received orders to shoot the protesters indiscriminately in the legs or ankles….
…This moment rips off the mask and lays bare the undisguised racism that masquerades as moral concern in western capitals.”
If the post had said instead, “If Russia stops fighting, there will be peace. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no more Ukrainians.” do you think I’d have gotten a concerned message about not spreading hate? Is shedding light on a clear power imbalance spreading hate?
By nitpicking every call for justice until it is neutral enough to offend no one, you’re doing the work of the oppressor for them. Expecting perfect language every time someone tries to speak to the power of their oppressors is just another way of silencing the oppressed.
It’s constantly moving the goalpost: you can talk about the way’s you’re oppressed if you’re nice. If you admit not all people who benefit from your oppression are your oppressors. If you admit that yes some of the oppressed are violent people too–but if you admit that, you risk being told you made your own bed.
“The only meaningful cure to hate that I’ve found in life thus far is education and radical love,” is easy to say when you’ve never experienced large scale human rights violations. And while it would be wonderful to live in a world without violence, I’ve never learned of a genocide ended by thoughts of love and peace.
resisting the propaganda machine:
In times like this, it’s crucially important to be aware of how propaganda functions in order to not aid in its mission. One way to do that is actively practicing your media literacy skills. A few days ago, we shared this post on questions we use when consuming digital content in order to engage critically with the messages we’re getting–because all media is messaging, and it’s up to us to decipher what its saying.
Ask yourself:
Who is providing this information?
How might they be biased?
Are they sharing their resources? Are those resources reliable?
What is the social/political context they’re providing it in?
What is the piece doing to get & keep my attention?
What perspectives or ideas are overlooked, oversimplified or missing?
What is the end goal of the piece? What is it trying to do?
How did you find this piece? What are the potential biases there?
There are tools out there to help–each publication referenced in this newsletter was reviewed by Media/Bias Fact Check and only included if their factual accuracy rating was high. Each report also includes information on failed fact checks, who the publications are owned by, who they were founded by, partisan bias, and credibility rating.
The News Literacy Project is also a great resource–I subscribe to their Get Smart About News newsletter and follow their Instagram account to keep up with identifying mis- and dis-information for current events, and their site has other quizzes and tools to improve news literacy skills.
We’ve chosen not to offer paid subscriptions for this project. The short version is: we don’t want monetary support for our work to fund anti-trans and white supremacist newsletters on Substack which is, unfortunately how this platform currently operates. If you want to support our work you can send us a tip here:
What’s happening is not an equal political conflict, but an ethnic cleansing. “Conflict” was used here to mimic the language we’re seeing in the media.
Why does it matter that she was queer? One: because she closed out our conversation referring back to both of our queer identities, so it was obviously relevant to her perspective in our exchange. And two: because in bringing our queerness top of mind, my acquaintance is positioning her neutral stance as related to our queerness. It is, in short, pinkwashing the issue. Pinkwashing is a method of propaganda, and a term that came into being as a direct critique of Israel’s public relation tactics. Pinkwashing works by highlighting support of LGBTQ rights as proof of progressiveness used to divert attention away from other violence or human rights violations. For example, Israel will position itself as a safe for LGBTQ people, while indiscriminately bombing Palestinian citizens, queer ones and all.
Any reference to “Israel” in this piece is regarding the government of Israel (with full acknowledgment of the capital backing of the United States) and the IOF, not Israeli citizens and most certainly not Jewish people as a whole. I in no way want to dismiss the many Jewish activists fighting for Palestinian liberation.
a war crime