One of the most alarming concerns surrounding the discourse of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since the war on Gaza began has been the pervasive degradation of the transmission of knowledge and critical thinking representations of the conflict. These have severely impacted the ability of many recipients to understand the empirical reality of the conflict, thereby restricting the room for any reasonable debate on this critical issue. This has been systematically done through three broad mechanisms, which have fatally contaminated so much of the discussion on the events succeeding October 7th of last year and making any attempt at an impartial analysis extremely difficult. Language is a key part of the social construction of reality and is one of the most important tools through which we filter information of the outside world to understand it. The perversion of language is a dangerous threat to our ability to do this and can lead to atrocious outcomes; violating Godwin’s law, it is pertinent to mention that in my first German lesson, my language teacher wrote on the blackboard “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work makes one free) the slogan appropriated by the Nazis and placed at the entrance of the detention camp at Oranienburg to house political dissidents and other social undesirables. Later, it was notoriously placed at the entrance of several extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau. It is this perversion of language that we must guard against and which is being so cynically deployed in this conflict. An understanding of these mechanisms is essential to steer through the distortions being disseminated.
The first mechanism is the abuse and perversion of language to disguise and in more extreme cases, misrepresent the reality on the ground and the effects of various actors involved in the conflict. As the linguist Abdulkader Assad commented “Language is the most powerful tool outside of the battlefield.” This goes beyond the usual use of euphemisms to which we have by now become inured for instance using terms like “collateral damage” to describe civilian causalities caused by military strikes reflecting a deeper linguistic move to make the unpalatable palatable and the disturbing more comfortable. Such euphonies have long since become commonplace but this conflict has moved beyond such terms to actual distortions of reality — hence we are told of repeated airstrikes in Gaza “targeted” ignoring the huge numbers of civilians killed in such strikes, ignoring that over 50% of munitions dropped on Gaza are “dumb” munitions which are incapable of precision targeting, ignoring that at least 60% of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed, by some estimates up to 80%. Use of the passive voice selectively masks the responsibility of those carrying out actions, thus hospitals are “hit by missile strikes”, Beirut is “bombed”, “lives are ended in Gaza”, cameramen are “are shot in Gaza by ‘increasingly hostile’ forces”. But who is launching these missiles, dropping these bombs, ending these lives, and shooting at journalists? This is deliberately obfuscated by performing great feats of grammatical gymnastics to avoid mentioning Israel as the actor that is responsible. The reader of such headlines could be forgiven for thinking that such events are almost like natural disasters and an inescapable fact of life that must be endured by the victims, rather than the conscious decision by a political and military force to carry out such acts with such dire consequences. In striking contrast, when Israel itself is attacked, as it was by Iranian ballistic missiles, the aggressor country is clearly named.
The use of misleading terms to colour perceptions of what is actually occurring on the ground is disturbing; a “limited ground incursion” describes the invasion of Lebanon with over 15,000 IDF troops actually entering the country, “safe zones” are used to describe areas designated as such for civilians in Gaza but which are repeatedly bombed, “evacuation orders” for non-combatants to uproot themselves and their families move out of entire areas where they have been living, amount to nothing more than forced population transfers coming close to ethnic cleansing. US Senator Marsha Blackburn, in a post on X, stated that “eight Israeli soldiers were murdered” ignoring mentioning that they were engaged in fighting against Hezbollah forces during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and were killed in combat, as soldiers are in a ground war. As several commentators pointed out targeting armed soldiers invading your territory is an act of legitimate resistance not murder.
The second mechanism through which discourse is being distorted is the denial of causation when it comes to violence and faux justification for carrying out disproportionate military action. A clear example of this was the interview with US Senator Lindsey Graham with Britian’s Channel 4 on 8th October, where when asked about the 40,000 dead in Gaza he stated that he doesn’t “blame Israel” and that it is because “Hamas wants them that way”. This is reflective of Israel’s justifications for strikes on civilian habitations, hospitals, UN shelters, universities etc. all buildings which are not usually seen as legitimate military targets. The claim is always that such buildings are hiding Hamas fighters or facilities- most markedly observed in the case of both Al Shifa and Al Ahli hospitals where the bombing were justified by unverified assertions by the IDF that Hamas command and control centres existed underneath the foundations of both hospitals. The justificatory rhetoric reached absurd heights when the Israeli Prime Minister in an address claimed that Israel would strike at any home that had a “missile in the living room and a rocket in the garage” in Lebanon, later claiming that some Lebanese citizens were “renting out” their homes to Hezbollah to use as launching pads for the same- an unsubstantiated claim which was picked up and recycled by the Israeli and American media. This double move which seeks to firstly blame the deaths of civilians, including women and children on the opponents (in this case Hamas and Hezbollah) and then to also justify such attacks by claims that they were either deliberately being used as human shields or merely happened to be in the way of targeting legitimate military targets is itself deeply deceptive and illusionary. As has been pointed out, it is a clear attempt to evade and deflect responsibility for one’s own actions — if you drop a bomb on what you know to be a densely populated civilian area, knowing there will be civilian causalities, and such casualties occur, then it is you who is responsible for killing those civilians not the enemy. No amount of verbiage can be allowed to hide this chain of causation. Moreover, as international law clearly states, even if a military target such as a commander is located in a school or heavily populated residential area, launching a pre-meditated strike to eliminate him knowing that there will also be substantial civilian casualties, is a war crime.
Combined with this causative distortion is the delegitimising of any information that could be seen to be challenging the dominant point of view most clearly illustrated by the way casualty figures were reported by media outlets in Gaza, which were initially cited as those being provided by the Health Ministry in Gaza as was the norm for the earlier five invasions carried out by Israel since its disengagement from the region in 2005. However, quite quickly, media reports started adding the qualifier “Hamas-run” as a prefix to the label “Health Ministry” with the clear intention of casting doubt on the figures as being reliable and instead being propaganda churned out by Hamas. This scepticism was sowed by the Israeli authorities to great effect, as when the Health Ministry in Gaza released figures on the October 26, 2023, showing that over 7,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza, including 3,000 children; less than 24 hours earlier the US President Joe Biden cast doubt on the reliability of figures being provided by the ministry, saying that he has “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using” and that “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed”. As usual he provided no evidence to support this assertion and as many observed this comment served not only to question the level of casualties but also to dehumanise the Palestinians even in death. As many international journalists and organisations including the UN and Israeli ones have noted, that in each one of the previous five wars in Gaza, the death tally confirmed after the hostilities had ceased were confirmed as being accurate as to what the Health Ministry figures were and in January 2024, Israeli intelligence services revealed that they themselves used the casualty figures being provided by the ministry for civilians (with the caveat that deaths of Hamas fighters were not recorded and excluded from the statistics) as these were the most reliable and accurate data available.
What is overlooked is the rigorous process hospitals in Gaza have for properly identifying and recording the details of every death, to the extent that bodies which are brought in which cannot be identified properly, they are kept in the morgue until they can and are not counted towards the official casualty figures published by the Health Ministry; such is the degree of care taken to accurately record the details of every single death. Needless to add, the repeated bombing, attacks and forced evacuations of all hospitals in Gaza, as well as the limitations placed on medical and emergency staff, who operate under extremely restrictive conditions with few supplies or capacity has severely limited the ability of the health network in Gaza to accurately record deaths and identify the victims- one of the reasons the published mortality figures have hovered around the 40,000 mark for the past several months, when it is widely accepted that the real figures are much higher. An article published in The Lancet in July of this year estimated a staggering excess of 180,000 plus deaths; as the methodology used also took into account not only deaths due to direct violence but also due to starvation, disease and unsanitary living conditions which always accompany intense conflicts and usually account for the majority of deaths in such cases. As the paper was not peer-viewed and based on estimated methodological models, it remains hotly contested; what is not contested however, is that living conditions in Gaza have become very difficult, with limited food supplies, breakdown in public hygiene and lack of medical facilities. Famine and pestilence stalk the region, affecting the vulnerable such as the elderly, children and disabled particularly severely. The official death count as of 11th October remains as 42,000 of which 16,000 are children.
The causative factor is at play here too, as despite Israeli denials, it has targeted the civilian infrastructure, with recorded evidence of destroying water treatment facilities as well as other public health installations and limiting the amount of food and aid being permitted to enter Gaza. Numerous UN experts and Human Rights organisations have accused Israel of engineering a man-made famine in the region. Such a policy, the journalist Yaron London noted, has become part of the security discourse, as enunciated in the “Dahiya doctrine” named after a suburb in Beirut that was a stronghold of Hezbollah during the 2006 war with Israel. This was outlined publicly back in 2008 when the former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot argued that the IDF "should target economic interests and the centers of civilian power that support the organization.” The explicit rationale was to inflict such a level of violence on the civilian population that they would be pressurised into turning against the militants, forcing the latter to surrender and sue for terms. The application of this doctrine fits the pattern of IDF actions in Gaza since October 2023, as the vast majority of buildings have been levelled, including schools, universities and mosques, hospitals have been bombed and attacked, health and other public services degraded and the civilian population been given repeated evacuation orders at short notice, forcing them to move from one part of the Gaza to the strip under threat of violence, to supposed safe areas, which are then redesignated as combat zones, to allow the cycle to begin again. The United Nations Fact Finding Mission into the Gaza War of 2008-2009 concluded that Israel’s actions were "designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population". It’s application over past two weeks has also been visible in Lebanon, where heavily populated areas of Beirut have been repeatedly bombed in attempts to kill Hezbollah leaders and where entire villages in southern Lebanon have been levelled being described as “Hezbollah villages” as a prelude to an Israeli ground invasion. The human toll of this has been abhorrently high, with over 2,000 Lebanese being killed in such strikes since they began.
The last mechanism by which our understanding how to perceive and discuss the conflict is perhaps the most disturbing. It lies in the very denial and inability to even register any evidence of atrocities as fact or to accept them for what they are. As George Orwell’s famous quote says “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” In an open letter to US President Joe Biden, 65 American surgeons, nurses and paramedics stated unequivocally the degree of human suffering and violence being inflicted on civilians, including the children in Gaza. Children as young as 5-8 were being brought into medical facilities with serious gunshot wounds; many of whom had been hit in the chest or head “dead centre”, indicating that they had been deliberately targeted. In the harrowing words of one of medics who treated such children, orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Mike Pearlmutter “No kid gets shot twice by a sniper by mistake,”. One doctor treated a girl of only 18 months who had a gunshot injury to the head, another recounted at least a dozen cases where the head injuries were so severe that they had left the victims with incurable brain damage.
Yet in one of the most egregious examples of atrocity dismissal, the Jewish and British novelist Howard Jacobsen, in an article published in The Observer, on October 6, with the title “Tales of infanticide have stoked hatred of Jews for centuries. They echo still today” going on to dub such reports as another incarnation of the anti-Semitic canard of “blood libel” levelled against Jews, in medieval Christian Europe, which accused them, falsely of course, of sacrificing Christian children for supposedly nefarious secret religious rituals. The spread of such rumours were frequently the precursor to anti-Jewish pogroms leading to massacres of Jewish communities, as happened in London and York in England in the 12th century. As Jacobsen notes, such experiences have formed part of the painful history of the Jewish community, especially in Europe. He acknowledges the pain caused by images of Palestinian children with terrible wounds being broadcast visually; however, he still terms the repeated broadcasting of such images can only serve to increase hostility towards Jews and act as propaganda; falsely claiming that such images of Ukrainian children are rarely broadcast (they are very much shown and have been from the start of Russia’s invasion back in 2020). As critical Jewish commentators in Britain sharply observed the dishonesty in Jacobsen’s piece while not an outright denial of the facticity of Palestinian children dying in such a fashion, is a more surreptitious downgrading and subtle denial of the scale and intensity of what is happening in Gaza by associating it with a “blood libel” which after all is based on a false rumour of child sacrifice, unlike the very real and deliberate targeting and killing of children by the Israeli forces in Gaza. Jacobsen should have known better, as the killing of children by Israeli forces is not a new phenomenon, even on the eve of the October 7 attacks in 2023, several human rights organisations had noted that 2023 had been the worst year on record for Palestinian children in the Occupied Territories in terms of violence with 47 having been killed till October alone. The actual testimony of medical professionals demonstrated what was happening in Gaza very early on but these were mostly disregarded because they were Palestinian, it was only when foreign and American medics publicly went on record in the summer of this year, echoing what their Palestinian colleagues had been saying for months, that more serious attention was given and the subsequent predictable pushback and rationalisations as demonstrated by Jacobsen’s piece amongst others. Instead, what did happen were the viral claims of “40 beheaded babies” and accusations of sexual assault which were circulated in the wake of October 7. The former claim was publicly supported by Biden, who claimed to have seen photographic evidence of such acts, a statement which his own White House administration had to walk back later and admit did not exist but which did not stop Biden from reiterating these claims several times subsequently. The effect of such repeated claims was to generate outrage against Hamas and by extension Palestinians in Gaza and prepare the ground for the subsequent unleashing of collective punishment and violence that Israel inflicted on the region with limited initial international protest and objections. It took some time for such claims to be debunked and for the reality of Israel’s actions in Gaza to emerge from the smokescreen of such manipulated attempts to justify and disguise it.
As the military theorist von Clausewitz opined “In war everything is uncertain and variable, intertwined with psychological forces and effects, and the product of a continuous interaction of opposites. Theory becomes infinitely more difficult as soon as it touches the realm of moral values.” War is the province of uncertainty but that is even more reason, while we may not be able to precisely know and comprehend exactly what is happening, all the more caution should be exercised in discussions and writings on conflicts as they are occurring. Especially, as the involved parties have a clear interest to control the narrative for their own purposes, it has also long been a cliché that “truth is the first casualty of war”. However, this makes it even more incumbent on us to try and critically arrive at the best approximation of the truth we can and be wary of the ways that the public discourse can be distorted and manipulated with the intention of having us believe various untruths, many of which are phantasmatic projections, echoing Voltaire’s warning that “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Conrad Kunal Barwa is a senior research analyst at a private think-tank, and a senior research associate at the Birmingham Business School
