the last place on earth you probably want to beart + space + audience

I don’t claim to have a deep understanding of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but in reading The Social Contract I came upon a passage whose startling prescience speaks to the injustice of land stolen by states:

Is it enough to put one’s feet on a piece of common land in order to claim it at once as one’s own? Is it enough to have the power to keep other men off for one moment in order to deprive them of the right ever to return? How could a man or a people seize a vast territory and keep out the rest of the human race except by a criminal usurpation — since the action would rob the rest of mankind of the shelter and the food that nature has given them all in common? (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, and Maurice Cranston. The Social Contract. New York: Penguin Books, Limited, 2004. 23)

Arundhati Roy, in a 2002 speech entitled, “Come September,” says the following:

Loss and losing. Grief, failure, brokenness, numbness, uncertainty, fear, the death of feeling, the death of dreaming. The absolute relentless, endless, habitual, unfairness of the world. What does loss mean to individuals? What does it mean to whole cultures, whole people who have learned to live with it as a constant companion? (Roy, Arundhati. “Come September.” Lannan Foundation Reading & Conversations. Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe. 18 Sept. 2002. <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=945405493000735497>.)

Roy has a lot to say about the failure of corporate media. In its delivery of information about Israel’s attack on Gaza, an attack so disproportionate to Hamas’s attack on Israel, this failure could not be more apparent. As Waleed pointed out in conversation, little consideration is given to the human element of this conflict. It is a militaristic strategy — targeted, precise, with a specific goal in mind: to put an end to Hamas. The corporate media says nothing of genocide, or spaciocide, or of how farcical it is that Israel has claimed 4 victims* while Palestinians have lost hundreds (and will lose hundreds more). That Israel has much of the developed world at their back is a sick, sick thing. [*I have spent time searching for an accurate update of Israeli casualties but I have not found any. It seems that the disproportionate figures have become too embarrassing to report as the Palestinian death toll rises.]

Support for Israel is garnered not only through ridiculous political weavings but also through vulgar abuses made by corporate media (abuses that Israel is complicit in delivering by banning media in Gaza). Through the corporate media, citizens of the world learn that Hamas are “Islamic militant rulers“. Its members are “commanders“, “operatives“; collectively they are “forces“. The media is responsible for painting Hamas as a destructive group of militaristic hardliners on a mission to destroy Israel, as if there was ever any chance of that. (Hamas does claim the obliteration of Israel as one of their mandates, though few would disagree that it is a lofty goal.)

Of course Hamas has taken violent measures against Israel to drive home their point. But at the end of the day, they are an oppositional party who is fighting back against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. When the news says that rockets or suicide bombings are unprovoked by Israel, that is a flat-out lie. Every day that the occupation holds, every day that Palestinians wait at checkpoints, every day they return to their bulldozed homes, every day their land is encroached on by settlements, every day their list of restrictions expands and suffocates them, is a provocation. Every moment of life in Gaza is a provocation.

Reducing Hamas to militaristic terms, illegitimizing them through fear-mongering, saying nothing of their non-violent activities, is a tactic used by Israel to bolster support for their vulgar occupation and startling disregard for the lives they ruin and then take in Gaza.

From the Real News Network:

There is much more to be said, but I’m sure nothing I say could match the acute intelligence of what Waleed is about to. (And here it is.)

The image corresponding to this article on the main page is a portion of this 1918 map of Palestine.