It is impossible to accurately grasp the current situation without discussing the concept of settler colonialism.
Palestinians walk through debris along a street in the aftermath of Israeli bombardment in Al-Karama district in Gaza City, on October 11, 2023.Much of the mainstream U.S. coverage of the recent Hamas attacks in Israel and Israel’s escalating war on Gaza — such as former— focused heavily on the Israeli security establishment’s alleged failures of anticipation or comprehension vis-á-vis Hamas.
With the benefit of hindsight, we know that such actions were fundamental to the colonization of North America via organized massacres, legal dispossession and vigilante violence on the so-called “frontier.” We are seeing these dynamics now before our very eyes, with the entire territory of Palestine essentially constituting the “frontier” of the Zionist project. Yet establishment news organizations consistently fail to place such actions in their proper context.
It would also become clear that Israeli communities in the news, such as the development town of Sderot, only exist because of organized efforts to drive Palestinians from the land and, in many cases, erase their communities from the map. This helps explain why, from the perspective of the colonized, the distinction between settlers and Natives is much more salient than the distinction routinely made in media narratives between soldiers and civilians.
This is why we see settler populations, whether in the U.S. or Israel, expressing “shock” when the inherent violence of their settler-colonial systems produces violence from the colonized. As philosopher Slavoj Žižek pointed out in his famous 2001 response to the 9/11 attacks, such populations arethat insulates them from the daily realities of those on the receiving end of imperial and colonial brutality. As a result, when the other shoe drops, they fail to see it coming.
Such narrative frames are not “objective” in any way. Instead, they signal that news organizations are actively taking part in constructing the horizon of what is possible, what is permissible and what is ethically required of us. In other words, even though their professional ideology of “objectivity” prevents them from acknowledging it, they are still ethically engaged and implicated. The only question is what sort of ethical principles they will choose to embrace.
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