First of all, I think this is no longer just a war between Israel and Hamas, it is profoundly affecting the shaping of the Palestinian nation and future Palestinian-Israeli relations along with counter-terrorism, and along with the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, that’s why I’m inclined to call it an Israeli-Palestinian war.
The two-month-old Israeli-Palestinian war was a perfect reproduction of chapter 35 of The Count of Monte Cristo, “The Hammer Torture”. Hamas turned Gaza into an execution table, the Israel Defense Forces became the executioners, and Hamas and more than two million residents of all of Gaza were held down at the firing squad. People around the globe watched simultaneously via social media. Indelible despair and madness spread across the globe through screens large and small.
This is probably the most crowded and controversial war in the world. In the squares and central stations of Western societies, groups of people on opposite sides of the fence protest as if they were in a ring, proclaiming the justice that each one of them is certain of. Confrontations gradually escalate, and hatreds feed off each other, erupting into unpredictable outbursts that tear societies apart on a daily basis. No other warring conflict has done this to my knowledge. Neither the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war nor the growing civil war in Myanmar. Clearly, the two million people in Gaza carry far more weight in the global court of public opinion than the 1.7 million displaced civil war victims in Burma.
The position of the spectator is ostensibly a dichotomy, with the parties taking sides between Palestine and Israel. But I think that behind the dichotomy, there are actually four positions, support for Israel or Palestine and hatred of Palestine or Israel.
Israel’s supporters define warfare as counter-terrorism activity and categorize civilian deaths as the externalities of counter-terrorism necessity. They will insist on the justice of counter-terrorism, treating all opponents as Hamas supporters, and if not, calling them ostensibly not, but in fact still Hamas supporters. And then the watery question will be, do you have any humanity left if you support Hamas?
Those who hate Palestine, which also manifests itself in support of Israel, has as its central theme not the fight against terrorism, but the fact that Palestine and, by extension, civilization, are friends of the totalitarians, or, to put it more hyperbolically, that they are the common enemy of modern human civilization. This practice of defining an entire civilized community as evil is exactly what the Exclusionists did back in the day.
Palestinian supporters, on the other hand, stand in the perspective of Palestinian nationalism, believing that the root cause of this war is that Palestinian rights and interests are not guaranteed, and that the Palestinian nation has reached the most dangerous moment. They accuse the Israeli side of genocide (Genocide).On October 7, when Hamas acted, there were Palestinian supporters in solidarity. Frankly, supporters’ attitudes toward Hamas are mixed. Some have shifted from initial public support to denial, while others continue to be extremist – such extreme expressions are not really common at public events. But the fact that posters plastered with kidnapped Israeli hostages were torn down in New York may be evidence that such attitudes still exist. And for the most part, supporters preferred to talk about what happened to the Palestinians. So it is somewhat understandable that it is seen by supporters of Israel as an avoidance of Hamas terror.
While the position of the Israel haters appears compatible with that of the Palestinian supporters, there is a subtle difference in the starting point of their position, with the former considering Israel to be an ally of the Western imperialist powers, especially the United States.
Whether they are on the side of Israel-haters or Palestine-haters, they have in common both a preference for alliterative judgments and an emphasis on the fact that the objects of criticism are all evil. At the same time, their expressions are more prone to racially discriminatory statements or rhetoric.
As the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza continues to grow, humanitarian voices seem to be growing.
I myself advocate humanitarianism and am reluctant to look at the war from a nationalist standpoint, I just have to accept the nation-state as a game setting. Realistically, I’m actually closer to the Euthyphro-left intellectual position that Israeli society is inseparable from Palestinian society, and Israeli security is inseparable from Palestinian security. Israel can only have a future if the Palestinians can have an equal chance of survival. And an Israel based on a racist position is unacceptable.
A few days ago I was on hand to observe a Euthyphro-leftist pro-Palestinian protest. Also present was the pro-Israeli opposition, tit-for-tat protesting the pro-Palestinian protest. Interestingly, both sides were accusing the other of speaking in the name of all Euthanasia. One side said, You can’t do it in our name, while the other had a sign saying, You do not speak for the jews.
These days, a quote has started trending on social media, supposedly from American movie actor Mark Ruffalo, who plays The Incredible Hulk, “My empathy for the suffering in Gaza doesn’t make me anti-Semitic or pro-Hamas or anti-Israel. It makes me human.” (My empathy for the suffering in Gaza does not make me anti-Semitic, nor does it make me pro-Hamas or anti-Israel. It makes me human.)
Mark did say this, but it was not in response to the current Israeli-Palestinian war and was not original.A long-time online commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, David Harris-Gershon, tweeted out this quote on July 24, 2014 to generate a following, which Mark paraphrased the following day.
Rather than examining the positions of the parties, I am actually more interested in the quality of opinion in Jane’s, i.e., what is being argued by the watchers of the world of Jane’s about the war, and whether it is nutritious or not. After all, while war is suffering, costly and traumatic for those involved, it may be an opportunity to reflect on the lessons of humanity for those who watch.
Frankly, there is very little nourishment for arguing in Jane’s middle opinion circle. For example, one might discuss whether Hamas was friendly when it released the hostages, as if the interrelationship between the hostages and the kidnappers was not enough to justify Hamas’s responsibility for the war. Or perhaps concerned about whether a baby’s dead body is plastic or real. As if the entire tragedy of Gaza doesn’t count if the dead body of a baby is faked. It’s gossipy, it’s soap opera, it’s more like discussing scripts, acting and props.
I’ve also seen an outrageous imagery from someone who believes that refugee status is hereditary and that the outside world has given Gaza refugees so much support that they enjoy it immensely. The odds are that this kind of imagination comes from a barren experience of China’s poverty alleviation policies. The problem is that if refugee benefits are that good, what inevitably follows is an influx of people from the neighborhood into Gaza, competing to be quite the refugee. Yet have there been?
In The Count of Monte Cristo, mentioned at the beginning of the article, a young man watching the execution says, “I was at first disgusted, then became indifferent, and finally curious.” This statement could also be used to describe the phenomenon on social media in Jane today. Perhaps this is an innate human trait, a neural processing of information set in the brain.
But just what is the truth about Gaza, and is it justified for this war to be seen as a reasonable price to pay for counter-terrorism and counter-terrorism, and what is the fate of the 2 million inhabitants of Gaza? How exactly is the death toll tallied? Or even, how high is Hamas’s approval rating and why is it so high? And so on and so forth.
Those short, carefully cut videos say nothing; they are just images, capable of accurately conveying emotions and faces, but not providing intellectual support for judging the deeper truth of events.
More or less ironically, it was precisely credible media journalists who allegedly came out and said that the babies were dead bodies, not plastic toys, that partially put a farce to rest. It’s frustrating that there are still people who are happy to be convinced of the plastic baby conspiracy. Let’s be blunt, if I were reporting from the scene and had to go and explain to the public that the baby wasn’t plastic, odds are I’d be swearing out loud.
Truth is a knowledge that produces details of the reality of what happened through specialized methods. Journalism, in turn, is the most typical and dominant part of this type of knowledge production. Perhaps we can use the petitioners as an analogy for the refugees in Gaza.
Most of the petitioners are socially vulnerable and marginalized groups. Some petitioners have few resources, insufficient intellectual capacity, poor mental health and paranoia. They often do not have the ability to lobby or impress mainstream society. There have been images of petitioners draped in white cloth with a large word of injustice written on them, creating a low-cost, but stark visual spectacle. It is an exaggerated rhetorical device that also illustrates the dilemma faced by petitioners, who are unable to accurately and rationally express their suffering and injustice within the established power-knowledge system.
If they were not “relayed” by specialized knowledge producers, they would probably be portrayed as otherworldly psychopaths. However, the experience of petitioners often carries a certain truth, that is, they appear as the price for certain forces and even mainstream society to obtain benefits. Behind their distorted encounters and clumsy expressions, they map the injustice and ruthlessness of society. And these require specialized knowledge production to dig out the truth from individual destinies.
In the past, the truth about public events was mainly reported by credible media. It is clear that the intensity and risks of this war have greatly contributed to the obstruction of media coverage. Factual errors were made in both the major international media and the local media in Eretz Yisrael, and the number of deaths of journalists who traveled to the scene is a reflection of the great difficulty in producing news, or “truth,” in this case.
When the supply of truth is relatively barren, dramatic scenarios that are unverified and unverifiable naturally ignite the court of public opinion, leading to the polarization of various voices that are already in opposition. Plastic babies are one of the extreme cases, and in the two months since then we have seen a great deal of “dehumanization” of the opponents, with extremists who are emotionally or traumatically charged trying to argue that a particular group of people would be extremely evil and violent, and deviate from the normal range of ordinary human beings. Such notions are clearly in the same vein as exclusionism.
To a certain extent, imagining the actions of the Other as rationally as possible is a precious cognitive ability. Frankly, I think this Palestinian-Israeli conflict has exposed the lack of a basic ability and awareness among many people to understand rationally how to perceive war and chaos. Perhaps this is because the public does not have much experience in cognizing suffering and commenting on it. There is a great deal of detail in self media and short videos, and a great deal of condensed knowledge that takes you to XXX in 10 minutes. But generally, people do not have the basic ability to judge the details of the images they see and the knowledge they find from unknown sources. These phenomena remind me of the legend of the Qiang village on the Tibetan Plateau, as described by historical anthropologist Wang Mingke. His analysis of fear and violence in the Qiang villages seems perfectly suited to the discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the 21st century.
Is this a regression phenomenon?
Looking back at our own history, is it that we and our fathers experienced too little suffering? Obviously not. But the public’s experience of reading about and reflecting on suffering has been too small.
Worse still, at a time when public opinion was becoming increasingly polarized and hatred and violence were rampant, a group of intellectual elites engaged in the production of knowledge did not assume the responsibility to reflect on the situation, but instead made racially discriminatory and extreme remarks, such as attacking Palestinians for their low level of intelligence. To a certain extent, perhaps it is the lack of supply of truth that reveals the true level of the so-called intellectual elite.
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