Israel: rogue state or righteous ally?

 

By Jeremy Webb

Oct 22, 2024

As Israel risks yet further charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in its siege of northern Gaza, its defence of the indefensible is built on a preposterous inversion of morality. That is, the portrayal of Israel as the West’s protector of its very civilisation in a sea of evil and a bastion of democracy.

In his recent UN speech, Netanyahu is ruthlessly divisive in apportioning good and evil and by framing criticisms of Israel as ‘lies and slander’. There is the barely veiled notion that the good resides with Western democracies and that therefore such nations should join his (un)holy civilising crusade. “These savage murderers, our enemies, seek not only to destroy us, but they seek to destroy our common civilisation and return all of us to a dark age of tyranny and terror. Will you stand with democracy and in this battle between good and evil, there must be no equivocation. When you stand with Israel, you stand for your own values and your own interests. Yes, we’re defending ourselves, but we’re also defending you against a common enemy that, through violence and terror, seeks to destroy our way of life”.

Such assumptions are nonsense to those who care to inform themselves of the brutal history of the Gaza conflict and of the fact that the Gaza war is not one of defending democracy. Which is to say Israel has long deliberately sustained Hamas’s authoritarian rule in Gaza to prevent a more truly democratic representation together with the Palestinian Authority.

Israel’s massive public relations machine has all too effectively claimed otherwise. The Murdoch press is an avid subscriber of its output: witness the October 5 edition of The Australian in which the entirety of 11 broadsheet pages including all 8 pages of the Inquirer were devoted to supporting Israel’s casus belli. That over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed is buried, briefly in two articles and then only in the context of Australians getting their moral compass misdirected by too readily rushing to condemn Israel. Greg Sheridan resets the moral compass making the remarkably unqualifiedly assertion that “…the terrible human cost in Gaza …is entirely the responsibility of Hamas”. This surely demeans his credentials as a journalist and certainly demeans the intelligence of his readers. Such a sweeping claim is shared by other august authors which include Josh Frydenberg and Mark Leibler (Chair of the Australian Israel and Jewish Affairs Council). For them, the war in Gaza is but, as Frydenberg puts it, a battle between “good v evil – democracy v theocracy”.

Entirely absent from the 11 page avalanche of one-sidedness is mention of the history of Israel’s colonisation of Palestine. No reference is there to the Palestinians being refugees, no admission of the widespread illegal seizure of West Bank land nor the apartheid treatment of Palestinians and no reference to the ultimately explosive Israeli strategy of deliberate preservation of Hamas as a bulwark against Palestinian unity. Not once is the issue of proportionality mentioned let alone discussed.

Such a PR coup speaks for the enormous resources Israel has poured into sanitising its image. This focus can be traced to the cumulative effect of the disproportionality of civilian/IDF death rates accompanying repeated incursions into Gaza. In its response, Israel has come to lead the world in the use of PR in prosecuting its military/political aims. An important milestone in its development is the 2012 incursion into Gaza when proportionality began getting far greater global attention. 107 of the 174 Palestinians killed were found to be civilians while thousands of civilians were injured. In a newly engineered response, the IDF applied a great deal of its resources to social media to justify its actions. Some 2000 soldiers including 70 officers were enlisted to design, process and flood the world’s social media platforms (Murdoch’s Sky After Dark has evidently adopted the same strategy by employing a team to expand the reach of little watched excerpts and exporting them to social media platforms). Other Israeli government agencies now share the role of feeding global social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and X. However, the IFD’s own press office is still said to currently number over 200.

The Western media’s lack of appetite for pulling apart the claims that Israel is the world’s foremost bastion of Western values and democracy is concerning given just how plentiful unambiguous, fully researched counterfactual evidence is – none more so that that amassed by the ICJ, the ICC and UN agencies.

Much of this evidence has not been easily obtained given Israel’s refusal to allow journalists into the Gaza war zone. The situation elsewhere in Israel is little better with the expulsion of Al Jazeera from the West Bank ending the operations of the last of independent non-Israeli press corps. Overall, press censorship within Israel has become extreme. Reporters Without Borders places Israel 101st out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom index. Largely absent, then, is the essential civilising component of democracy.

Israel’s credentials as a defender of western civilisation and promoter of democracy is seriously tarnished by another scantly publicised aspect of its past. Israel has a tawdry history as a major global arms supplier. During the Cold War it partnered with the US in providing arms to anti-communist causes in South America and to the brutal dictatorships which followed. That included Pinochet’s long ignominious reign in Chile. And even long after US military support was withdrawn from its increasingly corrupt creations in Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador, Israel continued to sell arms to these regimes.

Post Cold War, in the process of becoming the world’s 10th largest arms exporter, Israel has moved on to develop new arms markets with regimes which the international community has blacklisted. They have included such bastions of democracy as Papa Doc’s Haiti, The genocidal Rwandan regime, Ceausescu’s Romania, death squads in Colombia, Myanmar’s military regime and Sudan. A particularly successful military specialisation has been in surveillance – clearly a high priority for authoritarian regimes. A prominent example is Israel’s licensing the manufacture of Forpost drones to Russia – used extensively in the latter’s operation in Syria and now the Ukraine (the latest version of which can carry and launch air to ground missiles). Israeli firms are also world leaders in spyware – no surprise given its evident comprehensive penetration of Hamas and Hezbollah communications. There are claims that their globally renown Pegasus phone hacking system has indirectly found its way into Russia’s hands. Whatever the truth, Israel has refused to allow sale of Pegasus to the Ukraine government leaving undisturbed its murky commercial and political relations with Russia.

Such a poisoning of civilising forces within international relations is now being applied to the UN. In the absence of press freedom, the UN is one of the few organisation which has been able to provide evidence of whether the IDF is indeed committing war crimes. In response, Israel has vociferously attacked the institution rather than the evidence. Such attacks have targeted not only UNWRA but also UN personnel and no less the Secretary General – inexcusably made persona non grata. In this way, the aim has been – at great moral expense – to undermine the credibility of the UN as whole.

How then, it must be asked of Netanyahu, is it possible for us to view Israel as anything but a rogue state in which its civilising instincts have been all but extinguished and its democratic principles seriously eroded.

https://johnmenadue.com/israel-rogue-state-or-righteous-ally/