Cracks in the Wall of Disinformation

A Breakthrough in Understanding the Palestinian Cause

Henna Team

Capitals and major cities around the world are witnessing demonstrations in solidarity with those Palestinians threatened with illegal eviction from their homes in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, as well as those in Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Gaza Strip.

Contentious events have exacerbated the ongoing confrontations with the heavily armed forces of Israeli occupation. This was followed by the bombing of Gaza, which killed civilians, including children, and the launch of hundreds of rockets by Palestinian factions into the Israeli interior, which wounded several people.

The violations committed against Palestinians today are precedented and familiar. The past seventy-three years have been an uninterrupted parade of human rights violations, displacement, oppression, and occupation. These events established the features of the Middle East we know today.

But the difference today is the popular global solidarity with Palestinians’ plight. The power of the traditional media, to direct the dominant narrative and to regurgitate previously dominant narratives, has diminished. It is harder and harder to sell a story of two sides playing tug of war, one full of unarmed advocates defending themselves with stones, the other the repressive machinery of a fully armed state.

Sheikh Jarrah’s demonstrations were led by Palestinian youth who grew up under the constant threat of eviction and expulsion from the city of Jerusalem. Their peaceful protests succeeded in connecting Palestinian communities disfigured by the occupation. Palestinians in 48 drove cars or took buses for hours to participate in the demonstrations in Jerusalem, before uprisings then took hold of the cities of Lod, Haifa, Nazareth, Umm al-Fahm, and others.

These Palestinians do not want what the United States and the international community is offering them: an entity divided and without sovereignty, while calling it a “state.” Rather, as they are native inhabitants of these lands, they want to remain on their land and to reclaim their properties. They want freedom and equality in one state.

The recent developments of the past few days have strengthened global solidarity with the Palestinian cause and have given the Palestinian struggle new tools to express itself.

Sheikh Jarrah and the Media

Some media outlets, Canadian ones included, frame what is happening as an “ownership dispute” over the land, on which the homes of Palestinians are built, whom the Israeli authorities are working to expel. This explanation is misleading for several reasons. First, it ignores that East Jerusalem is occupied territory according to International Law — Israeli law does not apply to it. Second, it assumes Israeli court decisions are right, just, impartial. This ignores that those decisions discriminate between Jews and Palestinians on the basis of religion. Only Jews are allowed to file claims for land and property ownership, and documents are accepted from them without the required examination. Meanwhile, Palestinians possess ownership documents, but the courts refuse to consider them. This is not a question of the fates of six families, but whether Palestinians today have the right to live in Jerusalem at all.

During the past decades, Israeli authorities expelled many Jerusalemite families and refused to grant building approvals to Palestinians. This facilitated the demolishment of Palestinian homes and the expulsion of Palestinians from Jerusalem neighbourhoods. Only 7% of the building approvals were granted to Palestinians over the past decade, even though they make up 40% of the city’s population. Only half of Jerusalem’s Palestinians have access to the water network, while 75% of them live below the poverty line. This blatant disparity and systematic discrimination, that is discrimination in law and in the courts on the basis of religion, prompted Human Rights Watch to describe Israel as an “apartheid state” that practices ethnic cleansing against Palestinians. This strong but accurate terminology was limited in its circulation through the efforts of Israeli lobbies that have international political and financial influence and have cultivated some control over which terminology is used to describe events.

In the past few days Canadian parties have officially expressed, through their leaders or members, different stands on what is happening in East Jerusalem. A remarkable stand was taken by the New Democratic Party’s leader Jagmeet Singh, who described the Israeli occupation forces‘ attempts to expel the residents of Sheikh Jarrah from their homes as violence against them, and he simultaneously called on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take a public stand in support of International Law. In more neutral terms, Liberal ministers such as the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, Ahmed Hussen, and the Minister of Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development, Maryam Monsef, expressed concern about the current events in East Jerusalem.

Minister of Transport Omar Alghabra, described “Violence and unlawful acts” in Al-Aqsa, and Sheikh Jarrah and considered the forced evictions as liable to impede the option of a two-state solution and sustainable peace. On the other hand, the leader of the Conservative Party, Erin O’Toole issued a fiercely worded statement in which he did not address the Israeli attacks in Sheikh Jarrah and Jerusalem, but condemned the missile strikes by Hamas, describing it as a “terrorist” attack.

Growing Advocacy … and Shattered Taboos

The widespread public advocacy campaigns in Canada are widening cracks in the wall of the prevailing public discourse, which has up til now been neutral if not turning a blind eye to Israeli violations.

There are several factors that paved the way; the first is the massive circulation of certain events on social media, which has removed traditional media from the forefront and undermined their ability to monopolize which narratives are available for public awareness. Today, most social media users around the world are exposed to hundreds of daily videos and posts that document Jacob’s words about his desire to steal the house, or the policeman who stomped on the young man’s neck, reminding him what happened to George Floyd, or the celebratory dance of the settlers in front of the burning mosque. These are influential scenes reinforcing solidarity. It was possible in the past that they could only be found in Arab media sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and thereafter be removed or altered from their context if circulated by Western media. The wide scale spread contributed to breaking the engrained taboos of citizens in Western countries when speaking about Israel. Previously expressions, such as apartheid or ethnic cleansing, went unstated, even if that was the truth of what was happening.

The second factor is the new public awareness formed in public and academic circles about colonialism and the rights of ethnic minorities, and the accumulating intersections between the Palestinian cause and other local causes in the Canadian, American, and European communities. Hazem Saghieh referred to this in an article by pointing out that “the cause of the Arabs of Jerusalem is part of a broad spectrum of moral issues; it is human rights related to the forcible uprooting of the native inhabitants, and it is national rights related to the colonization and the political annihilation of a national group. It is one of the battles taking place today globally against Islamophobia, as well as one of the battles of the Indigenous people, and it is also global in scope, for remaining on their lands and the development of their own culture. Moreover, in the face of the arguments that base their right on ancient religious promises, it is a battle of reason, progress and enlightenment. In the face of a repressive and technical machine, it is humanity’s struggle against barbarism.”

A Time to Contemplate

These developments mark a new phase in dealing with sensitive and problematic causes that may confuse the normal Western recipient, such as the Palestinian cause. There are historical events that took place for decades in other countries in which a large segment of Western citizens formed their opinions regarding them based on what was provided for years by ideological or acquiescent media.

The shift that has taken place today, in exposing the West to the event directly, without tutelage or vetting, is an opportunity to review many issues: one of them is the principled position, formed over decades, regarding similar issues related to justice and human rights in places far away from their reality. It is essential today to ponder these positions and examine their intersection with the rising justice discourse of the times. This also includes the question of self-censorship and dread in dealing with issues such as the Palestinian cause, and the rationality of the restrictions on speech in countries with long-standing democratic practices such as Canada or some European countries, where freedom of expression, even those affecting their governments, systems, and history, are considered sacred and untouchable.

Advocacy and demanding rights are not provocations or hate speech. There is a clear difference. In order to achieve peace and to have a decent livelihood, Palestinians must obtain the human rights, which they are currently being denied, to which they are historically and politically entitled.

The effort spent to silence or to mitigate the speech of those condemning human rights violations would be far better spent joining the criticism of the violations themselves. Critisizing the violations might be easier and less embarassing for those who are confused and looking for the proper words to describe these events. It is also the shorter way to reach peace, which cannot be achieved through subjugation, oppression, and suppression. Humanity has gone through enough trials to prove the opposite.