“Never spread the occupation’s propaganda, and do not contribute to instilling a sense of defeat. This must be focused on, for soon, we will start talking about a massive invasion in Beit Lahia and Al-Nusseirat, for example. Never spread panic; be supportive of the resistance and do not spread any news broadcast by the occupation (forget about the ethics and impartiality of journalism; just as the zionist journalist is a fighter, so are you).”
-Basil Al-Araj
Copy left. As the author I reserve the right to say this essay may be freely reproduced, translated and adapted, even without indication of origin, so long as it is for revolutionary, anti-colonial purposes.
In the three days since the Al-Aqsa flood began on 7th October 2023, Israel has launched reprisals on the Palestinian people, with many in the Israeli government openly stating the genocidal intent of these plans. Airstrikes have killed hundreds, many more are wounded, and alongside this Israel has bombed the Rafa crossing on the Egypt-Gaza border, cutting the only route of escape for Palestinians. As well, the settler colonial state has taken full advantage of its position as a junior partner in global imperialism, with many Western allies full-heartedly endorsing this genocide as part of Israel’s right to defend “herself.” A lot of this has been calls for increased aid and support, but it has also been borne out in the Western media’s approach to covering the occupation, which has bombarded Palestinians with useless and biased questions, and reacted with a pathetic kind of shock when experts state the indisputable truth that the offensive mounted by Palestinian militants has been a response to the occupation of Palestine and the many war crimes visited upon the Palestinian people. The British media has shown that it is engaged in a concentrated and consistent campaign to dehumanize Palestinians, to justify their genocide and to disseminate the ideology of the Zionist state and its security apparatus. Journalists, wherever their position within the media, have been able to describe Palestinians as bloodthirsty and mindless, in an attempt to affirm the Israeli Defence Minister’s statement that they are ‘human animals.’
It has been able to do this with relative ease due to how it has always covered the conflict. This approach can be summed up as thus: the ideological apparatus of the Western media only ever chooses to give significant coverage to the occupation of Palestine when the so-called ‘conflict’ reaches crisis points. Many times this might be a massacre or bombardment campaign, but it does also include the actions of militants. It ignores that many of these things are simply a day-to-day reality for Palestinians, who face abuse, assault and murder by Israeli occupation forces as they go about their lives. In general, the 75 years of historical oppression has been erased by the media. By refusing to show or even acknowledge that all of these events happen in the context of a process of ethnic cleansing and apartheid waged by Israel, it does two things. First, it allows them to show crimes committed by Israel outside of the true scope of their regime, with the aim of making sure that discontent or opposition in Western countries is more easily manageable. But it also means that when actions such as the Al-Aqsa flood occur, they can be presented absent context. In this absence the long-standing orientalist and racist tropes and conventions for portraying Muslims (whom all Palestinians are generalised as) can fill the void. This then means when militants do engage in resistance, the media can represent their actions to the public as the result of Muslims historic bloodlust reaching a fever pitch, an expression of their pseudo-ISIS worship of death. In the public consciousness (outside of those in support of Palestine) long spaces of time pass before it comes onto their televisions and computers.
But it is not just the pro-Israel media that is guilty of this, hegemonic as it might be. Across the board, even in pro-Palestine media and left wing outlets, the response to the occupation takes a similar form. Regardless of how sympathetic or supportive they may be, these outlets find themselves only responding to the oppression of Palestinians when it becomes big enough to take their notice. This is not to accuse anyone of being fair weather friends or not supporting Palestine all the time. Rather it is to highlight how the existing structures of media, even in left wing spaces, act as a limit on our response to the anti-colonial struggle in Palestine. It is important to remember that the imperialists, through the rapid improvement of all instruments of producing information, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most marginal forms of traditional media into its fold. Through its hegemony it forces them to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world within a world after its own image. Looking at all the left wing media response to Palestine, one fact becomes abundantly clear: the works they produce on Palestine are made according to their own production cycles. Palestine is subordinate to the media mode of production, instead of the left wing media being subordinate to the Palestinian struggle (and in this vein, to any & all social struggles). What does this mean? To be blunt, we are too slow.
Look at the statistics below for articles on Palestine by selected Left wing media in 2023 as of the time of writing:
Tribune: 10
Novara Media: 7
Byline Times: 3
The Canary: 8
These are just a few examples. But from this it was clear how unprepared the left was for the speed by which legacy media could work in service of the occupation. Some might say it is unfair to single out these names, that the way they produce content or articles is not meant to act as a news service in the traditional sense but a means of providing commentary. Others might point to the nature of certain publications as being quarterly, preventing them from being able to comment regularly. But this is exactly the point. That the way media works as an industry will condition and limit the form of our work and effectively separate it from any mass movement or struggle. This seriously hampers the effectiveness of any media work carried out in conjunction with Palestine, and this fact is something that we must reckon with. We have sacrificed function for eloquence. We have chosen not to become revolutionaries, but brand names.
Given the choice between the long march and the office space, our writers forgot that the true poet is the one who’s always letting go of himself. Never too much time in the same place, like guerrillas…
But compare all that with something like Resistance News Network, a grassroots media collective in Palestine which provides updates on the ground about Israel’s crimes and Palestinian resistance, translating the statements and interviews of militants and announcing martyrdoms. At the time of writing, RNN posted 132 updates since 8pm last night. Based on the app Telegram, RNN seeks to provide constant updates and information to English supporters of Palestine.
Any media work done in support of Palestinian liberation must come to resemble this way of working. The most basic level of this may just be to share RNN and similar organisations more, thereby ensuring Palestinian militants are at the forefront of the struggle. But in order for media and communication work to truly be effective at building solidarity with Palestine, we must move away from profit-centred forms of media, which can only ever be beaten or recuperated by legacy media. We must then go to alternative and underground forms.
This is not to say, however, that what should happen is we simply consume more news in different forms or with new voices. As the Scottish situationist and novelist Alexander Trocchi wrote:
When our man after the day’s work comes twitching, tired, off the assembly-line into what are called without a shred of irony his “leisure hours,” with what is he confronted? In the bus on the way home he reads a newspaper that is identical to yesterday’s newspaper, in the sense that it is a reshake of identical elements . . . four murders, thirteen disasters, two revolutions, and “something approaching a rape” . . . which in turn is identical to the newspaper of the day before that . . . three murders, nineteen disasters, one counter-revolution, and something approaching an abomination . . . and unless he is a very exceptional man, one of our million potential technicians, the vicarious pleasure he derives from paddling in all this violence and disorder obscures from him the fact that there is nothing new in all this “news” and that his daily perusal of it leads not to a widening of consciousness, to a species of mental process that has more in common with the salivations of Pavlov’s dogs than with the subtleties of human intelligence.
News encourages passivity, it seeks to overwhelm you. As Gaza is bombarded, so too are we bombarded by information, digital atrocity exhibitions, the cost of which is borne by Palestinians in the form of continued genocide which we feel we are too powerless to stop. What we aim for is as Trocchi also writes, that in a manner after Trotsky ‘the cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind. Intelligence must become self-conscious, realise its own power, and, on a global scale, transcending functions that are no longer appropriate, dare to exercise it.’ What is important is not just that Palestinians pop up on our newsfeeds 132 times or more over the course of 8 hours, ready to be consumed as ‘content’, but that we engage with their voices and actions in order to better practice revolution ourselves. To see the work of the Palestinian resistance, and learn from it, both for the sake of solidarity with Palestine here and our own struggles. To practice this learning at an ever greater velocity, becoming not only good comrades but human beings living more freely. To dismantle the existing structures of human communication, and let them fall. To look at the fighters, and carry their spirit and their work into our own battlefields. From the Palestinians capacity to resist, learn what it is to create alongside the revolutionary process.
Our aim is to become, in the tradition of Ghassan Kanafani, commandos who never fire a gun, whose weapons are laptops and phones, and whose arenas are the networks of information and communication currently controlled by global capitalism. Away from an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of commissioned work, our work must become an instrument of ballistics, which hits spectators like a bullet from an automatic rifle, thus acquiring a tactile quality. We must endeavour to match the accelerating wheel of resistance and revolution, something we will never achieve in full but must be attempted in order to ensure that Palestinians are in the public discourse, speaking of their struggles in their own terms. There must be consistent engagement with the work of martyrs and freedom fighters from those who claim to support Palestine. We want, in no uncertain terms, to express the Palestinian experience at full speed.
