A battle of competing narratives

C Uday Bhaskar

Director, Society for Policy Studies

THE brutal war of reprisal that Israel launched against Hamas over the October 7 terror attack will enter its sixth month this week. This unrelenting assault by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the hapless citizens of Gaza to ostensibly ‘crush’ the Hamas cadres has been deplored as grossly disproportionate, inhuman and bordering on the genocidal.

While Israel’s right to self-defence is unexceptionable, the manner in which it has exercised this right has elicited both anger and revulsion globally.

The scale of the calamity that has been inflicted upon Gaza by Israel was graphically witnessed on February 29 when more than 100 people were killed and 700 injured, even as they were desperately scrambling for humanitarian aid. This marks a new low even by Israeli standards. Local authorities have blamed the IDF for opening fire on the unarmed crowd, while Israel maintains that its troops used weapons to prevent a stampede that would have endangered them. Bitterly contested narratives between the principal interlocutors about the October 7 attack and its aftermath and uncritical support from an extended ecosystem across the world that supports either Israel or Palestine in an emotive, binary manner have become the leitmotifs of the war.

The death toll in Gaza has crossed 30,000, according to Palestinian officials, and there is little hope that any meaningful ceasefire or cessation of hostilities by Israel will be possible in the near future. US Secretary of Defence Gen Lloyd Austin informed American lawmakers last week that Israel had killed more than 25,000 Palestinian women and children since the October 7 attack. If there was any remorse at this figure, it did not come through.

While Israel’s right to self-defence is unexceptionable, the manner in which it has exercised this right has elicited both anger and revulsion globally. But this has had little tangible impact on the Israeli government since Tel Aviv remains confident about US political support and military assistance to prosecute the war in Gaza.

This support was on display at the UN Security Council, where, in February, the US vetoed a proposal for a ceasefire for the third time in a row. Tacit American support to Israel over Gaza has triggered considerable dismay in many parts of the US and an extreme manifestation of this sentiment was the self-immolation by a member of the US air force on February 25.

Senior airman Aaron Bushnell (25) set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC. His dying statement was: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide [in Gaza]. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest.” Eyewitnesses said Bushnell shouted ‘Free Palestine’ before setting himself alight.

The battle of competing narratives has begun in earnest. The pro-Israel mainstream US media chose to project Bushnell as an anarchist and a mentally unstable person, while liberals and those who are opposed to the war in Gaza lauded him as a conscientious objector. Bushnell’s friends have described him as a caring human being who was very upset and anguished about US policies in Gaza and took this extreme step in protest.

Col Ann Wright (retd) noted empathetically: “It was an act of courage, an act of bravery, to call attention to US policies.” While this extreme act may draw attention to US policies, albeit briefly, it is unlikely to alter the basic policy orientation.

This is not the first act of self-immolation in the US over contentious policy issues, but this is, perhaps, the first time that this extreme act was streamed live by the protester on a social media platform. And in keeping with the bitter polarisation over Israel-Palestine/Zionists-Hamas on social media, the Bushnell act has led to a torrent of visceral calumny by one camp and sympathetic endorsement by the other.

But in this battle of burnished narratives, the truth will emerge in bits and pieces. One disclosure is particularly illustrative. The New York Times (NYT) is under adverse scrutiny for the purported distortion of the October 7 Hamas attack in a major report it carried in December with a dramatic headline: ‘Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponised Sexual Violence on Oct 7’.

It has now been revealed that one of the three authors of this story is reportedly an undercover Israeli intelligence operative and that the graphic portrayal that incensed public opinion globally was not factual (the veracity of this claim is also being disputed). Hamas was alleged to have engaged in violent sexual depravity. The NYT story mentioned that a victim was “lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread...”

To the discomfiture of the NYT, the victim’s family has denied this allegation. The controversy is being avidly discussed in the US and the credibility of the paper is at stake.

While domestic politics will continue to shape the war in Gaza amid the tangled geopolitical competition in West Asia, a long-term strategic view about a two-state option will have to prevail, in a consensual manner, at the end of this gory tunnel of death and destruction.

Israel’s current prosecution of the war in Gaza is clearly driven by the political compulsions of its much-reviled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is determined to stay in power, come what may. But as former PM Ehud Barak points out: “Netanyahu is focused on his political survival, and he will never step down willingly. The time has come for the people of Israel to stand up and bring about a change of course.”

When this time will come remains moot. Will the death toll in Gaza have to cross 60,000, even as the world wrings its hands helplessly and engages in pious platitudes? In the interim, babies and children in Gaza continue to die of starvation and disease — a reality that cannot be cloaked in sanitised narratives, or disparaged as being false. 

Join Whatsapp Channel of The Tribune for latest updates.

#Gaza #Hamas #Israel