Always the cause, never the effect
If you think there’s any justification for what Hamas did on October 7 2023, you’ve lost any shred of decency.
There’s a lot to say about the way the media, NGOs and other parties discuss the Israel-Gaza war but there’s an especially pernicious propaganda trick worth calling out: the ubiquitous references to “the context”.
When reporting on an event, referring to the “context” suggests there’s some pertinent background information that is the cause of the event. Whatever this context is, the reader is likely to infer two things: the context behind the event justifies and excuses whatever happened, and the stated context is the entirety of what’s relevant to know.
Take UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ statement in response to the October 7, 2023 attacks. Guterres first establishes that there is context behind the attacks: “It is important to also recognise that the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.”
This is the “it was really bad, but…” part. Guterres continues with, “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their lands steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced and their homes demolished.”
Wow. How awful. Any observer ignorant of the facts would be horrified at what’s been done to the Palestinians and you could forgive them for thinking that the October 7 attacks might be at least a little bit justified. After all, they’ve just been given the cause that explains the effect.
Guterres’ statement is actually a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, an oversimplification that suggests that because Palestine has been occupied by Israel, therefore Hamas committed their attack, ignoring the key fact that Hamas openly and explicitly states, in their charter, their ideological goal of eliminating the Jews.
More to the point, the statement is clearly made in bad faith, as Guterres ignores decades of rocket attacks from Gaza aimed at Israeli civilians, ignores decades of terror attacks committed by Palestinians against Israel, and conflates what he asserts is going on in the West Bank with what is going on in Gaza. The latter point is strikingly disingenuous. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, forcibly removing its own citizens prior to Gazans electing Hamas as their government. Hamas and opponents Fatah, still a major political faction in the West Bank, engaged in civil war and have been in conflict ever since.
Guterres simply asserts that Hamas committed October 7 in solidarity with their frenemies in the West Bank and ignores the possibility that it was simply due to their proudly stated Jew hatred.
All of this is by design. The propagandist cherry-picks a couple of data points and implies through omission there are no other contributing factors. A dispassionate observer of the region would at the very least acknowledge the chicken and egg dilemma surrounding Israel and Palestine: what came first, Palestine’s subjugation or Israel’s self-defence?
There are endless examples going back generations of actions and reactions from both sides. Yet through the use of this ”context” technique, Palestine is always painted as the victim, its violence described as “resistance”, its actions always justified. Israel is the cause of the problems, with Palestine being the effect.
To name some examples, the current increase in terrorist activity from and in Judaea and Samaria is due to Israel’s increased military actions there, not the other way around. Hezbollah are in breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 by being south of the Litani River but this is because Israel also breached 1701 by flying over Lebanese airspace, therefore Hezbollah’s thousands of rocket attacks aimed at civilians are justified.
Prior to October 7, Hamas fired tens of thousands of rockets again at civilians, but these are blamed on Israel’s military actions in Gaza and the “apartheid” walls Israel built due to the rocket attacks. When Israel is attacked, whether it’s by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis or others, it is so often described as a reaction to something Israel did to them — forget about their Jihadist goals.
This blame game is chased so far back you have an alarming number of critics claiming that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist at all. Scores of countries have declared their independence since Israel did, yet their legitimacy is never questioned. No other country’s legitimacy is disputed by activists, NGOs or the media.
The problem with offhanded mentions of the “context” is that the real context actually requires thousands of hours of study to understand, and even then, there’s endless bias and misinformation to wade through and the truth is often obscured.
Given the challenges of truly understanding the complexities of a centuries-old conflict, perhaps we can keep things simple by saying this: rape is never okay, massacring children is never okay, intentionally targeting civilians is never okay, and if you think there’s any justification for what Hamas did on October 7 2023, you’ve lost any shred of decency you might have once had.
Pete Malicki is an Australian playwright, producer and business leader. He is not Jewish.
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