A few of the factors that keep Israel standing are religion, the unfailing support of the West, its globally effective lobbying activities and the power of the media.By nature, propaganda relies partially on the exploitation and distortion of facts. Propaganda flips the truth around. When someone who possesses this power depicts a phenomenon, he provides an interpretive painting rather than taking a snapshot of it. Israel has become very apt at painting pictures.
Understanding how those who operate Israel’s propaganda machine portrayed the attack by the Israeli army on a ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza in international waters in the Mediterranean on May 31 and the resulting deaths and injuries is enlightening. It is important to understand how not only the bloody attack against the aid ship has been distorted but how biased images of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims in general have always been presented to the world.
As an example, there’s an article that appeared in The Jerusalem Post on June 1. The article was written by Zvi Mazel, Israel’s former ambassador to Romania, Egypt and Sweden.
According to Mazel, the six ships that aimed to bring humanitarian aid (solely food, medicine, toys, and construction materials) to Gaza were part of a fairly comprehensive plot against Israel and Israel’s security. He notes that the intention of those involved in the campaign was not to bring humanitarian aid to people in need in Gaza but to drive Israel into a corner by using aid and peace as a pretense. “They wanted to carry out their joint Arab-European propaganda offensive against Israel in order to delegitimize the Jewish state, deepen its isolation and provoke an international outcry,” he writes and adds “These ‘peace militants’ carefully planned their ambush. After having said repeatedly that they would only pose passive resistance, they attacked the soldiers who boarded the ship with guns, iron bars and knives and led to the dire results they were looking for.”
Mazel basically points to a reflex that any person or any animal for that matter would show in the face of an attack also known as the reflex of self-defense, as a “reason to kill.” As a result people who scattered around and tried to defend themselves with knives, forks, spoons and sticks are presented by him as having shown armed resistance. That’s not all. Mazel also says:
“Did Israel have a choice? It had to stop the flotilla since no one knew who the people on the ships were and what exactly they carried. Had the ships been allowed to go through, others would have followed, perhaps bringing weapons (and who knows, maybe terrorists) to Hamas, a terrorist organization which has made its intent to destroy the Jewish state clear.”
The image Mazel is trying to impose on us with his depiction of the events does not reflect the truth. In simple terms the incident was an attack by Israel on civilians and ships carrying food, medicine and construction material to Gaza in international waters. There were citizens from 33 countries that were hit by the attack but the target was Turkish citizens who were on the ship named Mavi Marmara. Many people were killed and wounded in the attack. This was a civilian massacre, and the use of forks and knives and sticks by the passengers so as to defend themselves against the attack cannot be a legitimate excuse for this massacre.
But if an Israeli diplomat can predicate the excuse on this, then it gives us the right to re-examine Israeli attacks and killings against Palestinians and Arabs. Palestinians launch stovepipe-type Qassam rockets and then Israel starts massacring civilians. This was Israel’s excuse when between December 2008 and January 2009 it killed 1,410 Palestinians in Gaza, of which one-third were children and one-third were women and old people and dropped phosphorus shells on homes.
