The past fifty days have provided an ongoing reel of violence that will, forever, redefine how mass death is consumed, absorbed, and disseminated moving forward.
The still images of Palestinian death, only trumped in horror by the streaming video capturing it, stands as a morbid sort of currency peddled by Israelis to show off their military might and Palestinians to illustrate their long-overlooked victimhood.
These bodies – with charred skin and chopped off limbs – are digitally cropped, pasted, then posted onto virtual selling boards to make a case. A range of cases, but most prominently, the expression of Zionist might or the scale of Palestinian victimhood.
This is the blood trade currently pervading digital spaces, often exchanged in siloes within the very same platforms that seldom intersect. And far less often, interact meaningfully or constructively.
This blood trade is just as vibrant on terrestrial media, particularly western television, but wholly unequal. On prominent outlets like the BBC or the CNN, to cite two examples, the value assigned to Israeli death is immensely higher than the fatality of Palestinians, illustrated by the scale of coverage assigned to the latter and the flattening of the latter as footnotes to the story. This point is made even more lucid by the careful and beautiful detail mainstream media outlets dedicate to the Israeli tragedies associated with October 7, lawyered with layered vignettes about the victims and their family members.
The third-party humanization of the mothers and boyfriends, fathers and siblings of Israeli victims is often more developed that that of slain Palestinians, the very subjects of genocidal violence, dropping by the thousands in the Gaza Strip.
This crude valuation of human life stands as one of the ugliest faces of the propaganda wars rising from Gaza it. Wars where powerful states backed by even more powerful states, like Israel, sell uneven stories that affirm the humanity of their fallen citizens while systematically mowing down the existence of Palestinians.
A story that, not coincidently, reflects their apartheid societal order.
Wars where Palestinians, and the swelling legions rallying around their cause, wield the morbid images of mutilated children and their wailing mothers as weapons. Perhaps, their only weapons in a long propaganda war once only fought atop corporate media theatres that foreclosed Palestinian voices from them, or rendered them illegible. The rise of social media has destroyed the media monopoly held by television and radio, and thus, created new spaces for Palestinians and their allies to rally, raise their grievances, and rebut that their Palestinian lives have value.
This blood trade and the propaganda battles that feeds it is a war without end. It not only kills the people on either side of it in the literal sense, but through the emotional zeal that saturates it, kills seeing Israelis and Palestinians – and the complex heterogeneity of both – as human subjects instead of killing objects.
Even more violently, it kills the truth. And the important discourses that surround the genocide in Gaza that could have, fifty days before today, prevented the destruction of that land and the taken lives of 20,000 people.
The vapid but violent blood trade that only peddles one’s own victimhood misses the conversations that are worth having. Particularly for those of us living far from the bloodshed in Gaza, not unmade with the justifiable rage that comes with directly witnessing the death of loved ones and the destruction of one’s home.
Nuanced analysis is a privilege for those us watching Gaza from afar. But sadly, a privilege seldom exercised within the political or popular discourses.
The truth around the crisis in Gaza, and the limitless passages before it that precede the creation of the modern Israeli state and the occupation it spawned, is a tale that ties Jews and Palestinians at the very hip. A deeply rooted truth that, if properly reckoned with, provides a pathway toward an existential peace that is a mandatory prerequisite for its elusive political counterpart.
Antisemitism and Islamophobia, both rising prolifically as a result of the violence unfolding in Gaza, are kindred forms of bigotry. They are both, simultaneously, racial and religious forms of animus that envision Jews and Muslims as ethnically inferior and religiously suspicious.
The stereotypes ascribed to both are indeed distinct, but similarly oriented as lesser than the white and Christian benchmarks. This takes us to the common roots, white supremacy, both in its original European mold and American form that pushed narratives about Jewish conspiracy and Islamic terror.
An Islamic terror that, in its formative Orientalist template and modern Islamophobic frames, are wholly ascribed to Palestinians. Ascribed in the vulgar form of conflating every Gazan with Hamas and imposing the ultimatum of “condemning Hamas” or otherwise supporting them on every Muslim, collective punishment on every Palestinian in Gaza as justifiable and targeting Palestinian college students for wearing the kaffiyeh as justifiable forms of shared rage.
The cases of anti-Semitism are just as jarring. Manifested by swastikas on synagogues across Europe and the vile rhetoric rising across social media platforms. The tide of anti-Semitism in the west does not roll alone, joined by bigotry toward Jews coming from Arab, Asian and African nations.
If a genuine reckoning with bigotry is to be had, we must acknowledge its existence – in all forms – from beyond the prism of political interest and egotistical service. This is especially true for anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, where proponents of each often believe that they have to suppress the genuine threat of the other to state their case.
This is not only a fallacy, but a destructive symbiosis fueled most prominently by religious zeal, political opportunism, and most potently, white supremacy.
There are, again, critical distinctions between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. But even more urgently, discussions that need to be thoroughly reckoned with about how the two forms of bigotry not only rose from the same epistemological roots, but are rising again because of it.
White supremacy, then and now, infects a proper reckoning with Islamophobia and particularly anti-Semitism. The political distortion of both, particularly the latter, skirts past a vital baseline that has contributed to unseeing the genuine contours of anti-Semitism, and in turn, how it is has been weaponized to silence critics of the genocidal violence in Gaza.
Zionism, as presently construed, is infused with several of the most ominous tenets of white supremacy. What are these tenets? There is an undeniable colonial bent to it, buoyed by a foundational belief that its members hold identarian supremacy, reflected in a society where caste exists across religious, ethnic and racial lines – across and within the Jewish community – which positions Ashkenazi, or Jews with European ancestry, at the pinnacle.
While there are a myriad more, these are the salient baselines Zionism has adopted from white supremacy. They are enough for a starting point toward understanding how the political cooption of anti-Semitism by Zionism, as a bona fide form of racial and religious bigotry, undermines a genuine reckoning with it on several fronts.
First, as the ongoing saga in Gaza exhibits, Netanyahu believed that the terror of October 7th would equip him with limitless range to unleash horrific, disproportionate violence on the people of Gaza by using politicized anti-Semitism as both a shield and a sword.
Second, this orientation was brazenly Islamophobic. By orienting any critique against the siege of Gaza as presumptively anti-Semitic, Netanyahu and his abettors hypocritically peddled the most damaging stereotypes about Palestinians. Reifying trite Orientalist tropes and modern War on Terror stereotypes, the Israeli war-machine conflated Hamas with 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, caricatured men and women as “human animals” and justified the killing of thousands of children by shamefully dubbing them “human shields.”
Third, the very cornerstone of anti-racism is equality, and the categorical disavowal of caste. However, the latter was indelibly infused in the politicized anti-Semitism narratives peddles by Israel, the United States, western European nations, and their corporate media proxies. The valuation of victimhood was reflected by the perpetual charge that “Israel had a right to defend itself” to justify the genocidal violence on the political front, while mere Palestinian existence was viewed as offensive. On the media front, CNN and Sky News, the BBC and their transnational analogs invested considerable air time to the carefully humanize the plight of Israeli hostages and political personnel, while the faces and names of Palestinians were only cognizable on social media platforms. These latter digital spaces finally breathed life into Palestinian existence, honing in on the contour of aborted stories and dying babies, in turn elevating the role of Islamophobia within the political and media spheres.
Political power, and the quest for it, is the enemy of genuine knowledge. The politicization of hate to justify genocide, embodied by the imperial bloodthirst of Netanyahu, sadly gives rise to anti-Semitism by conjoining it with the violence we see on our digital timelines. By elevating it as a type of bigotry over other form, particularly the dehumanization of Palestinians rooted in Orientalism and Islamophobia, anti-Semitism imbibes itself with the color of caste that distances it from the cornerstone of equality the entire architecture of anti-racism is built upon.
By first acknowledging that the roots of both forms of bigotry is white supremacy, it becomes urgently clear that the only road toward justice – a prerequisite for peace – is a return to it. And upon making that return, reckoning with that exorcism to remove white supremacy from the anatomy of Zionism, and segregating it from the politicization of anti-Semitism that devalues its true essence.
This discourse, which only a few are willing to have and many more are too afraid to engage, is the only place where a genuine peace can begin from.
Khaled A. Beydoun is an author and law professor. He shares his insights regularly on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.
Excellently written discourse and knowledge, presented in a balanced and eloquent way. Thank you for sharing.