The Truth is what They Make It: Discourse Control and the Ongoing Gazan Genocide
An article written for a rhetorical theory class in fall of 2023; my apologies for any dated references. Please consider donating directly to families with the link at the end of the article.
…in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion.
- Gorgias, Encomium of Helen
Logos is a zoon.
-Jaques Derrida, Dissemination
Israel's ongoing siege of Gaza, a tragedy sparked by a deadly invasion of Israel by Hamas fighters on October 7, 2023, has generated (or, more aptly, made visible) the highest worldwide concentration of Zionist propaganda I have seen in my lifetime. It is also the most horrific display of state violence that I have witnessed—I was alive during the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, though I was not old enough to see beyond the overwhelmingly propagandic, reductionist discourse surrounding the United States’ war on terror following the 9/11 attacks. However, as I have grown and learned, I have become convinced of the amorality of American neoliberal dealings in the Middle East; convinced of the impetus for control of developing nations being resources and ideological alignment—two large reasons for Biden’s ardent support of the occupation of Palestine. I have become emotionally attached to this issue, as I have spent the last two months bearing witness to firsthand videos depicting the terrorizing of Gazans. I feel it impossible and disingenuous for me to write a paper for a rhetoric class about anything else at the moment, so here is the organization of my thoughts and research: an epideictic (and sometimes deliberative) rhetorical analysis and contextualization of the discourse surrounding the atrocities unfolding in occupied Palestine. Though the breadth of the topic is overwhelming, and the geopolitical nuances too numerous to stuff into the page limits for this paper, I have committed myself to writing about it regardless, as the influence of discourse and rhetoric in the direction of justice, no matter how small, is a form of praxis. I am harnessing kairos by writing about this topic while it is still unfolding with the goal of convincing readers to challenge their perceptions of the situation; my exigence lies in the undeniable historical significance of this moment, and the worldwide effects it will continue to have; and my constraints are the guidelines of this assignment and the flak that has been cast upon dissenters of the modern Zionist project. The intent of this paper is to explore the order of discourse and ideological control surrounding the genocide of Gazans through the lens of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, to explore the faulty rhetoric of the Israeli, and by proxy, United States, propaganda surrounding the occupation of Palestine, and to place several specifically relevant documents and speeches under the rhetorical microscope to better understand the discourse they influence and are influenced by.1
First, for the purposes of this paper, we must define rhetoric. The introduction to Patricia Bizzel et. al.’s textbook suggests several definitions, though it ultimately states that the definition is fluid and amorphous depending on the context (Bizzel et. al. 1). This paper will primarily treat rhetoric along two definitions provided by the text: “The use of language, written or spoken, to inform or persuade,” and “the use of empty promises or half truths as a form of propaganda” (1). However, to gain a third definition more specific to my purposes, using another primary source to help focus this paper’s use of rhetoric will be helpful. Michel Foucault suggests rhetoric as the substance of discourse; discourse being the “thing for which and by which there is struggle… the power which is to be seized” (II). In other words, the study of rhetoric as the tool by which we convince others of our stance is synonymous with the study of discourse, and therefore, the study of state rhetoric and the study of state discourse control are inextricably linked topics. All discourse is rhetorical, as all statements are concerned with convincing the other of one’s meaning.
Foucault’s lecture “The Order of Discourse” is a vital tool in understanding the way “truth” is willed, constructed, and discursively reinforced by those in power. Foucault asserts that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality” (II). Foucault uses the example of the madman’s speech not carrying the same weight as others to bring up the idea of exclusion, where those who engage in unacceptable forms of discourse, subscribe to unacceptable ideologies, or proffer unacceptable identities are excluded from the discourse altogether. This works as both a powerful deterrent of dissent (as all of us humans long for group inclusion) and as a powerful mode for constructing truth. Foucault defines the “will to truth” as a “prodigious machinery designed to exclude,” or, to fish up a useful term, “a system of exclusion” (II). This system is wrought by a post-sophist metaphysics, where the “will to know,” a system where knowledge had to be invested in to be verifiable and useful, gave way to the will to truth, a system where the powerful decide and constantly reinforce which discourses are valid and true: the will to truth, “like other systems of exclusion, rests on an institutional support” (propaganda and the threat of social exclusion are two primary modes of institutional support) (II). An example of this creation of truth is, specifically in the case of the United States, the codification of economic practices as morality. This type of societal narrative (or “goal of work,” as literary critic Northrop Frye defines it in his book The Anatomy of Criticism) is universal for all modern societies and must be ritualistically reinforced at all levels (the scientific, the literary, the colloquial, etc.), but most relevant to my purposes, through propaganda. One must subscribe to this societal narrative, recognize its truths, subscribe to its doctrines, and ultimately conform to its validated discourses to enter a discussion of its politics. This situation—this requirement of “doctrinal allegiance”—excludes unassimilable statements from the conversation and homogenizes discourse on a topic into a propagandically controlled narrative (critical statements about Israel’s crimes are often met with accusations of antisemitism and doxxing) (IV).2 Lastly, I must go backwards in Foucault’s text to reinforce my own job as cultural commentator: to contribute to “the infinite rippling of commentaries,” to say what is articulated beyond the accepted discourses, and to ultimately expose myself to the exclusion reserved for those who oppose the so viciously constituted Zionist ideology that allows the United States to send hundreds of billions of tax dollars to Israel in support of its genocide of Palestinians.
The powers that organize and redistribute discourse can be as complex as the society that is being observed, though it can be said for the purposes of this paper that this power is in the hands of those who control what Louis Althusser calls the Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser 1290). I would like to posit ISA’s as the primary arbiters of the “will to truth,” of discourse control, and of accepted forms of rhetoric on a given issue. The ISA’s are effectively limitless, though the ones that are the most relevant to this paper are the educational ISA and the communication ISA (which includes all mass media like newspapers, radio, TV news, social media, etc.). The concept of mass communications as an ISA is an important concept to establish early in this paper because this is the primary arena where discourse is controlled and propaganda is disseminated: only certain topics and certain rhetors who stick to the rigid discursive guidelines are allowed to speak to a mass audience on the Israel-Palestine conflict (those that are in support of Israel and condemn Hamas)—this point will be relevant later to my rhetorical analysis of Benjamin Netanyahu’s October 31st speech. As for the relevance of the educational ISA, Althusser asserts that “the ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production,” and that the educational ideological state apparatus has surpassed the church as the most influential ISA in the mature capitalist society: this is true and observable for both Israel and the United States. The educational ISA provides the individual a base-level indoctrination into society, as well as the ability to process enthymemes when participating in discourse: this is why we see so many of the same unsound points repeated again and again in Zionist propaganda—many of them originated in the history and social studies textbooks at the grade school level.
As we move on to the discussion of the Israeli textbook and its position as the primary ideological apparatus for indoctrination into the accepted discursive sphere, it is helpful to guide our inquiry by momentarily returning to Foucault, who asks rhetorically, “what, after all, is an education system, other than a ritualization of speech, a qualification and a fixing of the roles for speaking subjects, the constitution of a doctrinal group, however diffuse, a distribution and an appropriation of discourse with its powers and knowledges?” (1462). Along this logic, one can look to the Israeli history textbook as a source for the populace’s indoctrination into an attitude of Israeli exceptionalism and acceptance (and, in some cases, support) of constant settler-colonial violence against their Arab neighbors.3 One can also infer that this state-prescribed Zionist historiography is an example of one possible inception for the rhetorical appeals that I will identify in Netanyahu’s speech—rhetorical appeals that are consistent through many fallacious defenses of Israel’s crimes against, and dehumanization of, Palestinians. Eli Podeh offers a concise and objective study on the lifespan of the Israeli history textbook and its importance in shaping a national identity. Podeh divides state-approved textbook content into three phases. The first generation is dated approximately from 1948 until the mid-1970s, which traces the span of time between the Nakba and an uptick in state-supported israeli settlements in Palestinian territory; this phase is characterized by dense narrativization by state officials driven by emotional appeals (a running theme in radical Zionist rhetoric) and the primary aim of “instilling zionist values” in students (Podeh 69, 75).4 The second generation is placed between the mid 1970s to 1992 in accordance with new curricula instituted by the ministry of education, and addressed problems with the first generation by including more maps, abandoned passionate rhetoric, and allowed authorship by university affiliated bodies, though their texts still had to go ministerial review (70). The third generation, which Podeh claims is too new to make a judgment call on, is still in circulation, and addresses many of the issues abundant in the first and second generations (70). For the purposes of this paper, which focuses on the propaganda disseminated by Netanyahu-era Israel, it is most important to focus on the era that influenced Netanyahu’s generation.5 This era is primarily the first generation, which was dominated by the nationalist school of thought (which is still massively influential in the latter generations) at the direction of Ministry of Education leader Mihael Ziv, who, in direct reflection of the aforementioned Foucaldian and Althusserian theories of indoctrination, believed the teaching of history to be a legitimate tool of the state and that history should “aspire to instill in the young specific values, direct them toward a particular point of view and encourage them to adopt proper attitudes approved by society;” that history should “inculcate in the student a strong sense of responsibility for the future” (quoted by Podeh 71). Mihael Hendel, in criticizing the this nationalistic methodology of indoctrination through education, noted that history should not be “whitewashed” to exclude the “shadows that darken [the] nation’s history,” lest this approach “produce a generation of fanatics, who will use any and all means to achieve their narrow political goals, who have no sympathy toward or understanding of their neighbors” (quoted by Podeh 73). Nonetheless, the first generation of textbooks, stylistically “laden with pathos,” were of an era where settler colonialism carried less of a negative connotation and state leaders were proudly transparent about Israel being a colonial project. This trend led to the dehumanization of the Arab individual with terms like “savage,” “sly,” “cheat,” “thief,” and, most importantly for this essay, “terrorist,” while depicting Israel’s history as one of long term antisemitism and under constant assault (Podeh 76). This hyper-defensive attitude was one Bibi and his father, Benzion Netanyahu, have proven to be affected by, and, as we will see, is apparent in the rhetoric of Bibi’s milieu.6 Lastly, Podeh identifies—through analysis of a quote from National Religious Party leader Zevulun Hammer, where it is claimed that Arab leaders intend to “destroy [Israel] through a long and continuous process of assimilation,”—a tendency for radical Zionist leadership in Israel to place blame on their perceived enemies (this is a relevant rhetorical tactic we will see later), reducing complicated situations to a matter of good and evil. This ideology, tested and refined in textbooks, has been appropriated by Israel supporters in the US and worldwide via propaganda. To end this section of contextualization, I will invoke the theory of “Metaphors We Live By” by Lakoff and Johnson, which asserts the vast rhetorical power of “metaphorically structured” language, and the specific effectiveness of the war metaphor in rhetoric, which is the lifeblood of effective propaganda.
I would like to take an aside now to briefly contextualize the place of Israeli propaganda in American media, and why fallacious rhetoric is so pervasive in American mass media, which has proven time and time again to be biased in support of the Zionist project. Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman is a valuable resource to move towards a more nuanced understanding of why this is. A supplemental answer for why the American media so constantly feeds propaganda to its people is simple: mass media serves “to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state and private activity,” and, in logical connection to the aforementioned theories of Foucalt and Althusser, serves to indoctrinate the populace through rhetorical deployment of carefully curated discourse into acceptance of the willed truths that serve the dominant systems (Chomsky et. al., lviiii). The evidence of this media system provided in Manufacturing Consent abounds. According to many sources, just two dozen firms control nearly the entirety of media consumed by the majority of US citizens, which leads to the logical conclusion that “the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse” (xiii, lviiii). This issue of powerful shareholders’ ability to influence what is shown on the news is a conflict of interest paralleled with the issue of “media companies’ dependence on and ties with the [US] government” (via media licenses), and thus, to tailor this to our purposes, the Israeli government (13).7 It is also vital to understand that most media corporations “depend on diplomatic support for their rights to penetrate foreign cultures with U.S. commercial and value messages and interpretations of current affairs,” and that news media giants, in their gross entanglement with advertising agencies and multinational corporations, have a shared interest in the “climate of investment in the Third World,” interests that are symbiotic with the government (14).8 The elephant in the room here, in terms of the discourse surrounding Israel and Palestine in 2023, is the two intertwined, utmost concerns of the US capitalist machine: that of oil in the Middle East, and that of the military industrial complex, two markets that actively benefit from the discursive support of Israel’s crimes against humanity. For instance, Chomsky et. al. note that “large corporate advertisers will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as… the military industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third World tyrannies” (17). Ergo, the dominant media sources refuse to engage in meaningful discourse about Israel, as such programming would threaten the invisibility (in the eyes of the layman) of the military industrial complex, and of the reality of Israel as a proxy for US power in the Middle East.9 It is easier instead for pundits to sophistically pander to the emotions of the average viewer by condemning Hamas above all, misrepresenting/underreporting Israel's war crimes, and making the situation an issue of suppressing terror rather than understanding the Hamas attacks, seeing Israel’s assault on Gaza as a genocide, and understanding that western terror often predicates eastern terror. It goes without saying that ideological control is also at play here, as we will continue to find as a primary theme when talking about Zionist propaganda (Islamophobic fear-mongering has become the 21st century version of anti-communist fear-mongering in the Cold War era—more on this type of “flak” later). What is important to glean from this media-government-global economy entanglement is an explanation for why the media considers some victims worthy and others unworthy. Worthy victims (in this case, the 1,200+ Israeli civilians killed and/or kidnapped by Hamas on October 7) are featured “prominently and dramatically” and humanized with a rigorous story that will strike sympathy into the hearts of the viewing populace; unworthy victims (in this case, the 15,000+ Palestinian civilians, more than half of which were children, killed by the IDF in response) only merit “slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage” (35). American media, when it comes to Gaza in 2023, is thus unconcerned with the value of human life at face value—it is instead instead concerned with upholding its willed truths, the “truths” that support capitalist interests; any and all dissent to this truth is threatened with what Chomsky et. al. define as flak, which is the negative response to dissent, the most important example of which on the topic of Israel is doxxing, specifically coupled with the accusation of antisemitism.
Let us turn now to our first primary source for an example of this deterrence in action, one that is indicative of so many common rhetorical counters by Zionists: Canary Mission.10 Canary Mission is an organization whose mission statement is to document “individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond,” while remaining impartial to political affiliation. They cite a “rise in antisemitism,” as well as the global community’s right to know, as their impetus for aggregating profiles on individuals that they deem antisemites (canarymission.org). Before getting into my analysis, I must acknowledge the extreme rise of modern antisemitism: neo-nazism, modern fascism, and the far-right are currently in a renaissance, and hatred of Jewish people is an imminent threat to the fabric of just society. However, the conflation of the state of Israel with the entire Jewish diaspora is a logical fallacy all too common in Zionist propaganda, and the false-labeling of dissenters speaking out about Israel’s injustices only diminishes the visibility of that threat (the vast majority of people doxxed on the site as of late are people talking about Israel’s violence against Palestine). To begin our brief rhetorical analysis of this site, let us take a look at its rhetorical appeals in basic Aristotelian terms, taking into account both its linguistic and visual realms. CM appeals to authority with its well-designed website and logo, its academic language, and its use of the “canary in the coal mine” idiom (the so-called “antisemites” which the organization doxxes are the canaries that signal the rise of antisemitism)—justice, as a core tenet of western morality, is always authoritative. CM appeals to logos (its least effective rhetorical strategy, as fallacies abound), for one example, by conflating Israel with all Jews (the site often uses these two titles interchangeably, and constantly invoking antisemitism. CM’s appeals to emotions have crossovers with its other appeals, as hate is an inherently emotional subject, but stand out examples are all-caps headlines like “HARVARD & PENN STATE STUDENTS JUSTIFY HAMAS MASSACRE” or a heavily filtered image of Israeli apartheid protests with the byline “THE TRUE FACE OF ANTI-ISRAEL ACTIVISM,” both of which invoke the fear of an active threat to the reader’s safety; a lurking force looking to terrorize the status quo (canarymission.org). If the first headline is clicked on, one sees that CM believes justifying the Hamas massacre to be a logical interpretation of the intent of two student groups who call themselves “Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee,” and “Penn Students Against the Occupation of Palestine” (canarymission.org). Beginning with the “organizations” page, we will find a highly disturbing visual rhetorical appeal, one that, as mentioned before, diminishes the very legitimate rise in modern antisemitism: legitimate news outlets, anti-war coalitions, and social justice organizations being listed next to organizations like The Daily Stormer and davidduke.com, the former being a neo-nazi news outlet with a swastika in its logo, and the latter being the site of the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. If we turn to the pages representing “antisemitic” students, we see an unending list of young people (predominantly POC) who actively practice their right to free speech and organization, many of them are publicly affiliated with legitimate protest organizations groups like Jewish Voice For Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and others. I struggled to find a single person on their list that had actually participated in hate speech or hate crimes—every single page depicted a college student voicing their dissent for the violence against Palestinian civilians and/or condemning Israel for war crimes. The page on professors is more of the same. Many students and professors are accused of comparing Israel’s actions in response to the October 7 massacre to that of the Nazis when invoking the term genocide.11 CM specifically references the tenth item in The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) examples of modern antisemitism, namely that of comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. Let us now explore this further.
It is clear that an all-too-common appeal to logic and emotion in flak directed at dissenters of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is the accusation of “antisemitism,” a term that is often treated as an empty signifier by Zionists, and is often invoked in a logically inconsistent manner. An article by Moshé Machover titled “An Immoral Dilemma: The Trap of Zionist Propaganda” discusses the pitfalls of this rhetorical move, and ultimately deconstructs it entirely. To understand this, we must first set the stage: the zionist project is a project of colonization of Palestine, and it is precisely this fact that is avoided in modern conversations about Israel. Zionists of the past, active in a time where colonization was the norm and not seen as negative for western imperialist nations, were honest about their colonial aims, justifying the inevitable violence by a claim to biblical return, however, Zionists in the modern era—an era where colonialism has been accepted colloquially as negative—deny the accusation altogether (Machover 72). This shunting of the openly colonial roots of the Zionist project is only compounded upon by the foundational myth that the “Hebrew speaking settler-nation of Israel” represented by a population of Israeli Jews, is a nation that represents the entire Jewish diaspora—the only attribute shared by all Jews, Machover claims, is Judaism, “not the secular attributes of a nation in the modern sense of the word” (72).12 In this myth is the key to deconstructing the fallacious attack against dissenters of the zionist occupation of Palestine: that criticism of Israel is synonymous with generalized criticism of the Jewish people en masse, and is thus antisemitic. A rhetorical comparison of the 10th IHRA claim cited by Canary Mission in our previous example (comparisons of Israel and Nazi Germany are antisemitic) with the very next claim deconstructs the argument altogether. Machover begins by conceding that the comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany is rightly defined as a slur, but then challenges this claim by asking: who is this claim slurring? At worse, it is a slur against a state, Israel, and might upset the supporters of said state, but how, Machover asks, “can it possibly be a slur against the Jews, and hence anti-Semitic?”(75). Machover concludes that the “only way in which [this slur] could bear such an interpretation is if we hold all Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel,” which is implicit in nearly all accusations of antisemitism by Canary Mission (76). The final example in the IHRA’s list of antisemitic positions presents a damning contradiction of its own logic, claiming that “holding all Jews as collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” is anti-semitic. The natural conclusion we must draw is this: you can only take example 10 seriously “as an act of antisemitism”—rather than outrage directed specifically at the Israeli state—if you hold all Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state (76). But then “you are guilty of anti-semitism according to example 11, which is undoubtedly an instance of real anti-semitism” (76). Thus, the entire list of examples is antisemitic in itself and displays the flimsiness of Zionist propaganda: the package is deliberately constructed to defend the indefensible, heinous humanitarian crimes carried out by Israel against Palestinians.
Now that we have unwound some of the threads of discourse that enforce support of Israel’s apartheid and emerging genocide (though we have only just scratched the surface), I will now turn to a final rhetorical analysis of the speech Bibi Netanyahu gave on October 31: a speech intended for consumption by an enthymematicaly primed global populace predominantly informed on geopolitics through the propagandic screens of mass media and through the ideologically-charged historiography they were taught in grade school; a speech that presents Zionist propaganda in its simplest terms; a speech that aims to reaffirm the Zionist will to truth; a speech delivered with a straight face and the militarial confidence reserved only for the leaders of nuclear superpowers; a speech served as a garnish to a body count of over 8,500 innocent Gazans, half of which were children.13 The Kairotic nature of this speech is hard to overstate, as it is the speech of a propagandist at the helm of a highly contentious war; it is the speech of a man who must spin civilian casualties, lapses in state intelligence, and a fraught history of colonial violence into a narrative that will garner support for his cause. His audience is the world. His exigence is clear, and his restraints are formed by the body of rhetorical and cultural theory that I have presented thus far in this essay: he must stay true to the carefully codified rhetoric that his propaganda machine has been sculpting for many years.
Netanyahu begins by noting a “turning point,” where “we” must decide between “hope and promise,” or “tyranny and terror”. The language here is immediately fatalistic, setting a tone for the rest of the speech as one of existential importance, one of a battle between good and evil.14 The opening also immediately appeals to the audience’s emotions with the all-too-common allusion to terror being on the doorstep of the west while leaving out critical inquiry into the cause of that terror. After assuring the audience that Israel intends to continue fighting, Netanyahu assures the audience that “Israel did not start this war, Israel did not want this war, but Israel will win this war.” This simple appeal to authority simultaneously codifies Israel as a strong arm for stability in the Middle East (commonly cited as America’s primary impetus for support of the state) and sets them in the defensive position. If Israel is striving for “peace” in the region, and simply defending itself from a nefarious enemy that only wants to hurt it because of its connection to Judaism, then how could they be held accountable for war crimes? Netanyahu, in the same breath, invokes the arch-pathos for denizens of the 21st century: that the attack was the worst carried out against the Jews since the Holocaust. We see here a veiled reminder that, in the discourse enforced by Zionism, Jewish people and the state of Israel are synonymous, a claim that we have already revealed as false. Netanyahu then quietly suggests Hamas’s attack as a justification for Gazan genocide via more appeals to the audience’s emotions—Hamas “murdered children in front of their parents,” “burned people alive,” “raped women,” “beheaded men,” “kidnapped babies,” etc. The more gruesome the claims, however unsupported, the more justified the IDF is in its carpet bombing of civilians, civilians that Israel claims are unanimously supportive of Hamas’s leadership, even though a survey from Arab Barometer taken just before the Oct 7 attack confirms that a majority of Gazans actually did not support Hamas.15 Next, Netanyahu repeats the binaries that posit Israel as the ultimate good, invoking American war criminal George W. Bush by defining Hamas and its allies as “the axis of evil,” and the “enemies of civilization itself.” This stance, again, appeals to Israel’s authority as an unfettered source of good, and to pathos by exaggerating the threat of resistance to their apartheid state as a threat to civilization itself (perhaps it is, if “civilization” only refers to western domination). Netanyahu then prompts the audience, via a weak appeal to logic, to accept the IDF’s mass killings of civilians as a lesser “war crime” than Hamas’s, one that “accompan[ies] every legitimate war, even the most just war” (he must uphold moral authority by reminding the audience that his war is just). In identifying Hamas’s killing of civilians as “war crimes,” Netanyahyu is accidentally admitting the IDF’s actions as war crimes as well (they both killed civilians), all in the same sentence that he calls said actions “moral.” In simpler terms, if Hamas’s targeting of Israeli civilians is a war crime (it absolutely is), then Israel’s targeting of Palestinian civilians is also a war crime (with tenfold casualties). He goes on to list off Hamas’s war crimes, though one is important to identify: the use of civilians as “human shields.” This appeal to logos asks the audience to permit the killings of civilians as simply collateral damage, though the multiple bombings of UN centers and refugee camps with no evidence of Hamas activity negate this claim. These baseless rhetorical appeals appear throughout the accepted (pro-Zionist or, at best, Zionist-dismissive) discourse on the war in Gaza and are never given in concurrence with significant proof—the public is instead asked to blindly accept them, all because Israel represents good/hope/promise/right in its self ascribed position as the victim, a position that ignores a long and bloody history of colonial violence against Palestinians. Netanyahu later denies any possibility of a ceasefire in an appeal to the authority of the United States, the world’s greatest superpower and Israel’s most ardent supporter, and how it did not back down after Pearl Harbor or 9/11. By comparing Israel’s response to that of the United States, who responded to Pearl Harbor, ultimately, with the first dropping of a nuclear bomb on a civilian center (a war crime in that it is collective punishment), Netanyahu is only confirming the grievousness of his own war crimes.16 Finally, Netanyahu tells the world that it is time for “everyone to decide where they stand.” Here, after positing the conflict as all but an existential threat to the west, he uses exigence to his advantage by urging the audience to take the side of good or evil, implying that by not taking Israel’s side, they are in support of an evil of existential proportions. By directing the discourse on Israel’s actions as a defense of the whole world as the audience knows it, Netanyahu intends to diminish the impact of his military’s genocidal actions and to will the truth to Israel’s favor. It is the world’s job now to decide whether they buy it or not.
Drawing this essay to a close is a difficult task. I have written and rewritten conclusions, some dwelling on the importance of rhetorical analysis when trying to make sense of topics like these, some attempting to predict the future of this discursive crisis, and some that desperately attempt to search for hope. What I have found in my hours of research—hours of forcing myself to bear witness to the horrors unfolding in the Middle East—is that in nearly all modern humanitarian crises, the grubby hands of American investment and propaganda can be found lurking in the background, puppeteering the oppression of populations deemed unworthy of humanity. It is—it must not be forgotten—American-made missiles that are the instruments of Israel’s crimes against humanity. From this, I have found myself dwelling, endlessly, on the United States’ declining global influence. The US, fumbling its response to crisis after crisis, radicalizing its younger generations against itself, losing grip of its own absurd narrative, is reverting, as it has for the last century, to warmongering as a shot in the arm so that the empire might limp along for a few more decades. As the US potentiates more wars than it can handle (war with Russia over Ukraine, war with China over Taiwan, and war with the entire Arab world over Israel), as it ignores the hardships of its own people, as it ignores the overwhelming demands for a ceasefire in Palestine, as its talking heads lose their grip over their own rhetorical situation, as it stares another major economic recession in the face while sending billions of dollars overseas, what is it going to take for the empire to crumble? Are we witnessing the final decline of the United States empire? I think so.
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Works Cited
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This essay will deal mostly with this topic as it exists in the US, though Israel and the US—their state interests being highly interconnected—exist in the same sphere. This stands even without consideration of the American evangelical-right’s ardent support of Israel’s zionism, which is a topic that demands its own paper entirely.
Foucault also notes that “discourses must be treated as discontinuous practices” that are sometimes “unaware of each other” (VI). Transgressive discourses can exist in closed environments that are in opposition to prescribed truths—this is made even more relevant by discursive echo chambers created by algorithms though I will leave that discussion for another paper.
I want to be clear that my intention is not to generalize all Israeli citizens, but to identify a source of discursive control that will contextualize my later rhetorical analysis—according to Haaretz, support of Netanyahu has plummeted since the beginning of the 2023 war, both with his traditional supporters and the general populace.
“Nakba” roughly translates to “disaster,” and refers to scattered massacres and mass expulsions of Palestinians (many scholars refer to this as an early ethnic cleansing). An interactive timeline of the history of the region is useful here.
It is worth noting that Netanyahu was born in Jerusalem and moved to the US for high school, though the indoctrination of history texts is effective at the early grade school level, and this influence should not be ignored.
Benzion Netanyahu, Bibi’s father, was a self proclaimed propagandist and a leader in the territorially maximalist revisionist zionist movement who argued that allowing arabs to retain any land that jewish people had lived on at any point in the past would doom the zionist dream (Zouplna). It is notable that Benzion moved to New York to stir up American support for violent zionism in the middle east via propaganda—this is part of an observable pattern.
As of December 2023, the US has sent over $130 billion in military aid to Israel since the state’s inception, with nearly $15 billion of that having been sent since the genocide started (Axios).
The US government, Chomsky et. al. write, has a public information service that employs thousands and spends hundreds of millions per year, dwarfing the power of all dissenting public information groups combined (19). The populace trusts the government and corporate resources because of their prestige, and the government knows this. This phenomenon is called by Mark Fishman “the principle of bureaucratic affinity,” which is an obvious point of decay in the public efficacy of logos as a rhetorical strategy in exchange for flimsy ethos (19). Propaganda themes, garnering little criticism, become willed to truth.
In his essay “No Human Being Can Exist,” Saree Makdisi recalls having a guest appearance on a major US news channel canceled after sending in talking points that addressed meaningful humanitarian discourse about Palestine. He also was dropped as a regular guest for the BBC’s coverage of Palestine when he told an anchor that they were asking the wrong questions, and “that the questions that mattered had to do with history and context, not just what was happening right now” (Makdisi).
If this paper ends up published (whether by myself or another source), and I end up being doxed as an “antisemite” by the Canary Mission, I would like to use this footnote to note the absurd irony of this happening, and how the very inclusion of this paper as an example of an antisemitic text only further proves my point.
While the ethics surrounding the “genocide” claim warrant careful and nuanced discussion, UN experts have been cited referring to Israel’s assault on Gaza genocide (ohchr.com).
It is important to add Machover’s example of the Jewish nationalist movement organized by the secular, Yiddish speaking, Eastern European Bund founded the same year the zionist movement began. The Bund called for national-cultural autonomy for this group within the nations that they already inhabited, nations whose populace that they formed a large portion of, sometimes even the majority of. The Bund was against the zionist project and made no claim to representing all Jewish people.
This good vs. evil rhetoric is consistent throughout Zionist propaganda regarding war against Arab populations, and has even reached levels of dehumanization. See: the since deleted tweet from Netanyahu’s X account where he calls the war “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle” (Snopes). The dehumanizing implications of this rhetoric, I hope, go without saying.
It must also be said that collective punishment, no matter how heinous the event it is in response to, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions (Geneva Convention IV, article 33).
Another instance of collective punishment.