By Chris Hedges
Tuesday 5 August 2014
All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel
and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that
characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth;
it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is
diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the
occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives,
which we dutifully insert into our stories—required under the rules of American
journalism—although we know they are untrue.
I saw small boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza
refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic over the
loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw
stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened fire, killing some,
wounding others. I was present more than once as Israeli troops drew out and
shot Palestinian children in this way. Such incidents, in the Israeli lexicon,
become children caught in crossfire. I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets
dropped 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on overcrowded hovels in Gaza
City. I saw the corpses of the victims, including children. This became a
surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. I have watched Israel demolish homes
and entire apartment blocks to create wide buffer zones between the
Palestinians and the Israeli troops that ring Gaza. I have interviewed the
destitute and homeless families, some camped out in crude shelters erected in
the rubble. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists.
I have stood in the remains of schools—Israel struck two United Nations schools
in the last six days, causing at least 10 fatalities at one in Rafah on Sunday and at least 19 at one in the Jebaliya
refugee camp Wednesday—as
well as medical clinics and mosques. I have heard Israel claim that errant
rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or
that the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites. I,
along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have never seen
any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.”
There is a perverted logic to Israel’s repeated use of the Big
Lie—Große Lüge—the lie favored by tyrants from Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to
Saddam Hussein. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to
elicit—racism among its supporters and terror among its victims.
By painting a picture of an army that never attacks civilians,
that indeed goes out of its way to protect them, the Big Lie says Israelis are
civilized and humane, and their Palestinian opponents are inhuman monsters. The
Big Lie serves the idea that the slaughter in Gaza is a clash of civilizations,
a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic barbarism on
the other. And in the uncommon cases when news of atrocities penetrates to the
wider public, Israel blames the destruction and casualties on Hamas.
George Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called this form
of propaganda doublethink. Doublethink uses “logic against logic” and
“repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it.” The Big Lie does not allow
for the nuances and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is a
state-orchestrated response to the dilemma of cognitive dissonance. The Big Lie
permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous
and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort—a comfort they
are desperately seeking—in their own moral superiority at the very moment they
have abrogated all morality.
The Big Lie, as the father of American public relations, Edward
Bernays, wrote, is limited only by the propagandist’s capacity to fathom and
harness the undercurrents of individual and mass psychology. And since most
supporters of Israel do not have a desire to know the truth, a truth that would
force them to examine their own racism and self-delusions about Zionist and Western
moral superiority, like packs of famished dogs they lap up the lies fed to them
by the Israeli government. The Big Lie always finds fertile soil in what
Bernays called the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All
effective propaganda, Bernays wrote, targets and builds upon these irrational
“psychological habits.”
This is the world Franz Kafka envisioned, a world where the
irrational becomes rational. It is one where, as Gustave Le Bon noted in “The
Crowd: A Study of the Public Mind,” those who supply the masses with the
illusions they crave become their master, and “whoever attempts to destroy
their illusions is always their victim.” This irrationality explains why the
reaction of Israeli supporters to those who have the courage to speak the
truth—Uri Avnery, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Norman Finkelstein,
Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ilan Pappé, Henry Siegman and Philip Weiss—is so
rabid. That so many of these voices are Jewish, and therefore have more
credibility than non-Jews who are among Israel’s cheerleaders, only ratchets up
the level of hate.
But the Big Lie is also consciously designed to send a chilling
message to Gaza’s Palestinians, who have lost large numbers of their dwellings,
clinics, mosques, and power, water and sewage facilities, along with schools
and hospitals, who have suffered some 1,650 deaths since this assault
began—most of the victims women and children—and who have seen 400,000 people
displaced from their homes. The Big Lie makes it clear to the Palestinians that
Israel will continue to wage a campaign of state terror and will never admit
its atrocities or its intentions. The vast disparity between what Israel says
and what Israel does tells the Palestinians that there is no hope. Israel will
do and say whatever it wants. International law, like the truth, will always be
irrelevant. There will never, the Palestinians understand from the Big Lie, be
an acknowledgement of reality by the Israeli leadership.
The Israel Defense Forces website is replete with this black
propaganda. “Hamas exploits the IDF’s sensitivity towards protecting civilian
structures, particularly holy sites, by hiding command centers, weapons caches
and tunnel entrances in mosques,” the IDF site reads. “In Hamas’ world,
hospitals are command centers, ambulances are transport vehicles, and medics
are human shields,” the site insists.
“... [Israeli] officers are tasked with an enormous
responsibility: to protect Palestinian civilians on the ground, no matter how
difficult that may be,” the site assures its viewers. And the IDF site provides
this quote from a drone operator identified as Lt. Or. “I have personally seen
rockets fired at Israel from hospitals and schools, but we couldn’t strike back
because of civilians nearby. In one instance, we acquired a target but we saw
that there were children in the area. We waited around, and when they didn’t
leave we were forced to abort a strike on an important target.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, in a Big Lie
of his own, said last month at a conference of Christians United for Israel
that the Israeli army should be given the “Nobel Peace Prize … a Nobel
Peace Prize for fighting with unimaginable restraint.”
The Big Lie destroys any possibility of history and therefore any
hope for a dialogue between antagonistic parties that can be grounded in truth
and reality. While, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, the ancient and modern
sophists sought to win an argument at the expense of the truth, those who wield
the Big Lie “want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” The old
sophists, she said, “destroyed the dignity of human thought.” Those who resort
to the Big Lie “destroy the dignity of human action.” The result, Arendt
warned, is that “history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility.” And
when facts no longer matter, when there is no shared history grounded in the
truth, when people foolishly believe their own lies, there can be no useful
exchange of information. The Big Lie, used like a bludgeon by Israel, as
perhaps it is designed to be, ultimately reduces all problems in the world to
the brutish language of violence. And when oppressed people are addressed only
through violence they will answer only through violence.
Christopher Lynn "Chris" Hedges (born September 18,
1956) is an American journalist specializing in American politics and society.
Hedges is also known as the best-selling author of several books including War
Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) - a finalist for the National Book
Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction - Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy
and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), Death of the Liberal Class (2010) and his
most recent New York Times best seller, written with the cartoonist Joe Sacco,
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012).
Christopher Lynn Hedges was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the
son of a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Thomas Hedges. He grew up in rural
Schoharie County, New York, and graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School, a
private boarding school in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1975.
He attended Colgate University, where he received his Bachelor
of Arts in English Literature. He later earned a Master of Divinity from
Harvard Divinity School, where he studied under James Luther Adams. He was
awarded an honorary doctorate in May 2009 from the Unitarian Universalist
seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry, in Berkeley, California. He
speaks Arabic, French, and Spanish, and studied Latin and Ancient Greek at
Harvard.
