Bought Western leaders and media are helping bolster a propaganda narrative about the Jewish captives that makes the resumption of the Jews' slaughter of indigenous Christians and Muslims all but inevitable
By Jonathan Cook: The Jews sustained their Western puppet leaders' support for their slaughter of indigenous Christians and Muslims in Gaza for 15 months only through an intensive campaign of lies.
They invented particularly heinous Hamas war crimes, such as baby beheadings and mass rape, for which no evidence has ever been produced. Conversely, they played down their own, even graver war crimes in response to Hamas’ attack on IsRealHell.
With Hamas’ October 2023 crimes ever-more distant in the rear-view mirror, and Israeli crimes still all too visible in Gaza’s complete destruction – amounting to a “plausible” genocide, according to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – Israeli leaders have been desperately trying to shift attention to a fresh narrative battleground.
They need a new set of lies to justify resuming the slaughter. And as ever, the western establishment media are actively assisting.
Both Hamas and Israel are playing a predictable propaganda game, using the regular exchanges of Israeli and Palestinian hostages in the ceasefire’s first phase to seize the moral high ground.
Israel once again has all the cards, care of rock-solid western support, and yet once again it is failing to win the public relations war.
Which explains why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threw another of his temper tantrums at the weekend, this time blaming Hamas for stage-managing the release of Israelis in what he called “demeaning” and “humiliating ceremonies”.
Israel and its supporters were particularly incensed, it seems, by one of the captives, released on Saturday, beaming on stage as he warmly kissed two of his captors on the forehead.
On his walk to the handover with Red Cross staff, he put his arm around one of the captors’ shoulders in another moment of apparent affection.
Two other Israelis – up for release in the next round – were filmed watching from a car nearby, excited at the prospect of freedom and pleading with Netanyahu not to sabotage their release.
Blow up ceasefire
Predictably, western media, including the BBC, echoed Israel in suggesting these were somehow far more serious violations than Israel killing over 130 Palestinians since 19 January, when the ceasefire began, in hundreds of attacks on Gaza.
The media have similarly given fleeting coverage to Israel’s new wave of destruction, this time in the Occupied West Bank. Thousands of homes have been demolished, ethnically cleansing entire communities.
Western outlets have signally failed to note that these war crimes are also gross violations of the ceasefire agreement.
Now Netanyahu has exploited the apparent cosy relations between some of the Israeli captives and Hamas as a pretext to blow up the ceasefire before the second phase can begin next week. That is when Israel is expected to fully withdraw from Gaza and allow its reconstruction.
Buses carrying hundreds of Palestinian hostages due for release on Saturday were forced to turn back, returning them to their prisons. Even according to Israel’s own assessments, the vast majority of these Palestinians have not been “involved in combat“.
Many, including medical personnel, were seized off Gaza’s streets following the 7 October Hamas attack. They have been held without charge, tortured and subjected to barbaric conditions that Israeli human rights groups have compared to “hell”.
Genocidal slogans
It would be nice to imagine that Israel and its supporters were genuinely concerned that, in parading its captives in public, Hamas had violated their rights to dignity under international humanitarian law. But don’t be fooled – or foolish.
Even before Israel reneged on the hostage exchange, it had vowed that Palestinians would be subjected to their own forms of degrading treatment. They would be forced to wear T-shirts emblazoned with slogans supporting Israel’s genocidal actions against the people of Gaza.
And Israel’s supporters appeared none too concerned about the sensitivities of the 600 Palestinian hostages due for release on Saturday whose buses returned them to their torture camps in Israel just as they could scent freedom.
But in any case, Israel’s own hostages have been a low priority for Netanyahu from the outset.
If Israel really cared so much about them, it would not have carpet-bombed Gaza for 15 months.
Instead it would have grabbed the chance for a ceasefire and prisoner swap not last month – as it was forced to do under heavy pressure from incoming US President Donald Trump – but last May, when it was offered a deal on exactly the same terms.
If Israel cared so much for the captives, it would not have used US-supplied, 2,000lb bunker-buster bombs that not only destroyed huge swaths of Gaza indiscriminately but flooded the tunnels where many of the Israelis were being held with toxic gases.
If Israel cared so much for the captives, it would not have set up undeclared “kill zones” across Gaza, where Israeli soldiers shot anyone and anything that moved.
Three shirtless Israelis waving white flags of surrender were gunned down by Israeli troops in precisely such circumstances in December 2023.
Doing as it pleases
The Israeli captives are useful to Netanyahu and his slimy apologists only in so far as they help prop up a narrative that justifies genocide.
Cornered by Trump, the Israeli prime minister had calculated that securing the return of at least some of them was the price he had to pay – to placate the new US president and much of his own public – before he could resume the mass murder of Gaza’s children.
He has repeatedly made clear that he has no intention of moving towards a permanent ceasefire after phase one, the main prisoner exchanges.
For Netanyahu, the importance of the Israeli captives is solely in providing him with a route back to the genocide.
Hamas, on the other hand, has every incentive to use the small window provided by the release of the captives to suggest it is not the bogeyman of Israeli-engineered and western-enforced dogma.
It hopes its carefully managed releases show how much it is still in charge of Gaza, despite Israel’s destructive rampage.
And Hamas has reason to cultivate reasonable relations with the Israeli captives – not least to soften its image with foreign publics, and make it harder for Netanyahu to return to the genocide.
Israel, of course, has no such reciprocal incentive. As the far stronger party – one that, even before 7 October 2023, had been holding the entire population of Gaza hostage through a 17-year siege of the enclave – it can do as it pleases, secure in the knowledge that its claims will never be subjected to proper scrutiny by the western media.
Freed Palestinian prisoners testifying to their torture, sexual assault and rape – confirmed by international human rights monitors – have been simply ignored.
‘Stockholm syndrome’
Despite the odds being stacked in Israel’s favour, the differential realities are so stark that Israel is losing the propaganda war, nonetheless. Which is why Netanyahu has no interest in continuing the prisoner exchanges a day longer than he is required to.
The problem is that the captives released by Hamas are mostly not helping his cause. They are hindering it.
There was brief relief from Israel’s genocide apologists – noisily echoed by the western media – that one group of Israeli hostages released earlier this month looked nearly as pale and emaciated as the hundreds of Palestinian hostages released by Israel.
There was wall-to-wall outrage at the condition of this small group of Israelis, when there has been utter indifference to the even more wretched condition of freed Palestinians.
But in most cases, the released Israelis have looked reasonably healthy, especially given that Israel has been denying the entry of food and water into Gaza for 15 months and that most of the captives have had to be held deep underground to keep them safe from the Israeli bombing campaigns that have levelled almost all of Gaza.
Of even more concern to Israel, however, the captives have emerged mostly looking relaxed around their captors.
On the defensive, Israel’s supporters have dismissed these scenes as staged for the cameras or argued that the captives are suffering from severe “Stockholm syndrome” – a psychological condition in which hostages are said to identify with their captors.
Possible though this may be, it is difficult not to ponder why we have seen no Palestinian captives looking or sounding similarly affectionate towards their Israeli prison guards.
‘Little time left’
However western publics weigh the evidence before their eyes, it offers little in the way of succour for Israel.
These scenes between Hamas and the captives are hard to square with the still-dominant, and evidence-free, narrative presented by Israel – and recycled by western establishments – that Hamas are barbarians who behead babies and conduct mass rape.
In reducing Hamas simply to monsters, Israel’s goal was to dehumanise the entire population of Gaza – to justify its genocidal crimes.
And yet the scenes of the captives demonstrating a human connection to their Hamas captors make that idea harder to sustain.
If Hamas might not be quite as evil as western publics have been led to believe – if its members’ behaviour might be no worse than, or even better than, that of Israel’s soldiers and prison guards – what does that say about the reliability of western media coverage of the preceding 15 months of genocide?
And even more to the point, what does it say of our own western barbarism that our elected leaders have so casually accepted the murder of many tens of thousands – and possibly hundreds of thousands – of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in supposed revenge for Hamas’ 2023 attack?
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