It is unlikely to have escaped anyone’s attention that, after being somewhat overshadowed by events of the ‘Arab Spring’ and the various permutations of Syria’s Civil war; Palestine is back in the headlines of Britain’s International and Middle East news pages. And what’s more, there has been something of a return to more positive language of peace and hope. We should not get over excited.
There are two prominent reasons for this shift that occurred this just this week. Examining them provides a useful insight into the way in which the media covers Palestine. First, on Monday night, the British parliament voted by a majority of 274-to-12 to recognise, albeit symbolically, “the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel as a contribution to securing a negotiated two-state solution.” This outcome was advocated for or applauded by a range of commentators (myself included) and also, predictably, led to a few head-explosions on the pro-Israel right wing.
Second, the launch of a new donor conference to help ‘reconstruct Gaza’ took place in Cairo on Tuesday. As one would expect the conference was replete with all the standard fair: earnest speeches about peace, fancy pamphlets with visions of a more positive future and, of course, the promises of enormous amounts of money ($5.4 billion this time).
Moreover, perhaps in an effort to make up for the fact that the international community continues to avoid talking to Hamas – which runs the government in Gaza and is the only Palestinian faction than can make an even remotely reasonable claim to a democratic mandate – Ban Ki Moon, the General Secretary of the UN, promised “to listen directly to the people“.
It all sounds jolly good then! At face value the picture is a rosy one: the promised aid for Gaza amounts to far more than the estimated $4 billion worth of damage, the UN Secretary General will act as an intermediary between the people and the donors to ensure that the money is spent wisely and the UK Parliament has – by voting for recognition – done at least something to rectify its colonial legacy.
Schizophrenia
Yet I couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that the rosy outlook might be hiding a few thorns. There is evidently a mixed feeling in much of the mainstream press on how to cope with these events. While the Gaza conference is treated with the slightly cynical eye, the vote in the UK Parliament is presented as something that may have further, positive, consequences.
Of course, one can understand why it is that these events are being dealt with in this way. In terms of Gaza’s reconstruction we have definitely been here before. After Israel’s 2008-9 bombardment of the strip, labelled “operation Cast Lead” by the Israeli military establishment, a similar conference was held in Egypt (this time at the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh), similar statements were made and a similar amount of money was promised.
Then again after another bombardment during November 2012, the UN Secretary General went back to Egypt (to meet the then President Morsi) and while there was no specific conference with promises of aid – the same language of peace and moderation was uttered by political leaders around the world.
Indeed, as Akiva Eldar neatly pointed out in al-Monitor, so profound are the similarities that one could read descriptions of previous conferences and easily confuse them with 2014!
But while, of course, it is easy to burst the bubble of positivity around the Gaza conference by doing such simple, but invariably annoying, exercises – that is: recalling basic historical fact – the issue of the UK parliament’s vote is a bit more difficult to deal with.
While much of the media coverage has of course noted the non-binding nature of the vote, the fact that it comes only after most of the rest of the world has already recognised Palestine, and noting a slew of Israeli objections, there is certainly an air of positivity in most analysis.
Why is it then, that two different events that occurred within the same week, involving the same key actors (the Israelis, the Palestinians and the ‘international community’ – embodied by the UK parliament in the case of the vote) and taking place within broadly the same political context, can be understood as essentially separate issues?
By way of example, consider The Economist, a solidly mainstream British newspaper, which published two different articles this week: one on Gaza, which expressed a bleak outlook on the unlikeliness of change – the take away quote of which was “a senior Israeli politician recently warned that donor investments ‘will go down the drain’ as soon as a rocket is fired. Nobody is willing to bet that will not happen again” – and a second on the UK vote which was much more positive about the future.
Clearly, if one is not careful, after reading these (and similar) articles one after the other one can find oneself trapped in some kind of – headache inducing –conceptual paradox: the conflict is simultaneously intractable yet resolvable; the future is simultaneously rosy yet bleak; unstoppable progress is being made toward ‘peace’ yet, at the same time, we are forced to start again from the beginning.
Tokenism
One obvious different between the reporting on the two events is that those more sober analyses of the aid conference for Gaza cannot help but be tempered by acknowledging the context of recent history and the utterly miserable situation of conditions in the Gaza Strip.
On the other hand, very few of the reports about the vote have taken into account the political context of this issue beyond the superficial. Indeed, instead of merely recognising the obvious – that the UK vote was preceded by Sweden’s recognition of Palestine or the legacy of Balfour – a deeper analysis would have interrogated questions like: what kind of ‘state’ the is being ‘built’ in the West Bank (with donor support)? How does this vote tally with the £39 billion worth of arms the UK sold to Israel in the last three years? and it would have noted that just weeks before this vote the UK parliament elected to bomb another Arab country, Iraq, for the sixth time in less than 100 years (in 1920, 1941, 1991, 1998, 2003 and 2014)!
The fact that it is possible to look at the vote, without examining its context in much detail and, by so doing, get a sense of positivity out of the news is probably significant in itself, but it probably tell us more about our role as observers (and the media’s role in story telling) than it does about the actual facts of the matter.
Indeed it seems to me that it is rather like the kind of uncritical view point that is necessary to take when one watches Hollywood movies, or various sitcoms, especially ones that – despite being targeted at ‘default white‘ audiences, by a predominately white-male creative industry – utilize a few racialized actors in supporting/minor roles in order to present a false image of diversity.
Indeed, the dictionary definition of tokenism is “the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing” (a fantastic example video of how this, and other shallow representations of ‘the other’, work in TV and film is available via the Sociological Cinema).
In the world of film and television, such a practice has a very clear purpose, to “give the appearance” that both the show’s creators, and its audience, are better people than they actually are. It is to present a world that is nicer, easier, and less riddled with prejudice and unfairness than the real world actually is.
Indeed, this is exactly how the critical issues of our time can get lost in popular culture; by the fact that the complex and difficult reality (for example, of, racism and/or inequality) are overlooked in favour of hackneyed, often two-dimensional, tropes.
In the context of Palestine, the artificial narrative that we’ve created and, in many cases, the media continues to swallow-and-regurgitate is that the Palestinian ‘State’ can really, eventually be made (and made ‘free’) through gestures such as non-binding resolutions and tired political speeches while also distracting us from the real issue that Israel’s power to occupy, colonise and bombard not only remains unchecked, but is actively supported by the UK arms industry and funded by the UK’s closest ally.
Of course voting for the motion was the only reasonable answer to the question being posed on Monday night and of course Gaza must be rebuilt. But if we really want to be honest about the issue then we need to drop the façade that such gestures are meaningful at all without real change in the broader dynamics.
We need to stop being schizophrenic, stop being tokenistic and demand real change to those UK policies that enable the perpetuation of Israel’s occupation, colonisation and the PA’s authoritarianism.
Dr Philip Leech is a visiting research fellow at the Council for British Research in the Levant. He is on twitter @phil_haqeeqa and his academic profile is available at academia.edu.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
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