How Israel Manipulates People Through Atrocity Propaganda.

How Israel Uses Emotional Manipulation To Manufacture Consent For Their Atrocities.

Pictured Above: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holding up a picture of the Bibas family.

The main story written about Israel and Palestine lately in mainstream media has been the fate of the Bibas family, a mother (Shiri Bibas) and her two children (Ariel and Kfir Bibas) who were taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th and died while in captivity.

But why are we hearing so much about this story now, and why is the fate of these three civilians being focused on so much more than those of the countless Palestinian civilians killed by Israel?

In this article, I will discuss how it fits a pattern of Israel teaming up with Western governments and the mainstream media to use atrocity propaganda to justify support for Israeli atrocities.

Worthy Vs. Unworthy Victims

In Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s famous book “Manufacturing Consent,” they wrote about how the mainstream media looks at “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. The “worthy victims” are the victims of official Western enemies who are written about endlessly and the “unworthy victims” are the victims of Western government and their allied client-states.

In the case of Israel and Palestine, the mainstream media has created a propaganda system where they write personal and emotional narratives around Israeli civilians who are killed while not doing the same for the endless number of Palestinian civilians killed.

Journalist Hamza Yusef recently spoke with insiders at mainstream media outlets across the spectrum in the UK and this trend came up continuously.

One BBC reporter told Yusef that the network had:

a deliberate focus on Israelis who lost their lives and their hostages, with reporters naming them and developing narratives about them which were very sympathetic and humanising, yet there was no such treatment for the Palestinians.

That same reporter also said that:

When I pitched a piece about a Palestinian whose family was caught up in the destruction of Gaza, I was immediately told we also had to find an equivalent Israeli story. It was an admission that focusing on the suffering of Palestinians didn’t merit a story item of its own.

This trend is especially clear in the case of the Bibas family.

The United Nations found that 70 percent of people killed by Israel in Gaza are women and children. They also found that the group of people most targeted were five to nine-year-old children and that 80 percent of people killed were inside a residential building.

The same is true of the brutal blockade Israel placed on Gaza, which former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant justified by calling Palestinians human animals.

This blockade- which Gallant bragged was “a complete siege on Gaza” and included “no electricity, no food, and no fuel” for Gaza- led to one in four Gazans starving, according to the UN. The UN also found that it caused nine out of ten families in Gaza to spend 24 hours without food.

The Integrated Food Phase Classification also found that the blockade caused one in every four households in Gaza to experience “famine-like conditions” and that it would eventually lead the entire population of Gaza to “face crisis levels of acute food insecurity”.

Multiple doctors on the ground in Gaza have also confirmed that Israel has intentionally shot children in the head and the chest.

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a doctor who has worked as a surgeon in war zones ranging from Ukraine to Haiti to Burkina Faso testified that:

nearly every day I was there (in Gaza), I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die

Initially thinking this was an anomaly, Sidhwa “asked other health care workers” and “found that dozens were seeing the same thing”.

Sidhwa spoke to 44 other healthcare workers in Gaza who “had seen cases of preteen children shot either in the head or the chest”.

Dr. Mohamad Rassoul Abu-Nuwar, another doctor working in Gaza testified that he saw “six children between the ages of 5 and 12, all with single gunshot wounds to the skull”.

Dr. Irfan Galaria, another doctor working on the ground in Gaza also testified that “Our team cared for about four or five children, ages 5 to 8 years old, that were all shot with single shots to the head.”

In all of these cases of Israel bombing innocent civilians, starving civilians, and targeting children with snipers, the mainstream media has not created a personal story.

Yet they create a narrative about the Bibas family. Because of the mainstream media, the public knows the Bibas family’s name while the endless civilian victims of Israel’s mass murder campaign remain unnamed numbers.

This creates the false impression that Isreali civilians are the real victims and thus manufactures consent for Israel to restart its genocide in Gaza.

Manipulative Atrocity Propaganda.

Aside from painting Israelis as “worthy victims” and Palestinians as “unworthy victims” the Israeli and Western governments along with the mainstream media also push endless atrocity propaganda in order to justify real Israeli atrocities against Palestinians.

They consistently reported on the Hamas attack on October 7th as an unprovoked atrocity without giving the context as to what led up to it.

In reality, Israel wanted Hamas to be in power so they could justify atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza. A 2007 WikiLeaks cable showed that Israeli intelligence chief Amos Yadlin admitted that the country would “be happy” if Hamas took power in Gaza “because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state”.

When Hamas eventually did take full control in Gaza, Israel used it as justification to in the words of top Israeli advisor Dov Weisglass- “put the Palestinians on a diet”.

This was referring to a brutal blockade placed on Gaza by Israel which caused 70 percent of the population to be unemployed, blocked clean drinking water, blocked electricity, and caused stunted growth in 10 percent of all children due to malnutrition.

The former UK Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that this brutal blockade turned Gaza into “a prison camp” and “an open-air prison”

Israel also intentionally sabotaged peace deals in order to justify this blockade. According to the private intelligence contractor “Stratford” Israel intentionally “forced the failure of negotiations by making unrealistic demands” in order to “appease U.S. and international pressure” against the blockade.

In 2018, when Palestinians attempted to peacefully protest this blockade in the “Great March of Return”, Israel responded by shooting 6106 demonstrators killing 183 of them and permanently wounding many others.

Netenyahu was even able to normalize with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco- without ending the blockade- through the Abraham Accords, thus sidelining Palestinians and signaling to them that Arab states would normalize with Israel without any concessions for Palestinians.

All of this context is left out of mainstream media reports on Gaza which pretend as if the October 7th attacks were just an unprovoked attack on civilians.

While Hamas certainly did commit atrocities against civilians on Ocotber 7th, the mainstream narrative exaggerates and misrepresents the situation as much as possible.

They claim that Hamas is responsible for every single Israeli death despite the now undeniable fact that Israel killed at least some of their own civilians that day.

In a recent interview, former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant admitted to issuing the “Hannibal Directive” on October 7th which the interviewer described as an order that “says to shoot and kill when there is a vehicle containing Israeli hostages”.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Hannibal order was given at the Erez border crossing (twice), the Re'im army base, and the Nahal Oz military outpost on October 7th.

The paper also reported that the order was given “to turn the area around the border fence (into Gaza) into a killing zone” and that “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza”.

ABC News reported that Israeli Air Force Colonel Nof Erez called this policy at the border crossing a “mass Hannibal” and admitted that Israel fired at “thousands of people in every type of vehicle, some with hostages and some without”.

The report also quoted an Israeli Air Force pilot who said “Twenty-eight fighter helicopters shot over the course of the day all of the ammunition in their bellies” and that “the frequency of fire at the thousands of terrorists was enormous at the start, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow their attacks and carefully choose the targets.”

The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth also reported that:

70 vehicles were destroyed by Israeli aircraft and tanks to prevent them from being driven into Gaza, killing everyone inside.

As journalist Asa Winstanley noted, given the fact that “some cars probably contained several (hostages)” this “could have easily resulted in hundreds of dead people”.

While avoiding the context that led up to it and ignoring the fact that Israel killed many of their own people on October 7th, the Israeli and Western governments and the mainstream media have spread outright false stories of atrocity propaganda around October 7th.

The most extensive of this has been the false claim that Hamas “mass raped women” on October 7th.

The Times Of London newspaper investigated this claim and found that “In all the Hamas video footage and all the photographs there were no depictions of rape”. Their investigation even included “hired a leading Israeli dark-web researcher to look for evidence of those images, including footage” who reported that “None could be found”.

The paper also found that the mass rape claims originated from the ultra-religious group Zaka, who were likely repeating what they had read in religious scripture. As the paper wrote:

They (Zaka members) have read a lot of Jewish texts that depict the raping of women. These texts kind of reappear again and again in Jewish stories and they reappear every time there is a major event against Jewish communities.

Recently Moran Gez, the Isreali prosecutor focused on October 7th admitted that “we don't have any complaints” of rape happening on October 7th. She admitted that her team had “approached women's rights organizations and asked for cooperation” but that “they simply weren't contacted” by any alleged victims of rape.

She even admitted that it “will be very difficult to prove these offenses” and that the mass rape claims “will not be able to meet the threshold of proof in court”.

The mainstream reporting on the Bibas family is likely a similar manipulative use of atrocity propaganda.

Hamas, for their part, has said that the Bibas mother and children were actually killed in an Israeli air strike.

This has yet to be proven, but given the aforementioned documentation of Israel killing its own civilians, it would come as no surprise.

This would not fully absolve Hamas, taking civilians hostage is still a war crime, even if they were killed in an Israeli air strike.

But Israel is yet again repeating evidence-free atrocity propaganda. The Israeli spokesman Daniel Hagari has claimed -without evidence- that Hamas “killed them (Bibas family) with their bare hands” and “committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”

Hargari cited unnamed “forensic findings” to back up this claim.

However,it was refuted by the Bibas family themselves. In a statement, the family said that “Any publication of details (of the family’s death) is against the family’s wishes, and we ask that this be avoided,” noting that “The family has not received any such details from official sources”.

Furthermore, the more important point is that Israel could have had all of their hostages home and chose genocide instead.

As the former Israeli spokesman Haim Rubinstein revealed

We later found out that Hamas had offered on October 9 or 10 to release all the civilian hostages in exchange for the IDF not entering the Strip, but the (Israeli) government rejected the offer

Don’t Fall For It Again

The propaganda about the October 7th attacks was repeated again and again in order to justify one of the worst atrocities in recent memory, the Isreali mass murder campaign in Gaza which Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called a genocide.

Now at a time when Netanyahu is again trying to “force the failure” of the current ceasefire negotiations, his government along with its backers in Western governments and mainstream media is focusing on and making unsubstantiated claims about the Bibas family in order to manipulate people into supporting a second phase of the genocide.

---

Note to readers: The Dissident is a reader-supported outlet. If you liked this article consider becoming a paid subscriber.