A CNN article on July 5 reported on three incidents in Melbourne, Australia: Tentré Criminal Fire in a synagogue, a confrontation in a restaurant and three cars were burnt down near a business. The play was rare on the details of the alleged crimes and the identity of the authors, but he said that the company “was targeted by pro-Palestine demonstrators in the past”.
The fact that the author has chosen to confuse activism in support of the Palestinian cause with violent acts which are weak on the facts and raised on conjectures indicate the way in which Western media came to work. Media reports are increasingly binding by default acts of aggression to activism which they call “pro-Palestinian”.
Here are more examples: before the release of his name, we learned that an armed man shouted, “free and free Palestine”, in a shooting out of the shooting who killed two staff of the Israeli embassy outside the Jewish museum of the capital in Washington, DC, May 21 “.
When on June 1, an Egyptian national attacked demonstrators expressing the support of Israel in Colorado, the media also linked the incident to “pro-Palestinian demonstrations”.
The landing slowly on the term “pro-Palestinian” allows journalists to respect the editorial standards to reconcile. But brevity is not a fixed journalistic value. Precisely inform the public is.
The word “pro-Palestinian” has become a political stenography for a well-used and deceptive coupling: Palestinian plea and violence. Striped in the critical context, the term offers consumers of information a reductive explanation – a violent act distilled and opens bound to “Palestinian” entities as imagined and included through a narrow and distorted lens.
A failure to engage in contexts is not a neutral omission. It is rather an affront to knowledge processes and power structures that govern traditional journalistic narration.
What historical, cultural and religious statements do Palestinians make? Most consumers of information in the West are not prepared to answer this question. In an ecology of closed information, they rarely meet these affirmations in their entirety – or not at all.
Like many of those who followed the historic arc of all things in Palestine or who reported, I used the term pro-Palestinian myself. It seemed functional at the time: concise and apparently understood.
Now, however, this shortcut misled. Any word prefaced by “pro” requires honest review. When circumstances change and new meanings emerge, lines ending as anachronistic. We are in one of these moments – a circumstance which is the epicenter of the global opprobrium, humanitarian collapse and spectacular moral failure.
Describe activism and peaceful protests against genocidal violence in Gaza as “pro-Palestinian” is derogatory. Opposing the strategic famine of a trapped population is hardly pro-Palestinian. It’s pro-humanity.
Is it “pro-Palestinian” to call the end of violence that cost more than 18,000 children? Is it “pro-Palestinian” to call the end of the famine that killed dozens of children and the elderly? Is it “pro-Palestinian” to express the indignation against the parents of Gaza forced to transport parts of the body of their children in plastic bags?
The term “pro-Palestinian” operates in a false linguistic economy. He flatten a very uneven reality in a story of competing games as if occupied, bombed and displaced people were one side equal to one of the most advanced armies in the world.
Gaza is not a side. Gaza is, as a UNICEF official said, a “cemetery for children”. It is a place where journalists are killed for testifying, where hospitals are deleted and universities reduced in rubble, where the international community does not meet the minimum standards of human rights.
At a time of impatience with rigor, the “pro-Palestinian” is the rhetorical crutch that satisfies the manufactured need for an immediate alignment (Fandom) without critical thinking. It allows actors of bad faith to stigmatize dissent, reject moral clarity and delegitimize indignation.
To call Elias Rodriguez, who made the Washington shooting, DC, a “pro-Palestinian” shooter is a framing device that invites readers to interpret the words of Palestinian solidarity as potential precursors to violence. He encourages institutions, including universities, to confuse the advocacy with extremism and put a freshness on freedom of expression on the campus.
Obscuments in reporting, euphemism or rhetorical coverage conventions are the last things we need in the moment catastrophic. What is necessary is clarity and precision.
Let’s try something radical: let’s say what we mean. When people protest on the destruction of the line and the work of the soil in Gaza, they do not “take a side” in an abstract pro-end debate. They affirm the value of life. They reject the idea that the suffering of a people must remain invisible for the comfort of others.
If people plead for human rights, say it. If they believe that Palestinian life is worthy of dignity, security and memory, say it.
And if they call for the “release” of Palestine and use sentences like “free Palestine” – sentences loaded from decades of political, historical and emotional weight – which also deserves clarity and context. Liberation and freedom in most of these calls do not imply violence, but a request for freedom of occupation, siege, hunger, statelessness and killing and impunity.
The collapse of these various expressions in a vague label as “pro-Palestinian” blurs reality and deepens public misunderstandings.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.