Israel's Disproportionate Violence in Gaza: Killing '7 October Israel Sympathy' in the World Community
Kenneth Waltz, in his work, defends a single common view in all his interpretations of the genesis of war at different times. According to him, "anything" can cause war. From this point of view, the Israel-Hamas war could have erupted for any other reason, even if the Hamas massacre on 7 October had not occurred.
Is There Any Sense Left in Why the Israel-Hamas War Occurred?
While the classical realists explain war by the shortcomings of human nature and the desire to gain power, the neorealists, who feed on the shortcomings of this theory, take their explanation of the cause of war one step further and explain the situation with the "anarchy" in the international system and the absence of a "higher authority" to stop war in the system of states. Marxism, on the other hand, sees the cause of war as a natural consequence of imperialism and capitalism.
Kenneth Waltz, in his work, defends a single common view in all his interpretations of the genesis of war at different times. According to him, "anything" can cause war. From this point of view, the Israel-Hamas war could have erupted for any other reason, even if the Hamas massacre on 7 October had not occurred. However, for the warring parties, the concepts of 'just war, legitimacy' require each nation and nation-state to attach more importance today than in the past, considering the influence of mass media on the masses in today's world. In this sense, Israel had the opportunity to start a just and legitimate war, and in fact, Hamas offered this psychological superiority to Israel on a golden platter.
Israel-Hamas, Israel-Hezbollah wars have started. Perhaps the Israel-Iran war is also at the door. No one ignores the possibility of a wider regional war. Some even talk about the possibility of a third world war in view of the developments that have gone out of hand. Just looking at the American, British, French, Russian, Russian and Chinese ships in the Eastern Mediterranean, which are rumoured to be on their way, shows, in plain logic, that the drums of a major war are sounding.
The "citizens' army" founded by Napoleon has turned into a universal understanding over time. With this nation-state concept, the concept of army-nation emerged in a sense. Although Montesquieu and Rousseau's sanctification of the duty of "every citizen to defend his country" has been eroded in many countries today, the existence of a mentality in Israel that sees everyone, men and women, as "soldiers" is a reality that surpasses even Napoleon's army of citizens. After the mobilisation declared after 7 October, the number of soldiers in the Israeli Army increased from 170,000 to 500,000.
As a result, even without the mobilisation, Hamas is nothing compared to the current Israeli army. Hamas may have simple but effective weapons. None of them are technologically advanced. For this reason alone, there is an asymmetrical imbalance between the warring parties in favour of Israel. I don't expect Hamas to succeed against Israel, it is against the nature of war. In every respect, Hamas is doomed to lose. Sooner or later, Hamas will lose a large number of its militants, perhaps the organisation will be forced to relocate itself outside Gaza, similar to the way it was forced to hand over 350 of its members to the Israeli security forces in 2014.
The Israeli-Hamas psychological warfare to win over the world community continues
Whatever the outcome of the Israel-Hamas war, there is a great psychological warfare, as well as a physical one, being waged against the world public opinion. The winner of this aspect of the war is not yet clear.
One of the aims of psychological warfare is to put pressure on the adversary, to deceive him and to create a mental breakdown to the extent that he cannot continue the war. Psychological warfare is the planned use of propaganda and related measures to influence the thoughts, life views, feelings and activities of enemy or friendly communities. Today, the military of every country has a small or large psychological operations organisation. These agencies carry out operations to use selected information and indicators to influence audiences, their emotions, motives, objective reasoning and ultimately the behaviour of governments, organisations, groups and individuals.
The ammunition of psychological warfare is propaganda and its weapon is communication. Technological changes and developments in the field of communication, social media environments (facebook, X, instagram, linkedn, youtube, tiktok, etc.) allow propaganda activities to be concentrated on very large masses instantly. From the perspective of social media, from the virtual world, it is easy to lose the sympathy of the masses, the people, the world. The simple formula is to play the role of victim. In this respect, 7 October easily opened the door to the whole world for Israeli psychological operations teams. The masses always prefer victims. Hamas' victims - Israeli women, children, soldiers, etc. - suddenly became the centre of attention. The world reacted. Of course, these reactions did not bring any benefit to the people taken hostage by Hamas for the time being, but they legitimised every action, every act of violence that the Israeli army would take to eradicate Hamas from Gaza at first. Ordinary people who saw the images of war and the suffering of the victims on their screens or on their mobile phones inevitably became pro-Israel. The fact that the Palestinian community has been living in very difficult conditions in the territories under Israeli occupation for years was instantly forgotten.
Israel is fighting against Hamas, claiming to represent the civilised world
Georgios of Athens expressed the effect of propaganda as follows: Let an orator and a physician go to a city. Let a debate be held in a square as to which of them is a physician, and I am sure that the orator will convince the public that he is a physician. For there is nothing that a person who knows the art of rhetoric well cannot convince the public."
The most important weapon and material of psychological operations is undoubtedly propaganda. Propaganda, a word of Latin origin, derives from the roots of propagere "to sow in the soil to obtain new saplings" and propago "to spread religion" and has settled in our language. According to its current definition, it is information, ideas, doctrines or special calls prepared to influence the ideas, feelings, behaviours and attitudes of the target society. As a simple definition, propaganda can be defined as the technique of influencing people's feelings, thoughts, attitudes and behaviours. According to another definition, propaganda is an organised effort to encourage desired behaviour in a group of people, usually by using emotional words and repeating these words at predetermined intervals.
In a press conference with visiting US President Joe Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu argued that the civilised world should support them. Describing Hamas, and therefore the Palestinians, as 'barbarians', Netanyahu is resorting to propagandistic rhetoric to win over Western society to his side, trying to endear Israel's disproportionate violence to the masses.
As a result, Israel has won the sympathy of the world with a very good propaganda. So much so that this propaganda has developed almost 'naturally'. It is as if Western societies, especially heads of state or government representatives, have had to "Germanise" themselves. They have entered into a race to sympathise with Israel. The historic visit of US President Biden, the expected visit of Macron, the visits of foreign ministers are clear expressions of political sympathy.
Israel is losing the sympathy of the masses. Why was the square empty in England?
An organisation working to promote Israel's cause in the UK tweeted a photo of a huge demonstration in favour of the Palestinians in London last Saturday, along with a photo of an empty square to symbolise the demonstration that was not organised in favour of Israel. Despite their mastery of all propaganda tools, Israel and Jewish organisations can have such road accidents.
Why was the square empty? Perhaps for a prosaic reason: The horror of the Israeli Defence Minister's promise to return to Gaza and die of hunger and thirst faded within a week. The British media, which in the first 48 hours surrounded Israel with love and compassion, began to describe Israel's actions as a "medieval-style siege". This is a significant change.
In this change, the Israeli army indiscriminately dropped thousands of bombs in Gaza, and according to the Palestinian Health Ministry's data of the previous day (Palestinian casualties are constantly increasing), 4,651 people, including 1873 children and 1023 women, were killed and 14,245 people were injured in the Israeli attacks on Gaza. The world has begun to realise that Palestinians fighting for their lives under Israeli bombardment in Gaza are human beings too. Images and recordings proving that Palestinians need compassion at least as much as Israelis, perhaps even more, reached large masses through mass media. The element of compassion in terms of human empathy causes a positive change in favour of Palestinians. It is generally accepted that Palestine needs help. The fact that generals in the Israeli army and officers at all levels cling to the language of violence reflected on the screens, when translated into foreign languages, shows that they tend towards a linguistic vulgarity that generally does not work in Israel's favour. Ordinary people see this as shameful, barbaric rhetoric.
Israeli Press: No room to feel sorry for the children in Gaza
From Rabin's words "break their bones" about stone-throwing children during the first intifada in 1988 to Matan Vilnai's threat of a "holocaust" in Gaza in 2008, all of these discourses are expressions of Israel's official state jargon. Netanyahu, the Israeli generals and the Defence Minister use the same language today.
Retired Major General Yaakov Amidror, former head of the Israeli National Security Council, used the following words in an interview, which are thought-provoking in terms of showing how the Israeli military bureaucracy views international humanitarian law:
"With all due respect to the world, the British did not ask themselves any humanitarian questions when they bombed Germany in the Second World War. Today they are arming the Ukrainians and they don't ask any humanitarian questions about the Russian cities that are being hit by the ammunition that the West gives them. When there is an enemy state on the other side, and Gaza is an enemy state for us, we behave as in war, and in war we don't worry about the needs of the enemy population."
They talk about wiping Gaza off the map. The Jews, a nation that experienced the Holocaust, do not hide the fact that they are trying to 'normalise' to the world the practice of inflicting the Holocaust on another nation, the Palestinians, in Gaza. The propaganda tools of the State of Israel are fighting for this. But the exaggerated rhetoric of Israeli military and civilian bureaucrats no longer finds a buyer in the social media or in Western capitals.
The exaggerated words in Hebrew uttered by the crazy Israeli are instantly translated into English and other languages and go viral. Perhaps this is surprising, but this is the reality. So much so that videos, articles, etc. in the context of the 'victimisation of Palestinians', which are widely shared in the Muslim world, are not so effective. The Israeli people are shooting themselves in the foot on social media and on the screens. The barbaric outbursts of the Israelis, especially the Zionists, bring more positive outputs than the media works showing the Palestinians as 'oppressed'. In the eyes of ordinary people around the world, Israel is losing and Palestine is winning.
For example, on the Twitter account of a far-right anti-Israel phenomenon in the USA, images of young people in the hills dancing and singing "Gaza will be a graveyard" are shared. According to some, this video is from 2015, but it can be used as if it was filmed today. This is because it is a video in line with the current rhetoric. Whether it is real or not is secondary. In another video, an Israeli celebrating Gaza's thirst by drinking from an ostentatiously raised glass of water has won eternal life on international television networks, anti-Israel websites, for example on a Chinese Twitter account.
Of all the haters on the Internet, the most popular Israeli is of course Yoav Galant. He continues to produce useful material against Israel, promising to "destroy everything in Gaza". Israeli sympathisers can still claim that Israelis do not really mean "breaking bones", "holocaust", "extermination", mass murder or genocide. They try to excuse the fact that Israeli youth speak the language of the barracks in military uniforms. Whatever makes the Palestinian Holocaust sound good? Do not the headlines of these media articles alone reflect the horrible, genocidal, 'revengeful' rhetoric of the Israelis?
- Albert Gabbai, editor of the local 'Din Vo Chakun' newspaper in Sderot, on Channel 11 (not a direct quote): There is no room to feel sorry for the children in Gaza. When we feel sorry for them, they grow up and come to kill our children.
- An article in The Harbinger: "When the fire is brought down on the cruel enemy, the slanderers and suckers of the cruel people should not be considered for a moment. Similar to what we are commanded in the Torah about the seven nations, 'not even one will live'."
- An article in 'Sheva: "These are our enemies, the Amalek of our generation. We are commanded not to forget what they did to us and to erase their memory under the firmament. Nothing less."
- Meir Ben Shabat of Globes: "Israel's action should turn Hamas' surprise attack into Gaza's Nakba."
- Reserve Major Yossi Peled Gali in Israel: "Be decisive and ruthless", "There is nothing humanitarian this time".
Conclusion
There are demonstrations in Israel in favour of the Palestinian genocide. It is thought-provoking that the Israeli police allow demonstrations in favour of genocide. The Israeli government does not stand against this perversion, extremism and violent discourse. It is as if they want to serve these images to the whole world. I believe that these images act as an antidote to the psychological operation initiatives carried out by the Israeli army. In the end, Israel's psychological operation weapons continue to stain the whole of Israel, despite the weight of Jewish capital on media organisations all over the world.
It is undoubtedly impossible to fight terrorist organisations like Hamas, organisations that try to make their cause known to the world through terrorism, without using military force, and it is certainly impossible to remove Hamas militants from Gaza. But why can't Israel conquer Gaza without killing innocents? There must be a way.
In 2016, the Turkish Army can explain to the Israeli Army Generals in Tel Aviv how it fought the PKK in the trench operations without harming innocent people. Innocent people, innocent Palestinian women, children and old people should not be burnt while trying to burn Hamas. This is a clear and clear humanitarian stance. The fight against terrorism cannot be a justification and excuse for violence against the people. The Israeli government should know this fact and show the whole world that it can wage a fairer war. Israelis are expected to accompany the experiences of innocent Palestinians in Gaza and the suffering caused by the Israeli army, not with festive joy, but at least with a bowed head and an expression of sadness. I believe that humanity and civilisation require this.
Whatever the outcome of the Israel-Hamas war, there is a great psychological warfare as well as physical warfare being waged in order to win the world community. Although the winner of this dimension of the war is not yet clear, I believe that Israel's violent rhetoric and actions ultimately serve to win the oppressed Palestinian people.
Reference
Savaş Özdağ, 21. Yüzyılda Türk Dünyası Jeopolitiği "Propaganda Üzerine", ASAM Publications, Ankara 2003, p. 272.
Bora İyiat, "Evolution of Psychological Warfare: From Declarations to Twits", 2021, https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/1432601
