Keith Rankin Essay – Al Aqsa provocation and the media game ‘Israel says’

Essay by Keith Rankin.

A few days ago I watched a recording from Al Jazeera of Earthrise Systems Change. The news banner at the bottom of the screen told this story:

“One person killed and at least five others injured in a car-ramming attack in central Tel Aviv. Medics say all victims in Tel Aviv attack are foreign tourists. Suspected attacker has been shot dead by Israeli Police. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has mobilized Police and army reserves after Tel Aviv attack. Israeli police say attacker tried to run over people on a busy promenade in central Tel Aviv. Two Israeli women were earlier killed in a shooting in the Jordan Valley area of the occupied West Bank. Israel carried out strikes on Gaza and Lebanese port city of Tyre early Friday morning. There is increased tension after Israeli forces stormed Al Aqsa Mosque in Occupied East Jerusalem twice on Wednesday”. And, in the preceding news bulletin: “Israel’s Iron Dome intercepts rockets from Gaza” and “airstrikes on [Tyre, Lebanon] in response to the barrage of rockets from Hamas”.

The recording was from live TV at 8:30am on Saturday 8 April 2023; that’s six months before the Hamas attack which triggered the present ongoing trashing of Gaza by the Israel Defence Force. (Nearly 45,000 Gazans are known to have been killed by the IDF, many other unverified deaths, and many other excess deaths due to illness, injury and inadequate nutrition. The big unknown is the number of Gazans presently alive in Gaza. I would be surprised if it’s as many as two million.)

After 7 October 2024, the Israelis authorities instructed the western mainstream media to treat the Hamas attack as a blue-sky event, something perpetrated ‘out of the blue’ by people – people who were “terrorists” because they were terrorists; aka “human animals”. The “liberal” western press obliged. When Benjamin Netanyahu said ‘jump’, the media moguls effectively said ‘how high?’ Since then, like Groundhog Day, media copywriters have been playing the game ‘Israel says’.

Israel demands that western audiences take into account 4,000 years of history to understand its position as the putative ‘tangata whenua’ of the Southern Levant. But it will not countenance the people of Gaza or Eastern Jerusalem having even a year of their history being allowed as evidence of understanding ‘Why?’.

The key point from the second paragraph quotation is that various relatively small tragedies (too small to make it as more than a byline in the western press) – perpetrated by both civilians and military on civilians and military – arose from a cynical police/military operation on one of Islam’s most holy sites, the Al Aqsa Mosque on East Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, aka Haram al-Sharif.

These provocative attacks ‘wind-up’ Muslims – especially Palestinian Muslims – understandably; indeed, that would appear to be the intent of ‘mosque-storming’ in and around Israel. And Hamas – a resistance (and service-providing) organisation in Apartheid Israel/Palestine – which may be compared to the ANC in Apartheid South Africa – feel obligated to ‘fire rockets’ to provide a degree of optics saying to Israel and the World “we are still here”.

Recently I learned about the 1929 attack on Al Aqsa. In p.262 of Shlomo Sand’s 2008 book The Invention of the Jewish People – a reasoned argument that Judaism is historically important as a religious faith, but not as an ethnicity – Sand notes that the founders of the modern state of Israel that Palestinians were of the same ethnicity as the ‘Jewish race’, but that they pulled back sharply from that position after “the Arab uprising of 1929”. “After the 1929 ‘pogroms’ these Muslim peasants became complete strangers with astonishing speed.”

What were the these ‘pogroms’, a word mostly associated with anti-Jewish events in the western part of the pre-1917 Russian Empire? In the Wikipedia entry 1929 Palestine riots, in [British] mandatory Palestine, the British “Commission found that the incident that contributed most to the outbreak was the Jewish demonstration […] at the Wailing Wall on 15 August 1929″. The context was that “From the late nineteenth century onwards pictures and postcards often depicted a rebuilt Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, sometimes next to Al-Aqsa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock and sometimes in their place [my italics]” and “Arab fears of Jewish immigrants ‘not only as a menace to their livelihood but a possible overlord of the future’.”

(I will say no more about that regrettable set of tragedies, but will note my article from last Friday – Israel, Syria, and the Map of the ‘Millennium’, Evening Report, 6 December 2024 – which gives ongoing context to the fears of Zionists and Christian Zionists razing the Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rockmosques. I will also note that, in light of the weekend’s events in Syria, that the eschatological optics relating to an imminent Armageddon arising from Russian and Iranian presence in Syria have now diminished.)

There have been many provocations relating to the sacred Al Aqsa Mosque. I’ll mention just one more, the Second Intifada of 2000 to 2005 began when the 1982 “Butcher of Beirut” (Ariel Sharon) “made a provocative visit to the Temple Mount”.

Provocations matter, and the provocateurs generally are fully aware of what they do. They start wars, little or big.

The Temple Mount site is sacred to Christians, Muslims and Jews. When in the eleventh century Muslim ‘Infidels’ occupied the Jerusalem holy site, it precipitated the classic Crusades. Western Christians, highly offended by this occupation, raised an army – the First Crusade – which in 1099 ended with the murder by Crusaders of every Muslim occupier of that sacred ‘Holy Land’ city. 88 years later, Muslims under Saladin in 1187 recaptured Jerusalem; Saladin spared the city’s Christian inhabitants, in part to avoid harm being done to “the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque”. “Upon the capture of Jerusalem, Saladin summoned the Jews and permitted them to resettle in the city”.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are faiths with the same mythistorical (a neologism utilised by Shlomo Sand) point of origin. Much cousinly blood has been spilt in terms that appear ridiculous in hindsight, just as much blood has been spilt in internecine conflict between different groups of Christians and between different groups of Muslims. Jews at least seem to have hit-on each other less, although the Zionist present trope of “self-hating Jews” is a major source of provocative rhetoric in the current conflict.

It is the ethnicisation of ‘peoples’ (ethnobiological and pseudo-ethnobiological collectives – ‘nations’ in the nineteenth-century sense of that word – as Shlomo Sand defined ‘peoples’) that leads to racial supremacism and ethnic cleansing. That causes so much grief today, much of it under the guise of religious conflict. So it was, also, in the first half of the twentieth century.

So much ethno-violence results from wilful provocation. And it happens when our institutions – including the mainstream television networks – look the other way. Playing ‘Israel Says’ is not ethical journalism.

I just rewatched DDN’s The Truth About October 7 Exposed (Youtube), which draws on the work of Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit. Eleven minutes in, it notes “the response to our film on October 7 has been interesting. The response has not been to criticize and pick apart and say that we’ve got it wrong. They didn’t do that at all. What they do is simply ignore you.”

The worst things happen when we, and especially our trusted institutions, choose to look the other way. When institutions succumb to narratives of the ‘Israel says’ variety, they are professionally corrupt. We need contests of ideas, contested narratives, not a ‘lay-down misère’.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.