Serving God Inside the Belly of the Empire An Interview with Rev Dr Jack Sara By Hadje Cresencio Sadje
Photo taken during the 72hr ceasefire between Hamas and Israel on 6th of August 2014. Destroyed ambulance in w:Shuja'iyya in the Gaza Strip. Photo by Boris Niehaus.
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he latest news of Israel continued colonial violence in Sheikh Jarrah (East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip has become one of the featuring top stories from around the world. Sadly, disinformation and misinformation have represented by various pro-Israel Western media platforms that generates confusion to mislead its readers without providing a proper framework. The end result is, readers received false information and inaccurate portrayal of Palestinian people. But this pro-Israel Western media tactic is not new. Since there are various competing views on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, many scholars, individuals, and concerned groups argue that the facts and truth about this long-running conflict were buried in the mountains of misinformation, particularly in various types of mass media (Uddin, 2021; Daoudi and Zeina M. Barakat, 2013). Many critics contend that the use of problematic media language distorted or replete the ground realities. Often, mainstream West media’s coverage misrepresents or obscures the truth about Israel and Palestine conflict. Using euphemism, gobbledygook, inflated language, and jargon, it de-emphasizes and minimises responsibility of Israel hostility against Palestinian people (Diwakar, 2021). For instance, Branko Marcetic observes that Western media depict the conflict between Israel and Palestine describes as “nebulous clashes” (2021). According to Marcetic, “Once again, the media are trying to depict the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians as a round of meaningless violence from “both sides” of an equally matched contest — the reality on the ground be damned” (2021). Likewise, many critics argue that the use of “both sides” or “clashes” obscures the nature of the violence taking place and the narrative descends into what has been colloquially referred to as “bothsideisms”. (McDonald, 2021). Aside from this term, the use of conflict, property dispute, extermist, terrorist, Islam, Zionism, Arab, and Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa are forms of discursive normalisation of Israel violence against Palestinian people, including pro-Palestinian Jews (McDonald, 2021). Except the word Zionism, however, I agree that all these terms are whitewashing that attempt to conceal incriminating facts about the Israel brutal colonisation of Palestinian territories (Zureik, 2015). In fact, this can lead people to have misunderstanding, complexities, and refusal to acknowledge Israel’s criminal actions. In his article titled, “There’s Nothing Complicated about What’s Happening in Palestine” (2021) published in Jacobin magasine, Asia Khatun describes how pro-Israel groups tried to make things complicated or blurring the ground realities. He writes: The normalisation of colonialism begins where it always has: in language. These language choices, be they irresponsible or just ignorant, reinforce the notion that this is a conflict in which both sides have the means to be equally violent toward each other.
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INSiGHT | June 2021
