A June 10 exclusive report in the United States newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, claims to have reviewed dozens of messages by Hamas’ Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, “transmitted to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas compatriots outside Gaza and others” and which show “a cold disregard for human life and [make] clear [Sinwar] believes Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas.”
The WSJ report does not name any source but puts some lines in quotes to indicate, presumably, the authenticity of the alleged messages as emanating from Sinwar. Ghazi Hamad, a spokesperson for Hamas, has already refuted the report and denied that any such comments were made by Sinwar.
Speaking to Al Arabiya, a Saudi-based newspaper, Hamad said, “We are in regular contact with Sinwar…there are regular conversations and discussions. We liaise on different matters and there is no conflict or discrepancy between us internally or externally. What has been circulated is completely inaccurate.” He added that Sinwar was “heavily concerned” with ending the war as soon as possible.
The report can be dissected at many levels, including its presentation of facts. For instance, it opens with the sentence, “For months, Yahya Sinwar has resisted pressure to cut a ceasefire-and-hostages deal with Israel.”
By all evidence, it is Israel that doesn’t want a deal. It has made clear, time and again, that it has two objectives — return of the hostages and complete destruction of Hamas.
This opening shows a clear disregard for any context and fails to qualify Hamas’ resistance to a deal on Israel’s terms, that is, a deal that helps Israel to get back the hostages without making any commitment in regard to what Hamas wants: complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and cessation of its genocidal war on Gaza; an end to Gaza’s prison-status; negotiations on a comprehensive peace that leads to Palestinian sovereignty et cetera.
The opening also disregards the fact that Hamas has been insisting on a ceasefire deal from the beginning, albeit one that is equitable and not biased heavily in Israel’s favour. By all evidence, it is Israel that doesn’t want a deal. It has made clear, time and again, that it has two objectives — return of the hostages and complete destruction of Hamas.
One doesn’t need to take an intensive course in negotiation theory to figure out how a deal would work out where Party X seeks acceptance of a deal by Party Y while seeking, simultaneously, to destroy Y.
At another point, the WSJ report describes Sinwar in these words: “For much of Sinwar’s political life, shaped by bloody conflict with an Israeli state that he says has no right to exist, he has stuck to a simple playbook. Backed into a corner, he looks to violence for a way out. The current fight in Gaza is no exception.” (italics added)
Let’s unpack these words because language is not just important, it’s crucial. The words we use inform others of the positions we take. The Nobel Laureate, Harold Pinter, once described language as “a highly ambiguous business.” It is. And yet, states and the mass media, since the 19th century, have employed words, symbols and imagery to cut through the context, the ambiguities, and the ironies of the language to give specific politico-strategic meanings to certain words.
The ahistoricity is deliberate and essential. It’s a tool. Providing context complicates the narrative because it brings into the picture the “other.” Once the other is present in the narrative, it cannot remain the story of just one or a story that begins only at specific points in time (e.g., October 7) or that Israel has a right to defend itself. Defend itself against whom and why? Why did Hamas attack Israel?
Take terrorism. It is supposed to evoke a response, a negative one. But its placement in the language is more than that. It is about setting a context and wielding power. This is why freedom movements, legitimate under United Nations General Assembly resolutions, are branded as terrorist by occupying states like Israel and India (with reference to Occupied Kashmir).
The WSJ report tells us that Sinwar looks to violence and thinks that Israel has no right to exist. It gives us no context either on why Sinwar “looks to violence for a way out” or why he thinks (and in what way) that Israel “has no right to exist.”
The ahistoricity is deliberate and essential. It’s a tool. Providing context complicates the narrative because it brings into the picture the “other.” Once the other is present in the narrative, it cannot remain the story of just one or a story that begins only at specific points in time (e.g., October 7) or that Israel has a right to defend itself. Defend itself against whom and why? Why did Hamas attack Israel? Was there history before October 7 or did that day happen gratuitously because Sinwar and Hamas just seem to like violence? What about the Occupied West Bank and Al-Quds, the slow, structured violence against Palestinians that has been recorded by the UN, its agencies, and rights organisations across the world?
The United Nations considers Israel an occupying power. Why? What’s the significance of that legal determination?
Robin T Lakoff, a linguistics professor who wrote the book The Language War, says as follows: “[M]aking meaning is a defining activity of Homo sapiens… [But] it is more than just a cognitive exercise, since those who get to superimpose a meaning on events control the future… And since so much of our cognitive capacity is achieved via language, control of language — the determination of what words mean, who can use what forms of language to what effects in which settings — is power. Hence the struggles I am discussing…are not tussles over ‘mere words,’ or ‘just semantics’ — they are battles.”
Dominating these battles requires that the other must be both present and absent — present as someone vile in order for the words and imagery to have specific meanings and absent because the other has no story and no presence beyond providing the dominant narrative its meaning, veracity and power.
Take this paragraph from the WSJ report: Health authorities [in Gaza] said almost 300 Palestinians were killed Saturday in an Israeli raid that rescued four hostages kept in captivity in homes surrounded by civilians — driving home for some Palestinians their role as pawns for Hamas.” (italics added)
Hamas is both present and absent here. Present as the vile entity being fought by Israeli forces and absent because it has no story. Then there’s the sentence I have put in italics — Hamas is something other than the Gaza Palestinians who are just pawns. The fact is that if Hamas weren’t from the soil, the Israeli intelligence would have long busted the group.
Last month, Politico reported that “Biden officials have…become increasingly concerned that Hamas has been able to recruit during wartime — thousands over the last several months. That has allowed the group to withstand months of Israeli offensives, according to a person familiar with U.S. intelligence.”
At another place the WSJ report says, “Sinwar isn’t the first Palestinian leader to embrace bloodshed as a means to pressure Israel”. The ahistoricity of this sentence is so perfidious as to shock anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of a conflict that began with the imposition on Palestine of a settler-colonial state.
Two Israeli publications, +972 and Local Call, have put out excellent investigative reports on Israeli targeting strategies, the use of AI and a horrendously high tolerance threshold for civilian casualties — for instance, killing and injuring over 100 civilians to get one Hamas commander in Jabalia in the early phases of the war. That threshold has consistently gone up as Israel’s war on Gaza has ground on. Its deliberate savagery has put Israel in the dock at the International Court of Justice and convinced the International Criminal Court’s Chief Prosecutor to seek warrants against Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
That strategy is also perfectly in line with Netanyahu’s biblical reference to Amalek, a people who attacked Israelites. And God said to King Saul, “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
As Noah Lanard wrote in Mother Jones last November, “There are more than 23,000 verses in the Old Testament. The ones Netanyahu turned to, as Israeli forces launched their ground invasion in Gaza, are among its most violent — and have a long history of being used by Jews on the far right to justify killing Palestinians.”
That far right now sits in the Netanyahu government and is mainstream. But violence still belongs to Sinwar and Hamas in a decontextualised WSJ report. At another place the WSJ report says, “Sinwar isn’t the first Palestinian leader to embrace bloodshed as a means to pressure Israel”. The ahistoricity of this sentence is so perfidious as to shock anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of a conflict that began with the imposition on Palestine of a settler-colonial state.
As for Israel’s right as a Zionist apartheid state to exist, it has none. Just like in the narrative, its existence must render Palestinians non-existent, symbolically and physically. As Just War theories go, I can’t think of a more just war than a peoples’ struggle to ensure no one can steal their land and make them disappear as if they never existed.