From Gaza with Regards

The Conflict in Gaza and in London

At the time of writing, a First-World-War style human wave attack being ordered against a gun line in the Tigray. There is a child being executed by religious fundamentalists in the Sahel. An ethnic cleansing is taking place in Nagorno-Karabakh, and a Saudi drone just wiped out a family in Yemen. A proxy war between various states and international corporations is being rekindled in the Congo, and there are major famines in Haiti and Afghanistan. Why is media attention so captivated by the conflict in Palestine. Even the ongoing war in Ukraine, previously an ideological goldmine, has fallen to the wayside. Despite a wide array of global crises, many of which directly affect the British public, why is this issue in particular so publicised?

As it is being presented, the current situation in the Middle East is a desperate clash of civilisations, a deadly struggle between evil foreign aggressors and desperate freedom fighters. On the one hand is the senseless terrorist violence of the antagonistic extremists, and on the other is the measured, rational response of a reluctant protagonist. Presiding over it all is the British state – the divine arbiter of life or death for the Palestinian or Israeli civilian.

It is this loose structure and narrative that makes the Israel-Palestine conflict so marketable. As we shall examine, the Israel-Palestine situation lends itself perfectly to neoliberal narrativization; a ready-made spectacle to be packaged and sold to a well-prepped public.

Simulated Conflict

In the 21st century, we interact with global events through instantaneous* media reports. Isolated fragments of information are organised into the narrative structures provided by ideological models. This combination allows the public to consume a simulated war, where they identify with the struggle and project onto it their own experiences.

In the words of Jean Baudrillard**:

“Real time” information loses itself in a completely unreal space, finally furnishing the images of pure, useless, instantaneous television where its primordial function irrupts, namely that of filling a vacuum, blocking up the screen hole through which escapes the substance of events. 

While foreign wars have always been understood by the public fragmentarily, instantaneous 24/7 coverage and the proliferation of ‘war-pornography’ intensifies the simulation and makes it visceral. Never has the public been able to consume simulation through such immersive and convincing media, and never has it been so difficult to grasp the limitations of our own perspectives. In this context the narrativization of foreign suffering becomes all the more gripping, and all the more dangerous.

The Culture Industry and Ideological Production

The models we use to conceptualise global events are produced industrially, in culture factories such as film studios, publishing houses, and media outlets. A film cannot be produced without a gargantuan budget, newspapers are oligopolised, and social media is governed by the marketing algorithms of mega corporations. The combination of these factors restrict control over the cultural production to the ultra-wealthy, and they use it to facilitate the further accumulation of power and wealth*** – to shore up neoliberalism.

The efficacy of neoliberal cultural production comes from its universality and simplicity. In a world where the vast majority are overworked, overstimulated, and over-commodified, an effective ideological model must be easily accessible without deep analysis.

Appeals to the familiarity of the everyday are ubiquitous, and there must always be a relatable and sympathetic protagonist. Simple dichotomies of good and evil, with simple solutions – usually the physical destruction or overcoming of evil – are paramount.

To maintain universality, everything must be decontextualised and essentialised. Social categories are non-challenging and limited to the aesthetic domain; the appearance of inequality is permitted so long as materialistic analysis is excluded and social inference is impossible. Similarly, Inclusion and diversity are encouraged so long as they have no deeper meaning - so long as individuals conform to society’s normative values and do not threaten pre-existing hierarchies ****.

Beholden to this logic, when lines are drawn between social groups it is on identarian bases such as culture and race which can be reduced to pure aestheticization. Different veneers are applied to neoliberal capitalism while substantive economic or social alternatives are presented as oppressive, or more often erased completely. This mechanism allows liberal ideologues to champion inclusion while celebrating the destruction of any meaningful diversity.

Stripped of their material origins and social relations, events happen spontaneously without complex causes. Outcomes are determined solely by the ‘essence’ of the characters, with some individuals having inherent virtue and others inherent evil.

Reducing individual suffering to individual causes allows a protagonist to engage in unrestricted individual struggle. When there are no material limitations, facticities such as socioeconomic status or systemic adversity have no deeper meaning – characters always have absolute individual control over their fates. Besides allowing the audience to experience a simulated liberation by proxy, this justifies social hierarchies: If everything can be overcome by sheer force of will, everyone is ultimately deserving of their position. Furthermore, the lack of context feeds into the mythology of universal individual freedom and equal opportunity, validating the liberating potential of capitalism.

Hollywood in Gaza

Once the key features of neoliberal ideology have been identified, the power of the Israel-Palestine conflict becomes surprisingly transparent. Regardless of which side the observer picks, from the fragmentary evidence an outsider can construct a narrative which conforms perfectly to a neoliberal ideological model.

Whether it’s the xenophobic imagery of Islamic barbarism or the moralised struggle against ‘white’ colonisation, there is no shortage of prejudice and chauvinism surrounding Judaism and Islam in the UK. Much of the perception of the conflict is entirely prefabricated, already completely subsumed in the cultural superstructure.

As such the conflict falls along clean identarian lines, where race, religion, and ethnicity are more important than class or culture. This allows the conflict to be neatly aestheticized by the media, with observers able to easily identify and pick sides. When decontextualised, an outsider can apply their presuppositions about either side onto the conflict. People can project issues closer to home onto a conflict whose scope is limited to the Middle East, and whose outcome will be decided in Washington DC.

On both sides sympathetic protagonists abound, with presentations of the deprived Palestinian civilian, or the innocent Israeli farmer. Perfectly relatable individuals to act as proxy for the consumer’s experience of the conflict - innocent and moral victims to identify with and root for.

Both sides are replete with totalising atrocities and insane religious fundamentalists, which lend themselves to a tidy dichotomy of a good side and an evil side. The ‘war-pornography’ provided by the media lends emotional weight to the consumer’s narrative - the only possible solution in the face of such atrocities is the total destruction of evil.

The racial and religious basis of the conflict allows aesthetics to be extrapolated into moral essences. Either the Israelis are born with a divine mandate, or the Palestinians are born as the true inheritors of their homeland. Motivations defy complex cause and effect, with reasoning becoming as fundamental as moral principles. One side simply has the right to exist and one does not.

The outcome for supporters of both sides is materially identical, if aesthetically opposed. For the outside supporter of either side, what must remain is a neoliberal, secular, diverse state – a part of the western ideological whole, where capital rules and money is the universal equivalent. Whether a Star of David or a crescent moon is hung over Jerusalem, the structure and economic model required by the West is the same.

Crucially, the British media consumer themself is presented as having agency, being able to directly influence the outcome of the struggle. The British government plays the symbolic role of arbiter of the conflict, with strongly worded condemnations and verbal support for either side being happily provided by politicians. The British citizen protests for the politician to renounce one platitude in favour of another, ‘winning the struggle’ in an easy, unchallenging, and purely symbolic exercise of democratic rights.

The Conflict is Not Happening

Mass mediatisation of the symbolic struggle in the Middle East serves a variety of ideological purposes.

Primarily a form of entertainment for the western observer, media and ideology provide a simple narrativized vision of the conflict. Significant emotional weight is derived from passionate discourse, eyewitness accounts, and the abundance of ‘war-porn’, but the western observer never experiences anything more than a simulation of real struggle.

Protests create a simulated proof by negativity of the validity of liberal democracy, where a symbolic exercise of democratic rights can influence a policy which has no material impact.

The lines of conflict also strengthen the neoliberal ideological consciousnesses of race and ethnicity over social class, as the combatants draw neatly from different ethno-religious backgrounds. Whichever side comes out on top will be beneficial, in the eyes of its supporters, as it will expand the realm of neoliberal capitalist domination at the expense of chauvinistic ethno-religious barbarism.

With all of this in mind, it is completely unsurprising that the Israel-Palestine conflict takes up so much media attention while the vast range of other issues go unnoticed. The complexities of each of the cases mentioned in the introduction make those issues harder to narrativize by the neoliberal media for the consumer, and so they inevitable receive little or no coverage.

* Instantaneously accessible, instantaneously gratifying, instantaneously immersive. Consumable without necessary analysis.

** The Gulf War did not Take Place

https://tinyurl.com/h4ndpvkh

*** Bourgeois cultural hegemony https://www.marxists.org/history/er HYPERLINK "https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/theoretical-review/1982301.htm"o HYPERLINK "https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/theoretical-review/1982301.htm"l/periodicals/theoretical-review/1982301.html

**** Capitalist Realism

 https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/7586_capitalist-realism-review-by-steven-sherman/