Ruhollah Abdolmaleki, researcher in regional studies
In his book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Marshall Berman has a famous phrase quoted from Marx, which is also seen in the title of his book: “All that is solid melts into air.” Even though this book is an outlook on the impact of culture on the process of modernization, Berman's words were a summation of what happened on October 7. The Leader of Iran described it as the victory of a small group that “was able to burn down and put an end to” everything that the Zionist regime had boasted about to the world regarding the superiority of its military and intelligence “in a matter of hours” (“Ultimate Victory”). Therefore, Hamas fighters inflicted irreparable blows on the military and intelligence of the Zionist regime through a calculated, surprising plan.
After many years of military, security, and intelligence dominance, the Zionist regime had now found itself in the middle of a battle in which it conceded hard, unbelievable and irreparable concessions to its opponent.
In response to this, the Zionist leaders used all their power to hold their ground and manage the crisis to their own interest. In this regard, during an apparently calculated plan, they followed a two-pronged policy based on which Gaza would be safeguarded on the condition that Hamas be removed from the Palestinian political sphere, while Hamas's insistence on remaining there would come at the cost of Gaza’s destruction.
On the one hand, this two-pronged policy sought a geopolitical victory when the occupying regime announced that it was necessary for the people of Gaza to exit from the south of this region. On the other hand, by deeming it necessary to destroy the Hamas government, it hoped for a political victory by planning to remove Hamas from the political future of Gaza and Palestine (Rascoe and Inskeep).
In order to achieve the above-mentioned goals, the Zionist regime relies on its military power. On paper, it is one of the world’s top military powers (“Israel ranks”) with an annual military budget of over 20 billion dollars (“Israel Defense”). It uses the most advanced American military equipment and in an unequal match, it bombarded the small, Gaza enclave with all kinds of military equipment.
Despite the maximum use of this regime's military capabilities and destructive and advanced weaponry, as the days of fighting and bombing of Gaza passed, the inability of the occupiers to achieve their declared goals became even more apparent to the point where US military commanders (if not other American soldiers) went to the occupied territories to lend a hand to the Zionist regime (Stewart). In spite of this, after about 45 days, none of the above goals were achieved.
In the field of diplomacy and international relations, the traditional supporters of the Zionist regime, especially the Arrogant Powers who themselves have a history of colonizing nations and launching wars and campaigns against the world’s nations, including Muslim nations, rushed to the aid of this regime.
The US president has spoken of unlimited moral and diplomatic support for the Zionist regime (Bacevich). The French president and the Briths prime minister expressed clear statements in support of the Zionist regime. The German chancellor also considered it his government’s duty to protect the security of Israel.
Despite this, these diplomatic measures were not able to create even a noteworthy consensus in the international arena in favor of the Zionist regime to the point where, in a letter addressed to Macron, the French ambassador to North Africa and West Asia criticized the French president’s pro-Israeli stance on the Gaza war (“French ambassadors”). More importantly, with the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza, international discontent multiplied, resulting in calls for a cease-fire by various countries (Saric and Mukherjee). The Zionist regime’s refusal to accept a ceasefire triggered reactions from many countries in the American, African, and Asian continents.
In addition to the condemnations and verbal protests of the official authorities of various countries, the governments of South Africa, Jordan, Turkey, Colombia, Bahrain, etc. withdrew their ambassadors from the occupied territories in protest of the disastrous conditions in Gaza. These statements, measures and the more severe encounters, such as the cutting of diplomatic ties with the Zionist regime by Bolivia, contained a clear message that the Zionist regime has lost the battle of international diplomacy in the Gaza war, ceding the field to its opponent (Sforza).
The sidetracking of the plan of normalization between the Zionist regime and Saudi Arabia and making it contingent on the resolution of the Gaza crisis and the Palestinian issue by Saudi Arabia (Scott) confirmed the claim that the Zionist regime has failed in the field of diplomacy and political relations.
In the field of media, the Zionist regime counted on the mainstream media in the West in the hope of gaining a win in the social and media field by coaxing public opinion. A large part of the mainstream Western media narrated the Gaza war with a theme revolving around the condemnation of the Hamas and Gazan fighters (Ridley).
Without addressing the origin of Hamas’s formation from within the Gazan society and the suffering and oppression that they endured in previous years, the aforementioned media used all their technical capacity to make the Palestinian fighters in Gaza appear as terrorists. The prevalence of one-sided news and analysis in the media space, while ignoring the vast magnitude of destructions, killings, injuries, displacements, and homelessness of the oppressed people of Gaza these days reminds one of a famous saying attributed to Mark Twain that states: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
A large proportion of the world's media were repeating and rebroadcasting the justifications and claims of the Zionist regime while the oppressed people of Gaza were deprived of basic necessities such as food and energy and their hospitals were being targeted one after another by Zionist missiles. The situation in Gaza was so grave that the extent of the destructive power of the occupying regime’s heavy bombardment of the coastal enclave was estimated to be three times that of an atomic bomb (“Israel hits Gaza”).
One of the other measures that the media giants took was that they propagated and published the comments and statements made by movie stars in support of the Zionist regime, while placing pressure on the actors who voiced their protest against the crimes of the occupying regime. The news about the dropping and firing of Hollywood stars due to their apparently pro-Palestinian statements (Kay) and the revelations of popular and famous figures showed that the Zionist regime had made plans to lure and threaten them in line with supporting the occupation and condemning the people of Gaza.
The Western media’s support regarding the manner in which news related to the Gaza war was covered triggered protests from analysts, commentators, and members of the media. From the viewpoint of these people, the significant bias of the Western media in its coverage of the war in Gaza indicates a double standard (“Media coverage”) and evokes this cultural perception in the West that the people of Palestine and Israel do not have an equal right to life (Gathara).
When we consider the historical support of the Western countries, especially the United States, for the many years of Israeli occupation and the cooperation of the mass media outlets with the discriminatory policies of the West in soft-pedalling years of violence and expansion of the Zionist occupation, the unequal and one-sided coverage of the Gaza war comes as no surprise. The purpose of this form of representation is to depict and narrate reality based on the interests of the Arrogant Powers and to interfere in the process of the public opinion’s understanding of matters while having a targeted impact on the audience.
That said, the use of media techniques and psychological operations by the Western media regarding the Gaza issue did not prove to be successful. The audience of these media outlets acted contrary to the goals of the propaganda machines, which was seen in the way they deciphered matters and in the reactions they displayed. In fact, many social groups, on the one hand, correctly understood that the representation of the aforementioned media was biased and not a reflection of the actual public opinion. And on the other hand, they reacted to it with collective measures such as the use of hashtags on social media and participating in protest rallies outside of social media.
In order to empathize with the residents of Gaza, especially the children and babies whose number of dead and injured were soaring under the showering of the Zionist regime's rockets, they denounced the actions of the Zionist regime on social media and called for the freedom of Palestine. As an example, according to a report in the Washington Post, during the Gaza war, the #freepalestine hashtag was used on Facebook 39 times more than the #standwithIsrael hashtag, and this number was 26 times more on Instagram (Adib).
In addition to this, the remarkable demonstrations in the capitals and important cities around the world, especially in Western countries that support the Israeli regime, such as Paris, London, and Berlin (“People”), signified people's disgust with the Zionist regime’s assault. It was also an indication of the gap that exists between the public opinion and the governments of these countries regarding the issue of Palestine. On that account, the Zionist regime was not able to steer the public opinion toward supporting its crimes in its media campaign or on social media or at least coax them into being silent and neutral about the atrocities that are taking place in the Gaza Strip.
With all being said, it can be concluded that the Gaza war, with the initiative of Hamas fighters, dealt a heavy blow to the military and security credibility of the occupying regime and marked the failure of the Zionist regime in the fields of geopolitics, politics, diplomacy, and public opinion. Ultimately, the occupying regime accepted a ceasefire without achieving any of its declared goals. Not only did this prove that what it had suffered was an irreparable defeat, but this failure also turned into a full-scale “knockout defeat.”
By recalling this verse from the Holy Quran that states, “How many a small group has defeated a large group by God’s will!” (2:249), the disgraceful defeat of the Zionist occupation once again showed that when the power of determination and faith of a small, impoverished, oppressed population is combined with patience and resistance, they gain the ability to “burn down and put an end” to the apparently tough powers “in a matter of hours.”
References:
Adib, Desiree. “Amid Israel-Hamas conflict, 'information war' plays out on social media, experts say.” ABC News, 24 Nov. 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/International/social-media-information-war-israel-hamas-conflict/story?id=104845039.
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“French ambassadors pen letter to Macron urging change of stance on Israel's Gaza war.” The New Arab, 16 Nov. 2023, https://www.newarab.com/news/gaza-french-ambassadors-criticise-macron-pro-israel-stance.
Gathara, Patrick. “Western media failures say more about the West than Gaza.” Aljazeera, 25 Oct. 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/25/western-media-failures-say-more-about-the-west-than-gaza.
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