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Since the latest escalation from ‘normal’ levels of violence in Palestine/Israel on October 7, 2023, Palestinian public and political figures have found their airtime on Western mainstream media significantly increased. While important, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian speakers were often immediately forced into self-defence. One particularly familiar face is the Palestinian Ambassador to the UK, Husam Zumlot, who was persistently and relentlessly required by presenters and anchors in mainstream media, such as CNN, BBC, Sky News, and Sky News Australia/Talk TV, to condemn the Hamas attack on Israel and even to apologise for it. In doing this, the mainstream media decontextualised the events by framing the parameters of the conversation to commence on October 7th. As will be demonstrated below, this decontextualisation, combined with the language used to describe Palestinians and the atrocities they have been subjected to, resulted in the dehumanisation and demonisation of Palestinians.

This is how the ‘narrative battle’ is being waged against Palestinians, and how propaganda has been instrumentalised as a weapon of war. This piece analyses how the vilification, dehumanisation, and demonisation of the enemy, particularly through the use of language, and the politicisation of victimhood, have been used as two mutually reinforcing components of Israeli propaganda. As a weapon of war, Israeli propaganda has been used to construct international public opinion on Palestine/Israel, both historically and within the latest events, to enable creeping Israeli settler colonialism, and legitimate the perpetration of mass atrocities, including but not limited to genocide, (as demonstrated by Center for Constitutional Rights, Raz Segal, Yoav Litvin, Craig Mokhiber, and nearly 900 scholars).

Language and Victimhood Construction: Deadly Weapons in Israel’s Propaganda to Vilify, Demonise, and Dehumanise Palestinians

A powerful propaganda tool utilised in times of war is language and narrative, which play a pivotal role in defining who becomes labelled as 'enemies' and who becomes perceived as 'victims' of violence. Thus, language becomes a powerful weapon in the demonisation and dehumanisation of ‘the enemy’, noting that both mutually reinforce one another. In these cases, the framing of the enemy goes beyond that of the mere adversary, and instead is consistently associated with a risk or threat to the hegemonic values, traditions, representations, and norms of a given society (Bhatia 2005) through their portrayal as malevolent, diabolical, monstrous, and perilous entities (Spector 1998). Some terms used to demonstrate the lack of humanity and the lack of belonging of ‘the enemy’ to ‘civilised society’ include ‘terrorists’, ‘savages’, ‘barbarians’, ‘criminals’, ‘rogues’, ‘outlaws’, ‘inferiors’, ‘irrational’, and ‘untrustworthy’ (Rieber & Kelly 1991; Spector 1998).  These narrative devices have consistently been used in the portrayal of Palestinians. For example, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has termed Palestinians in Gaza ‘human animals’; Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Arieh King, utilised the term ‘subhuman’; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dubbed Palestinian children ‘children of darkness’ and compared them to Israel’s ‘children of light’; while Israeli President proclaimed that there are ‘no innocent civilians in Gaza’. As explained above, this is part of a wider pattern where labels of demonisation are used to turn ‘the enemy’ into monsters, situate them as morally and intellectually inferior, and, as discussed below, justify the use of disproportionate levels of violence against them. Biko Agozino explains how this process took place with Indigenous people, who were described as having ‘warrior genes’ and therefore having crime ingrained in their DNA (Agozino 2023).

Narratives of war also construct who is perceived as the ‘victim’ of violence. Parties to the conflict often use victimhood as a political tool to exonerate ‘us’- the ‘good ones’ - of all blame for the violence and shift it entirely onto ‘them’- the ‘enemy’ (Álvarez Berastegi & Hearty 2019). The ‘victim’ is usually constructed in such a way that the observer perceives them as an object and not the source of harm. This approach resembles a reductionist representation of ‘victim’ and ‘enemy’, where actors in war contexts are characterised as one or the other, but in no case can they be both (Hearty 2018; Lawther 2023).

This false dichotomy of exclusive categorisation as either a ‘victim’ or a ‘perpetrator’ overlooks the complexity of the reality of war, where the categories are often intertwined (Bouris 2007). Specifically, it is well documented that Palestinians are victims of Zionist and Israeli colonisation, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, apartheid, and genocide. Furthermore, Palestinians have predominantly engaged in long-term non-violent resistance, including popular resistance, civil disobedience, boycott movements, internationalising the Palestinian cause, and engaging in bilateral negotiations. While all of these strategies were sabotaged, the Israeli public has elected increasingly far-right governments that have made it clear in the past and recently that Palestinians are not deserving of their own sovereign state, and that Israel will continue its occupation and settler colonisation of Palestine. Examples of this are abundant. From the current government, the best embodiment is seen in the three ‘options’ provided to Palestinians by the Israeli Finance Minister, who enjoys wide authority in the administration of occupied Palestinian territory: leaving Palestine, which amounts to unlawful transfer and displacement; being killed by Israelis, which amounts to murder and extermination; or remaining and becoming Israel’s servants, which amounts to apartheid, persecution, and modern slavery. All of these options amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and/or genocide. Yet, despite the compromises and non-violent strategies of resistance by Palestinians and the continuous election of radical Israeli governments, Palestinians are not only not afforded the right to self-defence, but also are vilified and demonised by mainstream media,........

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