By John Pickard
Al Jazeera is a news channel owned by the Qatari government. On the slaughter in Gaza, it has provided a better and more regular coverage for its world-wide audience than any other. Four years ago, it claimed viewing figures of 1.5bn, and that number will almost certainly have increased considerably in the last four months.
Al Jazeera is not only seen in Europe and is at least available in North America, but it is widely followed in the Arab world. The genocidal attack on the Palestinians in Gaza and the brutality and oppression faced by their fellows in the occupied West Bank, are witnessed in the living rooms of ordinary Arab families across the Middle East on a daily basis.
It was no coincidence that the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, asked the Qatari government, very early on this conflict, to ‘rein in’ Al Jazeera. Neither is it an accident that the IDF has targeted journalists in this one-sided war, and Al Jazeera journalists (and their families) have suffered especially.
One of the regular features broadcast by Al Jazeera is Listening Post, in which it looks at other news outlets and social media. This latest edition of that magazine programme is compelling viewing, not for its analysis of the New York Times in the first part of the programme, but for the analysis of social media posts by Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza.
Remember that the IDF is claimed to be “the most moral army in the world”, a claim repeated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu only last October. But here, revealed by Al Jazeera, are posts put up by IDF soldiers on social media showing a completely different story, in fact the opposite of any morality.
IDF uses more bulldozers than any comparably sized army
We see images of looting – all kinds of things are stolen from the homes of those Palestinians who have been forced to flee Israeli bombing. Anything from Dyson vacuum cleaners, to bicycles, to watches, to household goods. Soldiers are pictured laughing at their arrangements of ladies’ underwear (with, noticeably, no women IDF members present) plundered from the private bedrooms of Palestinian women.
In relation to its numerical size, the Israeli army probably uses more armed bulldozers than any other army in the world. As we have pointed out, this is because there is a political imperative – with no relation to military-strategic needs – to destroy as much of the infrastructure of Palestinian life as possible and to render such areas uninhabitable. So olive trees are ploughed up, streets and paving is destroyed, along with homes and facilities. In the ‘ideal world’ of the IDF, all Palestinians would move elsewhere.
The bulldozing and destruction is true of the West Bank as well as Gaza, but in the latter case high explosives are currently the favourite means of destroying facilities. In the Hollywood film Apocalypse Now, about the Vietnam War, a flight of US army helicopters is shown attacking a defenceless village to the music of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.
The IDF have many of their own versions of this posted on social media. They have set music to posts showing huge areas of residential properties burning or being demolished by a series of explosive mines, and they are glorying in the destruction of what used to be the homes of dozens of families.
These things are not made up. They’re there on social media, posted by IDF troops. There are soldiers giving each other high-fives, or ostentatiously drawing on big cigars as they thumb a switch to destroy another score of Palestinian homes or homes that are burning. You can listen to their music as you see IDF tanks divert from their path to needlessly and pointlessly destroy a parked car on the side of the road. And why? Because the car belongs to a Palestinian and it cannot be taken back. It is the same with destroying fields and olive groves.
The arrogance and impunity of any colonial army
Among the footage you can see are videos of Palestinians arrested, many of whom are still held, their whereabouts unknown to their families. If they are still alive, that is. The IDF do not really know who is a Hamas sympathiser and who is not, so, like every colonial army in the past – the British in Africa, the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, etc, etc, Israeli soldiers round up hundreds of men young and old, in the ‘hope’ that they will get some Hamas supporters. They strip them to their underpants and do their best to humiliate and intimidate them. Some of them are even shown on social media being beaten.
Some of the videos collected and shown by Al Jazeera researchers were examined by human rights experts who were asked for their opinions. They all pointed to the same thing. The IDF are doing what they are doing and posting it in public, on social media, because they feel utterly confident that they can get away with it. There is no come-back for them whatsoever.
Whereas their prisoners and those who have fled their homes are completely degraded, humiliated and deprived of any confidence or hope, the IDF soldiers are cocky and arrogant. Why? Because they feel they an impunity, thanks not only to their own commanders and political leaders, many of whom talk about Palestinians as ‘animals’, none of whom are ‘innocent’, and so on, but also because Western political leaders, by doing nothing, have effectively given them a free pass to do what they like.
It makes any normal person angry to watch this programme. Angry at the IDF. Angry at the Israeli government. Angry at grovelling politicians like Starmer who say nothing as Gaza is bombed to rubble. It is all, you see, just Israel “defending itself”.
What these IDF monsters do not understand, is that their images are not just circulating (as they intend) in Israel, where Al Jazeera is not viewed, but they will also be widely circulated in the Arab world. That, above all, is what the USA, and Western and Arab governments fear. The more such images circulate, the more likely it will be that there will come a reckoning. It can’t come soon enough.
The particular Al Jazeera Listening Post programme can be seen here. The picture top, shows three IDF soldiers holding an Israeli flag against a backdrop of the shocking destruction in Gaza. The message for social media is clear…”this is was Israel does”]
