An Israeli bombing of Rafah killed sixteen children and six women on Sunday. In the same hours, a new mass grave came to light, at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, after the long Israeli siege that ended on April 7: 283 bodies in plastic bags, many tied up, many killed at close range, probably executed. Women, children, elderly.
When the offensive ends, people will be walking over corpses in Gaza.
It’s not the first time. It had already happened at Shifa hospital. Mass graves freeze the blood, sediment horror in the global imagination: it is the definitive abuse. It is not just the death inflicted, it is his humiliation, the outrage of an oblivion without dignity. The mass grave of Bucha, in Ukraine, will remain in the European imagination thanks to the commitment of the political leaders who visited it. Those of Khan Younis and Shifa are not. They are not found in the newspapers, if they are found they are doubted: they were fighters, it is a fake video, perhaps it was Hamas.
The under-representation of war crimes committed by Israel – if not their concealment – is one of the metrics of this offensive. It has historical roots, here and elsewhere. The Israeli-Palestinian question has been a confrontation over land since its origins. But it was, and still is, also a comparison between narratives. The narrative of the self is at the same time a source of identity and the voice of that identity, even more so in a colonial context in which the denial of the other, of the subordinate, is a structural element of dispossession and subjugation.
AT THE BEGINNING of the 20th century, when the Zionist movement arrived in the land of Palestine, the Palestinian people already had a strongly rooted national and nationalist feeling and a complex collective identity (political, cultural, social). With the prolonged denial of self-determination, the need for external recognition has passed through the use of a universal and shared language, the vocabulary of international law.
Settler colonialism, apartheid and today genocide are the toolbox in academia to describe the nature of the Israeli state. In indifference. Until today: that lexicon has become so global that it resonates in the hall of the International Court of Justice.
It does not resonate in the Western media system where semantic violence serves to justify the concrete violence exercised in the occupied Palestinian territories. In Italy it is a clear dynamic: the uncritical adoption of the Israeli narrative, in addition to being dictated by a closeness to Tel Aviv’s claims, is functional to adhering to a model of unequal citizenship, racialized securitism and presumed moral superiority.
A good part of the Italian press replicates that model with a racist and neo-colonial attitude. Palestinian lives do not matter, just as those of migrants or second generations matter less.
The effects are visible: the use of Israeli language even when in clear contradiction with the dictates of international law, the absence of those who carry out violence (with Palestinians dead in war, dead in exodus), the questioning of Palestinian testimonies , the removal of historical context.
BUT MOST OF ALL, and it is this that generates confusion and pain, the concealment of Israeli war crimes. Massacres of children, targeted raids on schools, churches and mosques, vilification of hospitals, attacks on safe corridors for displaced people to pass through, closure of border crossings to cause famine, artificial intelligence to anesthetize the massacre, none of this is told in his real measure from the media who on other occasions have rightly given voice to the indignation. The images of stripped, tied, blindfolded prisoners concentrated in stadiums or squares do not generate this.
Such underrepresentation doesn’t just affect Palestinians. It falls on us: it is the precursor to the criminalization of those who dissent, accused of anti-Semitism in the “best” of cases, beaten with truncheons in the worst.
It makes us think that the same media system that evokes the years of lead and the five-pointed stars to narrate the student movement, faced with war crimes on live TV and the transformation of Gaza into a place unfit for life, is still babbling about existence or otherwise of a “plausible genocide”.
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