In recent days, US President Joe Biden has invoked many expressions of value to describe what Hamas did during its attack on Israeli settlements in the vicinity of Gaza, on October 7 as part of the so-called "Al-Aqsa flood." These expressions included words such as "brutality," a campaign of "pure cruelty" against the Jewish people, "absolute evil," "hatred," and "the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust," and other expressions that refer to two basic things:

Removing the moral and political qualities of any act of resistance. Dehumanizing Hamas and its inauguration.

With regard to the first issue, which is the demoralization and political characterization, it is clear that the latter event was intended to turn into a new September 11, and one of the requirements for this that we have experienced well is to eliminate the distance between interpretation and justification in dealing with the event, condemn any sympathy for the Palestinian cause itself and not with Hamas, and even condemn the carrying of the Palestinian flag. The duty, according to the criteria of the September 11 event, is to remove any moral or political character from the military operation carried out by Hamas, while completely ignoring the idea that we are facing an armed resistance movement against an occupation and apartheid regime, and ignoring the idea that the operation took place at the gates of the apartheid wall erected by the occupation itself on land usurped by the Palestinians.

The US president and the leaders of the so-called "free world" and their media all tended to isolate Hamas' action from anything else, as an isolated act without context or history prior to this act, and then exaggerated the ugliness of the event by falsifying news about the beheading of children or the burning of corpses, statements that were later retracted because there was no evidence to prove it. The dehumanization of the two qualities: moral and political serves the idea of dehumanization, confirms the idea of barbarism, as we will explain, and legitimizes, in return, Israel's actions in the face of that supposed barbarism, since war takes place outside the circle of politics, morality and law together.

With regard to dehumanization, it is necessary to achieve the political and military goal set for this battle, which is to crush Hamas at all costs, and even punish all the people of Gaza, thus exaggerating the dehumanization of Hamas and equating it with ISIS (Islamic State), although there are many differences between Hamas and ISIS. Hamas is a national resistance movement that adheres to the borders of the State of Palestine, faces occupation, and adheres to a specific morality of war, while ISIS is a protest movement against the international order, seeks to establish a transnational caliphate, and adheres to no ethics in war because it is based on savagery. The "Israel in Arabic" page, for example, was keen to use a hashtag at the end of each comment stating that Hamas is ISIS, which confirms the political and military objective of the Israeli battle.

The two previous things, namely political and moral dehumanization and dehumanization, involved an attempt to emily elevate Hamas and the Palestinians in general, and thus restore their lives, because Israel is facing ISIS, Nazism, or a "barbaric" or "barbaric" attack, according to the different descriptions used by Israeli and Western officials. The aim is to remove Hamas' action from the circle of political and military action completely to a purely criminal and vindictive act that does not invoke any law or moral principles, especially since Hamas is classified as a terrorist movement, which is a political classification and not a legal one, that is, it is a classification that begs politics to depoliticize its opponents.

On the other hand, two things were insisted on against Israel that confirm this media strategy that serves the political and strategic goal:

Insist on Israel's right to defend itself. Explicit and unconditional condemnation of Hamas by the Palestinians and the world.

As for Israel's right to defend itself, many Western leaders have been keen to assert that Israel has "the full right to defend itself," but in this statement two things are circumvented:

  • First, we are talking about the right of a state to defend itself against the attack of a resistance movement on land that has been occupied for decades. The right of self-defense is usually between state and state according to international law, Gaza is not a state, the government of Gaza has not been recognized either politically or legally, and international law grants the occupied people the right to self-defense as well, and this would give some legitimacy to Hamas's action as well, as an act of resistance in principle without details.
  • The second thing is that the right of self-defense between states is regulated by international law; it is not absolute from any restriction or condition, and these restrictions and conditions seek to preserve the minimum level of humanity and moral controls that govern wars between states, but Israel has not adhered to any law or moral rules, whether those that regulate relations with the occupied people, or those related to wars that arise between states. This means that the insistence of Western leaders, led by the United States and Britain, on Israel's right to defend itself meant unconditionally freeing its hand in Gaza.

Although Biden once confirmed that he urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to respect international law, he was completely silent about Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and the systematic displacement of its population, and the war on Gaza has so far resulted in the killing of about 3,11 Palestinians and the injury of about <>,<>, most of them children and women, and we are talking about about two million unarmed civilians, besieged and crammed in a very limited geographical spot. Unconditional U.S. support for Israel (in military hardware, political support, and troops) means that Biden's talk of urging Netanyahu to respect international law is merely diplomatic.

Interestingly, some Israeli leaders have been frank enough on this matter beyond diplomatic rhetoric: Israeli President Isaac Herzog held all Palestinians responsible for what Hamas did, saying, "It is unequivocally clear that there is an entire nation that bears responsibility" for the Hamas attack, and that "it is not true that civilians are not involved."

The Israeli president clearly rejects the distinction established by international law between military and civilians, and Herzog has repeatedly stressed this; in a video press conference, he denounced the question of Israel's commitment to the rules of international law in Gaza, and even rebuked the foreign journalist who asked him about it. So did former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett: when a foreign journalist asked him – in a television interview – about the effects of Israel's power cuts in the Gaza Strip as a punishment for all Gazans, especially children in incubators and patients in hospitals who need health support equipment, Bennett met the question with disapproval and rebuked the journalist, saying, "Are you serious?! Are you asking me about Palestinian civilians?! Didn't you see what was happening?! We are fighting the Nazis," he said, rejecting the distinction between civilian and military in war.

The second thing remained, the keenness to extract an explicit and unconditional condemnation of Hamas by the victims of the Israeli occupation over decades, the first question that Western journalists have been preoccupied with in their conversations with Palestinian officials and commentators is: Do you condemn what Hamas has done? It is as if this question is a necessary prelude to the continuation of the dialogue, despite the fact that the general public of these journalists ignored the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and its thousands, whose victims reached thousands in just ten days.

After all of the above, it has become clear that the political and military goal takes precedence over morality and international humanitarian law; the destruction of Hamas necessitated this media strategy, which explained its four dimensions, which deal with Hamas on the one hand, and Israel on the other, and seeks to provide moral cover for the high humanitarian cost of achieving the political-military goal. Unfortunately, the Western media has turned into a servant arm of this American and Israeli agenda, and it has also been supported by many Western decisions to prevent demonstrations in support of Palestine, and to restrict access to Facebook and other comments, in an attempt to give Israel a longer deadline to achieve the declared political and military goal, and to avoid the formation of humanitarian pressure that may hinder the achievement of the declared goal of the battle, but this strategy overlooked a central issue here, which is that it will often lead to the growth of extremist tendencies, after the blockage of the political and resistance horizon, whether military. Or peacefully, and God is the helper.