Lift the Ban: Gaslighting

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command". George Orwell, 1984 

The word of the decade surely has to be Gaslighting [1]. I thought this during the smears against Jeremy Corbyn, but it has been off-the-scale over Gaza.  (One of my Lift the Ban posts.)

I've been delaying writing this because there's so much I want to say, but it is so important, to my mind, that I'm going to get something down and published, even if I have come back change it. (I almost certainly will.)

Israel is committing ethnic cleansing and genocide [2]. For more than two years, it has been slaughtering Palestinian men, women and children in the most ruthless way imaginable ("shooting fish in a barrel"). It, Israel, has commited the most hideous of crimes. I'm not going to go through the details: they are readily available for anyone not wilfully turning away. Saying otherwise is a lie: gaslighting

Britain is complicit. Both main political parties and all the mainstream media is 'on the side of' Israel. The lives of Palestinians are worth infinitely less than the lives of Israelis. See Peter Oborne's book and my post Britain's Complicity in Genocide: Peter Oborne’s Litany. To pretend that Britain has made any effort to hold Israel to account is obviously not true: gaslighting. 

Palestine Action is a direct action protest group. They are not a terrorist organisation. Mr Justice Chamberlain has accepted that Palestine Action is not a terror organisation in the ‘colloquial’ meaning of the term (see David Renton, What is the Meaning of Support, London Review of Books, v47 n14/15 14 August 2024). How can anyone look from Palestine Action vandalising warplanes to the IDF killing 20,000 children in Gaza and Israel torturing prisoners and claim that the former is the one which is terrorism? Gaslighting.

Perhaps the most insideous gaslighting, though (because it enables everything else), is the claim that speaking out against the crimes of Israel is antisemitism. The large number of Jews who do just that - speak out against the crimes of Israel - somehow, incomprehensibly, counts for nothing. Gaslighting.

 Notes 

1 I'm sure everyone reading this knows the meaning of Gaslighting. If you don't, you can easily find it on the web but I also recommend watching the 1944 film that gave it it's name: Gaslight.  It has a specific meaning in relationships, describing a type of psychological abuse, but more generally it is the manipulation of someone into questioning their perception of reality.

2 In a recent podcast in which Chris Hedges talks with Norman Finkelstein there was what I think a key insight: genocide is not the goal of Israel: the goal is ethnic cleansing. Israel wants rid of all Palestinians, and genocide of one of the methods being used to achieve the goal. Israel is making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinians have to leave, but if they stay and die, that is OK with Israel.