Tonight at Columbia University, students continue to stand in solidarity with Palestine for the fourth night in a row.

“Free, free Palestine!”

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Happening tonight at Yale University!

Students refuse to back down, protesting for the second consecutive night in solidarity with Columbia University students for Palestine, despite facing threats of arrests.

Tunisians march in solidarity with the Palestinian people amid the ongoing Israeli genocide.

French pro-Palestine advocates took action yesterday in Lyon to mourn thousands of Palestinian children murdered by the Israeli occupation in Gaza.

In 2001, on 9/11, five Israeli men were arrested for dancing and celebrating as the Twin Towers fell

They were filming and had large amounts of cash, box cutters, and residue of explosives on them

They were discovered to be Mossad agents who later admitted they were there to document the events

While in jail they failed numerous lie detector test

One agent was an alleged expert in explosives

They were part of Urban Movers which was a large Israeli shell company used to get Mossad agents and spies in the US

Due to pressure from higher-ups, they were released and sent back to Israel

Columbia students participating in the Palestinian protest.

#GhostPrincess

BREAKING: New York University (NYU) students have launched the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, calling on their school to divest from Israel and to end its Tel Aviv satellite campus.

Students from MIT, Emerson, and Tufts University have established encampments in solidarity with Columbia University's Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

"Disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest"

Large crowd walk out in solidarity with students at
the Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment right now.

Air Force Veteran Levi Pierpont, a friend of the late Aaron Bushnell, joined the students' solidarity encampment at the University of Michigan.

For the second day in a row, students at the American University in Cairo protest calling for divestment from Israel.

BREAKING| The Columbia College student body overwhelmingly passes a referendum asking the University to divest from Israel, cancel the opening of the Tel Aviv Global Center, and end the Tel Aviv University dual degree program.

BREAKING| NYPD buses are moving in to encircle the Palestine solidarity encampment at NYU amidst speculations that the university has called police on its pro-Palestine students.

Protestors leave NYU and descend on NY Police Department headquarters (1PP) to protest the arbitrary arrests of dozens students from the Gaza solidarity encampment at the university.

Harvard University has suspended the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee after months of administrative repression, harassment and intimidation from pro-Israel groups and donors.

Students for Palestine start an occupation of Sydney University in Australia.

Italian students are protesting for a free Palestine, joining in solidarity with Columbia University students.

“Free, free Palestine!”

Students at Sydney University carry out a protest calling for their university to divest from Israel.

The art of deception: How Israel uses ‘hasbara’ to whitewash its crimes

As Israel conducts its latest round of aggression against the Palestinians, the prevailing narrative often peddled in mainstream western media outlets continues to be implicitly framed to favour the Israeli narrative.

Under the guise of neutrality, media discourse has been to describe the conflict flaring up in occupied East Jerusalem as “clashes” between “both sides”. Israel’s ruthless bombardment of Gaza leading to the deaths of hundreds of civilians is rationalised as an act of “self defence” in response to Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket attacks and their use of “human shields”.

The Israeli state is deeply aware that perception shapes reality. While it commits alleged war crimes with impunity, it can only do so if there is a powerful enough propaganda machine it can deploy to counter inevitable public condemnation and international solidarity with Palestinians.

Enter 'hasbara’ – Israel’s primary messaging tool.

Hasbara – Hebrew for explanation – is a public diplomacy technique which links information warfare with the strategic objectives of the Israeli state. Public diplomacy is to be strategically conceived as a foreign policy priority, whereby a positive image of Israel is cultivated on the world stage, especially considering the image challenges Israel has continuously faced since its creation in 1948.

While rooted in earlier concepts of agitprop and censorship, hasbara does not look to jam the supply of contradictory information to audiences. Instead, it willingly accepts an open marketplace of opinion. What it seeks to do in this context is to promote selective listening by limiting the receptivity of audiences to information, rather than constricting its flow.

To accomplish its mission, hasbara targets diplomats, politicians and the public through mass media. It is also accomplished through numerous institutes and government agencies, as well as in research centres, universities, NGOs and lobbying firms.

Hasbara 2.0

Following the 2006 Lebanon war and ‘Operation Cast Lead’ two years later, both of which seriously damaged Israeli’s international reputation, there was a gradual shift between 2008 to 2012, to what the scholar Miriyam Aouragh called “Hasbara 2.0”: an assertive digital diplomacy that accounted for web 2.0 technologies like social media and YouTube.

Soon, hasbara-styled initiatives from the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) were being synchronised into a new online branch, with a permanent team operating in liaison with the Ministry of Strategic Affairs in 2008.

In 2012, Israel would announce its war against Gaza on Twitter. During ‘Operation Pillar of Defense’, as Israeli-funneled talking points saturated the US and European media landscape, hasbara made heavy use of the more distilled communication channels of social media. It further exploited browser functions, search engine algorithms, and other automated mechanisms that controlled what content were presented to viewers.

In the process, Israel designed a narrative of itself as the innocent victim of Palestinian terrorism, one that was accorded with the sovereign right of defense against existential assault. This, despite the fact of having initiated the escalation, possessing advanced aerial power against an adversary without one, and unloading more than one thousand times as many tons of munitions on Gazans.

In 2014, Israel’s war in Gaza under ‘Operation Protective Edge’ prompted a much greater pushback to its media narrative, clearly underestimating the extent of the global outrage to their actions in Gaza.

As images of destruction and dismembered bodies of innocent civilians flooded social media, hasbara proponents were forced to re-double their efforts in well-orchestrated PR campaigns that attempted to reframe war crimes with talking points to whitewash any disproportionate use of force – which even ended up being ineffective back in Israel.

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#GhostPrincess

Desperate measures

In the event this posturing fails, there are a few well-worn strategies in their arsenal that hasbara engineers have resorted to.

One has been to force the public to make a choice between Israel and Hamas. Today, we continually see this dichotomy played out on international broadcast segments; in doing so, Israel is framed as a rational and innocent actor provoked by an irrational terrorist threat, making any criticism of Israel’s actions de facto apologia for terrorism.

While a number of western governments have designated Hamas a terror organisation including the US and the European Union, Norway and Switzerland, they still maintain diplomatic ties with the group. Australia, New Zealand and the UK only consider its military wing a terrorist organisation. A number of other states outside of the West do not label it a terrorist organisation, and the UN in 2018 rejected a US resolution to condemn it as a terror organisation.

Probably the most common tactic has been to link any criticism of Israeli policies, whether its human rights violations or illegal colonisation of Palestinian land, to anti-Semitism.

One of the strategic threats in recent years has been the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Israeli officials have attempted to smear those who support BDS as anti-Semitic and claim it is linked to terrorism, while anti-BDS laws have been passed in the US.

Online, it has translated into pushing prominent social media companies to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of anti-Semitism, which widens potential accusation of anti-Semitism to criticism of Israel.

The weaponisation of social justice issues and appropriation of ‘woke’ language is another frequently adopted strategy. For example the narrative of how Israel is the “only democracy” in the Middle East is repeated ad infinitum; indicating its the lone country which respects human rights and the rule of law in an otherwise regressive and hostile region.

“Pinkwashing” – cynically exploiting LGBTQ+ rights to amplify a progressive veneer and conceal Israeli crimes – has been added to the hasbara repertoire, along with the support for animal rights to “veganwash” occupation.

Ultimately, this discourse is meant to operate in juxtaposition against the “backward” Palestinian – to further dehumanise them among western audiences and soften criticism of Israel.

#GhostPrincess

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