Long after the dust settles on the mass graves in Gaza, we will see the reality of what is happening, and it will be too late, writes Qaanitah Hunter.
If you were sitting at a braai and someone said that 46 years of suppression of the black majority in South Africa by a minority white government was an innocent effort to stop the rise of communism in Africa, they would face a lot more than death stares.
It should be equally absurd to suggest that the killing of almost 3 000 Palestinians, including more than 600 children, and flattening half of Gaza is a necessary effort to counter actions of terrorism by Hamas.
To believe that the genocidal nature of Israel's attacks on Gaza since 7 October is an army asserting its right to protect itself is akin to conceding that the DF Malan government of 1948, which insisted that legalised racial segregation was an innocent effort to stop the spread of sinister communism punted by the ANC and the SA Communist Party, acted fairly.
In South Africa, there was a noble facade for the forced removals, the restriction of movement and the disenfranchisement of the majority black population both economically and politically, which is why apartheid thrived for almost 50 years.
Power of misinformation and propaganda
In the book Selling Apartheid: South Africa's Global Propaganda War, journalist and academic Ron Nixon detailed how the apartheid government used information warfare to create a global perception of the ANC as terrorists and the justification of the oppression against black people, which included mass propaganda, the use of international PR agencies, and paid defenders.
When criticism mounted against the brutality of the apartheid regime, demonstrated through massacres like the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, the apartheid government used the killing of 69 protesters to exploit the fears of white South Africans.
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Instead of understanding the cruelty of the apartheid regime through the mowing down of innocent protesters, the massacre was used to portray black South Africans as savages who the apartheid government had to protect whites against.
That is the power of misinformation and propaganda during war and mass oppression, where victims are portrayed as subhuman to justify the unthinkable.
To the millions who bought into Hitler's anti-semitic radicalism, the Nazi government was simply "restoring order", which resulted in the Holocaust and the extermination of Europe's Jews.
In conflict after conflict, euphemisms and disinformation are relied on to get widespread buy-in, otherwise a regime would not be left to mow down innocent people without justification.
'Fighting human animals'
In 1994, the Rwandan genocide was justified by the characterisation of the Tutsis as outsiders and "cockroaches", and their killing was simply pre-emptive self-defence.
In Gaza, Israel's defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a complete siege of Gaza with no food, electricity or fuel allowed in.
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"We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly," he said, and Israel's army actions since then prove as much.
The popular sentiment that Palestinian people collectively are responsible for the actions of Hamas in the killing of 1 300 Israelis and the abduction of around 200 others is rooted in a long-standing narrative that Palestinian people - even innocent babies - are low-life subhumans who deserve the full might of the Israeli army.
Writing in the Guardian, columnist Chris McGreal wrote:
Some of these statements might be no more than lashing out in the heat of the moment as a natural reaction to a shocking atrocity. There is certainly some of that. But in Israel, they fall on ground made fertile by decades of discourse dehumanising of Palestinians. For years, Israeli leaders have advocated ethnic cleansing, euphemistically called "transfer", with a discourse that portrays Palestinians as a fake people with no history that matters.
Language matters in war.
History is littered with examples of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of repression - neatly wrapped in ghastly rhetoric meant to characterise the victims as subhuman.
To believe, in 2023, that displacing a million people, starving them and bombing any safe exit is Israel fighting terrorism, is to believe Vladamir Putin when he says his invasion of Ukraine is a "special operation to de-militarise and de-nazificate".
Long after the dust settles on the mass graves in Gaza, we will see the reality of what is happening, and it will be too late.
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory, has warned that Palestinians are in grave danger of mass ethnic cleansing.
But the rhetoric forwarded by Israeli politicians that the evacuation order - forcing 1.1 million people to evacuate northern Gaza in 24 hours - and the air and ground invasion is an effort to fight Hamas is exactly the euphemistic language used historically to victim blame.
History has taught us that genocide ripens in a ground fertilised by misinformation.
Humanity can't fall for it again.
- Qaanitah Hunter is the assistant editor of politics and opinions.
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