Toxic narratives are imposed, installed and tend to remain, like a broken record and an ideological loop, although they are surpassed by events, analyzes and the times themselves. Only the concerted effort of debunkingor deconstruction, historical and journalistic, hand in hand with the global social awakening, can form some type of counterweight.
The discourse of war has historically served to legitimize any abusive action, internal or foreign policies, and economic interests of governments, armies, leaders, companies, agencies, arms manufacturers, drug traffickers, armed groups and other national and international actors. Suffice it to mention here the misnamed “war on drugs” in the United States and its corresponding “wars on drug trafficking” in the global South and Latin America, or the “war on terror” or “terrorism” of Bush and his successors, as an axis of interference and domination of other countries, resources and territories.
After October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack and massacre in Israeli territory, which triggered a prolonged and genocidal military offensive in the Gaza Strip, the chorus of the most influential international media, both center-right and center-left, private and public, particularly in the countries of the so-called West and global North, have described the situation as a “war” or an “armed conflict.” As if the state of Israel and the armed group Hamas were really fighting each other.
However, a more rigorous analysis from international law and political theory reveals that this characterization is problematic and biased, functional to the structuring of the American hegemonic power and its narrative, as well as that of its allies and satellites or dependent nations. It is evident that talking about war or armed conflict helps justify the ongoing genocide, which not even the supposed peace agreement and the exchange of hostages and political prisoners, promoted by Trump in Egypt, have been able to stop 100 percent.
The absolute asymmetry between the parties, a regular army and government equipped with nuclear weapons, on the one hand, and an armed group like Hamas, fragmented between militias and even factions in different countries, shows that the nature of Israeli control over Gaza and the magnitude of the destruction point towards an operation of a genocidal and colonial nature, of ethnic cleansing, that towards a war between comparable forces or a simple asymmetric conflict that is being carried out. driving according to the “rules” of International Humanitarian Law.
In this framework, the role of the United States, and of Donald Trump’s mediation, has been to reinforce the idea of an ongoing war, or now temporarily suspended, and contribute to the international legitimization of Israel, while the Jewish state was losing all consensus. The so-called peace plan and the preliminary agreement that is being implemented in Gaza, in fact, came at a time when more and more countries were recognizing the Palestinian state and the word genocide was being used and accepted internationally by leaders, organizations, protest groups and agencies of all kinds. It was necessary, then, to make a change, to invent a peace agreement, as if there really were a war. In reality, it is a unilateral ceasefire, since the Israeli army and its government, even beyond the will and American auspices, are the ones who have decided how and how much to intensify their offensive and when to suspend it, for the moment.
International Humanitarian Law (IHL), especially the 1949 Geneva Conventions, defines “armed conflict” as a situation in which there are prolonged clashes between two or more organized armed parties. This definition, adopted by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), requires both a minimum level of intensity and the existence of responsible command structures. In the case of Gaza, however, the disproportion in military resources, territorial control and offensive capacity between Israel and Hamas prevents talk of prolonged confrontations between comparable forces.
From the first weeks after the attack on October 7, 2023, Hamas’s military capabilities were exceeded, since we cannot speak of confrontations, advances and setbacks, campaigns or attacks by Hamas, as if it were simply a bloc or regular army, while the Israeli offensive became a unilateral campaign of destruction on a surrounded and defenseless civilian population, as denounced by the UN Special Rapporteur for the territories (illegally) occupied by Israel, Francesca Albanese.
That said, the media’s insistence on the notion of “war” fulfills a purely political and cynical function: the aim is to apply the discourses and norms of IHL instead of using those of international criminal law, by which the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity or apartheid have a different weight, as expressed in South Africa’s lawsuit for genocide against Israel before the International Court of Justice (which can condemn States, not directly responsible persons).
Therefore, equally, qualifying the case of the annihilation of the Palestinian people in Gaza as an “armed conflict”, another euphemism very common in the mainstream media even today, has the function of keeping Israel within the frameworks of war legality, where violations are judged as excesses in the use of force and not as part of a systematic pattern of annihilation.
In this falsified and counterfactual language in the style of Trump 1.0 and 2.0, anything goes, and unfortunately it is nothing new. This verbiage confuses and obscures facts and realities, by positioning itself as a counter-truth. This happens either before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which recognized the existence of plausible indications of genocide and ordered precautionary measures against Israel in 2024, or before the report of the United Nations special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, entitled “Anatomy of Genocide”, which declares that massive bombings, the blockade of food and medicine, and the destruction of hospitals and Universities form a pattern of extermination directed against the Palestinian people. But you have to keep trying to break the loop.
This violence is linked to a long history of colonization and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and is the continuation of a project of territorial control that combines material dispossession with the elimination of the political subject and of the Palestinian people themselves as such. For this reason, the language of “war”, supported even by governments of European countries, supposedly more “sensitive” to human rights violations, is insufficient and misleading: it presupposes a symmetry between contenders that has never existed, in addition to the fact that American involvement responds to a broader strategy of regional control, in which the preservation of Israeli power is central to the balances on that key board.
By framing the conflict as a war, Washington reinforces the idea that there is a confrontation between two sovereign entities, eliminating from the map the fact that Gaza has been a territory occupied and blockaded since 2007 (or before).
In this sense, Trump’s “mediation” in recent weeks can be understood as an attempt to “normalize” the political result of a genocidal operation, creating a minimum legal framework that legitimizes Israel’s operation and the future of the Strip and the West Bank, another large unresolved knot where Israeli colonization advances without hindrance in total illegality.
Faced with the incumbent total devastation and the onslaught of the leading world power and its main ally in the Middle East, the Palestinian people, and Hamas itself, they would have no other option than to accept the conditions imposed by the only belligerent and attacking party in this context.
The concept of “settler colonialism” accurately describes the Israeli policy of territorial expansion, accompanied by displacement and forced demographic transformation, and cannot be assimilated to an international or internal war or armed conflict. Saying “war” is inadequate, complicit and biased. At this point this criticism should not sound original or new, but it is reiterated and specified here at the insistence of media and political figures in all latitudes.
Tendently, since a few weeks after the Hamas attack, no sustained offensive campaigns or symmetrical confrontations were recorded on the part of this Palestinian political-military formation. The actions consisted mainly of dispersed resistance or even survival, without the ability to cause significant casualties or control territory.
Beyond the practically proven viability of the term genocide, in military terms it is a unilateral armed conflict or a prolonged asymmetric military campaign within an occupied territory, with systematic use of force by a State against a civilian population and unstructured armed groups, with massive humanitarian consequences.
Neither from a legal point of view, due to the absence of prolonged confrontations between equivalent forces, nor from a political point of view, due to the colonial nature of the Israeli offensive, can the name of “war” be sustained, as it did in the so-called 12-day war with Iran between June 13 and 24. The toxic narrative in loop What they want to impose will not be enough, in my opinion, to avoid Israel and Netanyahu, but perhaps also Biden and Trump, at least, some type of prosecution for international crimes, at a legal level and, above all, in the face of History.