The dire medical crisis in Gaza, explained

LiZhou

November 15, 2023

Israel’s ground assault is causing a collapse of Gaza’s health care centers — including the region’s largest hospital, al-Shifa, which has been raided by Israeli forces.

 

A group of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fighters entered al-Shifa on Tuesday, after the hospital had been under siege for days. Care at the hospital had been shut down since Saturday, after it ran out of fuel. Health care officials and local journalists in the hospital have said that gunshots can be heard throughout the facility and that soldiers are actively interrogating people. One al-Shifa surgeon told Reuters that staff have been hiding during the raid and that an Israeli tank was parked in front of the emergency department.

Israel has maintained that its focus on the hospital is due to claims that a Hamas command center is based underneath it, allegations US officials have echoed and which Hamas has denied. Israel says its forces battled with Hamas fighters outside the hospital, and that it’s discovered weapons and “terror infrastructure” inside it, a claim Hamas has also denied. The Israeli military also says there has not been fighting with physicians, patients, and civilians inside the hospital, though that has not been separately corroborated.

Little reporting coming from the hospital has been independently verified, making it unclear exactly what is happening. The Israeli military’s raid of al-Shifa has also been condemned by some members of the international community — including Turkey and the United Nations — who argue hospitals should not be military targets.

Additionally, Al-Shifa’s not the only hospital damaged by the ongoing Israeli offensive. As of mid-November, Gaza’s Health Ministry says just 10 out of the region’s 35 hospitals are still operational. The situation is particularly dire in the north, which has weathered the brunt of Israel’s airstrikes, and where multiple facilities are facing “perilous” conditions. Like al-Shifa, al-Quds hospital, another of the largest medical facilities in north Gaza, has now run out of fuel, according to hospital and humanitarian leaders, with doctors scrambling to save remaining patients’ lives. In the few hospitals that are still open, physicians are missing critical supplies, understaffed, and overwhelmed, officials say.

“It is a disaster from the top to the bottom,” Yara Asi, a professor of global health management at the University of Central Florida who has studied health care systems in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said ahead of the most recent wave of violence.

The need for quality medical care in Gaza has only deepened following weeks of devastating airstrikes by the Israeli government, which have killed more than 11,000 people and injured more than 28,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. These airstrikes came in response to a brutal attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7, during which the Palestinian militant group killed 1,200 people and took roughly 240 people hostage. The ongoing siege that’s blocked all but a trickle of humanitarian aid has also exacerbated the negative health situation, leaving Palestinians struggling to find clean water and untainted food.

Beyond the destruction they’ve caused to facilities and buildings, Israeli airstrikes have also overwhelmed hospitals with a surge of new trauma patients who’ve been grievously wounded and burned, and who have few if any options for treatment as doctors run low on antiseptic supplies, antibiotics, and anesthesia. In recent weeks, doctors described cleaning wounds with vinegar and laundry detergent, and operating on people without anesthesia.

Hospitals have also become refuges for displaced people, making facilities already full of the ill and wounded even more packed. Some living at hospitals have taken advantage of “tactical” or “humanitarian” pauses in the fighting to flee south. But tens of thousands remain, and as fighting intensifies around hospitals, some are being killed and wounded. Beyond the danger posed by the fighting, medical experts worry that infectious diseases — such as cholera — will increase as people in Gaza are exposed to contaminated water and forced to shelter in cramped, crowded spaces. Already, some physicians in south Gaza have noticed an increase in infections including sepsis and meningitis among the patients they are seeing.

“We’re running out of words to describe the horrors unfolding in Gaza,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a news briefing in early November. “Hospitals crammed with the injured lying in corridors. Morgues overflowing. Doctors performing surgery without anesthesia. Thousands of people seeking shelter from the bombardment. Families crammed into overcrowded schools desperate for food and water. Toilets overflowing and the risk of disease outbreak spreading. And everywhere, fear, death, destruction, loss.”

Hospitals are suffering from supply shortages and airstrikes

Of Gaza’s 35 hospitals, 25 aren’t operational, and a number of those that remain have been overwhelmed by a surge in patients and supply shortages. Smaller practices are in dire shape as well, with more than 70 percent of primary care clinics reportedly forced to shut their doors.

Due to both dwindling fuel and damage from airstrikes, Gaza’s only cancer hospital, the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, ceased operations earlier this month, according to Palestinian health officials. The Indonesian Hospital, a major provider of medical care in northern Gaza, also saw its main generator go out in early November, severely limiting its ability to provide key services, including oxygen and ventilators. And this past weekend, both al-Shifa and al-Quds hospitals announced that their fuel had been depleted, and that patients and doctors were effectively trapped there as Israeli forces surrounded the two facilities.

Al-Shifa’s shutdown — and the IDF raid — has endangered the lives of its patients, including 36 premature babies reliant on incubators to survive. Doctors tried to jury-rig solutions to keep them alive once those incubators went offline such as wrapping them in blankets to keep them warm. Israel claims to have brought “incubators, baby food, and medical supplies” as part of its raid, including machines that are battery-operated. Three premature babies who depended on these machines have died as of this weekend and more could do the same without additional support, a physician at the hospital told ABC News.

For a time, the UN was able to keep some services at hospitals in the south afloat by sharing its fuel reserves, but the organization says it’s now out of fuel. The UN has warned that it may not be able to provide any more humanitarian aid at all, due to the lack of fuel available to move trucks and supplies.

In addition to a dearth of fuel, Gaza’s hospitals are also lacking key medical supplies including everything from gauze to IV bags to antiseptic.

“Even the most basic of supplies we’ve run out,” Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon in Gaza, told Australia’s SBS News. “We’ve run out of dressings, we’ve run out of intravenous fluids, we’ve run out of blade sutures. Anything that we require is finished or in the last few boxes left in the department.”

As their supplies dwindle, hospitals are also becoming more crowded with an influx of patients as well as other civilians seeking shelter after they’ve been displaced from their homes.

“We are three surgeons — I’m an orthopaedic surgeon, we have another general surgeon and a plastic surgeon. We have more than 100 in-patients. We have people who need surgery but we can’t do this because of the limited resources,” Fadel Naim — of Gaza’s City’s last running hospital, al-Ahli Arab — told Al-Jazeera. “We do only [life-saving] surgeries. Every day we received more than 200 injured people. Some of them stay in the hospital because they have no homes.”

“In terms of the patient load of hospitals, it’s indescribable,” says Tanya Haj-Hassan, a physician with Doctors Without Borders who is based in Jordan, but in regular communication with doctors in Gaza. “They’re having to resuscitate patients on the floor, to do surgical procedures on the floor because there’s no room anywhere else.”

Hospitals are targets of violence — and competing claims

Hospitals have endured significant damage from repeated airstrikes and bombings, and they’ve also become a flashpoint in dueling claims from the Israeli government and Hamas.

According to the WHO, there have been 137 attacks on health care-related facilities in Gaza, and at least 160 health care personnel have died while on duty. These attacks include airstrikes that were near the al-Shifa hospital, the al-Quds hospital, and the Indonesian hospital, as well as a bombing that hit an ambulance convoy near al-Shifa. Many hospitals in North Gaza have been told to evacuate due to bombings in the region, but physicians have previously said this is impossible and an effective death sentence for patients who rely on ventilators and life support.

“Moving a baby on life support would be hazardous in a high-income country. Doing so in Gaza would gravely endanger a child whose life has only just begun,” said Ghebreyesus.

Beyond al-Shifa, other hospitals, including al-Rantisi, a pediatric care facility, have also been at the center of competing allegations. The Israeli government has alleged that health care facilities have been utilized by Hamas and that this is the reason they are being targeted by the military. Hamas has denied these claims, as have hospital officials. The Israeli government’s claims also haven’t been independently verified.

Prior to the raid, al-Shifa hospital director Muhammad Abu Salmiya said that the Israeli military has been “shooting at anyone outside or inside the hospital.” Similarly, Doctors Without Borders has expressed concerns for the safety of its physicians near al-Shifa, saying in a Tuesday statement that bullets were fired into one of their locations close to the hospital where staff and families were sheltering. An IDF spokesperson had said there was “no siege” on al-Shifa Hospital and that the east side of the hospital was available for safe passage for those wishing to leave.

Those inside, however, disagreed. “It is not safe to move out. It is not safe to stay. We don’t know what to do,” Nidal Abu Hadrus, an al-Shifa neurosurgeon, told NBC News. According to hospital officials, there were 700 patients, 700 medical professionals, and thousands of displaced people still in the hospital as of Monday. Unable to leave the grounds, hospital staff worked to dig a mass grave on Monday for 180 people who had died on its premises, NBC News reports.

Hadrus says there have been efforts to coordinate with the International Committee of the Red Cross for an attempted evacuation, but it will be difficult to transport patients who are in fragile condition.

Attempts to evacuate the premature babies at al-Shifa who rely on incubators have also been a focus of divergent statements from the Israeli government and hospital officials.

The Israeli government has said that it would provide incubators for the babies and help to move them to a “safer hospital.” Al-Shifa Director Salmiya, however, disputed that claim as “completely false” on Sunday. The Israeli government has also said that it would provide 300 liters of fuel to al-Shifa, though hospital officials said it was left too far from the hospital for them to be able to safely retrieve, and that the amount would not be enough to keep vital services functioning for a substantial period of time.

Other hospitals, including the al-Rantisi pediatric hospital and al-Quds hospital, have been targeted by the Israeli military due to alleged ties to Hamas as well, claims which also haven’t been independently verified. Monday, the Israeli military released images and video claiming that Hamas had used the basement of the al-Rantisi hospital to store weapons and hold hostages. The photos and videos showed guns and grenades in the space along with a chair with a rope near it, and a makeshift toilet.

A Gaza medical official, however, said the space was used to shelter women and children, calling the IDF press release a “lie and charade.” The Israeli government has also alleged that Hamas fighters were using al-Quds hospital as a base to hide after launching rockets, something that the Palestine Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian organization, has pushed back on. Doctors and patients at al-Quds have also previously struggled to evacuate. Because of how intense the airstrikes have been in its vicinity, an emergency convoy headed to al-Quds to retrieve patients was forced to turn back earlier this week.

Human rights groups have called out the airstrikes that have hit hospitals and cited the violence against health care facilities as violations of international humanitarian law. “The protection of newborns, patients, medical staff, and all civilians must override all other concerns. Hospitals are not battlegrounds,” UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said on X.

As experts told Al Jazeera, attacks on hospitals are a breach of the Geneva Conventions, which state, “Directing an attack against a zone established to shelter the wounded, the sick and civilians from the effects of hostilities is prohibited.” There are exceptions if there’s evidence that medical facilities are being weaponized to harm an opposing force, however, though human rights groups have said their focus is on the fallout on civilians in these hospitals.

“According to Israel, Hamas has chosen to set up a military base underneath the hospital. If that is the case, Hamas is committing a war crime that is morally reprehensible and absolutely prohibited under international humanitarian law,” said B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. “Even if there is a military facility operating under the hospital, this does not allow Israel to bomb the site. Such an attack would result in unbearable, horrifying harm to civilians and constitute a war crime — violating the provisions of international humanitarian law that Israel has repeatedly declared its commitment to uphold.”

The WHO has emphasized, too, that “the difficulty here is separating the needs of [thousands of] people at al-Shifa hospital, civilians, doctors, patients, and others.” And even President Joe Biden issued a warning about attacks on hospitals on Monday, though it came after significant violence has already taken place, saying, “My hope and expectation is that there will be less intrusive action relative to hospitals.”

Evacuations from these medical facilities — in addition to being physically challenging for those who are ill and injured— haven’t necessarily guaranteed safety, either, as Israeli airstrikes have increased in southern Gaza. Transporting the premature babies at al-Shifa outside of Gaza might be the only way to ensure their long-term safety, health officials have said. There have been some successful medical evacuations from Gaza into Jordan and Egypt, though the number pales in comparison to the need. A dozen pediatric patients with cancer and blood disorders have been evacuated, according to the WHO, as have dozens of other people with injuries and medical conditions.

There’s immense fallout for patients and providers

The fallout for patients from these hospital closures and shortages has been enormous — and is poised to increase.

For patients with chronic illnesses, hospitals are increasingly unable to provide the vital medication and care they need to survive. “If you don’t have electricity, you can’t give dialysis [to patients with kidney illnesses],” says Haj-Hassan. “If you cannot do those things, you will ultimately become very unwell and die. [If] you can’t get cancer therapy, you will also die.”

For people with acute conditions, like a heart attack or stroke, there are limited medical resources — both when it comes to staffing and supplies — to be as responsive to these needs as before. “For acute problems, there’s just no capacity to care for anything that’s not a war injury at this point,” says Haj-Hassan. Care International told CNN roughly 160 people are expected to give birth in Gaza each day over the next month. Those pregnant people — including those who need C-sections — are among those who may be unable to secure the care they need.

Data from Al Jazeera and the WHO also notes that there are 130 infants relying on incubators, 1,000 kidney dialysis patients, and 350,000 patients with noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease who have to bear these effects.

And for patients with traumatic injuries — including thousands who’ve been injured during the airstrikes — it has meant incomplete treatments and little pain management. “How can you care for patients [when a] large part of their body is burned if you don’t have pain relief? It is completely inhumane,” says Haj-Hassan.

On top of the existing patient needs, many experts worry about the spread of infectious disease as clean water supplies continue to run low and people continue to shelter in cramped spaces. Several thousand people were still taking shelter in al-Shifa as of mid-November, while the UN said 670,000 people were packed into its shelters. Asi pointed to a cholera outbreak that occurred during the war in Yemen and said a similar scenario could take place in Gaza.

“[Water-borne illness] is one of the number one killers of children in Gaza even before this, and the potable water situation there has always been poor since the siege started in 2006,” she says.

Infrastructure projects and general pollution limited the availability and quality of water before the war. Now, water is available, but it is untreated — full of salt from the Mediterranean and contaminated by wastewater and other pollutants.

Doctors, too, are completely overwhelmed by the degree of need they are seeing as well as having to make impossible decisions about who is able to receive care and use supplies. “What I’m hearing from speaking with them is just desperation that they can’t do anything,” says Asi. “The hospitals are to the point where they’re so full that when patients arrive, sometimes doctors have to choose between who we bring into the hospital, who may have a chance of survival, and who we can’t.”

The WHO and Doctors Without Borders are calling for a ceasefire, the ability to provide humanitarian aid to hospitals, and security for health care providers in light of these conditions.

In her description of doctors’ experiences in Gaza, Haj-Hassan read a text message she previously received from a pediatric intensive care physician based there.

“Unfortunately, we are on our way to collapsing from the horror of the scenes we see despite our strength,” it reads. “And the world is watching as if we were in a movie theater showing a horror movie and the viewers are silent.”

 

The Washington D.C. “March for Israel”: A bipartisan rally for genocide

JacobCrosse, Joseph Kishore

November 15, 2023

On Tuesday, a degraded spectacle took place on the National Mall in Washington D.C. The “March for Israel” will be recorded in history as a rally for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties declared their support for Israel’s war against the people of Gaza, which has already killed at least 11,000 people, including more than 4,000 children. Just hours later, in a move apparently coordinated with the rally, Israeli tanks and bulldozers attacked Al-Shifa Hospital, the latest blatant war crime.

Under these conditions, the most popular chant at the rally, “No Ceasefire! No Ceasefire!”, would have been more accurately rendered as “Genocide, genocide, more genocide!”

The rally was a desperate attempt by the ruling class to manufacture popular support for its actions that does not exist. It had the backing of the entire political establishment, with Democratic and Republican leaders in both the US Senate and House featured as prominent speakers. The Biden administration sent as a representative its “Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism,” Deborah Lipstadt.

Substantial funding was devoted to flying participants from throughout the country and financing their attendance. At its height, however, the rally barely attracted 10,000 people, a tiny fraction of those who participated in the mass rally of 300,000 in Washington D.C. 10 days ago.

The media, entirely predictably, trumpeted the rally as a massive outpouring of support for Israel. The New York Times, Washington Post and other publications carried prominent articles Tuesday night, while the network news published live reports—the same outlets that have blacked out coverage of far larger demonstrations against the genocide, which have been held throughout the US and around the world. Wildly inflated figures were published, along with closely cropped images, claiming an attendance more than 10 times the reality.

While those speaking attempted to present the rally as representing the voice of Jewish people, far more Jews have participated in demonstrations against Israel’s actions than traveled to D.C. Tuesday. Just the day before, hundreds of protesters, led by Jewish Voice for Peace, staged a sit-in at the federal building in Oakland, California, with many arrested.

Both the Democrats and the Republicans joined hands, literally, to proclaim their absolute and unconditional support for the Netanyahu regime in Israel.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer led the crowd in chants of “We stand with Israel,” and promised that Congress would not rest until the Israeli government got the military “assistance you need!” Following his proclamation that “the United States has always stood with Israel, and we will do everything to see that that never, ever changes,” Schumer led the crowd in chants of “USA! USA!”

Newly elected Republican Speaker of the House Michael Johnson, a Christian fascist, echoed the remarks of Netanyahu and other Israeli ministers used to justify the genocide. “This is a fight between light and darkness, between civilization and barbarism. The calls for ceasefire are outrageous!”

Johnson concluded his remarks with a threat to those within the United States opposing Israel’s actions. “My hope,” he said, “[is] that this gathering today serves as a reminder to the entire world, but also to those within our own borders, that the United States stands proudly with Israel (emphasis added).”

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, “I support Biden’s bipartisan funding request for Ukraine and Israel,” invoking the “special relationship” between the US and Israel, “rooted in shared values and shared strategic interest.”

Fourth-ranking Republican Senator Joni Ernst capped the congressional leadership speeches with a warmongering rant: “Monsters of Hamas deserve nothing but complete and total destruction!”

The remarks of the four congressmen, along with those of all the speakers, were premised on the fraud that the world has been overcome by a wave of mass antisemitism. Speakers denounced protesters, including students on college campuses, demanding that university administrators take more aggressive censorship actions. They exploited the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews to justify their own support for genocidal actions.

CNN talking head and Democratic Party operative Van Jones—whose remarks were most significant in that his pious wish to end all violence and discrimination was met with boos and chants of “No Ceasefire!”—referenced a report from the Anti-Defamation League claiming that antisemitic incidents in the US had skyrocketed by 400 percent since October 7.

The ADL, as detailed by Mint Press News’ Alan McCleod, claimed that 153 rallies and demonstrations held in support of Palestine since October 7 were actually “in support of terror” and provided “explicit or strong implicit support for Hamas.”

If anything will fuel antisemitism, it is the lie, promoted by all those speaking yesterday, that, in its criminal actions, the Netanyahu government is acting in the interests of all Jewish people.

Adding to the absurdity of this charge is the fact that the rally brought forward far-right Christian fundamentalists and antisemites. Among the speakers was the white supremacist and antisemitic head of Christians United For Israel (CUFI), evangelical pastor John Hagee.

Among his many antisemitic statements is Hagee’s assertion, in his book Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to The World, that Hitler was a “half-breed Jew,” who was sent by God as a “hunter” to drive European Jews to “the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have—Israel.”

Framing Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign as a divine mission, Hagee proclaimed at the rally that “Israel is not merely a state, Israel is the apple of God’s eye.” Putting no restrictions on Israeli war crimes, Hagee declared, “You, the leaders of Israel, should decide how this war is conducted, you, and no one else!”

It is not a secret that Christian fascists like Hagee (and House Speaker Johnson) subscribe to the view that all Jews must return to Israel to fulfill a biblical prophesy that is required before the End Times, when everyone, including Jews, will have to convert to Christianity or be exterminated.

What brought together the entire political establishment and the state in support of Tuesday’s rally, however, was a shared commitment to the strategic interests of the financial oligarchy in supporting the genocide in Gaza as part of the broader war of American imperialism. The pathetic and bedraggled character of the event only demonstrated how isolated they are.

However, it also made clear that the American ruling class is united in its determination to use any means to enforce its social interests, both abroad and at home. The struggle against genocide and war must, therefore, proceed as a fight of the working class against the entire rotten and blood-drenched political establishment, including both of its parties, and the capitalist social order they represent.

 

The Banality of Propaganda

PatrickLawrence

November 14, 2023

The annals of the awful art  — Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, Japan’s and America’s during World War II — show that it does not have to be sophisticated. The Israeli president’s display of Mein Kampf  just proved that again.

I watched a video clip Sunday of Isaac Herzog that takes all cakes in the way of silliness that also manages to be pernicious. In it the Israeli president holds a copy of Mein Kampf, translated into Arabic.

The video was made one day after an immense demonstration in London in behalf of a ceasefire in Gaza and the freeing of Palestinians from Israel’s long, violent repression. Here is part of what Herzog had to say:

    “I want to show you something exclusive. This is Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. It’s the book that led to the Holocaust, and the book that led to World War II. This is the book that led … to the worst atrocity of humankind, which the British fought against.

    This book was found just a few days ago in northern Gaza, in a children’s living room which was turned into a military operations base of Hamas, on the body of one of the terrorists and murderers of Hamas, and he even makes notes, he marked, and learned again and again of Hitler’s ideology of killing the Jews, of burning the Jews, of slaughtering the Jews.

    This is the real war we are at. So all those who demonstrated yesterday — I am not saying all of them support Hitler. But all I’m saying is by omitting to understand what Hamas ideology is all about they are basically supporting this ideology.”

You can view a one–minute, 22–second version of this video clip here, or a longer, BBC version here. In both, we watch the Israeli head of state play the Holocaust card, the Hitler card, the Jewish victim card and the Hamas-as-murdering-burning-slaughtering-monsters card all at once.

I cannot identify the television network that showed the shorter version of Herzog, and I am astonished that the BBC took it seriously enough to broadcast it, but this is the Beeb these days — always on for the trans–Atlantic cause.

How remarkably flimsy propaganda is in most cases, I thought after watching Herzog and taking my notes. This is true in many, many cases in the annals of the awful art — Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, Japan’s and America’s during World War II. As you look at it now, none of it is very sophisticated for the simple reason it does not have to be.

Propaganda is about forceful impact, subtlety the last thing on the propagandist’s mind. The banal will always do. The Japanese during the Pacific war were “Japs” or “Nips,” and in the plentitude of American propaganda images they had buck teeth and pencil mustaches and wore round glasses over their evil Asiatic eyes.

After watching the Herzog video I went in search of footage from London the previous day. There have been many demonstrations against Israel’s savage military campaign in Gaza since hostilities erupted Oct. 7, and may there be many more, but London last Saturday looks like the biggest to date.

“Free Gaza,” “Ceasefire Now,” “Not in Our Names” — these were among the things shouted and scribbled on placards as the protest wound slowly through Central London from Hyde Park to the U.S. Embassy several miles away. The police estimated the number of protesters at 300,000. From the footage—all I have to go by—I would put it nearer half a million.

If you watch enough propaganda, contemporary or historical, you find that it does not matter even if the scripts and images betray the crudity and indignity of those producing the propaganda. The intent is solely to capture the thoughts and feelings of the unthinking majority however this needs to be done.

Israeli Propaganda Department Is Desperate

But this project is more difficult now, in the age of digital media and an increasingly influential independent press. So it seems to me. People can see more and see it more clearly and immediately now, providing they choose to look. And more and more people are so choosing.

If the idiotic Herzog clip told us anything, it is that the Israeli propaganda department is in a desperate state, having already lost the public-relations war as the Israeli Defense Forces dig the hole deeper by the day.

After watching the Herzog video and then the London footage, I thought of a memorable passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism:

    “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Arendt was looking back to the Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union when she wrote her celebrated 1951 treatise. But the thought seems never to have been thereafter far from her mind.

In a conversation with a French, free-speech activist not long before her death in 1975, Arendt had yet blunter words as to what eventually comes of circumstances such as ours. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said to Roger Errera, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

Half a century before Herzog made his video and demonstrators filled the streets of London, Arendt called last weekend perfectly.

It is a fine thing that fewer and fewer people are taken in by the psyops and propaganda blitzes of the national security state, the corporate media, and ruthless — indeed Hitleresque, I shall say it — regimes such as Israel’s.

But to live in a world in which one believes nothing of what is said is its own kind of misery. It is effectively a surrender of all public discourse and public space altogether to the malign, the indecent, the inhumane, the degraded and degrading. The truth, and along with it logical thinking and plain decency, become “alternative.”

Is there a way to build beyond our debased circumstances? Or are we to wander indefinitely in a state of negativity, of not believing, of alienation from our own polities? 

My answer is yes to the first question, no to the second: There is always a way to build a different future — this as a matter of general principle. In this case the project must begin with the reclamation of language. Rejecting the official language of those in power, as so many people now do, is a start. We must then learn again to speak the language that is not spoken, the language wherein truth resides.

In large part because of how I have spent my professional years, I am especially sensitive to the power of language as it is used in the cause either of clarity and understanding or of obfuscation and ignorance.

The language of institutions, the language of power, is made of obscuring euphemisms — “global leadership,” “collateral damage,” “regime change,” “the intelligence community,” “the rules-based order,” and so on through the bureaucratic lexicon — and of bold falsifications such as Isaac Herzog offered us last Sunday.

Orwell described how the language of ideologues and bureaucratic mandarins devastates our ability to think clearly — precisely its purpose — in “Politics and the English Language.” Since he published his essay in Horizon in April 1946, the problem as we have it is seven decades’ worth of worse.

This use of language has disarmed language itself, depriving it of its assertive power such that speech or writing outside the orthodoxy can be dismissed as a site of serious discourse. Language is rendered impotent as a medium of creative thought or as a prompt to new, imaginative action.

The preposterous, insulting use of “anti–Semitism” that now besets us is a case in point. The obvious intent is to impose a vast silence to obscure the crimes of apartheid Israel. 

The task before us is one of restoration. It is to take language back, to renew its life, to wrest it from the deadening influence of institutions, bureaucracies, and corporate media — these having deformed language into an instrument for the enforcement of conformity. This is why every shout and placard heard or seen in London or many other cities these days is important, an act of significance and worth.

Clear language is an instrument — unadorned, written and spoken plainly, colloquial in the best sense of this term but perfectly capable of subtlety and complexity. It is the language of history, not myth.

This language is spoken not in the cause of empire but always in the human cause. “Free Palestine,” “From the river to the sea”: These are two-word and six-word examples of the language I describe.  

This is the language necessary to confront power rather than accommodate it. It is language that presumes the utility of intelligence and critical thought. It is meant for the posing of many worthy questions. It is unreservedly dedicated to enlarging what is sayable in hostile response to “the great unsayable,” as I call it.

By way of this language a more vibrant, fulfilling public discourse awaits us. By way of this language the Isaac Herzogs, Antony Blinkens and Ursula von der Leyens who pollute our public space can be reduced to what they are — liars and propagandists. The power of the language I describe will deprive the language they speak of all power.

Let us speak it, let us write it, let us scribble it on walls and sheets of cardboard. Let us know it as the most powerful tool available to those who refuse the silence Isaac Herzog sought to impose upon all those Londoners last weekend.