Written by Client Relationship Manager, Chloe Woolford.
In the early hours of April 5th 2023, Israeli police began an open assault on worshippers at Al-Aqsa mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. The police, who claimed they were responding to “rioting”, beat worshippers with batons, and disseminated tear gas into the mosque before arresting 450 people over two consecutive days and removing access for Palestinian men to enter the structure in the days following.
Over previous years, some of Israel’s most significant attacks in Occupied Palestine have correlated with the holy month of Ramadan. On 7th May 2021, as 70,000 worshippers attended final Friday prayers of Ramadan, Israeli police were deployed to Temple mount. Tensions mounted as Palestinian worshippers began throwing rocks. In retaliation, officers threw stun grenades, deployed tear gas and fired rubber bullets. Once again, in 2022, on the 15th of April and two weeks into Ramadan, Palestinians threw stones and firecrackers at police officers interrupting prayer. The policemen used tear gas shells, stun grenades and batons against the Palestinians before an eventual raid of the compound and numerous arrests.
This 2023 event is only one in the recent violent history of Ramadan in Palestine. Indeed, the month of Ramadan has seen Israeli forces regularly attack worshipers at Al Aqsa and prevented them from spending the night inside the mosque for Itikaf. Despite these regular re-occurrences, the same narrative permeates the media: Palestinians, unprovoked, begin throwing rocks at Israeli police officers until they are forced to control the situation by reciprocating attacks and arrests. Whilst this simplification of events dominates popular narratives, it neglects that these “unprovoked” attacks on Israeli forces fall into a backdrop of constant occupation, destruction and displacement of entire villages, and an ongoing threat of absolute violence.
This notion of rational intervention on the side of Israel is consistently validated by the media at the time of the attacks. Reports from news organisations insist on using neutral terminology to headline stories of the attacks at Al Aqsa. BBC News reports, for example, stated “clashes erupt at contested holy sites”. This linguistic presentation suggests a story where two parties of equal standing and culpability entered into a conflict that erupted organically over a highly politicised area. In reality, Israeli forces, under the pretence of ‘masked aggravators’ inside the mosque forcibly entered Islam’s 3rd most sacred site and engaged in an unreasonably violent response to a collection of people attempting to pray.
“Clashes”, “conflict” and “eviction” are terms that often appear during media discussions on Palestine. Whilst this type of neutral terminology is deemed by major news outlets like the BBC as ‘unbiased’ or ‘non-partisan’, they carry weight and tell a pointed story, one that is inaccurate. As stated by the Middle East Eye, the ‘impartial’ language choice is meant to “lull audiences into accepting Israeli violence as always justified, and Palestinian resistance as always abhorrent”.
It is clear this is not the case, particularly when charitable and civil-society organisations are using entirely dissimilar language. Amnesty International regularly uses terms such as ‘apartheid’ to describe events in Palestine, or investigations from the United Nations state Israel’s action and expansion of settlements are indeed war crimes. These facts could not be assumed from media reports, especially those confronting unreasonable attacks on one party during their most sacred month.
Israel-Palestine is infamously one of the most challenging political events to discuss. Its complexity, history and topic sensitivity defines this. But regardless of an individual person’s political stance, what they’re personal thoughts and feelings are, one thing cannot be blatantly disregarded: a ‘conflict’ cannot be equal when one side is firing bullets and the other is throwing stones.
References
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/aqsa-mosque-raid-israel-bbc-enabling-violence-how
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-65529490