The Blind Spot of Power: How Suppression of Palestinian Voices Fuels Israel’s Strategic Missteps

By Nizar Farsakh

The history of modern Israel and Palestine is not just a story of land, security and diplomacy.

It is also a story of narratives: Who gets to define reality, whose pain counts, and whose voice carries weight in the global conversation?

For decades, the pro-Israel lobby has worked tirelessly to frame Israel as the righteous, peace-seeking country battling unreasonable and violence-prone Palestinians and Arabs more generally.

Key to that is portraying Israel as relatable, with its adversaries as inanimate obstacles to peace.[1]

This strategy has often succeeded in shaping headlines and policymaking circles, at least in the short term. But beneath the surface, its costs are mounting.

Each act of silencing—whether it is pressuring a news outlet, an academic institution, or a cultural venue—plants a deeper awareness among journalists, analysts, academics and even some politicians: Israel is not the besieged underdog it claims to be.

It is in fact the bully perpetually destabilizing the region.

Paradoxically, by insisting on total hegemony over the narrative, Israel and its advocates inadvertently make the long-term collapse of that narrative inevitable. When reality breaks through—whether after a major war, an intifada, or a rupture in Western political orthodoxy—the hidden consensus is revealed: Israel’s policies are indefensible, and its moral authority is threadbare.

This article traces how overconfidence blinds the powerful, how suppression breeds backlash, and why Israel’s ill-fated attempts to erase Palestinian voices mirror the hubris that brought down empires past.

The pro-Israel lobby’s influence on Western media and political discourse is well-documented.

Editors fear losing advertisers, politicians fear losing re-election, and academics fear denial of tenure if they step outside the boundaries of acceptable criticism. For years, this has created a climate where Palestinian suffering could be mentioned only cautiously, if at all.

But this very censorship creates an undercurrent of unease among professionals tasked with analyzing the conflict empirically. Over time, this builds a tacit recognition: Israel is not defending itself; it is enforcing a system of domination. More importantly, the dominant narrative allows only for the self-defense narrative, and therefore all the discourse built on that false narrative fails to come up with effective policies by necessity.

That recognition rarely surfaces in public discourse. It remains suppressed until an extraordinary development forces a rupture because a crisis is simply too large to be contained through media spin.

Sometimes it is a shift in political winds, as when Donald Trump’s disregard for Washington’s political orthodoxy allowed conversations once deemed unspeakable to enter the mainstream.

When the moment comes, the backlash is not mild. It is explosive. Years of suppressed recognition burst forth, leaving Israel and its advocates stunned at the breadth of opposition.

Israel’s history is punctuated with extraordinary victories that later get erased by inconceivable defeats. In the 1967 war, Israel quadrupled the land mass under its control. It took the much-coveted holy city of Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the strategic Golan Heights overlooking Damascus, secured a foothold on the east bank of the Suez Canal, and got hold of Sinai’s oil and gas riches; and all that in just six days.

Israel then wagered that the Arabs would not dare attack it again thanks to its air superiority, the 70-foot sand barrier it erected to block the Egyptians from charging across the canal, and the destruction of any remnants of Arab self-confidence.

Yet, on October 6, 1973, a surprise attack from Egypt and Syria came just six years after the Six-Day War. Then, to Israel’s surprise, it turned out that the Arabs had the latest SAMs with the range to deny Israel air superiority, the most technologically advanced anti-tank missiles to debilitate Israel’s armored defense strategy and, as to the “impenetrable” Bar Lev Line that could withstand 12 hours of constant shelling? Well, the Egyptians simply used high-power pumps to create breaches in less than three hours.

Re-enactment of Egyptian soldiers using high-power water cannons to breach the Bar Lev Line on October 6, 1973. [Source: youtube.com]

In 1982, Israel entered Lebanon to expel PLO militias that had been attacking it from there for years. They pounded Beirut so hard, killing thousands of civilians in the process, that at one point even President Reagan felt compelled to demand a stop to the shelling.

The PLO held their ground for two months but then had to accept evacuating Lebanon at the request of their Lebanese allies. A triumphant Israel rejoiced at pushing the PLO over a thousand miles away from its borders, to Tunis.

Yet, in 1987, Israel found itself caught off guard when the confrontation with the Palestinians came from within the borders it controlled. It was the Intifada, the uprising of the occupied Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This time, the Palestinians neutralized Israel’s overwhelming military advantage by engaging in non-violence and civil disobedience, again, rendering air superiority and armored brigades ineffective.

The world witnessed the greatest power in the Middle East fail to defeat small crowds of unarmed civilians and stone-throwing youth. This time, too, Israel went from having strategically pushed away the Palestinian threat from its borders and the Palestinian cause out of the headlines, to having TV sets across the globe broadcast a brutal military occupation repress unarmed civilians and delegitimize Israel itself.

It made headlines everywhere and Israeli politicians were forced to recognize the Palestinians, for the first time, as a national group with whom to negotiate. Of course, the emergence of Hezbollah in Lebanon during the same period would also contribute to dismantling Israel’s deterrent image, but that’s a topic for another article.

SEE: Famous recording of Israeli soldiers using stones to break the arms of tied Palestinian detainees. [Source: youtube.com]

That recognition coincided with the watershed moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transition into a unipolar world under a pax Americana.

The U.S., having ousted Saddam from Kuwait with the support of most Arab countries, stewarded a peace process to bring an end to the turmoil that had plagued the region for four decades.

While the Oslo Accords started with great promise and enthusiasm, the changes on the ground and the wrenches thrown by spoilers opposed to the accords stalled progress and even got many in both communities feeling buyers’ remorse. It seemed like the peace process was mostly a process with no peace.

After seven years of “peace processing,” the Israeli settlement population in the West Bank doubled, and the Gaza Strip was all but completely severed from it geographically, politically, and even socially.

A last-ditch attempt at bridging differences in the Camp David talks of 2000 exposed how far both parties were in what they were willing to accept as a compromise. The Palestinians, already seething with how the promise of an independent state became steadily more distant as the Israeli occupation entrenched itself further, erupted in a second Intifada.

This time, with bullets rather than stones. This anger had been simmering throughout the 1990s, but to Israelis, Palestinians seemed “under control.” As alluded to in my previous article, Israel mistook Palestinians’ relative passivity for acquiescence, and superficial quiet for real stability.

Alas, the October 7th attack did not veer from the script. It was the latest iteration of this cycle where Israel’s hubris breeds complacency and impaired vision. Israel believed it had contained the Gaza Strip after its withdrawal in 2005. They surmised that a state-of-the-art billion-dollar high-tech barrier and 24/7 surveillance of an area half the size of New York City made for an impregnable security cordon.

Yet, in a little more than six hours, a militia, not even a full-fledged country, that they had besieged for more than 15 years and having “mowed the grass” four times already,[2]managed to inflict the greatest loss of life for Jews in one day since the Holocaust.

To say that the event was triggering to the entire Israeli society would be an understatement. After 75 years of progressively growing stronger while weakening and sometimes coopting its adversaries, the Jewish state failed to protect Jews when that was its chief raison d’être. The scale of Hamas’s attack was not just militarily shocking; it was psychologically devastating.

It exposed the extent to which all Israeli political, military and intelligence bodies completely underestimated them. It was worse than 9/11 when U.S. agencies didn’t share information that they had already collected.

In Israel’s case, intelligence about Hamas’s preparations for a massive attack was already being circulated. However, they all believed that Hamas could not pull it off. Hence, the collective psychosis that gripped Israeli society demanding the flattening of Gaza.

Israelis’ confidence in their military and security prowess got shaken to its core, especially because it came one day after the 50th anniversary of the biggest scare Israelis had in their lives, the 1973 war, the only time Israeli politicians actually discussed the use of nuclear weapons.[3] It is one thing to fail to protect your citizens; it is something entirely different to discover that you actually have no idea how to do it.

In fact, one of the key changes made due to the intelligence failure then was to create “devil’s advocate” roles precisely to counter confirmation bias.

This cycle is not unique to Israel. It is the fate of every dominant power that mistakes control for permanence.

Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels once declared that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. But he left out the other half of the equation: eventually, the lie becomes the liar’s truth as well. The powerful begin to believe their own narrative so deeply that they fail to prepare for the day when reality breaks through.

Israel’s decades of suppressing Palestinian perspectives have produced precisely this effect. For so long, the narrative of Israel as a small democracy fending off existential threats was repeated that Israeli leaders internalized it. They stopped seeing Palestinians as capable adversaries with political agency. They conflated quiet with consent, dominance with legitimacy, and victory with annihilation of the other side.

But history shows that suppression breeds resistance, not erasure. The more a population’s voice is denied, the more explosive it becomes when finally expressed.

Here we reach a deeper irony. In Arabic, the word for human—insan— derives from nisyanwhich means “forgetfulness.” Humanity’s condition, in this linguistic framing, is to forget. And forgetfulness is precisely what afflicts the powerful.

Empires forget that their dominance is temporary. They forget that silence does not mean consent. They forget that even the strongest military cannot erase the political will of a people determined to resist.

Israel’s leaders, like the leaders of empires before them, act as though their dominance is eternal.

But every shock—from the 1973 war to the intifadas to October 7—reminds them that what seems permanent is fragile. Their mistake is not just strategic; it is existential. They forget that to be human is to resist domination, and that Palestinians are no exception.

The suppression of Palestinian voices creates an artificial quiet, an appearance of calm maintained through overwhelming force, censorship and economic dependency.

Yet, beneath the quiet on the surface, red-hot embers seethe, what James C. Scott calls the “hidden transcript.”[4]

That which is not said when the others, those with a different status, power or privilege, are in the room.

With every peaceful protest crushed with live ammunition, every journalist self-censoring to keep their job, every academic choosing their words cautiously to stay relevant, and every aspiring politician advocating the policy that safeguards their position, that hidden transcript expands.

Palestinians learned the hard way that world powers pay attention only when their interests are threatened or those who matter are endangered. Powers impervious to moral pleas or non-violence, but predictably responsive to violence and extortion.

As I explained in my previous article, Palestinians are consistently pragmatic: They pursue whatever method seems most effective.[5]

When negotiations yield accelerated settlement expansion, non-violent marches are met with sniper fire, and restrictions mushroom at a faster pace than you can adjust to, the conclusion becomes obvious.

Israeli leaders mistake the absence of visible resistance for pacification. But each eruption reminds them of how fragile that quiet really was. And with every round, Israel’s sense of control erodes further, while Palestinians’ confidence in their own resilience grows.

The erosion of Israel’s narrative is not confined to the Middle East. Globally, more and more journalists, academics and even politicians are recognizing the imbalance. Social media have accelerated this shift, allowing Palestinian voices to bypass traditional gatekeepers. Images of bombed-out homes and civilian casualties circulate widely, undermining official narratives in real time.

When the taboo breaks, the effect is dramatic. Western publics, long shielded from Palestinian perspectives, suddenly encounter them without filters. The reaction is not mild sympathy but—often—outrage at how long such realities were hidden. This is why Israel finds itself increasingly isolated in global opinion, even as Western governments continue to provide military and diplomatic cover.

The long-term cost of narrative suppression is thus isolation. By silencing Palestinian perspectives, Israel ensured that, when those perspectives finally surfaced, they would be heard with raw intensity.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march in Washington on January 13, 2024. [Source: apnews.com]

The cycle is clear: Suppression breeds backlash; over-confidence leads to surprise; and power mistaken for permanence becomes fragility.

The pro-Israel lobby may succeed in silencing Palestinian voices in the short term, but the cost is that, when reality breaks through, it does so with overwhelming force. The artificial quiet collapses, and Israel is left astonished at the scale of opposition.

This is not just Israel’s story: It is the story of every dominant power in history. Empires forget that their dominance is temporary. They forget that humans—insan—are defined by forgetfulness, but also by resilience.

Palestinians, silenced for decades, have not surrendered to the dominant narrative. Their voices, suppressed in public arenas, have only grown louder, clearer and more compelling in the bleachers. When they break through to center stage, they remind the world that the human spirit is impervious to destruction. A people’s longing for dignity and freedom does not wither with time. And a story that needs to be told cannot be muffled forever.

Until Israel and its advocates internalize this cosmic rule, the cycle of violence will persist: from suppression, to eruption, to shock, and then attrition. The tragedy is that it does not have to be this way. But as long as forgetting defines the powerful, history will repeat itself—again and again.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/10/24/the-blind-spot-of-power-how-suppression-of-palestinian-voices-fuels-israels-strategic-missteps/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

At least 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians had been held at notorious Israeli jail, say Gaza officials
Documents indicate they came from Sde Teiman, which already faces allegations of torture and unlawful deaths

BY Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem and Seham Tantesh in Gaza

At least 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians returned by Israel to Gaza had been held in a notorious detention centre already facing allegations of torture and unlawful deaths in custody, officials from Gaza’s health ministry have told the Guardian.

The director general of the health ministry, Dr Munir al-Bursh, and a spokesperson for Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where the bodies are being examined, said a document found inside each body bag indicated the bodies all came from Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert where, according to photos and testimonies published by the Guardian last year, Palestinian detainees were held in cages, blindfolded and handcuffed, shackled to hospital beds and forced to wear nappies.

“The document tags inside the body bags are written in Hebrew and clearly indicate that the remains were held at Sde Teiman,” Bursh said. “The tags also showed that DNA tests had been carried out on some of them there.”

Last year the Israeli army launched a criminal investigation, which is continuing, into the deaths of 36 prisoners detained at Sde Teiman.

As part of the US-brokered truce in Gaza, Hamas has handed over the bodies of some of the hostages who died during the course of the war, and Israel has so far transferred the bodies of 150 Palestinians killed after the 7 October 2023 attack.

Some of the photographs of Palestinian bodies seen by the Guardian – which cannot be published due to their graphic nature – show several of the victims blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs. One image shows a rope fastened around a man’s neck.

Doctors in Khan Younis said official examinations and field observations“clearly indicate that Israel carried out acts of murder, summary executions and systematic torture against many of the Palestinians”. Health officials said the documented findings included “clear signs of direct gunfire at point-blank range and bodies crushed beneath Israeli tank tracks”.

Eyad Barhoum, the administrative director of Nasser medical complex, said the bodies carried “no names but just codes” and that part of the identification process had started.

While there is substantial evidence that many of the returned Palestinians had been executed, it is much harder to determine where the victims were killed. Sde Teiman is a storage facility for bodies taken from Gaza but it is also a prison camp that has become notorious for deaths in captivity. Human rights activists are demanding an investigation to find out whether any of the dead were killed there, and if so, how many.

The body of Mahmoud Ismail Shabat, 34, from northern Gaza, bore marks of hanging around his neck, his legs crushed by tank tracks, which suggests he was killed or injured in Gaza and that his body was later taken to Sde Teiman. His brother Rami, who identified the body of his sibling by the scar from a previous head surgery, said: “What hurt us the most was that his hands were tied, and his body was covered with clear signs of torture.”

“Where is the world?” said Shabat’s mother. “All our hostages returned tortured and broken.”

Some Palestinian doctors say the fact that many of the bodies were blindfolded and bound suggests they were tortured and then killed during their detention at Sde Teiman – where, according to Israeli media reports and testimony from prison guard whistleblowers, Israel is holding nearly 1,500bodies of Palestinians from Gaza.

A whistleblower who spoke to the Guardian and who witnessed the conditions of detention at Sde Teiman said: “I did witness a patient from Gaza being brought with a gunshot wound to the left chest. He was also blindfolded and handcuffed, naked as he arrived to the emergency department. Another patient, with a right-leg gunshot wound also arrived to my hospital in similar conditions.”

Another whistleblower has previously described how patients, all from Gaza, were handcuffed to the beds. They had all been dressed in nappies and were blindfolded.

He was told that some patients had come from hospitals in Gaza. “These were patients who had been captured by the Israeli army while being treated in Gaza hospitals and brought here. They had limbs and infected wounds. They were moaning in pain.”

He claimed the military had no proof that detainees were all members of Hamas, with some inmates repeatedly asking why they were there.

In one case, he said, he learned that a detainee’s hand had been amputated “because the wrists had become gangrenous due to handcuffing wounds”.

Shadi Abu Seido, a Palestinian journalist from Gaza who works for PalestineToday, who was released after 20 months’ detention at Sde Teiman and in another Israeli prison, said he had been seized by Israeli forces at al-Shifa hospital on 18 March 2024.

“They stripped me completely naked for 10 hours in the cold,” he said in a video interview published on Instagram by the Turkish public broadcaster TRT. “I was then transferred to Sde Teiman and held there for 100 days, during which I remained handcuffed and blindfolded. Many died in detention, others lost their minds. Some had limbs amputated. They suffered sexual and physical abuse. They brought dogs that urinated on us. When I asked why I had been arrested, they answered: ‘We have killed all the journalists. They died once. But we brought you here and you will die hundreds of times.’”

Naji Abbas, the director of the prisoners and detainees department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHR), said: “The signs of torture and abuse found on the bodies of Palestinians recently returned by Israel to Gaza are horrifying – yet, sadly, not surprising.

“These findings corroborate what Physicians for Human Rights Israel has exposed over the past two years about conditions inside Israeli detention facilities – particularly at the Sde Teiman camp – where Palestinians have been subjected to systematic torture and killings by soldiers and prison guards.”

PHR said: “The unprecedented number of Palestinians who have died in Israeli custody, together with verified evidence documented of deaths resulting from torture and medical neglect – and now the findings on the returned bodies – leave no doubt: an independent international investigation is urgently needed to hold those responsible in Israel accountable.”

The Guardian submitted photographs of the bodies to an Israeli doctor who also witnessed the treatment of prisoners at the field hospital in Sde Teiman.

On condition of anonymity, the physician said one of the pictures “shows the man had his hands tied likely with zip ties. There is a change in colour between the arms and the hands at the level of the zip ties, likely indicating ischemic changes due to excessive restraints.”

He added: “This might be someone who was either injured and captured (thus died under Israeli custody) or someone who died due to injuries inflicted after his capture.”

Dr Morris Tidball-Binz, a physician specialising in forensic science and a UN rapporteur, said: “A call should be made for independent and impartial forensic assistance to assist efforts to examine and identify the dead.”

Contacted regarding the allegations of torture, the Israel Defense Forces said they had asked the Israel Prison Service to investigate. The IPS did not respond to a request for comment.

As for the alleged abuses at Sde Teiman and the torture of prisoners, the IDF previously said it treated detainees “appropriately and carefully” and that “any allegation regarding misconduct by IDF soldiers is examined and dealt with accordingly. In appropriate cases, criminal investigations are opened by the military police.”

Asked about the claim Palestinian bodies had come from Sde Teiman, the IDF said they “are not commenting on this matter”.

At least 75 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli jails since 7 October 2023, according to the UN.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/20/mutilated-bodies-palestinians-held-notorious-israeli-jail-gaza-officials

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

SEE ALSO: Famous recording of Israeli soldiers using stones to break the arms of tied Palestinian detainees.[Source: youtube.com]

Justin Glyn

There is a famous quote with many attributions but no firm source – “Sincerity is the most important thing in politics: once you can fake that, you’ve got it made!”

Examples of performative hypocrisy in public life are legion and growing. A few recent examples: In the US, a furore has erupted over the Nazi tattoo of a Senate candidate, while funnelling billions to the real thing seem to be just fine by both sides of the House. In Australia, of course, we have politicians arguing for transparency while running the most secretive government in decades.

While the Catholic Church is definitely moving to address issues of its own in this area — especially in the areas of abuse and its cover-up — it cannot afford to be complacent in this regard. A year after the final document of the Synod on Synodality was issued, recommending sweeping changes to areas as diverse as disability ministry, relationship between Eastern and Latin rites, youth ministry and women’s ministry, few if any of its proposals have been implemented — or even begun — even though the language of synodality is still used in public.

There is, however, one area above all where the hypocrisy of public discourse has been laid bare with devastating consequences for politics at large. Well over 18 months ago, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice pointed out the measures that would need to be taken by Israel to avoid turning the spiralling tragedy there into a genocide. In July 2024, this was buttressed by its opinion on the legal effects of Israel’s occupation, in turn reinforced by its opinion on the consequences for the treatment of UN and other relief agency personnel.

Now, even Israeli groups are agreed that genocide (once thought to be the most serious atrocity crime in international law) is in progress. Indeed, at least when addressing domestic audiences, Israeli leaders themselves are inclined to agree, with one commentator arguing in an article in The Times of Israel (since deleted, but archived here) that Israel needed the West Bank as Lebensraum (yes, his word) for its exploding population.

So, what has been the world’s response to this atrocity which has unfolded on the phones, tablets and computers of the world in real time? Well… not much. While church and state leaders have expressed “concern”, the tangible response in terms of measurable outcomes has been minimal. After all, Israel pays well for arms and military components essential to creating its Lebensraum (including from Australia). Accordingly, neither doctor, nor print journalist, nor broadcaster, nor university studentnor hospital have been immune from the ruthless attempt to silence any attempt to raise the issue of morality of support for Israel’s campaign in the public sphere.

In so doing, of course, the whole Western architecture of human rights as guarantors of liberty is collapsing as never before. It was always clear, not least during the Cold War, that human rights abuses would be forgiven if it was “ our son of a bitch” who was the perpetrator. Despite backing a rogue’s gallery, however, the West could nevertheless argue — with some justification — that, compared to a Mao or a Hitler or a Pol Pot or a Stalin (all of whom, it should be noted, the West were happy to support at one time or another!), the Western side was the lesser of a plethora of evils.

When, however, the question of genocide is up for grabs as it is now, genocide by people who are proudly admitting it, it is increasingly hard to say that there is a worse alternative. China – which, while it has a patchy domestic human rights record, hasn’t been to war since 1979? Russia – who (even ignoring the murky circumstances of the Ukraine War’s origins) has killed four times fewer civilians in Ukraine (in twice the time) than Israel has in Gaza? If states, yes, and Churches, cannot stop the supply of weapons to the perpetrator (let alone condemn this) then what exactly would they find unacceptable?

The trouble is that not only are states which are not part of the West watching, so too are Western populations. When the killing goes on regardless of who is in power – Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Labor, Liberal – what exactly is it that democracy means? Especially in a country like Australia where, as refugees and First Nations people know only too well, there is neither an enforceable bill of rights nor any appetite among the political class for one. Tony Benn is reputed to have said (although the quote is probably Neil Ascherson’s) that it is important to note what a government does to refugees because it shows what they will do to citizens, given the chance.

Around the world, more and more people are realising that the same is true of Palestinians.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/10/raise-the-double-standard-high/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE SINS OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…