Tag Archives: Gaza

military, politics, tactics

Outrage management in Israel-Palestine

Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli military attack on Gaza generated enormous rage and despair throughout much of the world. To understand these reactions, it is helpful to examine the tactics commonly used by powerful perpetrators of actions perceived as unjust.

            In the long-standing conflict in Israel-Palestine, supporters on each side have perceived their opponents’ statements and actions as threatening and dangerous. Then came the 7 October attack by fighters from Hamas, the governing body in the Gaza Strip, and the Israeli military’s assault on Gaza. Much of the discussion about these events has been about the rights and wrongs of the two sides, including acts of violence, ways to stop the war, arguments for and against Zionism and Hamas, Israeli settler colonialism, Hamas’ terrorism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, two-state and other options for conflict resolution, and the history of the conflict.

            A different perspective on these events can be obtained by examining tactics used to reduce or increase public outrage. In a sense, in parallel with the fighting, there is a different sort of struggle, over people’s understanding of what is happening.

Outrage management

Most people are angry, distressed or upset when they witness an obvious injustice. For example, if someone shoots into a peaceful crowd, this can cause public alarm, anger and distress: this is unprovoked killing, which few people treat as acceptable. Perpetrators commonly take steps to reduce adverse responses to their actions. This can be called “outrage management,” namely influencing people’s feelings in response to a potentially upsetting action.

            A murderer can do this by concealing evidence, so no one knows what they did. If they are accused, they can claim it was an accident or that they were provoked. When a powerful group — for example a government or corporation — is responsible, it has more potential tools to reduce outrage. These tools or methods can be classified into five categories.

  • Cover-up: the actions are hidden from wider audiences
  • Devaluation: the target is denigrated and demonised
  • Reinterpretation: the meaning of the action is altered by lying, minimising consequences, blaming others and/or framing it as appropriate or justifiable
  • Official channels: formal processes are used to give an appearance of justice without much substance
  • Intimidation: participants and observers are threatened or harmed.

How these methods work is, in most cases, straightforward. When an action is hidden, people don’t know about it and so can’t be upset. When a target is devalued, what is done to them doesn’t seem so bad: murdering an esteemed brain surgeon is worse than murdering a serial killer. Reinterpretation techniques change the way people think about an action. Intimidation can affect whether someone decides to do something. The method of official channels, in contrast, can be counterintuitive. When an issue is referred to expert panels, appeal bodies or courts, many people think justice is being done. However, when perpetrators are powerful, official channels often are slow, procedural and target low-level agents with minimal consequences, with the result that public outrage dies down but little of substance happens.

            The same five types of methods are used by perpetrators and their allies in a wide variety of actions, including censorship, sexual harassment, industrial disasters, massacres, demonising of refugees, wartime bombing of civilians, torture and genocide. This is called the backfire model, because if the methods to reduce outrage fail, the perpetrator’s actions can become counterproductive. There is a body of writing applying this model to diverse issues.

            To complete the picture, it is useful to consider counter-tactics, used by targets and their supporters, to increase public outrage over injustice. These are reversals or counters to the five types of methods noted above.

  • Exposure of the action, countering cover-up
  • Validation of the target, countering devaluation
  • Interpretation of the event as an injustice, countering lying, minimising, blaming and framing
  • Avoiding or discrediting official channels; instead, mobilising support
  • Resisting intimidation.

            This framework — five methods that can reduce outrage from injustice, and five counter-methods that can increase it — can be applied to both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict, going back decades. The events on and after 7 October have highlighted the use of these methods, some of which have gone into overdrive. Because the framework applies in a more obvious way to the Israeli military assault, I will cover it first, with examples of each of the methods. Then I’ll address the Hamas attack using the same framework, showing some distinctive differences in the methods used.

            This examination is far from comprehensive, for two main reasons. First, the volume of material about each of the two atrocities is so great that only a few examples can be given. Second, new information will be revealed in the future, in the coming years or decades. Although atrocities can be limited in time — Hamas’ 7 October attack was over in a day — disputes over what happened and its meaning can continue for a very long time. For example, the Turkish government continues to deny the Armenian genocide a century after it occurred.


Armenian genocide

The tactics of outrage management can be deployed before, during and after the events. Accordingly, the treatment here can be considered a preliminary assessment, one that will require revision and updating as new information becomes available. Furthermore, by the nature of cover-up, some relevant information may never be publicly known.

The Israeli military assault on Gaza. 1: Reducing outrage

Soon after Hamas’ 7 October attack, the Israeli government initiated a military response that targeted both Hamas and the wider Gazan population and infrastructure. Information about the consequences of this military response triggered anger and despair in many parts of the world, threatening to harm the reputation and operations of the Israeli government. Therefore, it is predictable that the government and its supporters would take measures to reduce adverse reactions to the military operation.

            Cover-up In many previous cases of mass killing, perpetrators have made serious efforts to hide their actions from wider publics, at least from ones that might be opposed to it. What is unusual about the Israeli assault on Gaza is that so much of the operation — bombings, targeted killings, destruction of hospitals, denial of food, and much else — has been revealed to a wide range of audiences. This is a prime reason why the level of international protest has been far greater than from many previous atrocities.

Although many of the consequences of the assault have been exposed, nevertheless some Israeli actions have received little or no attention. For example, compared to the huge publicity about the hostages taken by Hamas, there is almost no attention to what might be deemed Israeli de-facto hostage-taking, with thousands of Palestinians arrested and imprisoned without being charged or tried. There is little media attention to claims that Palestinian prisoners have been ill-treated, even tortured. There have been reports of Israeli shooters targeting civilians, military targeting of water infrastructure, and obstruction of humanitarian efforts, that have received little attention in mainstream media internationally. The Israeli military does not publicise these actions and targets some of the journalists who expose them (see below under the category intimidation). Some foreign media organisations do not report these sorts of actions.


Gaza water well

            When there are reports about Israeli military actions that challenge its official narrative, how can we say cover-up was involved? It is useful to think of secrecy as an onion, with many layers. Some information is known only to an inner core, some to a slightly larger group, and so on, with ultimately some information broadcast to large audiences. Some features of the Israeli military assault are known but given little attention. Cover-up is a process with many players. The Israeli military and government can try to hide or downplay some information; so can international media, especially those sympathetic to the Israeli cause.

            Devaluation For many Israelis, Palestinians are considered inferior, as people whose lives do not matter as much as the lives of Israelis, and some Israeli figures have attempted to dehumanise Palestinians. Dramatic examples of this sort of attitude were cited in the South African application for proceedings before the International Court of Justice, accusing the state of Israel of genocide, for example the Prime Minister referring to “monsters” and “barbarians” and the Minister of Defence referring to “human animals.” Law for Palestine provides a comprehensive list of Israeli incitement to genocide, in which devaluation plays a crucial role.

            Another aspect of devaluation is labelling Hamas as a terrorist organisation. “Terrorism” is a loaded term, normally only applied to non-state groups, although scholars argue that state terrorism is far more deadly than non-state terrorism. The Israeli government has killed far more Palestinians than vice versa, yet Israeli operations are seldom called terrorism. Some Israeli figures have talked of all Gazans as Hamas, thereby applying the stigma attached to Hamas to the entire population.

            Reinterpretation Powerful perpetrators commonly try to reduce outrage by explaining, or explaining away, their actions, by lying, minimising, blaming or framing. When the Israeli military targeted al-Shifa Hospital, it claimed its purpose was to destroy a Hamas command centre located underneath the hospital. However, evidence supporting Israeli claims was questioned, suggesting that the official rationale for the attack on the hospital was a lie.

            Israeli government spokespeople have repeatedly assigned responsibility for their assault on Hamas, specifically on the 7 October attack, which is the reinterpretation technique of blaming. They have called their actions a defence of Israel against aggression, which is the reinterpretation technique of framing.

            Official channels When other methods of reducing outrage work well, powerful perpetrators may feel no need to invoke official channels. This can change when calls for accountability become exceptionally strong. The Israeli military’s killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers on 1 April 2024 was publicised internationally and seen as especially egregious because those killed were White Westerners, not Gazans, and were involved in humanitarian efforts, which made them harder to devalue. As information came out that their WCK convey was well marked and the Israeli military had been notified about its route, the usual reinterpretation technique of claiming it was a mistake was insufficient.

            The response of Israeli authorities was to dismiss two military officers and reprimand two others. This followed the usual pattern of powerful perpetrators who are exposed: a few lower-level individuals are given relatively mild penalties, but policymakers are exempt from investigation or stricture. In the WCK case, the inquiry was in-house, run by members of the perpetrator group, and accordingly had less credibility than an independent inquiry. Either way, formal inquiries can serve to suggest that processes are operating to address the injustice, so continued protest is not necessary.

            Another sort of official channel is statements by leaders of other governments criticising the Israeli government over its assault on Gaza. US President Joe Biden has been widely reported in the media as expressing US government displeasure with Israeli actions. This seems to respond to protests demanding US government action. However, this public rhetoric gives only the appearance of addressing popular concerns, given that even as Biden spoke, the US government continued to supply weapons to the Israeli military.

            Intimidation Speaking out against the Israeli military assault is potentially risky, depending on the circumstances. Over a hundred journalists in Gaza have been killed, injured or arrested, suggesting that exposing the events poses a threat to the Israeli operation, and also indicating how dangerous it is to do this. In some countries whose leaders back Israel, in particular Germany and the United States, protesters against the assault on Gaza have been arrested.

***

This brief overview indicates how the Israeli military and government, and their backers internationally, have used five methods — cover-up, devaluation, reinterpretation, official channels and intimidation — that can serve to reduce public outrage over the assault on Gaza. However, given the huge level of opposition, it can be said that these efforts have been only partially successful. The assault on Gaza led to a drastic decline in international support for the Israeli government.

Generating outrage over the Israeli military assault on Gaza. 2: Increasing outrage

To understand the limits of efforts to reduce public outrage, it is useful to look briefly at five counter-methods that increase outrage.

            Exposure As noted, what is distinctive about the Israeli assault, compared with many other atrocities, is the massive media exposure. This can be attributed to two factors. First, Israel-Palestine has long been high-profile in the Western media compared to other equally deadly conflicts elsewhere, which scholar Virgil Hawkins refers to as “stealth conflicts.”

Second, the widespread use of video devices, along with communication channels, has made it far easier to circulate vivid portrayals of killing and destruction to international audiences. The continuing flow of images and information has been crucial in generating public outrage outside Israel.

            Validation Although Palestinians are devalued within Israel, internationally this is not quite the same despite demonisation of Muslims in many places. Stories of personal loss and trauma, that feature in some news reports, make Palestinians seem as human as anyone else, and powerfully counter devaluation. References to children who have been killed or who are dying from starvation are especially influential because children are widely perceived as innocents.


Palestinian boy in Gaza refugee camp

            Interpretation The killing and destruction have been portrayed as extreme and disproportionate to anything done by Palestinians. Labelling the Israeli assault genocide is an interpretation of what is happening, especially controversial because Jews were the primary target of the Nazi genocide, and potent for the same reason, as it is tragically ironic to imagine descendants of genocide becoming agents of one. (See also “Genocide reflections“.)

            Official channels It is difficult to assess the role of official channels in dampening or promoting public outrage. Much of the international protest in support of Gazans has been to pressure governments to act, and as such is an appeal to official channels, seemingly with limited effectiveness. The South African submission to the International Court of Justice, alleging genocide, is also an official channel but, in the context of ongoing killing and destruction, seems to have contributed to public awareness and concern.


International Court of Justice

            Resistance Within Gaza, efforts to document killing and destruction, and to provide relief, have continued despite the dangers. This resistance to intimidation has been crucial to maintaining outrage internationally.

Hamas’ attack on 7 October. 1: Reducing outrage

Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians, and the taking of hundreds of hostages, can be analysed using the same categories. This is not an assessment of the morality or effectiveness of the attack, but rather of the methods used by Hamas to reduce outrage from its actions.

            Cover-up Hamas did little to hide its attack.

            Devaluation By its actions, Hamas treated Israeli lives as tools in a struggle. In the wider Palestinian population, there are examples of derogatory attitudes towards Israelis.

            Reinterpretation Hamas put out a statement presenting its motives for the attack, putting its attack in the context of the history of Israeli displacement and killing of Palestinians. This was an attempt at framing, at getting audiences to see its actions from its perspective. However, it did not deny killing many hundreds of Israelis and kidnapping hundreds more.

            Official channels Hamas had no capacity to use expert panels, inquiries or courts to give an appearance that justice was being done concerning its actions. There is no evidence that Hamas penalised any of its members for their actions on 7 October.

            Intimidation After 7 October, Hamas had little capacity to threaten or hurt those who exposed or condemned its actions. One possible source of leverage was its hostages, but there is little evidence of threats to hurt or kill them.

            In summary, Hamas had little capacity to reduce outrage over its actions on 7 October 2023, and seemed not to use even what small capacity it had, for example by devaluation or intimidation. It might be concluded that one purpose of the attack was to generate public anger. It can be argued that Hamas leaders knew their attack would lead to a massive Israeli military response, which in turn could generate support for the Palestinian cause, but at the expense of many Palestinian lives.

Hamas’ attack on 7 October. 2: Increasing outrage

In response to Hamas’ 7 October attack, the Israeli government and sympathisers worldwide undertook a major effort to generate public outrage, an effort that was highly successful, especially in terms of public opinion and support from governments internationally. Looking at the methods used to increase public outrage shows some unusual features.

            Exposure Given that Hamas had done little to hide its attack, it was straightforward for Israeli authorities to publicise it. The attack became a number-one news story in many parts of the world, with coverage continuing for weeks afterwards. The exposure was aided by the high profile of Israel-Palestine in international coverage of conflicts, and by the sympathies of many journalists and editors worldwide. This was a prime story for generating outrage: the killing and kidnapping of a large number of innocent civilians.

            However, there was a twist to this campaign to publicise Hamas’ atrocity: cover-up by Israeli authorities of some aspects of the events. According to some reports, which received little attention, many Israeli deaths during the attack were caused by the Israeli military as it sought to kill Hamas fighters. This was per the “Hannibal directive,” by which Israeli military priorities are to prevent the taking of hostages even at the expense of the lives of Israeli civilians. The implication is that publicity about Hamas’ attack was incomplete, leaving out the role of the Israeli military in causing hundreds of Israeli deaths.

            Validation Publicity about Hamas’ attack was effective in highlighting that the Israeli victims had moral worth, especially through stories about individuals, both the dead and the kidnapped. Giving personal details and photos of the Israeli victims made their humanity vivid, so audiences could empathise and feel sorrow. Little attention was given to the fact that many of the Israelis killed were military personnel; it is easier to see civilians as innocent.


Israeli hostages

            Interpretation It was straightforward to interpret Hamas’ attack as unjust, as an unscrupulous assault on innocent civilians. This was the frame that dominated most media coverage. Nevertheless, there were several unusual features of the pro-Israeli interpretation techniques.

            One of the claims about the attack was that Hamas had cut off the heads of babies, something even more horrible than killing adults. However, several investigative reports concluded that there was no good evidence for this claim. Another claim was that Hamas endorsed mass rape as a weapon of war. This also has come under question. These claims could be examples of lying or exaggerating to generate public outrage.

            In early 2024, the Israeli government made allegations against UNRWA — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, which was playing a crucial role in providing humanitarian aid to Gazans — including that some of its members were involved with Hamas’ 7 October attack. In response to these allegations, many governments suspended funding of UNRWA. However, the Israeli government failed to provide solid documentation for its claims, which thus could be another example of lying to increase public outrage. It also involves the technique of devaluation, of guilt by association, namely of UNRWA by association with Hamas and its attack.

            Another reinterpretation technique was treating the 7 October attack as unrelated to previous history, in particular Israeli attacks on Palestinians and their livelihoods, notably the 1948 Nakba, in which thousands of Palestinians were killed and more than half a million were driven from their lands, to which they have been unable to return. This is a framing technique, seeing events from a perspective justifying a heightened Israeli military response.

            Avoiding official channels; mobilising support Because Hamas had no access to official channels that might dampen reactions to its 7 October attack, there was no need for Israeli authorities or campaigners to avoid or discredit official channels. Instead, their main approach was to mobilise support, which they did with remarkable effectiveness in the days after the attack, with the help of massive media coverage generating popular sympathy for Israelis and Israel. Mobilising support also extended to governments, with government leaders around the world condemning the attack. This might be thought of as a use of official channels not in the usual pattern by powerful perpetrators to reduce outrage through delay, technicalities and dependence on experts — the factors that commonly make formal procedures cause popular outrage to subside — but in a different pattern, by the targets of attack to give legitimacy and support for popular feelings of sympathy and support.

            Resistance In the aftermath of 7 October, the threat from Hamas to people in Israel and their supporters was minimal, except for one crucial group, the hostages. The Israeli government and its allies did not let this threat inhibit their condemnation and, soon after, its armed response.

***

In summary, after 7 October the Israeli government and its supporters domestically and internationally, in government, media and civil society, used the full range of methods to generate outrage over Hamas’ attack. What is different from the usual pattern is that in responding to the attack, the Israeli government and its supporters used some methods characteristic of perpetrators of injustice, including cover-up, reinterpretation techniques of lying and reframing, and launching a massive operation of reprisal.

            This difference from the usual pattern can be partly explained by the fact that Hamas is the weaker party in the conflict with the Israeli government. In the wider context, Hamas was not a “powerful perpetrator” in the sense of being able to deploy a full gamut of methods to reduce public outrage over its actions. Instead, its attack almost seemed designed to backfire, a pattern peculiar to non-state terrorism. In contrast, the Israeli military attack on Gaza was a clear case of a powerful group taking action against a weaker one, with the Israeli actions widely seen as disproportionate to anything Palestinian civilians had done, so the use by the Israeli government and its supporters of all the methods of reducing public outrage is not surprising.

Conclusion

In the vast volume of commentary on Gaza since 7 October 2023, there has been little attention given to the methods used by the Israeli government and its supporters on the one hand, and by Palestinians and their supporters on the other, to manage public emotions about and responses to the events. In this struggle over outrage, campaigners on each side support those they portray as the worthiest victims. This manifests in efforts to highlight despicable actions taken by those on the other side. Being seen as a victim becomes a claim for moral worth.

            This struggle over worthiness in part relies on current events, but it also has a strong historical dimension, as each side draws on its interpretation of the past to advance its current claims. Zionists repeatedly draw on the legacy of the Holocaust as making them worthy victims decades later, and for identifying antisemitism as an especially grievous form of hatred. Israelis also point to a history of Palestinian violence against Israelis, including terrorism by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Hamas.


Auschwitz

Palestinians, in contrast, draw on the legacy of the Nakba and a history of oppression by Israeli occupiers, including discrimination, displacement and killings.


Nakba

            The outrage-management analysis here has focused on the events on and after 7 October in Israel-Palestine, but there is much more to the struggle. In several countries, there have been fierce disputes over responses to events relating to Gaza, for example concerning media coverage, arms exports to Israel, humanitarian relief for Gazans, government statements about Israel and Palestine, allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia, claims about genocide and responses to it, and protests on university campuses and responses to them. In many of these clashes that are inspired by events in Israel-Palestine, it is possible to analyse the role of outrage management, with the same patterns involving the methods of cover-up, devaluation, reinterpretation, official channels and intimidation, and counter-methods.

            One serious limitation of any study of outrage management is incomplete information. Given that cover-up is an important tool, often it is only much later that a fuller analysis can be undertaken, after archives are opened, interviews undertaken in a different era, and pieces of evidence put together into a coherent picture.

            However, full information may never be available, or at least not uncontested. The struggle over outrage, over the memory and meaning of events, can continue for years or decades. The significance and implications of both the Holocaust and the Nakba, both more than 75 years ago, continue to be contested, as campaigners use interpretations of them in today’s struggles. For this reason, the analysis here is necessarily preliminary, subject to revision and updating. The struggle over outrage is never over, and impossible to escape.

Brian Martin, bmartin@uow.edu.au

My thanks to Jungmin Choi, Alex Christoyannopoulos, Jørgen Johansen, Anita Johnson, Janet Mayer, Alison Moore, Erin Twyford and Stellan Vinthagen for useful advice and comments.

military, politics, tactics

Genocide reflections

The mass killings in Gaza have been called genocide. This got me thinking about other genocides, and how they are similar to or different from what’s happening in Gaza.

                  For years, I have read articles and books about genocide. It is a particularly horrific phenomenon that needs to be studied and addressed. It is a challenge for those, like me, who support nonviolent methods of resisting aggression and repression.

                  According to the United Nations Genocide Convention, genocide refers to intending to destroy all or part of an ethnic, religious or national group. Technically, then, the mass killings in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 do not constitute genocide, because the targets were members of the same national and ethnic group. The Cambodian killings could instead be called politicide. However, most scholars diverge from the Genocide Convention definition, instead applying the term genocide to any state-sponsored mass killing aimed at destroying groups of civilians.


Raphael Lemkin, the prime force behind the UN Genocide Convention

                  Some scholars are genocide specialists, devoting their entire careers to examining genocide in general, or specific ones. I have never been such a specialist, but I developed a framework for understanding the tactics used by powerful perpetrators of injustice, and found it applied to genocide, one of the greatest injustices of all.

                  In this framework, called the backfire model, powerful perpetrators commonly use five types of methods to reduce public outrage. They cover up their actions, devalue the targets, reinterpret events by lying, minimising, blaming and framing, use official channels to give the appearance of justice, and intimidate or reward people involved. I and others applied the model to censorship, sexual harassment, police brutality, massacres and torture.

                  I knew this model of outrage management would apply to genocide. For example, the Nazis used all these methods in their extermination of Jews, Slavs and others, known as the Holocaust, keeping the killing programme secret, devaluing their targets, and denying the extent of their culpability. The model would certainly apply, but given the massive documentation of the Holocaust, I decided to examine a different genocide, where it was more feasible to get on top of the evidence, and picked Rwanda.

Rwanda, 1994

In the course of studying the Rwandan genocide, I read about ten books and lots of articles, keeping an eye out for methods used by perpetrators to reduce outrage. It was shocking to read so much about the genocide. I knew it was bad, but it was much worse than I had imagined.

                  Rwanda is a small landlocked country in central Africa that had been a Belgian colony. The Belgian rulers introduced a formal racial distinction between the Hutu and the Tutsi, though they lived among each other and intermarried, and put Tutsi figures in charge, though they came from a much smaller group. These racial groups became a toxic legacy after independence, when Hutu politicians controlled the Rwandan government.

                  In 1994, the death of the president of Rwanda triggered a sudden and massive assault on the Tutsi minority, and on Hutu “moderates,” with over half a million people killed in a matter of months. Reading about the genocide, I learned several things that usually receive little attention.

                  Rwanda is the most Christian country in Africa. The genocide involved Christians killing Christians, some of them slaughtered in churches where they had sheltered. Yet the worldwide Christian community paid little attention to the implications of this shocking violation of Christian precepts.


Aftermath of the killing of thousands of people in a Rwandan church

                  Before the genocide, the Rwandan government had been at war with Tutsi exiles based in the neighbouring country Uganda. Many other genocides have occurred during wartime, including the genocide of the Armenians during World War I and of the Jews during World War II. War seems to facilitate the unleashing of military force against civilians.

                  In Rwanda in 1994, there was a United Nations peacekeeping force, introduced to constrain the outbreak of war between the Rwandan government and the Tutsi rebels, who called themselves the Rwandan Patriotic Front or RPF. After the genocide started, the RPF recommenced its attacks. The war was on again.

                  I found ample evidence of cover-up, devaluation and other methods of reducing outrage over the killings. For example, Western governments withdrew their nationals, thus aiding in cover-up. The head of the UN peacekeeping force, Canadian soldier Roméo Dallaire, desperately appealed to the UN for greater support and for permission to defend civilians, given that peacekeepers are normally expected to use force only to defend themselves. Dallaire’s hopes were dashed. Amid the worst killing, the UN withdrew most of the peacekeeping troops from the country.

                  Meanwhile, other governments did nothing to stop the ongoing massacres. Only the French government belatedly organised a military intervention, whose main purpose was to protect the killers.

Bangladesh, 1971

When India gained independence in 1947, it was accompanied by a horrific breakup, called the Partition, leading to the creation of Muslim-dominated Pakistan, which was divided geographically between West Pakistan (today called Pakistan) and East Pakistan (today called Bangladesh), separated by 2000km.

India operated as a parliamentary democracy, but Pakistan suffered from authoritarian politics. In 1971, the military ruler of Pakistan, General Yahya, called elections. To his surprise, a party in East Pakistan, the Awami League, won the majority of seats and should have become the government. To stop this, Yahya sent troops to East Pakistan that began a massive killing operation.


Yahya Khan

                  Most of the people in East Pakistan were Muslims, but there was a significant Hindu minority, perhaps 13 million people. They were prime targets in the killing. Soon there was a vast tide of refugees, mostly Hindus, fleeing East Pakistan for safety in India. Within a matter of months in 1971, there were nearly ten million refugees, while hundreds of thousands of people were massacred in East Pakistan.

                  In writing about this story, I’m relying heavily on Gary Bass’s book The Blood Telegram. Bass did extensive interviews and studied archives. There was a rich lode of information about the US role. President Richard Nixon secretly taped all his conversations, and those with national security advisor Henry Kissinger were especially revealing.

                  In Dacca (now Dhaka), the major city in East Pakistan, staff in the US Consulate witnessed the slaughter of Bengalis by West Pakistan troops. They reported their observations to the State Department in increasingly desperate terms. The consul general, Archer Blood, supported his staff, using the word genocide to describe the killings. They were supported by State Department staff in Washington DC.

                  Meanwhile, the Indian government and press were in an uproar about the killings and the refugees. Likewise, in the US, there was considerable media coverage. Senator Ted Kennedy, who obtained reports from the Dacca consulate, attacked the Nixon administration.

                  Lots of people knew about the killings, but this had little impact on US policy, because Nixon and Kissinger saw General Yahya as their friend, and they hated India and its prime minister Indira Gandhi. They were using Yahya as a go-between to engage with the Chinese government for the first time since the 1949 revolution. It was a strange configuration. Nixon and Kissinger supported a military dictator who was massacring his citizens, made friends with China’s Communist rulers, and were intensely hostile to the major democracy in Asia, India, which turned to the Soviet Union for arms and diplomatic support. Nixon and Kissinger illegally organised arms shipments to Yahya’s government and encouraged Chinese leaders to mount a military threat to India.

                  As in every genocide, things were more complicated than apparent on the surface. As the killings continued in East Pakistan, Bengalis organised a guerrilla resistance, supported by the Indian military. As the refugee numbers increased, and public pressure increased, Indira Gandhi prepared for war with Pakistan. When it happened, it took only two weeks for Indian troops to take Dacca, ending the genocide and enabling East Pakistan to become the independent country Bangladesh.

                  Nixon and Kissinger furiously condemned the Indian government, and cynically used the United Nations as part of their campaign. Yet, as Bass tells the story, the role of Nixon and Kissinger in supporting Yahya and one of the worst genocides in the twentieth century has largely been forgotten.


Kissinger and Nixon

Other genocides

Wars over the past century have killed more civilians than soldiers, and genocides may have killed even more than wars. Yet many genocides receive little attention.

                  Who now remembers the genocide in Indonesia in 1965-66, a pogrom of Communists and others, with over half a million people killed? Western governments did nothing to stop the killing. As documented by Vincent Bevins in his book The Jakarta Method, the US government helped the killers. This “benign bloodbath” was welcomed by Western anti-communist leaders.

                  The record shows a remarkable lack of interest by foreign governments in intervening against genocide. During World War II, Allied leaders knew about the Nazi death camps, such as Auschwitz, and could have ordered bombing of the camps or rail lines leading to them. But they didn’t. They prioritised defeating the Nazis over ending the mass extermination.

                  Nor were the Allies all that concerned about civilian lives. In the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan during the war, civilians were the main casualties, despite this doing little to hinder the enemy’s war efforts. Some scholars have pointed to similarities between this bombing and genocide, but there seems to be little interest in examining strategic bombing through the lens of genocide.

                  Some of the greatest human disasters in the past century were in Communist states, especially the Soviet Union and China, where millions perished in purges and famines. These atrocities were covered up. The famine in China resulting from the Great Leap Forward, initiated in 1958, resulted in tens of millions of deaths, but information about this only became known outside the country decades later. Inducing famine, as in the case of Stalin’s ruthless policies against Ukraine in the early 1930s, can be a genocidal tool.

                  The human rights group Article 19 published a revealing report titled Starving in Silence, arguing that famine can usually be avoided when there is a free press. This helps explain why, in India, there have been no famines since independence, whereas famines have ravaged several African countries with authoritarian governments.

                  After the Gulf War in 1991, in which the Iraqi military was driven out of Kuwait, economic sanctions were placed on Iraq, leading to mass deaths due to hunger and disease, with perhaps two million people dying as a result over the following decade. In a widely publicised exchange, Madeleine Albright, US ambassador to the UN, was asked whether the deaths of half a million children in Iraq was a price worth paying for keeping Saddam Hussein’s regime in check. She answered yes.


Madeleine Albright

                  Finally, it is necessary to mention colonialism. European militaries invaded, conquered and occupied much of the rest of the world — North and South America, Africa, Asia and Australia — leading to the mass death of Indigenous people due to war, disease and cultural destruction. On a per capita basis, deaths due to colonialism probably outnumber all other mass killings.

                  Despite the carnage, governments today are prepared for even greater slaughter. Every government with nuclear weapons — US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — is poised to kill millions of civilians, and some of these governments reserve the right to launch a first strike. Nuclear arsenals are commonly justified as deterrence against aggression, but in human terms they are a form of collective insanity, a willingness to be prepared to kill millions of people. The Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons came into force in 2021, but none of the governments holding them seems to care.

Gaza, 2023–24

The Israeli military assault on Gaza, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, has generated outrage worldwide. What lessons are there from earlier mass killings?

                  One important difference is the role of cover-up. From Nazi Germany to Indonesia to Rwanda, perpetrators and their supporters have tried to hide killings from wider audiences. But the killings in Gaza are in the glare of publicity, which is a key reason for the much greater public uproar. Nevertheless, it is plausible that future exposés will reveal Israeli actions even worse than those now reported in the media.

                  In nearly every genocide, there is devaluation of the targets. There is ample evidence of contemptuous Israeli attitudes towards Palestinians, for example as documented in the South African application to the International Court of Justice alleging Israeli responsibility for genocide in Gaza.

                  When mass killings are exposed, perpetrators and their allies provide explanations, or rationalisations, for their actions. I’ve called this reinterpretation, and it includes lying, minimising, blaming and framing. Lies include the claim that Hamas cut off the heads of babies. The Israeli government blamed Hamas’ 7 October attacks for its attack on Gaza, and framed the assault as defending against terrorists.

                  The US government has publicly warned the Israeli government about its actions, meanwhile providing arms for the Israeli military. In this context, foreign governments are a sort of official channel, giving the appearance of providing justice without much substance. The United Nations has been impotent.

                  Finally, there is the tactic of intimidating critics of the Israeli military attack on Gaza, including campaigns in several countries against critics of Israel, and the killing of journalists in Gaza itself.

                  According to the backfire model, counter-tactics to increase outrage include exposing the injustice, validating targets, interpreting actions as unjust, not relying on official channels but instead mobilising support, and resisting intimidation and rewards. Protesters against killings in Gaza have been using all these methods, including circulating information, humanising Palestinians through personal stories, emphasising the injustice of mass killing of Palestinian civilians, organising public protests, and standing up against threats. For more on this, see “Outrage management in Israel-Palestine.”

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                  Reflecting on genocides past, present and future can be demoralising. It seems that social institutions are set up to be humans’ own worst enemies. But there are also many examples of sustained efforts to oppose domination, exploitation and killing. Just don’t rely on national leaders to be our saviours.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

For valuable comments, thanks to Mark Diesendorf, Jørgen Johansen, Janet Mayer, Michael McKinley and Dalilah Shemia-Goeke.