Direct US-Hamas talks break Israel’s Gaza narrative monopoly

When I read about the recent direct talks between an official representative of the US and a high-level Hamas official, it jogged my memory back to the time of the First Intifada.
Back then, I was traveling in the Occupied Territories with a foreign journalist — I believe it was Dan Fisher of the Los Angeles Times — when members of the Israeli military stopped us. The first thing they did was separate us because they knew they could not harass me the way they would, with a foreigner — especially a journalist — watching.
Except for an attempt to bully me, and a slap to my face, I was able to return to my colleague with little harm. But the incident, repeated in different circumstances more than once, was an indication to me of how the occupier always wants to monopolize control. And to do that, it needs to remove anyone who can weaken an occupier-occupied relationship that is overwhelmingly weighted in favor of the former.
The importance of a third party — even a larger, biased one such as the US — is that its presence helps to partially adjust the asymmetry that exists in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The attempt to monopolize the narrative can be best seen in the way Israel deals with the media. Palestinian journalists are not recognized as such unless they work for foreign media outlets. As far as I know, no Palestinian journalist working for a Palestinian media organization has ever been issued with a press card by the Israeli government’s press office. Lately, of course, even Al Jazeera, which was previously permitted to work as an international media outlet, has been prevented from doing so by an anti-press freedom law in Israel.
However, perhaps the best example of this vicious Israeli effort to control the narrative presented to the outside world can be seen in the ways in which its army and foreign policy have dealt with the war on Gaza. For more than 17 months, Israel has refused to allow a single foreign journalist into the territory. It has killed nearly 200 Palestinian journalists and destroyed buildings containing media offices in a clearly targeted effort at silencing Palestinians.

Israel has spent hundreds of millions of dollars bullying politicians and the foreign press to accept its narrative. 

Daoud Kuttab

The Foreign Ministry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars bullying politicians and the foreign press to accept its narrative, which at times has included feeding fake stories to the White House about children being burned in ovens and mass rapes, without shame or apology for embarrassing their most powerful ally.
Israel feels no shame in regularly lying and distorting the facts on the ground, even when there is unmistakable visual proof to the contrary. By spinning the reality to justify its continued war crimes, Israeli authorities have attempted to ensure they can literally get away with murder.
In the case of the peace talks, Israel has used the same tactic to confuse and obfuscate negotiators in an attempt to make them believe whatever it wants them to believe about where Hamas stands on various issues. By flooding the airwaves with falsehoods, they have often succeeded in creating enough of a public opinion pause to get away with whatever they want.
The Israeli public, especially the families of the hostages, eventually realized what was happening and were able to debunk the continuous lies of their own government. But for the most part, Americans, including certain people in the White House who depend on only one particular TV station for news, have often been duped into believing that Hamas was always the obstacle.
But the moment that an authorized US representative this month met a senior Hamas leader without any Israeli officials around to try to alter the story, the American representative stated progress was being made. He also, accurately, stated that his job was to represent the interests of the US and he was not an agent of Israel — a clear jab at many of the current administration’s powerful Zionists.
It is not clear whether the US will continue its efforts to engage in direct negotiations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a strongly pro-Israel member of the US government, said the meeting was a one-off and will not be repeated.
That might be so, but the genie is now out of the bottle and the Americans realize, through firsthand experience, how much and for how long they have been duped by Israel. Nevertheless, the attempt to end a peace effort that appeared to be making progress is itself further proof of Israel’s desire to continue to monopolize the narrative, even in its dealings with its best ally, the US.
If talks for a permanent ceasefire and an end to the war on Gaza continue to stumble, I am not convinced that the White House will not attempt to send its envoy back to find out more directly from Hamas.
The Israeli power, both on the ground in the Occupied Territories and in the corridors of power in Washington, is not to be belittled. But still, the attempt to continuously monopolize the narrative cannot go on forever.

• Daoud Kuttab is an award-winning Palestinian journalist. X: @daoudkuttab