Case 3: The Great March of Return

Drone photo of protesters walking towards the Gaza separation fence during the Great March of Return. (Image: UN News)

My third example is the aforementioned Great March of Return, the 2018 Palestinian mass mobilization originally conceived by independent journalist Ahmed Abu Artema.

Hamas, the Islamist party that has administered Gaza for more than a decade in the context of ongoing Israeli domination, tried to take over the Great March movement and played a role in some of its tactical elements, but political and civil society groups from across the Palestinian political spectrum embraced the movement. The goal was to focus attention on the Palestinian right of return, the ongoing strangulation of Gaza by an Israeli and Egyptian blockade, and the Trump administration’s recognition of occupied Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The Great March drew people of all ages, sometimes in the tens of thousands, to the area near the barrier that Israel constructed to keep nearly two million Palestinians, almost all of them refugees, trapped inside a territory that is significantly smaller than the town where I live (Canton, NY).

Gaza occupies an area of approximately 141 square miles and has a population of approximately 2 million

.

St. Lawrence County, NY occupies 2,821 square miles, with a population of approximately 108,000

. (

Scale - 1:750,000. Map courtesy of Carol Cady, St. Lawrence University GIS/Map Librarian)

Israel’s response was extremely harsh and included widespread use of live ammunition and tear gas fired in high volume from both soldiers on the ground and drones in the air. Over several months of protests, Israeli forces shot dead more than 200 Palestinians and wounded more than 30,000. United Nations officials strongly condemned Israel’s response, suggesting that it may have constituted a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as a war crime, while Amnesty International called for an arms embargo against Israel.  

Settler colonialism, absent again

I reviewed 49 Great March stories from the three establishment media outlets. None of them mentioned settler colonialism, none identified Israeli Jews as settlers, and none identified Palestinians explicitly as native or indigenous to the land. Only one article – an op-ed by the critical Israeli journalist Gideon Levy – connected the actions of the Israeli state in any way with a colonial history.

The coverage regularly acknowledged Palestinian grievances, and the New York Times did the best job of the three outlets in terms of letting us hear the voices of Palestinians in detail. At the same time, the coverage consistently diverted attention away from any consideration of the relationship between those grievances and the long-term and ongoing impact of colonization.

A Hamas obsession?

Two patterns in this coverage deserve special mention. First is the extensive space devoted to discussions of Hamas. Mentions of Hamas dwarf even passing references to the status of the people in Gaza as refugees. NPR’s coverage was especially egregious in this regard. Limited almost entirely to the work of one reporter, Daniel Estrin, this coverage was remarkably consistent in its framing of the situation through “they said vs. they said” constructions pitting the versions of the two “sides” against each other as part of a narrative war.

NPR also emphasized the Israeli blockade as a primary cause of the Palestinian mobilization. This tied the story back to Hamas (to which Israel claimed to be responding when it put the blockade in place) rather than to the actions that pushed all those refugees into Gaza in the first place. Also noteworthy was NPR’s tendency to frame Israel as “defending” its “border.” This frame ignores the fact that Gaza is not a sovereign country and raises an obvious question that a settler colonial analysis could easily answer: if Israel is just engaging in “defense,” how to explain the fact that the territory under its effective control keeps growing?

Decontextualized displacement

The second pattern gets to the heart of the Great March of Return itself: the desire of refugees to return to their homes. Reporters from all three outlets acknowledged this desire, but did so using language that was often misleading or deliberately obtuse: “lands that Palestinians lost that are today in Israel” (NPR 3/31/18) or “lands where their families once lived, in what is now Israel” (CNN 4/20/18). Lost in such language is the entire history of the Zionist movement, many of whose key leaders openly envisioned the mass removal of Palestinians for decades before carrying it out in 1948 and the period immediately following.

For NPR and CNN, the relevant history only begins in 1948, and even there, the agency of Israel’s founders is exnominated. For its part, the New York Times often uses what appears to be a slightly more precise formulation: Palestinians “fled or were expelled” in 1948 (NYT 4/27/18). Here the passive language (expelled by whom?) once again shields the Zionist movement from scrutiny, while the distinction between “flight” and “expulsion” begs the question of whether such a distinction even matters when it comes to the right of return.

Unfortunately, not a single article in the entire set of coverage I reviewed references international law as a relevant piece of context for understanding the right of return. Instead, the binary frame leaves readers with the impression that the right of return is simply a Palestinian talking point to be weighed against Israel’s own official narratives.

In short, the establishment media coverage of the Great March of Return is a festival of exnomination: no international law, no Zionism, and above all, no colonization.