For better or worse, the 1942 quasi-propaganda film Casablanca, with its stellar cast headed by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, was a staple of my generation’s access to movie theatres showing classic, independent and foreign films in the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Called on to shut down a gambling operation run by American Rick Blaine (played by Bogart), French police captain Louis Renault (played by Claude Rains) speaks a line that has become a slogan of the times to refer to blatant hypocrisy and corruption.
While his heart is with the resistance, Renault works for Vichy – and while he has to shut down the club, he also wants to cash in. As he loudly blows his whistle to call for reinforcements, Renault shouts at Blaine: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here” – and Ugarte, the character played by Peter Lorre, quickly hands the captain his winnings.
I can’t begin to count the number of times this scene and those words have crossed my mind as I have watched responses to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.
While it’s almost impossible to place the atrocities in any kind of hierarchy, the public “shock” over Israeli practices of abducting Palestinian civilians and torturing them in the most unspeakable ways, including the common and long-standing use of sexual assault and rape, can put such feigned reactions into perspective.
Given that rape and sexual assault are well-established tools in the Israeli arsenal of subjugating the colonized Palestinian population, dating back to the state’s creation during the Nakba, it stands to reason that the propaganda headlines in the 7 October story are allegations of systematic sexual assault by Palestinian fighters against Israelis.
We have learned enough about how Israeli propaganda works to understand that the very things the regime is trying to hide about itself, are the ones it tends to project upon those fighting against it.
Relentless propaganda
Outside of brute force, whether military or economic, and the relentless propaganda that saturates all aspects of life, there are two other significant ways in which liberal hegemonies maintain control and power, particularly in the US. Most pervasive, perhaps, is the displacement of politics by some other category, whether that is “civilizational value”, various forms of “exceptionalism”, or, most perniciously, the “humanitarian” dodge.
We are witnessing all of these processes in action in the American enabling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Famine and epidemic by design, intentional demolition of all forms of infrastructure, and even torture itself, are no longer political issues; rather, they are turned into “humanitarian” problems, as if they were the result of an earthquake and not a calculated political policy.
A population left defenseless thus becomes a charity case, and those attempting to defend their people are deemed terrorists. While these are familiar processes that have played out historically in many different times and places, we have never watched the whole scenario live, in real time, or been able to witness such colossal levels of injustice and hypocrisy with such unwavering clarity.
The other way in which liberal hegemony works, particularly in the US, is through containment: by shrinking the spectrum of available possibility and thought, fully embodied in the now-ossified and incurably corrupt two-party system, but evident everywhere in what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has dubbed the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank) complex.
This ramped up exponentially through the “war on terror” following 9/11, in which the world and all its populations were divided up according to categories beneficial to US full-spectrum dominance and the institutionalization of perpetual war.
In a crucial passage that I’ve written about many times but never seen analyzed by anyone else, the official 9/11 Commission Report found that the “attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.” It went on to note: “Considering what was not done suggests possible ways to institutionalize imagination … It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of the imagination.”
Rather than being predictive of some Orwellian future, this passage has always seemed to me descriptive, confirming what had already largely been put in place and would only entrench across all aspects of US society, and then rigorously get exported – either through soft or brute power – as the “war on terror” proceeded apace.
Devoid of humanity
Of course, the preparation and pre-programming for the “war on terror” through decades of relentless imagery shone a very bright spotlight on “innocent civilians” killed by crazed “terrorists”, often Palestinian and almost always Muslim.
These specters were devoid of politics, history, economics or any other factors – including, ironically, their humanity, even though hegemonic powers are only too ready to let these communities become “human” once they’ve been deprived of water, food, medicine, shelter, children, parents, grandparents, and everything else that made them human in the first place.
The key is continuous domination of the narrative, even if that means exposing one’s own crimes. The hegemon is quite ready to shine a spotlight on its own sins, as long as what is exposed still diverts attention from greater crimes or forms of resistance. In this sense, the “revelations” of torture at the Sde Teiman detention center feel very much like the revelations of US crimes at Abu Ghraib, but not in the manner usually considered.
Routine humiliation, blackmail, random abductions, imprisonment without charges, and torture: alongside “facts on the ground” in the form of land seizures, home demolitions and colonization, this is the very glue holding the Israeli occupation together.
No Palestinian is unaffected. According to estimates that are not even up-to-date with the current wave of violence, some 70 percent of Palestinian families have had one or more family members sentenced to prison for anti-occupation activities.
None of this, of course, is news. But just as revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib in 2004 shifted focus away from prisoners’ movements and testimonies in Palestine, Morocco, Syria and other parts of the Arab world back onto the US and its evil doings, so too does the “exposure” of atrocities at Sde Teiman feel like an attention-shifting tactic.
Edifice unravelling
From what, exactly, is attention being shifted? Despite the obvious personal trauma involved in being subjected to torture, the prison experience in Palestine and throughout the Arab world is, primarily, a political experience.
Rather than being helped to understand this fact, we are given a very limited spectrum of permitted thought. This ranges, on the one hand, from “Israel losing its soul”, to voyeuristic spectacles of how degraded Israeli society has become.
Palestinians are depicted as victims, which they certainly are in such cases. But this ultimately equates the Israeli state’s psychopathology with a “natural disaster” that somehow manages to destroy water systems, homes, hospitals, universities, and everything else in its path – including as many women and children as possible – in a calculated and systematic manner.
Nowhere are we given space to think or understand that torture is, and has long been, a key policy for the Israeli occupation; that it is a potential feature of any Palestinian’s life, because they are a colonized population under the control of a despotic military regime – a rogue state whose primary support is baked into the US geopolitical policy framework.
One of now-phantom US President Joe Biden’s favorite tall tales is recounting how he was arrested trying to reach Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. But Palestine and the Arab world have many of their own Mandelas, political prisoners who US politicians would never deign to mention.
Such an utterance or recognition would begin to unravel the whole US edifice of support for despots, regime change, political suppression, and the bulwark of Israel’s atrocities – its “pre-emptive strikes”, nuclear capabilities and utter disregard for international law due to US veto power – as a harbinger for what awaits anyone in the region who steps out of line. But we will soon see whether the times are actually changing.
-Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic and scholar. He is the author of more than 20 books including After Jews and Arabs, Memories of Our Future and the forthcoming Controlled Demolition: a work in four books. He is Distinguished Professor at Queens College, CUNY, and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. His article appeared in the Middle East Eye.
