During the imperial war on Iraq and its subsequent occupation, claims that the country, under Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction were overdetermined in the public discursive space. Two years into that Western coalitional effort, The New York Times published a now-famous 2004 letter from its editors offering a small apology for “a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been.” They committed only to updating their methods, while the goal remained intact. Michael Gordon and Judith Miller were proffered up as institutional scapegoats for the mass scale falsification of evidence by Western media. This systemic editorial practice laundered public support for the decades-long forcible de-development of the country and for the enactment of the same project throughout the Arab–Iranian region.

Two decades later, we do not need to relitigate that mediascape; we are still living it. In December 2023, the Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz — a former Israeli intelligence officer with no relevant experience — and the latter’s nephew, Adam Sella, published “Screams Without Words,” an investigation which accused Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups of weaponized mass rape during the events of Tufan al-Aqsa. Their reporting has been thoroughly debunked and discredited as an ideological smear authorized at the highest levels of the newspaper, under the supervision of Joe Kahn, the paper’s executive editor, and Philip Pan, the international editor. The Palestine movement has rightly claimed weaponized sexual violence to be the de facto W.M.D. lie for the genocide in Gaza. It is also appropriate, however, to think of Gettleman et al.’s Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting as a trace of the ancient strategy of bearing false witness — no less insidious than its instantiations in Iraq, or Libya, or under Jim Crow. Its contemporary form is wracked with a contemporary object impermanence caused by the global war that has been prosecuted against the concept of witness itself. Their handiwork is condemned to a cheap imitation of racial histories, leaving in its place only a familiar pang. Israeli propagandists are never quite fully invested in these efforts, for they are already the beneficiaries of a total system of unanswerable lies.

But there are other rhetorical modes of genocide apologia that play with a generalized ambivalence towards witness. To understand them, we might turn to a curious essay published by the long-standing Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg two years ago today: “It Is Impossible to Know What to Believe in This Hideous War.” Its subject was the massacre at al-Ahli Arab hospital (Gaza’s oldest hospital; also known as al-Maamadani), the first high-profile attack on Gaza’s hospitals in the immediate aftermath of October 7. Since its publication, all of Gaza’s hospitals have faced repeated bombings, sieges, and/or destruction. Released on the heels of a press conference by the hospital’s staff in which they beseeched the world to act, the op-ed appeared at a very important moment of outrage against the Israeli military, for which Goldberg was a perfect foil. (She is less obviously compromised than her colleagues in the Jerusalem bureau, who are former employees of Zionist think tanks (Adam Rasgon), or who cover Israeli wars while their children fight them (Isabel Kershner). There is also a perception that Goldberg speaks directly to people of a more humanitarian inclination, and certainly to the liberal wing of Jewish solidarity organizing.)

The piece operates in two ways. First, it casts doubt on Palestinian testimony from within the unfolding war of extermination. Goldberg contests the Palestinian narrative around al-Ahli, both in terms of the alleged martyr count and the origin of the rocket that struck the hospital. Her discrediting of the Gaza Health Ministry based on “early American intelligence” and other (unnamed) “independent experts” implies that Palestinians cannot be trusted to accurately represent their past or their future. She achieves this through a falsified historicization of siege and violence in Palestine; for her, al-Ahli is most responsibly read in the same lineage of what she calls “the myth” of the 2002 massacre in Jenin refugee camp. Then, like now, the Zionist forces waged an operation against the perpetrators of militant attacks within the dakhil; the Arab world got the story wrong, she claims, before focusing on the technicalities of what counts as a massacre. She exhibits no curiosity about the upstream conditions that ‘permit’ counterinsurgency campaigns in occupied refugee camps, much less the history that produced said camps.

Goldberg’s second offering is to conciliate those sympathetic to Palestinians. She says that the covered-up assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh reveals that the other side lies too, but in this case, her choice of framing is revealing: “In the past, when Israel has accidentally killed civilians, it has blamed Palestinians for the deaths.” [Italics ours.] Her conclusion is that no one should rush to judgment during this war; that every actor has an agenda, whether to conceal violence against Palestinians or to demonize Jews. The latter conflation is hers of course, implying that Jewish soldiers kill for the right reasons, and that to suggest otherwise is a form of hatred. In effect, Goldberg papers over the salient forces of imperialism, settler colonialism, and genocide with a liberal imperialist framework, that of the human shield: the fighters’ unfortunate choice to embed themselves inside of and around popular infrastructure. This concept, while not explicitly named in the article, allows Goldberg to offer a cleaner division for the reader, between the militant and the innocent, permitting them to adjudicate in a context where the relevant analytics are occluded.

Of course, Goldberg is aware that the ‘human shield’ has a long imperial history, and that the Palestinian fighter is, fundamentally, an encaged person resisting occupation and siege — their integration into communal life is inevitable, and therefore the distinction is intended to excuse attacks against the entire social formation. Goldberg’s work is therefore a form of clumsy genocide denialism in its elision of the structure of violence in occupied Palestine — a denialism, it is worth saying, that can only operate in one direction. That Israel bombs hospitals is an uncontestable fact; to litigate this particular instance of a hospital bombing is a deliberate choice to conceal the specific Israeli strategy at play. The destruction of hospitals, and of all life sustaining systems in Gaza, are part of an attempt to engineer defeat amongst the colonized population, to facilitate geographic modularization, and to enact ethnic cleansing. The target, just like the war itself, is the social base of anticolonial resistance and not just the infrastructure that protects or heals the fighter.

The ruling class strategy for advancing the cause of genocide can be better understood by studying both the diffuse circulation of spectacle and the deep investment in ideological maintenance and control — in our case, a technical, juridical, and militarized project for the development of the terrorist as a floating chain of signification. This is a conjunctural a priori; always already steeped in these logics, the ‘terrorist’ is marshaled in a kind of lazy will-call by state and para-state power.

The social function of “Screams Without Words” fell clearly within this territory: to render the Palestinian as savage in toto, to tar the young men of the Al-Qassam Brigades and other resistance groups with the accusation of having perpetrated an inexcusable, totalizing crime, the kind that stands outside of the realm of strategic–martial logic, or self-defense. It was far from unique; many others followed its well-worn terrain in the early days after Tufan al-Aqsa. Among them the literary critic Adam Shatz, whose essay “Vengeful Pathologies” in The London Review of Books was perhaps the most high-profile attempt at genocide laundering from the perch of American letters. The affective field produced by these texts was readily integrated into the figure of the annihilable terrorist — he who employs nihilistic violence for the sake of retribution; he who might be understood but never countenanced — then reified and collectively appended to Gaza’s people, all subjected to a blanket of dehumanization, and thus, consent-making for ongoing extermination.

This type of discursive maneuver, however, is not entirely durable. Certainly, there is no martyr count in Gaza that will satisfy the colonizer, who can only be brought to heel by the combined forces of social and armed resistance in tandem with global campaigns of isolation and anti-normalization. But, in general, the idea of a putative war of proportionate retaliation has its expiry date for so-called dispassionate observers — the moment when “what did you expect” becomes “that is probably enough.” For previous instances of such expiry, we may again look no further than the Iraq War’s shake-and-bake scandals, and the litany of consequence-free mea culpas from American writers, journalists, and editors who supported the war, among them, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, Peter Beinart (then of Marty Peretz’s New Republic; now the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents), and even Bush-era speechwriter and ultra-Zionist David Frum, who was forced to describe the Iraq war as a “misadventure.” All of these men persist comfortably and have reprised their playbooks over Gaza.

To engineer acquiescence among the public to the targeting of a hospital requires not only the dehumanization of the colonized, like in the above case studies, but also the receiving public’s own disarticulation: the death of historical knowledge, organized ignorance and forgetting, and permanent submission. This strategy goes beyond ‘fog of war,’ but rather operates within the organic unity of the de-subjectification of the Palestinian and the integration of the rest into a global theater of spectacular contestation. In the latter space, far away from the makeshift cemeteries and cratered earth, total social knowledge is posited as existing, but inaccessible and unverifiable. The phenomenological individuation of the public leads to the deputization of truth content to that diffuse external realm. Authority is vested in the spectacle itself — in this case, to the benefit of the colonial power — and the result is a sense of powerlessness and resignation, coupled with an injunction to not disturb the fragile balance of forces.

In this sense, “It is Impossible to Know” is a different offering than “Screams Without Words,” precisely because it models this ambivalence. In its formulation, the Palestinian can be both good and bad; the primary intention, however, is to maintain the providence of the imperial system, whose mastery and knowledge of the terrain endows the burden of dispensation of the primitive’s fate within a structure. This linguistic practice is formally homologous with the subject-position of the image–spectator — the adjudication of a moral dilemma, before ‘opening out’ and dissipating onto a landscape of unfortunate and perhaps unknowable violence. That landscape is, of course, our own: where the terrorist stalks the frame and depth perception blurs.

Goldberg is not an imperial planner, not really, and her article is not a cause but a symptom. Latching onto affective tissue from within the existing structures of genocide denialism, she slips past her responsibility to the Palestinian by anchoring in her duty to her fellow Jews, who, remarkably, ring the final note in a piece that was ostensibly about the bombing of Gaza:

“In much of the world, there will be no dissuading people from holding Israel, and by extension America, liable for the hospital bombing. At the same time, Israel will be able to use this episode to deflect criticism of the violence it really is inflicting on the Palestinians. Jews, whatever their views about Zionism, will be placed in greater danger…”

Returning to that old letter of acknowledgement about Iraq, we can expect no such notice about the work of Goldberg and her like, perhaps because they have been careful not to make the mistake of trafficking in convenient fact, but rather inconvenient feeling. This month, around the two year anniversary of the genocide, Goldberg sat down for an unrelated interview with none other than Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J-Street, one of the most powerful Zionist lobbying groups in Washington D.C. Her work will remain exemplary of the ideology of Jewish supremacy’s liberal face in the post–Tufan Al Aqsa period. In the persistence of relentless, unrepentant war, texts like Goldberg’s can seem quaint. They have been boxed out by a deafening wall of noise — lies, sadism, triumphalism. But we would do well to not underestimate this specific tactile edge of Zionism, particularly in moments like these when denialism and revisionism will be at their most pronounced.