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The recent Israel assault on Gaza was one in a series of war crimes and atrocities committed by the State of Israel. In 1948 there was the Nakba, the violent deportation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of their villages and towns. The Nakba was followed by the imposition of military rule on Arab-Palestinian citizens from 1948 to 1966, and their systematic discrimination and marginalization ever after. Along with the 1967 occupation of yet more Palestinian territories came the criminal establishment of Jewish settlements in them. The racism within Israel feeds into justification of the occupation by representing the colonized/occupied as "inferior," "barbarian," or "primitive."1
The repeated assaults on Gaza since September 2005 should not then come as a surprise. They are a "natural" byproduct of the occupation and, particularly, of the so-called 2005 "disengagement plan" that turned Gaza into a huge prison. So the question is: in what sense were the latest Israeli aggression and its attendant, horrendous war crimes against Gaza different from its predecessors? In my view the answer lies not in the nature of the assault or the war crimes themselves, but in the way that the Israeli public experienced the war through media and public discourse. For the Israeli public, the assault was, in Jean Baudrillard's terms, a simulacrum of war, a hyperreal war.2
According to Baudrillard our age, "the era of simulacra and of simulation", is characterized by two interrelated features: (i) the image or copy is the "real" by virtue of its perception as such by society, and (ii) any distinction between reality as is and its representation vanishes:
[In] the era of simulacra and of simulation ... there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgement to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.3
In the First Gulf War, Baudrillard argued that the images of the "war" and its simulation preceded the war, becoming the war itself.4 The atrocity of the massive airstrikes and artillery barrages by the coalition troops, the immense death toll and injuries, especially of Iraqi civilians, were not part of the "war" in which there were few...