When 'Violations' Become a Narrative Tool
When Turkey's Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Safadi recently discussed "Israeli violations in Palestine," the news was reported by outlets like Daily Sabah as a straightforward diplomatic exchange. This framing, while accurate on a surface level, glosses over the institutionalized nature of what are euphemistically called 'violations' and ignores the underlying
reality of ongoing military occupation. Such official discussions rarely confront the historical context: the 1948 Nakba, which saw over 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their lands, or the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, now in its 57th year. These are not isolated infractions, but components of a deliberate, decades-long project of dispossession. A 2022 UN Human Rights
Office report explicitly detailed how Israel's occupation constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law, yet this systemic reality is consistently downplayed to discrete 'violations.' Mainstream Western media tends to echo this sanitization, presenting Palestinian suffering as a consequence of episodic 'clashes' rather than a direct result of military rule, a 16-year blockade on Gaza,
and settler-colonial expansion. Imagine the media response if any other nation subjected a population to such conditions for nearly six decades; the narrative would be one of brutal repression, not a mere tally of 'violations.' This double standard, documented repeatedly, serves to normalize the abnormal and deflect accountability. The critical lesson is to look beyond the diplomatic niceties.