Bluewashing refers to when a state or organization uses humanitarian aid campaigns to deflect attention from its harmful practices.
“He kills the victim and then walks in his funeral”.
This is an Arabic proverb that conveys how those who cause the most harm will still try to save face afterwards. It’s a fitting one to describe Israel’s behavior; despite the death and destruction it has caused throughout Palestine and most recently in Lebanon and Syria, its propaganda efforts depicting itself as an altruistic savior through humanitarian aid are nothing short of relentless. The use of humanitarian aid campaigns to cover for crimes against humanity that themselves necessitate humanitarian aid is what has become known as bluewashing, and it is a publicity strategy that Israel has become increasingly fond of.
The term “bluewashing” is a portmanteau of the words “blue” and “whitewash,” which is generally a metaphor for the covering-up of crimes committed; the color blue is used because of its association with the United Nation and has thus become associated with humanitarianism and human rights. Bluewashing was first used to criticize the corporate partnerships formed under the United Nations Global Compact initiative following credible accusations that this association with the United Nations was undeservedly improving the corporations’ reputations. In short, these partnerships were being used as a fig leaf rather than an honest commitment to any kind of ideal.
Israel too is quite flagrantly attempting to improve its ugly reputation through a cover of humanitarianism regarding the Palestinians it has been massacring, ethnically cleansing, bombing, imprisoning, and keeping under occupation for over 70 years. Such “humanitarian” work is also intended to ideologically align Israel with the West despite its physical location in the East. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak described this conception as “a villa in the jungle” – a part of the enlightened West surrounded by the backwards, incompetent East and so, similarly to Western countries, in a position to provide aid and assistance to “developing” countries such as Palestine. That Palestine is simultaneously treated as a separate, developing country while Israel builds its settlements and exercises its control throughout all of it, is yet another contradiction in the arsenal of Israeli hasbara, where Israel is allowed to have its cake and eat it too.
This includes efforts to dictate the “solution” to the Palestinian cause as an “economic peace” where crumbs are thrown the Palestinians’ way while Israel continues to solidify its control and extract Palestinian resources (for example, land and water for widespread settlement expansion) and deny Palestinians their political, economic, and human rights. While Israel and friends pat themselves on the back for supposed “aid” to the Palestinians under Israeli domination, an actual study of the Palestinian political economy reveals a process of de-development (first coined by Sara Roy in her analysis of the economic performance of the Gaza Strip) whereby productive capacity is systematically restricted and sustainable growth made infeasible; “over time, de-development represents nothing less than the denial of economic potential”, which Palestinians working in cooperatives or small businesses can attest to when being forced to navigate the bureaucratic maze of checkpoints and total Israeli control over imports and exports, which aid does nothing to address the root cause of. This is fundamentally why, despite billions of dollars of said aid since the beginning of the 1993 Oslo peace process, the Palestinian economy in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is failing.
Rather than this damning reality, Zionist bluewashing campaigns are instead meant to convey that Israel has these technological, medicinal or other advantages to so graciously share because they are an ingenious, innovative nation, while their enemies are not so gifted. Naturally, this approach neglects to mention that Israel is propped up by billions in US aid and immeasurable diplomatic and other forms of support.
Despite the absurdity of the chauvinism in using humanitarian aid to distract from its colonial violence, Israel’s bluewashing strategy is nonetheless pursued across several social media platforms as well as on the Israeli government’s website. Most insultingly, these pages also mention aid Israel has allowed to enter the besieged Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank it is increasingly dotting with illegal settlements. To really drive in the ridiculousness of Israel boasting of giving aid to the Palestinians under its occupation, it is worthwhile to delve into the context of how Israel is ultimately the root cause of the issues their aid is purporting to help. Let’s take a look at some of Israel’s claims that it proudly displays on its official websites:
“Despite attacks by Hamas, Israel maintains an ongoing humanitarian corridor for the transfer of perishable and staple food items to Gaza.”
Here Israel begins by placing Hamas’s actions in a vacuum, rather than within its rightful context. Most of those who live in the Gaza Strip are refugees of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaigns during the Nakba which made founding the State of Israel possible. All resistance to Israel from Gaza has been borne out of this catastrophe. Israel here is also absolving itself of its responsibility for Gaza’s present state. Before 1948, Gaza City had been a prosperous market town functioning as a collecting and forwarding center for the citrus, wheat, and barley crops of the Gaza District. Much of its population had worked in the surrounding countryside, and many of the Gazan landowners and farmers had owned or worked on citrus groves and pastures outside the area that became the Gaza Strip. The Nakba drastically altered the situation. Gaza was cut off from its normal sources of supply and from its markets in the areas that became Israel.
The economy was ravaged: within a few months the strip had come to depend almost entirely on imports. Many refugees attempted to return to their homes during those initial months, but such attempts were dangerous. The presence of land mines was evident from the dead camels, donkeys, and cattle along the highway. Despite this, hundreds of refugees still tried daily to return-but none were allowed by the Israelis. Decades later, Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip are still fighting for their right to return, as evidenced by the Great March of Return (GMR) which began in 2018. The GMR consisted of Palestinians marching towards the barrier separating them from their villages and in turn being shot dead by Israeli snipers or intentionally disabled by exploding “butterfly bullets”.
Thus, this framing that Israel is acting benevolently despite Hamas’s supposedly irrational violence obscures how Israel began wreaking havoc on Palestinian lives decades before Hamas even existed. This havoc includes how Gaza’s food insecurity began in 1948 and has been allowed to continue since through Israeli violence and domination, despite Israeli claims that the pulling out of settlements from Gaza marked the end of its rule over the strip. Even this “transfer of food items” to Gaza being boasted of is dependent on the whims of the Israeli government and in the past has been blocked while the army was raining bombs down on Gaza, including on UN schools.
“21,200 international organization staff members entered the Gaza Strip.”
Again shamelessly minimizing the devastating impact of total Israeli control over who and what can enter and leave the Gaza Strip and why these staff members need to enter in the first place, this also belies how as recently as 2018, Israel was exposed as having sent in an Israeli commando unit into Gaza undercover as humanitarian aid workers. This is a war crime, and rightfully so as it endangers all actual humanitarian aid workers by placing them under a cloud of suspicion, essentially using these aid workers as human shields.
“22,849 Palestinians exited the Strip, among them 10,544 patients and their companions, exiting for medical treatment in Israel.”
This bluewashing of the Palestinians in Gaza who despite all obstacles were able to leave for proper medical treatment as an act of generosity covers up how Israel is responsible for the abysmal state of Palestinian healthcare. This figure simply ignores how Israel is increasingly limiting the number of Palestinians who are allowed to access the lifesaving care they need, while Gaza’s healthcare system – subjected to half a century of occupation and over a decade of blockade – is left unable to meet the needs of its population. Furthermore, Israel does not allow Palestinians in Gaza to reopen their airport or build a seaport, leaving Palestinians dependent on foreign ports for travel abroad.
Travel to the West Bank from Gaza is also restricted, even for medical treatments: a recent heartbreaking story was of a young Palestinian girl with cancer who eventually died in a hospital in Nablus, after her treatment was delayed and her parents were denied permits to accompany her, a story that is tragically not unique. The precariousness of Palestinians’ access to healthcare has only been exacerbated by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, where with the UN’s plan to facilitate permits stalled, Israel only approved half of the urgent medical permit requests from Gaza by late spring 2020. Thus, many Palestinians who contracted COVID-19 and who suffered from preexisting conditions have been prevented from receiving adequate medical attention, including access to ventilators.
Moreover, the pharmaceutical market in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is bound by economic agreements with Israel and has been structured in furtherance of Israeli interests at the expense of Palestinians. This is accomplished through the blocking of less expensive pharmaceuticals from neighboring countries, forcing a reliance on Israeli pharmaceuticals, as well as the limiting of raw material imports and the exports of medicines which places a huge burden on Palestinian pharmaceutical manufacturers. In the case of the Gaza Strip, medicines are allowed in but not out, placing the burden of dealing with expired medications on Gaza’s over-capacitated toxic waste processing sites. This has resulted in the pollution of water resources in Gaza which in and of itself leads to further health problems in the population.
“Coordination and processing of requests regarding humanitarian infrastructure, such as water, sewage and electricity systems in the Gaza Strip is conducted between COGAT (the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation) and the Palestinian Authority”
How generous to ‘process humanitarian requests’ as an occupying power after bombing and destroying Gaza’s water pipelines, sewage treatment centers, electricity systems , and its power plant in the first place. Since then, Israel has not only delayed but benefitted and profited from rebuilding through the “Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism.” Under this mechanism, basic commodities such as cement are deemed a “dual-use material” and thus are subjected to a complicated bureaucratic system of surveillance and Israeli pre-approval which pushes many Palestinians to resort to price-gauged black market goods.
Families wishing to rebuild their destroyed homes have their personal information passed on to Israel who can reject these requests at will, but only after being given unfettered access to everything from family ID card numbers to GPS coordinates. Meanwhile Israeli companies profit while international donors foot the bill for Israeli destruction even when this includes donor-funded structures. One small example is how 10% of the Israeli cement industry is made up of cement sales to Gaza. This is unsurprising considering the hoops Gaza cement companies have to jump through; one factory owner had to install a dozen security cameras with two video-monitoring systems that run 24 hours a day. Due to Gaza’s frequent blackouts (courtesy of Israeli destruction of infrastructure) the factory owner had to buy a pair of battery backups to ensure a steady stream of power. If the lights go out, the internet connection fails, or a storm knocks out a camera, the factory risks being shut down under mechanism rules.
Overall, Palestinians are left with little choice but to either risk buying illegal and exorbitantly priced necessary goods or be subjected to a long and humiliating process to be allowed to access supplies made by the same people who destroyed their homes. All of this is then cynically exploited and spun as a feel-good humanitarian show of kindness.
“In 2009, the West Bank enjoyed a significant economic recovery thanks to measures taken by Israel to support economic activity. A number of infrastructure projects are currently in different stages of implementation in the West Bank. These projects will help improve the standard of living for the local population, including among others the upgrading of water, and sanitation infrastructures.”
Israel’s continuous attempts to obfuscate its occupation of the West Bank also extends to its bluewashing efforts. Israel simultaneously seeks to take over as much Palestinian land as possible, and deprives Palestinians of any kind of authority or sovereignty, but also frames the West Bank as some poor neighboring country when it suits it. Here Israel is ignoring its status as the occupier of Palestinian land, framing its actions as “economic aid” rather than as its actual responsibilities under international law as the occupying power.
Despite Israel’s delusions about making the desert bloom , the economy of the West Bank was described as thriving before being occupied in 1967, generating “significant production and income that sustained a growing population of 1 million people”. Since then the Paris Protocol to the Oslo Accords, which was ostensibly signed decades ago to supposedly strengthen the Palestinian economy, has instead resulted in a captive Palestinian market dependent on Israel. Israel has imposed restrictions on the movement of goods so that they can only move freely from Israel to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but not vice versa, privileging Israeli goods. This is evident in how the West Bank and the Gaza Strip account for only 3% of total Israeli trade.
Israel has also imposed restrictions on the movement of goods within the West Bank, further fragmenting the Palestinian economy into small and disconnected markets and increasing the time and cost needed to transport goods from one area of the West Bank to another. Furthermore, under the Paris Protocol, Israel collects customs duties on imports destined for the Palestinian market, which are required to go through Israel, as well as indirect taxes on Israeli products sold to the Palestinian market and income taxes from Palestinians employed in Israel or the settlements. Ultimately, most of the money Palestinians earn flows back into the Israeli economy in one way or another. This is not to even mention how damaging the illegal Israeli settlements are to the Palestinian economy. Settlements result in prices for land and water being greatly increased, resulting in very high construction costs, especially for industrial enterprises, which severely hampers Palestinian industrial development.
That Israel is also speaking of assisting with “water upgrades” in the context of settlements is also fascinating, seeing as the settlements hoard water from Palestinians to the extent that 599,901 settlers use six times more water than the whole Palestinian population in the West Bank, some 2.86 million Palestinians as of 2015. Both absolutely and proportionately, Israelis use a far greater amount of the region’s total water resources, while Palestinian water use does not even meet the minimum daily standard recommended by the World Health Organization. Israel also controls a disproportionate amount of the two water systems it shares with Palestine, effectively controlling 100 percent of the Jordan River basin, more than 80 percent of underground water resources from the Western (Mountain) aquifer, and 85% of groundwater resources available in the West Bank – accounting for 25 percent of Israel’s water consumption. Israel hoards water, dries up Palestinian wells and springs, and increases the price of water through checkpoint delays. Turns out the secret to Israel’s “water miracle” is plain old fashioned theft.
Finally, one needs only look at the multiple instances of sewage dumped on Palestinian villages by Israeli settlers, including on a school, to understand exactly what these claims of helping Palestinians in the West Bank with sanitation infrastructure are worth.
Overall, Israeli “humanitarian aid” to the Palestinians living under Israeli colonialism can be best described by one of Malcolm X’s most profound quotes:
“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less healed the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.”
Lebanon
While Israeli bluewashing of ‘aid’ given to Palestinians under occupation is most egregious, these propaganda efforts are not restricted to Palestine. Following the August 2020 Beirut port explosion, Israeli hasbarists descended like vultures on the tragedy, expressing hollow condolences and making a big show and dance about Tel Aviv city hall being lit up in the colors of the Lebanese flag. Most cynical was the official Israeli army twitter account, which declared that Israel had graciously offered humanitarian aid and medical assistance. We are expected to believe this is a touching change of heart on the part of Israel, when it was only in 2017 that the former Israeli defense minister threatened to “send Lebanon back to the Middle Ages”, this after having already killed between 15,000 to 20,000 people in the 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon which preceded over two decades of occupation.
It was only a few years after Israel withdrew from Lebanon following a UN resolution when it again invaded in 2006 and fired more than a million cluster munitions and missiles into the country. Some of those missiles had messages written on them by Israeli children, obviously incapable of fully grasping the horror these missiles would unleash. Even an Israeli army officer described 2006 as “insane and monstrous” as the army “covered entire towns in cluster bombs.” Monstrous it was, as 1,100 people were killed and some 4,400 injured, the vast majority civilians.
It cannot even be claimed that these civilians were “collateral damage” with the reveal of the infamous Dahiya Doctrine. The doctrine is named after the southern suburb of Beirut, known as the Dahiya, which was totally devastated through bombardment, where the IDF dropped two-thousand-pound bombs. Eizenkot laid out how total destruction and mass casualties was actually the aim, later declaring that “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. . . . We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases”, brazenly describing a strategy of collective punishment. As is typical, the Dahiya doctrine was never mentioned in statements by U.S. politicians, or in the reporting of the war by most of the mainstream American media. It is within this context that Israel publicly declares the offer of “aid”. This allows Israel to receive a pat on the back for “rising above politics”, and Lebanon’s refusal to partake in this PR stunt can then be depicted as an example of the irrational Arab stubbornness and hatred of peace which poor Israel must contend with.
Syria
Similarly to Palestine and Lebanon, Israel also uses aid to Syria to bluewash its war crimes, despite Syrians being yet another people who have had to deal with Israeli bombs and occupation. Israel has been occupying Syria’s Golan Heights for decades due to its geostrategic advantages and its beautiful natural landscape now dotted with illegal settlements. The occupation of the Golan Heights resulted in the ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 Syrians, and the destruction of dozens of villages. Israel has also carried out multiple air strikes in Syria, killing a whole family in January 2021 alone and through its medical and material support for Al Nusra Front, initially Al- Qaeda’s branch in Syria, has only worsened the devastation of the Syrian civil war.
Israel has of course chosen to deemphasize such stories, instead focusing its bluewashing efforts on some 177 Syrians being treated in Israeli hospitals. Israel acts like this miniscule expenditure of resources on a very small number of Syrians is impressive in the context of a war that resulted in millions of Syrian refugees, the vast majority of whom fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan. It is also in effect ignoring how the ethnic cleansing campaigns which made Israel possible resulted in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees ending up in Syria, barred from returning to their homes purely because they are not Jewish. The purpose of this aid is not to make up for the damage and destruction caused in any meaningful way; rather, it is about garnering good press from a Western media more than happy to provide it.
Kashmir, Haiti, the Philippines, Nepal.
Israel’s destruction is of course most immediately felt in the Middle East, but it has a long and sordid history of providing weaponry and support to some of the most odious repressive regimes in modern history. This also includes India, which has sent special forces to train with the Israeli army and has become one of Israel’s biggest customers for weaponry. It uses this weaponry in no insignificant part to strengthen its occupation of Kashmir, which is strikingly similar to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, not only in practice but also in its justification as part of the ‘war on Islamist terror’. In 2019, the Indian consul-general in New York even suggested that “India should follow the Israeli model, and build settlements in the Kashmir Valley to secure the return of Hindus”. Yet the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website has the gall to brag of some aid to Kashmir following the 2005 earthquake, even as Israel helps increase the efficacy of Indian brutality which has left Kashmiris more vulnerable to natural disasters.
However, Israel need not have a role in a country’s suffering to exploit it. The same foreign affairs page brags of aid given to Haiti following the devastating 2010 earthquake and to the Philippines following a storm in 2009. In 2015, Israel also touted aid given to Nepal following a devastating earthquake, all of which was painstakingly covered in a sophisticated multimedia propaganda effort. The incentives for this campaign are clear; as the Israeli army’s former chief medical officer has claimed, these efforts “contribute to Israeli hasbara (public relations efforts) and “help bring respect to Israel.” Israel uses this aid to present itself as a gift to the world thanks to its unique technical expertise and goodwill. Meanwhile, the same week that Israeli forces were deployed to the Philippines, Palestinian children in Gaza were wading to school in sewage because of the collapse of infrastructure due to the Israeli blockade.
At the time of writing, the Covid-19 pandemic rages on. When Israel hasn’t been using the pandemic as cover to ramp up its horrific policies such as home demolitions, it’s been using it as a PR moment, quickly administering more vaccines per capita than any other country- a task made more feasible by limiting vaccines to citizens rather than all those under its control. Though it should be noted here that even for those Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, there have been noted discrepancies in vaccination rates, due in part to less resources being allocated to information campaigns conducted in Arabic against the backdrop of the history of systemic discrimination against non-Jews in Israel overall.
Make no mistake- despite the Palestinian Authority and Hamas supposedly being the official governments of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is really in charge. Israel controls the borders and currency and collects taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA); even in areas like Ramallah, supposedly under the complete control of the Palestinian Authority (Area A), Israel reserves the right to enter the city at any time. This system, where West Bank settlers are vaccinated while the Palestinians mere kilometers away are ignored until it’s time to burst into their homes and arrest them in the middle of the night, is what has led Palestinians, allies and the international community to deem Israel as instituting medical or vaccine apartheid.
Only after this pushback did Israel start vaccinating some Palestinians in the West Bank, and even then has thus far limited their efforts to exploited workers in settlements because of their direct contact with Israelis. The millions of other Palestinians under Israeli rule have been left waiting while Israel practices vaccine diplomacy– vaccinating diplomats, and promising vaccines for diplomatic favors such as states moving their embassy to Jerusalem. As a result, Guatemala has moved its embassy to Jerusalem, while Honduras has pledged to do so, Hungary has set up a trade mission in Jerusalem, and the Czech Republic has promised to open a diplomatic office there, to name a few examples. Despite some legal challenges to Israel’s vaccine export plans, Israel is still negotiating sending out over 100,000 doses which are set to expire before the end of May, even as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have had to go under lockdown yet again. Israel is doing its best to give nearly everyone a vaccine as long as they are not a Palestinian. Currently, the government is working to acquire an additional 36 million doses, despite millions of unused vaccines going to waste. Should this contract be signed, Israel will officially have seven times its population in vaccines.
At the end of the day, Covid-19 does not care about Israel’s painstakingly crafted supremacist system, from a purely public health perspective health perspective, everyone from the river to the sea must be vaccinated as soon as possible if this pandemic is ever going to end. Those who are not among the ranks pressuring Israel to make this happen, and are instead praising Israel as a ‘health model’ as it uses vaccines as bargaining chips while the Palestinians under its boot are dying, are complicit in this egregious form of bluewashing.
It is of course morally incoherent to work to save lives in some places while actively destroying lives in others, or to expect applause for the offer of band-aids to the same people you have mortally wounded. Yet this is what Israel is doing with its bluewashing campaigns; Israel’s goal is applause for technological expertise and aid to drown out the suffering it is causing Palestinians and others in the region. Surely their lives are equal to the lives of those in Haiti, the Philippines, Nepal or anywhere else in the world. Israel must not be allowed to exploit disasters, especially the ones it has caused, to distract from its war crimes, crimes against humanity, and colonization.
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