The myth that “ Israel has the right to defend itself” is constantly used by the regime and its international supporters.
This statement has been used by Israel’s propaganda over the past decades as a key rhetorical tool to justify its aggressions.
It is a broken record repeated constantly in the Israeli regime’s communication and western diplomatic statements.
Precisely because Israel is the occupier, which has illegally annexed and colonized a territory depriving Palestinians of their right to self-determination, it cannot claim self-defense as a legal justification for the use of force.
On the contrary, Israel is liable for the prolonged occupation, settler colonial expansion and apartheid crime it is inflicting on Palestinians.
Israel often claims the right to prevent “foreign” intrusion into its “sovereign territory” – e.g. from Gaza.
Yet Israel gives itself the authority to invade and fully control the territories whenever it pleases, manipulating international law concepts to whitewash colonial domination.
Back in 2018 Gazans started regular peaceful demonstrations called the “Great March of Return”. Thousands of Palestinians marched near the border to demand an end to the illegal blockade and their right to return to their homes destroyed or stolen in 1948.
Israeli occupation forces responded with tear gas and live ammunition, leaving dozens wounded and killed.
Israel is killing children, demolishing people’s homes, bombing hospitals and electricity lines, expropriating land, putting children in prison, ransacking people’s houses at night, bulldozing schools, surveilling and torturing… all in the name of “self-defense”.
Every war of aggression is justified these days as self-defense against “threats”: from the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to the Russian invasions of Chechnya and Ukraine, and have only caused war crimes, devastation and massive death, absence of freedom and rights, and eroded the credibility in international law and the UN.
This rhetoric of “self-defense” and PR myth aims to :
- dehumanize the people, cheapen our death, our dispossession and our trauma;
- compare a nuclear military power exerting colonial control with a captive population with no political representation, no army, no free economy, no natural resources
- reverse roles between oppressor and oppressed;
- make it easier to continue acting in total impunity.