How Misinformation -- and Disinformation -- Allowed the Plight of Palestinians and Black Americans to be Framed as One and the Same
This mural was painted on the side of a building, not in Minneapolis, MN, but in Gaza City, Gaza, in the weeks after former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in May, 2020.
This mural was painted on a wall in the occupied West Bank --
The histories behind these images are truly painful, and equally complex. Far too complex for the oversimplified discussions we tend to engage in about them. Yet, for reasons we will discuss, racial injustice here in the United States imposed upon and endured by Black Americans has been effectively tied in a knot with injustices endured by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, collectively, the occupied Palestinian territories.
Conflated might be a better word. How did innocent Palestinians come to see their struggle as so similar to the plight of the Black American, and perhaps more importantly, why have so many Black Americans, especially those under the age of 35, come to see the plight of the Palestinian as so similar to their own?
Because for the past 60 years, dedicated and concerted efforts have and continue to take place which frame the plight of two peoples, thousands of miles away, as variations of the same imperial, colonial, oppression. One of Black America's most influential voices during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s explained it this way:
As I stated earlier, the plight of these two peoples have been tied in a knot, not because of a common history or geography, but because they have been framed as being one and the same.
Simply put, to quote the Republican political consultant Lee Atwater, "perception is reality." In other words, whatever it is we're witnessing, or experiencing, is what we see, or how we feel, not necessarily what it is.
What scholars and practitioners of media effects refer to as framing "is the process by which a communication source constructs and defines a social or political issue for its audience." In plain English, I see a crisis or controversy somewhere in the world, whatever it might be, I decide what is important and what is useful, I determine what is right and wrong, I package the issue in the way I believe my intended audience will best understand it and then I get to describe it to you.
I need to draw a distinction between framing and say, "setting an agenda." When the NBC Nightly News (or ABC, or CBS, or the New York Times or the Washington Post) decides what news stories to broadcast or publish on any given day, they're not necessarily telling you how you should feel or react to those stories, they're telling what to think about that day.
But when I "frame" an issue, I'm organizing what I believe is the relevant information, what I believe the cause of the problem, what I think is at stake, and suggesting the manner in which you should react to it, and what I think you should do about it. Because I want you to do something, usually something specific.
So, let's jump back to the Malcolm X video above, when he describes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a "fundamental struggle for human rights", he has decided that what is important is not how the conflict began or who started it. He articulated his viewpoint that the Palestinian struggle for "basic human dignity" is no different from the racial oppression that Black Americans were forced to endure in the U.S. -- oppression and tyranny.
What did Malcolm X want people to do? Equally important was, "who was his audience?"
These are critical questions we must consider when we want to figure out if how we frame an issue has any meaningful effect on the audience. While we can presume he wanted all of humanity to feel the pain of the Palestinian and answer the call to aid in securing their freedom, and while a great many people heard his words, the people who were listening to him were... Black Americans. And, in 1964, his message, and how we framed it had the greatest effect on them.
Here's why: if you were a 50 year-old Israeli citizen, Jewish, born in Austria, Germany or Poland, who either escaped to British Palestine in your 20s, or was forced to endure unimaginable trauma in a concentration camp and arrived in Tel Aviv in 1947, just in time to endure the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, Malcolm X's plea for Palestinian freedom and dignity simply does not match with how you experienced the intervening two decades in Israel, so it does not resonate.
On the other hand, if you were a 50 year-old Black man who lived in Jackson, Mississippi, who has never had the right to vote, who must ride in the back of the bus, who has seen some of his relatives violently murdered by White townsfolk, whose children and grandchildren do not have access to education, healthcare, and seemingly had no way out of this hellscape, what Malcolm X describes of the plight of the Palestinian sure sounds and feel exactly like what you are living in 1964. So it resonates.
That's the key to framing an issue: either you feel it, or you don't, and that depends on your memories, your lived experiences, how you see the world and what you believe.
By now, you're probably asking yourself, "what does any of this have to do with misinformation or disinformation?"
Well, what if the issue I choose to communicate to you is not based on a completely accurate description of what actually happened or is happening? Worse, what if I choose to intentionally give you a false description of what is happening?
Communicating information that is either false, or inaccurate has tremendously negative impacts on public discourse, public consensus, and threatens our ability to live in a viable democracy.
For instance, in 1964, when Malcolm X gave that emotionally-powerful speech, from Oxford University, in London, most people with little or no knowledge of events in the Middle East could easily have taken his statement to mean that the Israelis and western governments were occupying Gaza and the West Bank. In reality, from 1948 to 1967, Gaza was occupied by neighboring Egypt and the West Bank was annexed, and therefore a territorial possession of neighboring Jordan.
Now, do I believe that Malcolm X was intentionally deceiving his audience? No, I do not. And he never said who was occupying those territories, just that they were being occupied. And, within 3 years of that speech, Israel would, in fact, be the occupying force in Gaza, and the West Bank (and a large portion of Egypt's Sinai Desert, the former two remaining under de facto and/or de jure occupation of to this day).
But most Black Americans do not know that part.
We know that in our day and age, with 24-hour news cycles and social media, which democratized global communications and allows anyone to be a producer of "news", information travels the world instantly. 90% of Americans own smartphones, and almost as many report using a social media platform. Most of us get at least some of our political news that way.
When anyone chooses to use social media to communicate inaccurate or false information, inadvertently or otherwise, it becomes extremely difficult to set the record straight, and even when tremendous resources are used to do it, it doesn't always work.
Oppression is inhuman, in any of its forms. The mistake some here in America, and some over in Palestine are making, is arguing, mistakenly, that the two movements are the same. That mistakenly implies that what Black Americans face in the United States, and what Palestinians endure in Palestine, have a common solution. Both are being misinformed. Most Black Americans do not know the history of the Levant, have not been exposed to enough of the information which details the past century in what was formerly British Mandatory Palestine, or the most effective means of providing effective aid and comfort to the Palestinian people.
The solution will ultimately require the truth, from all involved.
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