Jerusalem has long been the focal point of the still unsolved problem of Palestine. There are currently millions of people all over the world who are deeply invested in each and every development of the war in Gaza, and the spillover wars brewing in southern Lebanon and the Red Sea. For the last 100 days, there has been plenty of commentary about how some of the kinetic elements of the war have been unfolding.
I suspect the vast majority of casual observers have been somewhat surprised, both by Israel's inability to achieve any of its major objectives, but also by the ability of Hamas and other resistance factions to impose their own battle plans upon the Israelis. None of us know what is going to happen next. Israel is already walking back, almost all of its original war aims.
There are people way more qualified than myself who have already given detailed analysis of every battle and every inch of Gaza. Combat veterans from all over the world have taken to social media to share their expert opinions on how the battle is going, and they have been noticing things and commenting on things that a civilian like myself honestly just never could.
So I will not be giving a detailed breakdown of the war itself, and in these episodes, I'm going to focus on things that I think have been missing from the mainstream discourse so far. I want to focus on elements of this war and resistance in general that aim to capture the hearts and minds of Palestinians and the Arabic-speaking world in general.
We're going to take a tour through the evolution of the public relations elements of the resistance axis, and the way that it has evolved throughout my lifetime. This whole industry, it's something that I've come to call resistance ink. You're about to discover that armed resistance, as it is understood in the Arab world, is not just a few organizations who make headlines in Western media once in a while.
These are social movements made up of a variety of moving parts, and some of those parts are intimately connected to the top brass of these resistance factions, and some are only tangentially related, if at all. So let's get into it. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. That invasion was the first war that consumed the full depth of my emotional energy. I followed the whole war very closely, and I've revisited those details constantly throughout my adult life.
Anyways, the Americans had previously invaded Iraq in 1991, and in an effort to ensure that there was no repeat of what had unfolded during the Vietnam War, the US military made sure that all members of the press who were present in the country were to be embedded with the American military. Now, this practice was repeated again in 2003, and it had a pretty spectacular effect in impacting the way the world saw the war.
The other night, I was watching a PBS documentary called Once Upon a Time in Iraq, and some of the footage in that documentary was stuff that we definitely did not see on the news during the actual invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now, while watching this documentary, it really dawned on me the extent to which we were in the dark as to what was happening in Iraq's towns and villages as the war was unfolding.
Now, there is a reason why I'm starting the conversation with the invasion of Iraq, because despite the presence of high-speed internet and lightweight, portable, high-resolution cameras, and really all of the technology that one would need to capture battle footage, there is shockingly little combat footage from that war.
There is nothing like what you can find from the Vietnam War, the Second World War. I really think that if you dig through the archives of what was shared on CNN or BBC or other Western media outlets, you'd find virtually nothing.
This was made all the more possible with the Bush administration's war on Al Jazeera at that time. Now, I don't say that lightly, by the way. I mean, they literally launched an airstrike against Al Jazeera journalists, killing Thoughta Qayub, a Palestinian Al Jazeera journalist, about a month into the invasion.
The message was clear, America was going to control the narrative, and it is in the context of that media blackout that US President George Bush was able to stand on an aircraft carrier barely two months into the invasion, and declare before the whole world that the war in Iraq had already been won, with a giant banner behind him reading Mission Accomplished.
There just wasn't much visual content to contest the official American narrative. Now, that is, of course, until footage started leaking from the Iraqi insurgents themselves.
Now, much like Syria a decade later, the war in Iraq had many factions fighting against the Americans and against each other. These factions posted videos of roadside bombs destroying American armored personnel carriers, the most famous or infamous combat content from that time, featured a sniper who became known only by the pseudonym, Juba.
And between 2005 and 2007, a series of videos were shared online wherein that sniper who identified himself as Juba would pick off American soldiers, though grainy and blurry by today's standards, those videos became the clearest proof that the war was not going the way the Bush administration was leading the world to believe. Those videos also provided an important lesson for every resistance faction ever since.
There is an adage that has been floating around in the last few weeks that I've been trying to keep in my mind as I process what it is that I'm seeing in Gaza. In an asymmetrical war, the powerful side loses by not winning. The weaker side, meanwhile, wins by not losing. And this plays out in the information war as well.
The powerful side, the state or the empire will go to great lengths to show that it is winning and the weaker side, the non-state actor resisting an empire, needs to prove that it isn't losing. This equation also holds true in the way that the two sides conduct themselves in the information war. The powerful nations wield their incredible resources through global media empires to carry out that message, a message which must clearly state that they are winning.
Those resisting the invasion rarely have big media machines at their disposal. At best, insurgents and resistance factions have traditionally used greedy underground magazines and local newspapers to get word out that they are still in this fight.
In hindsight, we can say that the Iraqi insurgency did not successfully penetrate the media blackout that was imposed upon them by the Americans. Unlike the Vietnam War, the combat footage produced by the Iraqi insurgents did not penetrate through the collective memory of the invasion, evidence by the fact that we remember very, very little about that combat footage.
If we compare the amount of combat footage that leaked from Iraq, even with contemporary wars like that of Chechnya in the same time, one can easily see just how little information managed to emerge from the Iraqi theater. This was probably in large part due to America's ability to control cyberspace and shut down websites, something that the Russians at the same time would not have easily been able to do with the Chechens.
The footage is just one part of piercing into the world's collective memory and winning over hearts and minds and winning the war of information. A comprehensive public relations campaign needs to be targeted at and successful at winning over large swaths of the local population that is witnessing the war unfold.
This was something that in hindsight, the Iraqi resistance had largely failed to do. Still, the lessons of the Iraq war and the role that combat footage played in maintaining the morale of the resistance became an important part of the way all resistance organizations would go on to conduct their operations in the future. So now our story takes us to the slopes of southern Lebanon, wherein the late 1980s, Hezbollah was just emerging as a resistance faction.
Of all the factions in the access of resistance, Hezbollah is widely recognized as the most militarily capable. But like I said at the onset of this episode, it's not Hezbollah's military capabilities that I want to focus on here, because there are other elements of Hezbollah's overall operation that don't get nearly enough attention in Western discourse. Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon began in 1982, and in 1991, Hezbollah launched its very own news network, Al Manar.
Now according to Abid Kenanah, I think that's how his name is pronounced, in his book Understanding Hezbollah, Al Manar, quote, seeks to address issues of the Mustadafin, that is, of the oppressed, in the cause of national revival and confrontation with tyranny and Zionism. The channel also aims to cover all Mokawame, that is resistance, so all Mokawame related events, in furtherance of the victory narrative.
Public emphasis on the resistance's victories, since the 1990s, through to the liberation in 2000 and the victory in 2006. End quote. The network, both back of men and today, headquartered in southern Beirut, which put it outside of the Israeli occupied south, having this network allowed Hezbollah to broadcast its own updates regarding its resistance to the Israelis in the south.
It also allowed Hezbollah to broadcast combat footage from the south alongside footage of the first anti-Fada, which was unfolding in Palestine concurrently to Hezbollah's struggle against the Israeli occupation. The launching of Al Manar is all the more substantial when you consider that Al Jazeera itself hadn't been launched until five years later in 1996. Nearly a decade after Al Manar's inception in the year 2000, Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon.
Shortly after discovering that the occupation had withdrawn, residents of southern Lebanon hurried in mass toward Chiam Prison, where Israel had been holding hundreds of Lebanese citizens in dungeons for months and years. The ensuing scenes are some of the most powerful images you will ever see, and I strongly encourage anyone and everyone to look up the liberation of El Chiam on YouTube. The videos are still there.
And at one point in a 30 minute clip, there's this one liberated prisoner surrounded by his family, and I just need you to hear this. The for you non-Arabic speakers, where he's screaming is freedom, freedom, freedom. Almost immediately, Hezbollah began investing in the folklore of this historic victory.
They began chronicling the stories of those who fought against the occupation, those who survived the torture of Chiam Prison, and the euphoria that swept through southern Lebanon when they discovered that the Israelis had withdrawn. And as part of the whole grand venture of solidifying this memory in the collective consciousness of the Lebanese people, they released this.
The chorus of the song transcribed by the song translights to, quote, and this along with dozens of other songs just like it played with heavy, heavy rotation on the Al-Manad network. The original video that corresponded with the songs, the music video, featured celebratory scenes from southern Lebanon.
At one point, this woman from southern Lebanon is throwing candy into cheering crowds shouting, which means victory to the resistance, and with that, has Balahad ushered in, and new era in resistance music. I cannot overstate the power of this genre. For people living under occupation, resistance music performs an essential pedagogical function. Through easy to memorize songs, whole societies actively learn about the heroes, villains, victors, and foes.
Now, I'm not telling you that resistance music is the same thing as a historically accurate account of what took place in the past, but it is undoubtedly a major part of the learning function. Think of it like this. Resistance music and resistance poetry are not a clear cut recap of the facts on the ground that emerged from the battles and wars that took place in some bygone era. Rather, resistance music is about rewriting the way that those battles are imprinted on your heart.
Combat footage tells you how the battle is going. Resistance music tells you how the battle will be remembered, and how people will feel about those memories in the decades to follow. Resistance music is at its very core, a flattering self-portrait that gives us a peak into how the society and how the resistance views itself and its struggle.
But even the most flattering self-portrait must be rooted in reality, otherwise it loses its ability to play a meaningful part in creating the narrative that the authors of these songs really hope to achieve. Now, I want to be clear before I say anything else, and this is going to be a bit of a rant. But Hasballa did not invent the genre of resistance music. This genre was already alive and well before Hasballa came into existence. Resistance music plays.