The white masters are once again dealing with future of the natives
Two hundred years and nothing has changed
By Kobi Niv • Translated by Sol Salbe
Any film director worthy of their profession will tell you that in cinema, in films, what is important is not only what is shown and seen, but also what is not shown and seen. Because the story, every story, is a combination of what is told in it and, no less and perhaps even more than that, what is not told in it. And this is not only the case in cinema and literature, which are only mirrors of reality, but indeed also in reality, even in life itself.
Thus, for example, on Israeli television channels we have been shown and we have seen since the beginning of the “war” — the quotation marks are there because when one side, not mentioning any names , continuously bombards a defenceless population for two years with tanks, artillery, planes and missiles, this is not war, this is annihilation — day and night, over and over again, dozens of interviews and articles about each and every one of our 2000 dead and 250 abducted. In contrast, on our television programs we have been barely shown any items about the 20,000 Gazan children we killed or the thousands of Gazans we still hold without trial. It is no wonder, then, that the story we tell ourselves about this “war” is what we have been shown, and therefore does not include a smidgen of what we were not shown.
Well, in the picture before you, an official picture released by the government of the state of Israel, you can see the participants in the “working meeting” of senior Israeli and US officials, in a conference room at the hotel where Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was staying, ahead of his meeting with US President Donald Trump. At stake, as we have seen, are the futures of Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, and of course our own.
And as in the children’s newspaper picture riddles, I will ask you too: “Look at the picture, grown-up children like you, and tell me, all by yourselves — what is missing from the picture?”
The answer, that is, the picture, is clear — there is not a single woman in the picture, that is, in the meeting of the senior working teams of Israel and the United States, nor a single black person, nor a Muslim or Middle Easterner. They are all white gentlemen, dressed according to all the rules of the upper classes. But that is only at first glance.
In the picture (I recognised some and newspaper captions identified the others for me) from the US side, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Trump’s special envoy Steven Witkoff, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, and Secretary of War (formerly Defence) Pete Hesseth. Present from the Israeli side are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his military secretary (and soon-to-be head of the Mossad) Roman Goffman, Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, and head (or acting head, the newspapers couldn’t agree on the title) of the National Security Council Gil Reich. So wait, not only was there not a single woman or black person in this meeting of senior officials, neither from the US nor from Israel, but the Israeli side at this meeting of elite officials, did not include even a single Mizrahi Jew, not even as a token representative n ornament (where was Idit Silman, really?). All the senior Israelis here are Ashkenazim, just like all the Americans are white (strictly speaking, Secretary of State Rubio is not white, he is Hispanic. But if I hadn’t said that, you wouldn’t have guessed it yourself, because “it isn’t all that obvious in the picture.” But the fact that one of the eight people present at the meeting of American and Israeli senior officials is not quite white does not change the picture, for what it includes and what it excludes). In the populations of both countries, the US and Israel, the percentage of women is a little over 50, but among the senior officials in the picture, they are zero, both in percentages and in absolute numbers. The percentage of Mizrahi Jews among the Jews in Israel is also about 50 percent, and they are also represented here at zero. And certainly none of the Arab citizens of Israel, who constitute 2 per cent of the Israeli population, exactly like the percentage of Hispanics in the US, are here.
But wait, there’s more — two, that is, 25 per cent of the eight photographed participants in the discussion, Witkoff and Kushner, have a fortune of over half a billion dollars. And what is the real percentage of those who hold such imaginary money bags among all the people on earth? And the answer is — 0.0004 per cent.
Supposedly, in the last two hundred years the world has changed — freedom and equality and decolonisation and feminism and what not. But here, the white gentlemen are gathering again and discussing the future of the natives — the Palestinians, the Mizrahi Jews, the Egyptians, the Persians, and all the “those over there” in this Middle East.
Two hundred years and nothing has changed.
