Israel’s War of Time

By Ada Mullol

During the last couple of months, the international community has been paying increasing attention

to the developing conflict in Gaza. The focus has, understandably, been on the relentless increase

in the number of casualties – so far, over 20,000 – since Israel started bombing the territory, the

kidnappings and killings by Hamas, and the forced displacement of most of Gaza’s population.

However, another parallel battle is being waged on the background: the battle over narratives,

which Israel has been fighting using quite an underestimated weapon, time.

Since early October, Israel’s official narratives have been meticulously sketching the idea

that the attacks by Hamas on October 7th came out of the blue. These narratives have invoked the

country’s moral duty to eliminate terrorism and, for an added element of fear carefully tailored to

ring Western audiences’ alarm bells, these have run under the banner “Hamas is ISIS”. Such

imagery has been used to justify Israel’s brutal retaliation against the Palestinian population.

Meanwhile, the oppression of Palestinians since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, including

the Nakba and a second exodus following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the occupation of Palestinian

territories, restrictions of movement and other human rights violations, which are crucial elements

to understand the recent developments, have been deliberately erased from the picture.

Moreover, in its mission to impose its narrative on the international arena, Israel has

attempted to delegitimize any attempts to contextualize the October attacks, labeling critical voices

as antisemitic. The UN Secretary General António Guterres, for example, made some remarks to

the UN Security Council on October 24 stating that “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a

vacuum”, and highlighting the “56 years of suffocating occupation” suffered by the Palestinian

people. While the UN chief condemned both the attacks by Hamas and the collective punishment

of the Palestinians, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, was quick to call for his

resignation, arguing that such remarks implied an understanding for “the massacre committed by

Nazi Hamas terrorists”.

Israel, in short, has been trying to create a narrative without a story, or a logical connection

with past events. While the country’s use of time as a political resource goes a long way back, to

the point of becoming a naturalized practice of domination, the implications of this

instrumentalization of time during an open conflict are particularly devastating. As the critical

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé recently put it, the dehistoricization of the October attacks by Hamas

is helping Israel “to pursue genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip”. It also serves as a pretext for

international powers, including the US and European countries, to allow the violation of

“democratic freedoms in the name of a new ‘war on terror’”.

By trying to convince the public opinion that the attacks on October 7th were random

terrorist attacks, Israel has been trying to frame its brutal response to such offensive in path

dependence terms. Within this framework, the attacks by Hamas are conceived as a critical

juncture, which set in motion an inevitable retaliation – in a similar way as the invasion of Iraq

was framed by several Western countries following the 9/11 attacks. This inevitability also

suggests a lack of agency by the Israeli government which, in turn, leads to a lack of accountability

for its actions. Moreover, this type of framing implies a lock-in or irreversibility within the new

path of increased warfare. Thus, when framed in these terms, the conflict in Gaza has very

pessimistic prospects.

This is why, now more than ever, it is paramount to introduce emplotment, or a logical

connection between events, in our view of the war. Framing the October attacks and the war that

unfolded as process sequencing, instead of path dependence, would allow us to see how those

attacks were firmly rooted in previous events. In addition, this approach does not imply a

unidirectional path following an initial juncture, but rather allows for the reversal in trajectories.

This implies a greater role of agency, as decisions can be taken to reverse the course, and therefore,

a greater accountability for these decisions. This model, then, would provide some hope for a

change of course, in the form of an effective ceasefire or a de-escalation, of the conflict in Gaza.

While Israel will likely continue immersed in its War of Time, aiming to win the battle of

narratives, it remains to be seen which of these two approaches will prevail in the international

community’s framing of the war in Gaza. And, even if the process sequencing model imposes

itself, with a greater focus on Israel’s accountability, Israel may play the card of using time as a

strategy of exhaustion. If the conflict becomes protracted, the international attention – including

news media – may eventually get “tired” of it and look for a more newsworthy event somewhere

else, as it sadly happened with the war in Syria, and more recently with Ukraine.

Time, however, while potentially malleable, is not a tamable force of nature. As the ancient

Roman philosopher Seneca once said, ultimately, “time discloses the truth”. Thus, even if Israel

wins this battle of narratives, facts will sooner or later come to light. It is only a matter of time.

 
3 
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