There are thousands of Palestinian hostages Israel doesn’t want you to talk about, as only 39 Israeli hostages remain in Gaza. This is an important point to highlight as Israeli violations threaten to derail the current ceasefire.
Independent journalists have highlighted clear mainstream media bias in the treatment of Palestinian and Israeli hostages. In particular, media outlets are usually very careful to call Israelis ‘hostages’ and Palestinians ‘prisoners’. And this distinction makes a difference.
Consider, for example, how you feel when you hear the word ‘prisoner’. Many will see a person who has committed a crime, and who authorities are justifiably punishing. Think about a ‘hostage’, however, and many will imagine scared civilians and evil captors. That’s why the language we use matters.
Palestinian hostages: the occupier vs the occupied
Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territories, according to the International Court of Justice. And Israeli occupiers have brutally controlled these lands for many decades now, through a system of apartheid. They are currently trying to suppress the resistance of Hamas against this system, despite the fact that Hamas “repeatedly sought a permanent ceasefire” before 7 October 2023.
Because Israel avoided negotiations to put an end to years of on-and-off fighting, Hamas tried to force its hand with its 7 October attacks. With the aim of negotiating “the release of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons”, Hamas took hostages on 7 October, many of whom were Israeli soldiers. Israel responded with genocide.
What exactly is a ‘hostage’, though? Well, the Cambridge dictionary says a hostage is “someone who is taken as a prisoner by an enemy in order to force the other people involved to do what the enemy wants”. A prisoner, meanwhile, is simply “a person who is kept in prison as a punishment”. With this in mind, many have argued that the word hostage is also appropriate for many Palestinians who are in Israeli prisons mainly because Israel wants to stop resistance to its settler-colonial occupation. Indeed, why else would Israel have arrested and charged “one in every five Palestinians” at some point in their lives?
No trial, no crime? Then you’re a hostage, not a prisoner.
‘Administrative detention‘ is Israel’s primary method of taking Palestinians hostage. This is when:
a person is held without trial without having committed an offense, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future. As this measure is supposed to be preventive, it has no time limit. The person is detained without legal proceedings, by order of the regional military commander, based on classified evidence that is not revealed to them. This leaves the detainees helpless – facing unknown allegations with no way to disprove them, not knowing when they will be released, and without being charged, tried or convicted.
As Israeli human rights group B’Tselem points out:
At the end of June 2024, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) was holding 3,340 Palestinians in administrative detention.
Even before 7 October 2023, there were 1,326 in administrative detention.
In the last 20 years, Israel has detained around 10,000 Palestinian children, for offences “from stone-throwing to participation in a gathering of merely 10 people without a permit”. Occupying forces often arrest these minors “during nighttime raids, interrogate them without a guardian present, hold them for longer periods before bringing them before a judge and hold those as young as 12 in lengthy pretrial detention,” according to Omar Shakir from Human Rights Watch.
This policy dates back to 1945 under British colonialism in Palestine, and continued under Israeli colonialism.
As the Daily Trojan has written:
Being taken by an occupying military and put into jail without trial is equivalent to being held hostage.
To call people ‘prisoners’, it said, is to dehumanise them and suggest they’re less innocent. ‘Hostages’ is a much more appropriate word to use, because of Israel’s occupying apartheid regime and its brutal treatment of detainees.
Why does Israel take so many hostages?
Former UN official Moncef Khane has insisted that:
The thousands of Palestinians, many of them children, arbitrarily held in ‘administrative detention’ by Israel are every bit as much hostages as those seized by Hamas on 7 October
He added:
Testimonies of Palestinian mothers, terrified by a military 3am raid on their home to take away their children, husbands, or themselves, are chilling. The not-so-subliminal message is clear: don’t resist occupation and you’ll be fine. Or else.
Being a hostage is all about what your captor wants to achieve. What’s their purpose? For Hamas, it’s to secure the release of Palestinians from Israeli prisons. For Israel, Khane stressed, it’s to:
instil fear in every single family, and terrorise entire Palestinian communities to compel their submissiveness to, and acquiescence in, the occupation.
Amnesty International has essentially agreed, insisting that:
Israel has systematically used administrative detention as a tool to persecute Palestinians
Israeli oppression isn’t just physical. It’s linguistic too – like ‘Palestinian hostages’
Mainstream media outlets cover up for Israel and its Western enablers by omitting essential information. And they generally echo Israeli propaganda, using loaded language about Palestinians but not Israel, using inexact numbers for Palestinian deaths but exact ones for Israeli deaths, using ‘people’ to talk about Israelis but not Palestinians, and giving context for Israel’s actions but not context (like decades of brutal settler-colonial occupation) for Palestinian actions. Reports on Israeli victims of violence, meanwhile, include names and faces, but reports on the significantly larger number of Palestinian victims rarely do.
This propaganda tradition focuses energy on ‘worthy’ victims whose cause aligns with the interests of the rich and powerful, while downplaying or ignoring ‘unworthy’ victims whose cause goes against those elite interests. And when establishment journalists accidentally place too much focus on the latter, there are guard-dog mechanisms that bark back.
“Extreme Israel advocacy groups” like CAMERA, for example, don’t reveal their funding sources but do reveal their hatred of using the word ‘hostage’ when it comes to Palestinians. For them, the occupier is always the good guy and the occupied population is always the bad guy, and they pressure the media to reflect that stance too. ‘Honest Reporting’, a nationalist propaganda source whose funding sources are unclear but whose editorial staff are in Jerusalem and whose website ask for donations for Israel’s ‘war’, is another enforcer of propaganda. It seems to have a particular distaste of any media “eagerness to humanize Palestinian prisoners”.
So as the ceasefire begins to fall apart over Israel’s continuing murders in Gaza, obstruction of aid, and excitement over Donald Trump’s support for ethnically cleansing Palestinian land, remember your words. It may be hard to resist the military dominance of a settler-colonial power endorsed by imperialism, but we can at the very least resist their propaganda.
Featured image via the Canary
