American journalist and filmmaker Dan Cohen has argued that the world is undergoing a discourse shift about Israel, recognizing it as an entity that is committing ethnic cleansing and genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip, rather than as the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” that once held.
The director of “Killing Gaza” made the comments in an interview with Press TV aired on Thursday, two days after the Israeli regime killed hundreds of people during a missile attack on a hospital in Gaza City.
“The entire world is seeing what is happening. The Overton window, or the boundaries that limit the discourse, is shifted. No one is talking about Israel as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ anymore now, and no one really questions whether Israel is an apartheid state. Now, the discourse is about ethnic cleansing and genocide,” Cohen stressed.
“Israel is destroying itself where even Saudi Arabia doesn’t even see Israel as important anymore. This is what’s happening here. I think we could see the end of the era of Zionism,” the US journalist added.
The world was shocked when Israel launched a missile attack on the Anglican-run al-Ahli al-Arab Hospital, also known as the Baptist Hospital, in central Gaza, where, along with patients, hundreds of people had also taken refuge from Israeli airstrike. The brutal aerial aggression killed at least 500 people and wounded hundreds of others.
Elsewhere in his comments, Cohen stressed that “we need to consider that the United States is not just complicit in this, but is actually part of it. It continues to arm Israel to the teeth”, making a reference to a constant flow of arms that Washington pours in Tel Aviv to be used against desperate Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, where shortages of food, water and medicine due to a complete siege threaten the lives of Gazans while hospitals are overwhelmed amid incessant Israeli bombings.
He also stressed that the so-called photos of the beheading of Israeli soldiers and babies by Hamas fighters were all fake and the fact that even “the White House retracted” from its previous claims about these photos proved that they were not real and one of them “was apparently made with artificial intelligence.”
Israel “feels the need to lie to the public and then to its own people and also to the West in order to generate bloodlust,” Cohen further said, adding, “This is not about protecting the Israeli public or anything like that. This is about getting Israel, the Israeli public, so hyped up and desperate for genocide that it wants” Israeli leaders and authorities to “do it.”
“This is frankly a very easy task when you distribute this kind of propaganda,” he stressed.
Israel launched the war on the enclave on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group waged a surprise attack, dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, against the occupying entity.
So far, at least 3,785 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air raids, which target densely-populated residential areas.
