reflections on the people’s conference for palestine: ideological warfare and the manufacturing of consent

At the core of our political fight and orientations are the ideologies upon which we found our social systems, relationships, and willingness to struggle. Therefore, for many of us who attempt to move towards liberation, autonomy, and self-determination, belief itself can be understood as both a weapon of violence and the key to building collective political power and harmonious acts of revolutionary change.

 The People’s Conference for Palestine, coordinated by the Palestinian Youth Movement, convened over the weekend of August 29th - 31st, in Detroit, Michigan. As organizers, activists, doctors and youth gathered, one question continued to arise: How can we identity and reshape how ideological warfare manufactures apathy, impunity, and cultural menticide? This meeting was structured to provide a historical and contemporary analysis of how sociopolitical and militaristic consent is manufactured through media, medicine, and political dialogue. This conference was also an exercise of ideological counterwarfare against the so-called state of Israel and the United States as ideological and political entities. The discussions held presented a challenge, specifically for those living within the belly of the beast, to expand our capacity to think critically about how belief and access to information shapes our political reality and willingness to challenge normative violence and genocide at large.

Before further discussion, it is important to first review some definitions of concepts that will be referenced frequently in this reflection.

Menticide, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “a systematic and intentional undermining of a person’s conscious mind: brainwashing”. 

Manufactured Consent is “the process by which governments, media, and powerful groups create an illusion of agreement among the public towards their policies or agendas, often through manipulation of information and media”. In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman describe mass media as a tool for manufacturing consent for the decisions made by the political and corporate elite through exclusion, inaccessibility, narrative creation and erasure, and monetary control of the media industry as a whole. 

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with values, beliefs and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda. 

Ideological warfare, according to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States is “a planned attack against the basic ideology of a hostile system [and] should be conducted concurrently with a vigorous effort to gain acceptance or tolerance of basic ideas of [your] own system”. 

Ideological warfare has two fronts:

1. External front: military competition and conventional measures of strength which consists of formal warfare between states

2. Internal front: ideas, deception, subversion and other measures short of war itself 

We see the intersection of these two fronts of ideological warfare most explicitly in the systematic killing of journalists in Palestine, Haiti, Mexico, Pakistan, Myanmar, Mozambique, India, Iraq, and Sudan in 2024 with journalists attempting to disseminate new conceptions of truth on one end, and imperialist and paramilitary regimes seeking to coerce them into submission through intimidation and violence on the other. 

Using these definitions, we can understand that the People’s Conference for Palestine — and any gathering which is structured to understand, expose and challenge the narratives and ideas of imperialist violence — operates within the internal front of ideological warfare. This framework is particularly useful when analyzing and clarifying the role of healthcare in the manufacturing of genocide through “isolation, racism, classification, ghettoization, and extermination”. Medical practitioners and our systems of healthcare either act as an arm of imperial, colonial and capitalist violence or collective liberation because they are the vessel through which information regarding the value of human life, impact of violence, and rights to care is disseminated to the masses. 

Political clarity is necessary when presented with media and policy which glorifies “medical solutions” for life-saving care such as medical evacuations, which ultimately require Palestinians to undergo familial and cultural/land separation and forfeit the right to return. Framing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as a “medical necessity” grants the Israeli regime impunity, or freedom from the consequences and responsibility of their actions, as they move towards the completion of the last phases of their genocidal project under the guise of “aid”. Through this lens, we can also identify how the “concentration of toxic release sites [that] contaminate low-income areas where residents may have trouble affording new windows or other upgrades to keep out polluted air” are consequences of a culture that consents to environmental racism and classism which ultimately results in the death of Black and poor people in Detroit. So when the corporations who are responsible claim ignorance, we can resist these narratives through an understanding that the disregard of Black and poor people’s lives in Detroit is a form of political and medical violence, meticulously constructed by “policies, laws, and resource allocation processes that determine who gets to live where”(Planet Detroit). 

Frantz Fanon reminds us that the ideological warfare committed against us creates a tendency for “all colonized people––in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave–– [to] position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture.”  Therefore, when ex-Detroit Police Chief, James White, excuses the killing of Porter Burks, a 20-year-old experiencing a mental health crisis, because officers “feared for their safety”,we are able to identify how the integration of Black people into the police department is a strategy for manufacturing consent for continued state-sponsored violence against Black and poor people in Detroit. When the Palestinian Authority claims to speak for the Palestinian people while suppressing movements of Palestinians attempting to resist occupation on behalf of Israel, we are responsible for sharpening our analysis to understand this as an act of attempted cultural and political erasure of the Palestinian voice. 

When the Israeli regime frames the bombing of schools, hospitals, housing infrastructure, libraries, refugee camps and aid distribution sites as “necessary” for their fight against “terrorists”, we are responsible for understanding this as an attempt to manufacture consent for collective punishment, displacement, genocide and the deterrence of any form of resistance to settler colonialism, from armed resistance to mere survival (Al Jazeerah). When Detroiters are presented with “solutions” for equitable water accessibility such as the Detroit Sewer and Water Department’s EasyPay Plan, ideological clarity allows us to understand that access to clean water is a human right, revealing this plan to be an attempt at manufacturing consent for the monopolization of natural resources through debt management and intimidating water shutoffs, a form of structural violence which largely targets Black and low-income people in Detroit.

In the closing plenary of the conference, Palestine Today: Struggle, Resistance and the Path Forward, Miriam Barghouti speaks to the power of collective ideation as necessary for winning the militaristic, sociopolitical and geographical war against life in Palestine and across the globe. She says that we are all responsible for beginning to imagine liberation in our contemporary conversations about reshaping power within the world. Belief is a practice and the first seed towards actualizing material transformations. Whether in Palestine or Detroit, Barghouti emphasizes that it is not enough to speak of revolution, or to think of winning, we must truly believe that it is possible and prepare ourselves for the inevitability of our liberation through strategic planning and creative imaginings of the redivision of land, food, and water, the rebuilding of schools and hospitals, the creation of communal accountability and retribution outside of the violent, militaristic forces of policing, and the development of equitable banking systems which center the needs of the collective over the disease that is capitalist accumulation, hyperindependence and consumption. 

Ideology shapes our capacity and preparation for resistance and in the everchanging, sociopolitical terrains of warfare, we who aspire to contribute to revolutionary, meaningful change have a responsibility to understand how ideological warfare is shaped, dismantled and disseminated across the globe. Developing a shared sense of uncompromising political and ideological clarity is central to effectively resisting and dismantling systems of violence throughout the belly of the beast and in every corner of the world that this beast seeks to exploit.