Framing 'Violence', from the 2025 LA protests to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon

On how 'violence' is reported on, from the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon to the 2025 LA protests

This will be a quick one.

Bluesky thread version here.

Mastodon thread version here.

• The thing about monopoly of violence is, well, that the state has the monopoly on violence.

• Journalism can be better at recognising that fact instead of wasting time talking about ‘violent protests'.

• Civilians never have the monopoly on violence. The state does.

• The same goes with unseen versus seen violence. You may think that some person with a rock at a protest is the violent one, but to do that you need to erase the daily mass violence inflicted by the state on citizens and non-citizens.

• You need to be able to compare a rock thrown by a protester with tanks and jets and mass incarceration and ICE kidnapping children and border cops letting innocent people die of thirst and teargas and torture and more. If you erase the latter and only look at the rock, you're memory-hole-ing most of reality.

Take an example: Edward Said (photo above) once threw a rock.

• Taken without context, as the Right likes to do, it seems bizarre: a famous academic throwing a rock?

• Let's add some details: where and when was this? Where: Southern Lebanon. When: 3 July 2000. What was happening then?

• Israeli forces had just withdrawn from southern Lebanon, the territory they had been occupying since 1982. Their occupation was marked by widespread torture, disappearances and murder. Edward Said went there a few weeks after those same troops withdrew.

• Back then, we were still learning of the horrors of the 18-year-long occupation. The Khiam prison (look it up) had just been liberated, and so much was still being discovered. Israel had left thousands of mines around. Just six years later, during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, Israel dropped an additional 4 million cluster munitions around south Lebanon (and Dahieh and east Lebanon). People still die from these today. Kids still stumble upon mines, farmers (or their animals) still walk into them. People are still maimed or killed as a result of these mines.

• Edward Said was, of course, well aware of the Israeli occupation. He wrote about it many times. So, in July of 2000, he threw a rock at the separation wall dividing the newly-liberated south Lebanon and Israel.

• If you memory-hole 18 years of occupation, and decades more of Israeli violence, it just looks like a man being violent. If you integrate reality, that action becomes symbolic. Nothing even actually ‘happened’ to the Israelis. The nuclear-armed and US-funded state that occupied south Lebanon, continues to occupy the Syrian Golan Heights, continues to occupy Palestinian territories, and is now back to occupying parts of south Lebanon and even more of the Syrian Golan Heights while also openly committing a genocide in Gaza and only talking of annexing all of Palestine was nor harmed by the throwing of a rock.

That did not stop ‘the discourse', of course. Here's Caroline Glick for Newsweek:

• A year after that happened, the Freud Society of Vienna canceled a talk by Edward Said - because he threw a rock. Did Viennese high society cancel talks by Israelis for partaking in actual mass violence including genocide? Let me know when you find one example.

• What if in addition to everything just mentioned, I added that Edward Said had not been to Lebanon since 1982? Since the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, preceded by the siege of Beirut and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, started?

• What if I added that Edward Said visited the Khiam prison that day? The prison that served as a torture camp for resistance fighters (look up Soha Bechara's story) and run by Israel and their proxy militia 'the South Lebanon Army'? What does a rock mean with that context in mind?

Conclusion

• So what does that tell us? When reporting on ‘violence’ caused by much weaker actors against much stronger and much more violent actors, you have a choice: do you contextualise the weaker violence against the backdrop of the stronger violence, or do you not? It's a choice you make.

• It's a choice between seeking to understand and seeking to obfuscate. There could be a 100 articles on a ‘riot’ that start from the premise of ‘riot bad’ instead of seeking to ask the simply question of why. Doing so does not require you to ‘like’ the ‘riot'. It just requires you to seek to understand before seeking to explain a situation.

• Did people wake up, felt bored, and thought to themselves today I shall risk arrest for the lolz? If the social contract was actually maintained and the state was doing ‘its part’ of providing social services (etc) wouldn't that make ‘riots', less likely to occur?

• If ‘riots’ are a response to an injustice, however unpleasant you may find them, shouldn't you first seek to contextualise it by giving that injustice the context you owe your readers/listeners/viewers?

• Finally, if ‘riots’ are synonymous with ‘violence’, does that include police violence? If not, why? What are you taking for granted? Why are you taking for granted that you live in a society where police violence is common? If it does include the cops, and given that they are most often than not the instigators of violence rather than mere recipients, wouldn't it be the ‘fair and balanced’ approach to see more articles about police violence than about protesters being violent?

• Similarly, if the story you care about is ‘professor throws a rock’ rather than ‘nuclear-armed state illegally and brutally occupied an entire territory for 18 years', are you not making a value judgment as to which lives matter, and which do not? If you are, have the decency to say so openly. It's the least you can do. Don't hide behind pseudo-’objective’ language.

• Framing is always a choice. You can choose to obfuscate most forms of violence, that which is committed by the state, and only focus on less common, and usually short-lived, outbursts of violence by protesters - but that is always a choice.

• You're not doing better journalism by obfuscating the former. You're just deciding what to focus on and what to obfuscate.