But buried in the otherwise sharp analysis we read this:
Some will say it’s pandering to the Muslim vote. But even for British Muslims, Gaza is not a priority. In a poll during the last election, while the slaughter was still underway, only 21 percent of them named it as their top issue. Only 44 percent of British Muslims even put it in their top five. The figures for non-Muslims were much lower. That’s not because people don’t care about the horror. It’s because they think, surely correctly, that there is little that any British government, let alone any local council, can do about it.
Gilligan writes about the Gaza "slaughter." He means the war. But "slaughter" encodes a specific claim about intent — that Israel was killing civilians purposefully, for its own sake, the way one slaughters animals. That claim is precisely what is contested, and by accepting the vocabulary, Gilligan concedes the argument he probably never meant to make.
This is how layered propaganda works. A writer can consciously reject the outermost layer — the genocide accusation, the apartheid framing — while having already absorbed a deeper layer without noticing. The deeper layer doesn't announce itself as propaganda. It arrives as neutral description, embedded in the shared vocabulary of respectable discourse. "Slaughter" sounds like a strong word for a lot of deaths. It functions as a verdict on intent.
"Horror" — another word Gilligan uses for Gazan civilians' experience — is legitimate. Families living near Hamas infrastructure, not knowing why their neighborhood was targeted, experienced genuine horror. That describes their experience accurately. "Slaughter" describes Israel's supposed motivation — and gets it wrong.
The intelligence record makes the error concrete. Israel's operations in Lebanon and Iran demonstrated intelligence capability that most militaries can only dream about — striking specific leaders on specific floors of buildings, eliminating Nasrallah in his secret and very deep bunker, targeting Iranian leaders all over the country simultaneously. An intelligence apparatus precise enough to kill a specific general in a specific room in Beirut is not simultaneously carpet-bombing Gaza at random. The two pictures cannot coexist.
Hamas's own martyr announcements close the case. When the IDF struck Al-Faluja School on October 13, 2024, media coverage and Airwars' database recorded it as a strike killing only civilians, with IDF claims about Hamas using the school as a command center dismissed as usual. Hamas has since confirmed on a affiliated Telegram channel that Rafat Mousa Sakb Muhna — a 42-year-old Beit Lahia Battalion commander — was killed in that strike, along with fighter Amir Majdi Wajih Muslim, age 19, whose memorial posts identify him explicitly as a mujahid. The August 4, 2024 strike on Hassan Salama School, reported at the time as killing 30 civilians, targeted Jaber Aziz, the Al-Furqan Battalion commander and October 7 planner. Hamas now confirms he died there — and that he was scrubbed from the Ministry of Health casualty list entirely.Hamas is doing this to honor its dead as martyrs. The effect is to validate Israeli targeting, strike by strike, from the adversary's own records. The "indiscriminate" narrative depends on Israel having no specific targets in mind. Hamas keeps naming the targets.
Israel cannot publicize its intelligence for each strike without burning sources and methods. That structural asymmetry — Israel silent, the other side's framing filling the vacuum — is why "slaughter" can feel like neutral description even to a writer who knows better. Gilligan almost certainly does know better. That's what makes the word worth examining: the ceaseless propaganda succeeded not only on a hostile mind but on a friendly one.
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