Israel Kills The Journalists. Western Media Kills The Truth Of Genocide in Gaza
Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’
Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.
They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.
Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.
For a year, the global networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.
That is why western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on 7 October 2023, as intensely as they have a year of daily horrors in Gaza – in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.
That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis – civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive – as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.
That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.
While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one – in one of the greatest massacres of journalists in history.
Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On Thursday night, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.
In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters this week, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.
Israel wants no one reporting its final push to exterminate northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.
These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide – from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.
Sympathy for Israel
Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached this week in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.
In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable – but sadly was all too predictable – CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.
Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.
In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop, as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims – even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.
One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.
What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.
CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”
Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there – because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe would their “psychological burden” be the story.
After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”
Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.
Banned from Gaza
Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.
This week – in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide – dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.
Don’t hold your breath.
Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year – for a number of reasons.
Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2,000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.
That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.
Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.
The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” – the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.
The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.
In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.
But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.
The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Karim Khan, the ICC’s prosecutor, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.
After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.
The western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.
Censoring Palestinians
Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations – including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian – are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.
An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of the Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.
Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.
During Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour Party, senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much of the insistence that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.
That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.
As staff who spoke to Novara noted, the Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, the Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
One veteran journalist there said: “Is the Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”
Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.
Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.
According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide.
Things have got far worse since.
Whistleblowing journalists
Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.
Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.
According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done on Israeli or Jewish guests.
She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” – Israel’s state ideology – in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.
Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.
Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.
An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.
Upside-down values
These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.
Headlines – the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read – have been uniformly dire.
For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people earlier this month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”
Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.
It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced this month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.
With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.
Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time – it is an occupational hazard.
And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.
But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.
Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.
It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.
It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents – 31 percent – said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.
Crushing dissent
Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its western patrons in crushing dissent at home.
Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.
Though the police have not arrested or charged him – at least not yet – they confiscated his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.
Police told MEE that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.
The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-free speech Terrorism Act.
Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation – a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West – itself a terrorism offence.
Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police. Their electronic devices were seized too.
Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made in support of Palestinians.
It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.
The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press – supposedly the very things they are there to protect.
The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.
This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.
Once again the world is being turned upside down.
Echoes from history
The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.
This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.
His unprecedented journalism – revealing the darkest secrets of western states – was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.
Last week, I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.
The missing guest – he had to join us by Zoom – was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.
Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African parliament. A Home Office spokesperson told MEE that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.
Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.
The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.
The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.
That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.
Jonathan Cook
British writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His books are Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto, 2006); Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto, 2008); and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed, 2008).
In Midst of Palestinian Genocide, Late Hamas Leader Scolded for ‘Eradicating’ Israel
The Israeli military killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip on October 17, and it didn’t take long for the usual media suspects to line up with their anti-eulogies.
Reuters (10/18/24), for example, produced an obituary headlined “Yahya Sinwar: The Hamas Leader Committed to Eradicating Israel Is Dead”—a less than charming use of terminology in light of the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in Gaza.
Since last October, more than 42,000 Palestinians have officially been, um, eradicated—although according to a Lancet study (7/20/24; Al Jazeera, 7/8/24) published in July, the true death toll could well exceed 186,000. Per the view of Reuters, this is really the fault of Sinwar, a “ruthless enforcer” who, we are informed in the opening paragraph,
remained unrepentant about the October 7 attacks [on Israel] despite unleashing an Israeli invasion that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, laid waste to his Gaza homeland and rained destruction on ally Hezbollah.
Never mind that Sinwar’s elimination will have no impact on the genocide, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear: “Today we have settled the score. Today evil has been dealt a blow, but our task has still not been completed.”
Delegitimizing resistance
Further down in the obituary, Reuters journalist Samia Nakhoul managed to insert some biographical details that hint at reasons besides “evil” that Sinwar chose to pursue armed resistance:
Half a dozen people who know Sinwar told Reuters his resolve was shaped by an impoverished childhood in Gaza’s refugee camps and a brutal 22 years in Israeli custody, including a period in Ashkelon, the town his parents called home before fleeing after the 1948 Arab/Israeli war.
This, too, is a rather diplomatic way of characterizing the ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter that attended the 1948 creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land—an enterprise predicated on perpetual killing, as we are now witnessing most acutely. By portraying Sinwar’s actions as stemming from an intrinsic diabolicalness that made him hellbent on “eradicating” Israel—in contrast to Israel’s actions, which are implicitly restrained until “unleashed” by Sinwar—the corporate media delegitimize resistance while effectively legitimizing genocide.
This longstanding commitment to laying nearly all responsibility for the conflict at Palestinian feet also leads to bizarre headlines like the New York Times‘ “Yahya Sinwar Is Dead, But a Palestinian State Still Seems Distant” (10/21/24). It is the Biden administration’s alleged hope that Sinwar’s killing could “help pave the way for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.” The idea attributes the failure to create a Palestinian state to Sinwar rather than Israel, and ludicrously imagines that genocide, along with the massive destruction of housing and basic infrastructure that Israel is committing in Gaza, are logical ways to go about state-building.
That report came on the heels of another Times intervention (10/19/24) that critiqued “Hamas’s single-minded focus on the Palestinian struggle, which had dragged the whole region into the flames”—even while acknowledging that Israel is the party presently responsible for perpetuating the conflict. This particular effort bore the headline: “Despite Sinwar’s Death, Mideast Peace May Still Be Elusive.” Well, yeah.
‘Terrorist Hamas leader’
For its part, Fox News (10/17/24) deployed predictable lingo in its memorialization of Sinwar, describing him in the obituary headline as “The Israeli Prisoner Turned Terrorist Hamas Leader.” Indeed, the “terrorist” label never gets old, even after decades of being wielded against enemies of Israel and the United States, the Israeli military’s partner in crime and the primary financial enabler of the current bloodbath. Lost in the linguistic stunt, of course, is the fact that both the US and Israel are responsible for a great deal more acts of terrorism than are their foes.
But pointing out such realities goes against the official line—and so we end up with Sinwar the “Hamas terrorist leader,” as ABC News (10/17/24) has also immortalized him. Time magazine (10/18/24) opted to go with a front cover featuring Sinwar’s face with a red X through it.
CNN (10/17/24), meanwhile, offered space in the second paragraph of its own reflections on Sinwar’s demise to Israeli officials’ spin on the man, noting that they had “branded him with many names, including the ‘face of evil’ and ‘the butcher from Khan Younis,’” the refugee camp in southern Gaza where Sinwar was born.
Given the Israeli butchery to which Khan Younis is continuously subjected these days, it seems CNN might have refrained from taking Israel’s word for it. On just one bloody day this month, October 1, at least 51 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes on a tent camp in Khan Younis (BBC, 10/2/24)—a space that had been designated by Israel as a “humanitarian area.” Israel killed 38 more there yesterday (AP, 10/25/24).
‘The threat remains’
Sinwar is not the only Middle Eastern resistance leader to have been recently eliminated by the Israelis. On July 31, Israel assassinated Sinwar’s predecessor Ismail Haniyeh with a bombing in Tehran, and on September 27, it killed Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, in an operation that entailed leveling an entire residential block. (What was that about terrorism?)
On the latter occasion, the Jerusalem Post (10/6/24) got its panties in a bunch over the allegedly “unnerving eulogy of the terror chief” that appeared in the New York Times (9/28/24), whose authors had not only had the audacity to call Nasrallah a “powerful orator…beloved among many Shiite Muslims,” but had also mentioned that the man had helped provide social services in Lebanon.
(That Times article also reported that some Lebanese “felt he used Hezbollah’s power to take the entire country hostage to his own interests,” and it linked to another Times piece—9/28/24—about those who “welcomed Mr. Nasrallah’s death.”)
The Washington Post (9/28/24) went with the noncommittal headline “Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah Leader and Force in Middle East, dies at 64,” while simultaneously running an op-ed by Max Boot (9/28/24): “Nasrallah Is Gone. But the Threat of Hezbollah Remains.”
Now that Sinwar is gone, too, rest assured that Israel will continue to exploit all manner of threats to justify unceasing slaughter—and that the media will be standing by with disingenuous and reductionist narratives all the way.
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