The West, Gaza, and the Global Majority: A Relationship Reshaped by Genocide and the End of His-Story
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Since the beginning of this century, triggered by the US’s illegal invasion of Iraq, its occupation of Afghanistan, and aided by the arrival of the turbo-charged digital age, there has been a significant growth in interest within those in the non-Western world around issues related to their colonial past.
This quest has been shaped by seeking answers to fundamental questions linked to events in their past and how these events shaped the world today – a world that for the first time is mired in more conflicts than since the Great Wars, seemingly rooted in age-old animosities also linked to our shared colonial history.
The two headline-grabbing events—the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the terrifying sequence of events they spawned for over a decade including current events in Syria — were merely the tip of the iceberg of resentments around the world about the abuse of unsustainable power structures by major Western nations. These invasions delivered a rude awakening to many outside the Western world, who had believed that the woes of the past were behind them and that humanity was moving toward a system of peaceful coexistence, with the West ready to share power and move away from its 500-year history of domination.
This was premised on the belief that international laws would be strengthened so that might is not seen as right. The assumption was that these laws would be adhered to by major powers so that progress could be made toward creating a world united by common goals. This was shattered by the brazen breach of international laws that marked both invasions.
It proved to be a naïve assumption as the West had from centuries of dominance, become accustomed to seeing the world as its oyster. Thus, the first seeds of widespread doubt were sown about the sincerity of those nations that claimed to have moved away from the old ways and positioned themselves as the architects and guardians of a more peaceful and equitable world.
As a result, more non-Western communities now have a better understanding of their past and how their countries had been ruled and abused by colonial powers, including how their borders were re-created, which added to the challenges of becoming independent nations while striving to grow a viable economy for their impoverished people. Many of these countries failed initially and many continue to struggle; this is no simple exercise, especially in a world faced with existential threats.
Across the world there has been a widespread desire to dig into the past and tell “our-story” about what happened during centuries of oppression and plunder as opposed to accepting the carefully crafted brain-washing version of the past, ingrained in the white-washed version of “his-story” as told by Western experts.
In the years following the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, numerous books on re-telling of his-story were written by subjects of former colonies, and even by some Western historians. A few became bestsellers in the Western-controlled media sphere but largely never received the attention they deserved. This sophisticated form of censorship has itself sparked global debate, focusing on the role of Western media in shaping narratives and influencing the formerly colonised. However, the process of producing our-stories continues to accelerate, even if it remains largely ignored by Western-controlled media.
This process of discovery and disclosure helped signal the dawn of a new era of global reckoning for the former imperial powers and their successors like the USA. It was also an awakening for those who had been formerly colonised or losers in the wars of conquest but who had been lulled into believing his-story.
Despite brutal truths being uncovered and exposed, this phenomenon of confronting the past has largely been polite, even scholarly, and rarely radical or confrontational – except when triggered by specific events that mobilise communities, as with the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet generally, the lack of global publicity has made it difficult to mobilise an international movement even of public intellectuals. Universities, even those in former colonies, were still teaching his-story according to curriculums designed during the period of global colonialism, for which many history books continue to serve as propaganda tools. Though significant progress has now been made all around the world, revising curriculums to incorporate comprehensive reflections of colonisation in no small feat.
Nonetheless, the global awakening has produced important results, helping to shift attitudes in former colonies and nurture a growing sense of confidence, retelling his-story and discussing our-story was no longer the pre-occupation of lefties or strong nationalists from poor countries. There began a stream of consciousness and with it demands for equity.
This spawned calls for reparations for centuries of wealth extraction, loss and damage agreements with regards to climate change, recognition of the role of colonialism in destroying indigenous communities and their cultures thus affecting their key role as stewards of biodiversity loss, and increasing calls for the return of treasures stolen, even human skeletons of “exotic natives”. The current efforts of a growing number of nations seeking redress at the International Court of Justice for the impacts of climate change is an indicator of this trend.
However, much of the growing resentment and calls for justice for harm inflicted on societies worldwide by a handful of countries fell on deaf ears in Western capitals. They were confident that “might is right” and that if the natives got restless, there were always ways to pacify them—military force being a key option—to maintain the rules-based order. Past successes in suppressing demands for freedom, even in modern times, and a firm grip on global institutions has bred deep arrogance rooted in a belief in racial supremacy. This, in turn, has fostered a culture of self-defeating exceptionalism, now corroding the fabric of societies like the US. A symptom of this socio-political decay is the sharp decline in the quality of leaders in major western powers and the fragility of political structures.
But the genocide in Gaza has now put this nascent global movement on steroids for peace-loving people around the world – not terrorists – outraged as they come to terms with the ugly truth of racism, white supremacy, and settler violence on an oppressed people. It has changed everything and opened the floodgates of this search for answers to explain the actions of those who have so brazenly betrayed the promise of international progress to date and are shamelessly willing to go to extremes of violence to maintain global dominance. Resentment and suspicion against the West is unfortunately at an all-time high and this is dangerous as it can be exploited by bad actors across the spectrum.
Key questions that are being asked to understand and explain the past to make sense of the present, are: what were the mindsets of the colonisers, and have these mindsets persisted in the West till this day? What drove them to such extreme acts of violence including committing large-scale massacres and genocide, despite claims of a belief in God and the Church?
These questions are crucial in deciding future tensions and collaborations because, to quote Samuel P. Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
It is a worldview-shaking realisation when one considers how many of the interventions over the last 70 years have been unnecessary and unilateral actions triggered and conducted in the same imperial spirit of colonisation. Is seeking and needing to maintain a dominance over others who are viewed as inferior still part of modern Western political psyche?
And is it the same penchant for dominance and a belief in racial superiority that explains the current genocide in Gaza – a white settler colonial community supported by other Western tribes led by the US, acting as if coded to do so? What is the driving spirit able to justify such carnage and mass murder? Is it no coincidence that the USA, a white settler nation birthed out of genocide and the enslavement of Africans, is the most violent and war-like nation in modern history? These are the uncomfortable questions being asked. And there are only ugly, unpleasant answers.
Thus, millions in the non-Western world are looking beyond the books written by Western historians. They do not rely on the current headlines in Western media, which typically tries to justify, downplay or even lie about genocide when committed by the West. This is their only way to gain insights and answers to troubling questions about what is happening in Western societies given their tolerance for the action of their governments. They seek to understand whether attitudes of superiority over other cultures still prevail and how widespread they are. How are these attitudes ingrained and reinforced in cultures that simultaneously espouse liberal values, framed as democracy, freedom, and liberty? Is there something more sinister than simplistic explanations like “great power rivalries” or claims that these governments merely serve corporate interests, to account for the evidence of sustained violence against others?
What is becoming clear is that the response of people around the world is no longer going to be polite and reticent or even temporary. Gaza has been the tipping point. As the horrors of the war continue to be live-streamed, we can see the West even now seeking to downplay the charge of genocide levelled by the ICC against its good ally Israel. We can see the West also brushing aside the charge that it is complicit in the crime because it has supplied arms to Isreal. No African, Asian, or Muslim country would be allowed to be in denial and get away with it. Even Amnesty International has concluded that genocide is the only word to describe what is taking place and the US, Britain and Germany are likely to be charges with being complicit .
What the world is witnessing in Gaza is the most telling moment in capturing the state of humanity today. It is a key marker in providing a clue to understanding the nature of Western civilisation and its thirst for dominance even in the 21st century.
From the tea stalls in Calcutta to the road-side eateries in Jakarta to the markets in Nairobi or Cape Town or the bazaars in Cairo and the favelas of Rio, the refrain is the same:How can such large-scale murder be happening in this day and age, and be permitted? How is it that the US will not even permit a ceasefire? How do these perpetrators of massacre get away with it whilst at the same time preaching to others whose crimes pale in comparison? There is anger aplenty.
Yet this growing outrage is not understood in Western capitals as the average citizen is easily persuaded by politicians and media that the West knows best. Even if it is, the calculation is a simple one: Why care about the sentiments of people who have no power to harm us? Hidden in this sort of sordid worldview is the rationale that if they tried to oppose us, we have the military and economic power to hurt them badly.
This is the recognition for people the world over, who now see that the mean spirited and racially driven attitude of supremacy has never been extinguished in the West.
Here is one rationale as to why. The post-colonial order which was created after the Second World War – also known as the rules-based-order to provide legitimacy – was carefully managed and promoted, aided by its media partners, to project an image of benevolence and liberalism in order to mask the hard-wired desire to continue to dominate and rule the world.
The growing understanding in the non-Western world is that the collective West is in fact a tribe, united by a shared history, culture, and religion, of brutal conquest, occupation, colonialism marked by genocide and plundering – from Asia and Africa to the Americas to Australia. The tribe is united in appreciating its need to protect itself. Its members have a bond around the simple need to survive in a world where if the majority, who were until recently oppressed by them, were awoken by the anger of the great injustices they continue to endure, they may seek revenge and turn the tables.
This paranoia in the West that its past is catching up with it -that the majority will awaken and seek justice as all is revealed – is what drives it to this day. It is this tribal commitment which anchors its willingness to protect Isreal as a member of the tribe – the last standing white settler colonial community – even by committing genocide, which has laid bare its true nature for all to see. It is the same paranoia that allows it to have the largest military capability in the world but use every means at its disposal to suppress the actions of others to build their own capabilities to defend themselves. The recurring fear is that this global call for justice could spread as calls for reparations turn into real demands and other actions. An example is the recent actions of the Maori in New Zealand who have united to oppose changes in laws that would weaken their status in the nation. Will the First Nation People of Australia be the next to call for reparations and take their case to the ICJ?
This global awakening in response to the shameless violence has rekindled horror stories that had remained dormant for decades about white settlers grabbing land and committing genocide. It has emboldened people and that is not necessarily a good thing for a world that desperately needs to come together rather than splinter.
Imagine the 21st century in which the West had come to terms with the notion of living in harmony with the global majority, rather than allowing its paranoia about retaining power at all costs, to shape its relationship with others, driven by its sense of superiority. The cost of this entrenched desire to dominate the world has been incalculable. This is the tragedy of our times and an unspoken cost that the world has had to bear. It could so easily have been a world in which the West, with its great achievements and power, could have chosen to support rising powers, irrespective of ideological difference – rather than choosing to exploit them to serve the need for hegemony – working for a shared humanity. Imagine such a world, brimming with the prospect of dealing collectively with the biggest challenges we face, leveraging the strengths of all nations within a multi-polar world.
Sadly, the West refused to change its DNA of dominance, one that mutated even further by the enrichment which came with centuries of colonial exploits. The current global awakening and accompanying resentment have sadly set back the relationship between the West and the global majority by decades. Many in the non-Western world had been seduced for decades since liberation into believing that a page has been turned and that West was determined to redress the crimes of the past by being benevolent. They thus even agreed to allow them to write the rules and be the so-called leaders of the world. They tolerated Western dominated institutions making global rules like the G7. This accommodating approach was no doubt aided by the subservience instilled in these countries after centuries of dominance and deep sense of inferiority too.
That has now all changed, and the building of a new order will be met with fierce resistance from the West as we are currently witnessing. With our-story emerging around the world, the re-telling of his-story is simply the first step in non-Western populations seeking more agency in what their nations, organisations, and communities are capable of achieving in the international arena. This is the repurposing and reclaiming of Francis Fukuyama’s self-admitted blunder, because we are in many ways at the End of His-story.
Western nations, both big and small, would do well to recognise that to navigate this new global reality, there is a need to reject exceptionalism and the desire to dominate others, rescind political doctrines about their special place in the world, reconfigure existing norms of diplomacy, international financial architecture, media, and cultural imagery. Very importantly embark on a generational long educational project to shift attitudes by coming to terms with the lies of his-story and understanding “our-story”.
The current decoupling from the Western world view and its preferred operating system is not de-globalisation as so many pundits fear. It is simply de-Westernisation – not an anti-Western movement – which is long overdue in a multipolar word, once which desires an End to His-story.
Chandran Nair is the CEO of Asia’s leading independent think tank The Global Institute for Tomorrow based in Hong Kong. He is the author of several books including the acclaimed, Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post- Western World.
Another Expert Report Finds Israel Is Committing Genocide. The West Yawns
Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Medecins Sans Frontieres are all agreed. But the Gaza genocide is now just another routine news item, buried on the inside pages.
Three separate reports published this month by leading international human rights and medical groups have detailed the same horrifying story: that Israel is well advanced in its genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza.
Or, to be more accurate, they have confirmed what was already patently clear: that, for the past 14 months, Israel has been slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians with indiscriminate munitions, while at the same time gradually starving the survivors to death and denying them access to medical care.
Genocides can happen with gas chambers. Or with machetes. Or they can be carried out with 2,000lb bombs and aid blockades. Genocides rarely look the same. But they are all designed to arrive at the same endpoint: the elimination of a people.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) agree that Israel is striving for extermination. It has not hidden its intent, and that intent is confirmed by its actions on the ground.
Only the wilfully blind, which includes western politicians and their media, are still in denial. But worse than denial, they continue to actively collude in this, the ultimate crime against humanity, by supplying Israel with the weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover it needs for the extermination.
Last week, MSF issued its report, titled Life in the Death Trap That is Gaza, concluding that Israel was intentionally “unravelling the fabric of society”.
The medical charity observed: “The violence unleashed by Israeli forces has caused physical and mental damage on a scale that would overwhelm any functioning health system, let alone one already decimated by a crushing offensive and a 17-year-long blockade [by Israel].”
MSF added: “Even if the offensive ended today, its long-term impact would be unprecedented, given the scale of the destruction.”
Rebuilding the society and dealing with the health consequences will “span generations”.
Intention proven
MSF’s findings followed hot on the heels of an 185-page report by Human Rights Watch, which concluded that Israel was committing “acts of genocide”.
The organisation limited its focus to one Israeli policy: its systematic effort to deprive the population of access to water – a clear measure of intentionality, the critical yardstick for judging whether mass killing has crossed into genocide.
At a news conference, Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East director, said their research had proved Israel was “intentionally killing Palestinians in Gaza by denying them the water that they need to survive”.
Israel had done so in four coordinated moves. It had blocked pipelines supplying water from outside Gaza. It had then cut off power to run the pumps that Gaza’s own supplies from wells and desalination plants depended on.
Next, it had destroyed the solar panels that were the backup to deal with such power cuts. And finally, it had killed crews trying to repair the supply system and aid agency staff trying to bring in water supplies.
“This is a comprehensive policy preventing people from getting any water,” HRW’s acting Israel and Palestine director, Bill Van Esveld, concluded. He added that the group had made “a very clear finding of extermination”.
‘Pattern of conduct’
HRW echoed a much wider-ranging report by Amnesty International, the world’s best-known international human rights organisation.
In a 296-page report published in early December, Amnesty concluded that Israel had been “brazenly, continuously” committing genocide in Gaza – or “unleashing hell” as the organisation phrased it more graphically.
The period of Amnesty’s research ended in July, five months ago. Since then, Israel has further intensified its destruction of northern Gaza to drive out the population.
Nonetheless, Amnesty described a “pattern of conduct” in which Israel had deliberately obstructed aid and power supplies, and detonated so much explosive power on the tiny enclave – equivalent to more than two nuclear bombs – that water, sanitation, food and healthcare systems had collapsed.
The scale of the attack, it noted, had caused death and destruction at a speed and level unmatched in any other 21st-century conflict.
Budour Hassan, Amnesty’s researcher for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, said Israel’s actions went beyond the individual war crimes associated with conflicts: “This is something deeper.”
Agreeing with major Holocaust and genocide scholars, Amnesty concluded that the high bar needed to prove genocidal intent in law was crossed last May when Israel began destroying Rafah, the area in southern Gaza that it had herded Palestinian civilians into as a supposedly “safe zone”.
Israel had been warned not to attack Rafah by the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but went ahead anyway.
‘Mass denial’
For some time, leading Holocaust and genocide scholars – among them Israelis – have been speaking up to warn not only that a genocide is unfolding, but that it is nearing completion.
Last week, Omer Bartov even managed to get his message out on CNN. He told Christiane Amanpour that Israel was carrying out “a war of annihilation” on the Gaza Strip. “What the IDF [Israeli military] is doing there is destroying Gaza,” he said.
Amos Goldberg, another Israeli Holocaust expert, noted that Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish-Polish scholar who coined the term “genocide”, described its two phases.
“The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called ‘imposition of the national pattern’ of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements.”
Goldberg added: “Like in every other case of genocide in history, right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.”
Bartov’s invitation by CNN appeared to have been provoked by an article in Haaretz, Israel’s most liberal newspaper. It published last week testimonies from Israeli combat soldiers, in which they described committing and witnessing war crimes in Gaza. They paint a picture of systematic erasure that, even from their limited perspective, looks ominously like genocide.
The soldiers describe shooting dead anyone who moves inside undeclared so-called “kill zones”, even children, and then claiming them to be “terrorists”. The dead are left to be eaten by packs of dogs.
The only words one Israeli reservist found to describe Israel’s repeated and intentional killing of children in Gaza was “pure evil”.
According to a senior reserve commander recently returned from the enclave, the Israeli army has created “a lawless space where human life holds no value”.
Another says units compete to see who can kill the greater number of Palestinians, indifferent to whether they are Hamas fighters or civilians.
Others describe these units as operating like “independent militias”, unrestrained by military protocols.
‘Everyone is a terrorist’
How the Israeli army implemented the Gaza genocide is alluded to in the Haaretz article. After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, the military leadership devolved normally centralised decision-making to local field commanders.
Many of those commanders live in the most religiously extreme of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Not only are they Jewish supremacists, but they follow rabbis who believe all Palestinians, even babies, pose a threat to the Jewish people and must be exterminated.
Notoriously, a group of influential settler rabbis formalised their genocidal teachings into a book called The King’s Torah.
One senior commander identified by Haaretz is Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, a settler from Kiryat Arba, possibly the most extreme of all Israel’s West Bank settlements.
For many years, Vach headed the military’s officers training school, passing on his extreme views to a new generation of officers, presumably some of whom are now making decisions in Gaza.
Today, he heads Division 252, in which many of the soldiers who spoke to Haaretz have served.
One of his officers recounted how, after Hamas’ military leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in October, Vach held an official meeting to determine what to do with his body. He wanted to strip Sinwar’s corpse naked, put it in a public square, dismember it and pour sewage over the remains.
In an address to soldiers, he is reported to have echoed a genocidal view widely shared in Israel, that “there are no innocents in Gaza”. Even Israel’s supposedly liberal President Isaac Herzog has said as much.
But according to one officer, Vach has made this view an “operational doctrine”.
Vach’s view of Palestinians is that “everyone’s a terrorist”. And that means, given Israel’s current, explicit aims in Gaza, everyone must be killed.
Nothing sticks
None of this should surprise us. Israeli leaders from the very start announced their genocidal intent. And more than a year ago, Israeli soldiers serving in Gaza began telling us of the systematic nature of Israel’s war crimes.
But like everything about this genocide, those accounts made no impact on the western political and media consensus. Nothing has stuck, even when it is the soldiers themselves documenting their atrocities, and even when it is Israeli Holocaust experts concluding that these crimes amount to genocide.
It has been nearly a year since the ICJ, comprising more than a dozen internationally respected judges, decided that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
The judiciary is amongst the most conservative of professions.
The situation in Gaza is incalculably worse than it was last January when the court issued its ruling.
But the wheels of justice are required to turn slowly, even though Gaza does not have time on its side.
How is this permanent condition of mass denial possible? There is nothing normal or natural about it. The denial is being actively and furiously manufactured.
Only because we live in a world where billionaires own our politicians and media do we need courts and human rights groups to confirm what we can already see quite clearly being live-streamed to our devices.
Only because we live in a world owned by billionaires do those same courts and rights organisations spend long months weighing the evidence to protect themselves from the inevitable backlash of smears aimed at discrediting their work.
And only because we live in a world owned by billionaires is it possible, even after all those delays, for our politicians and media to ignore the findings and carry on as before.
The system is rigged to favour the imperial hub of the United States and its client states.
If you are an African dictator, or an official enemy of the so-called West, the most minimal evidence suffices to prove your guilt.
If you are under the protection of the US godfather, no amount of evidence will ever be enough to put you behind bars.
It is known as realpolitik.
Always another story
For many months, the western media’s role has been to gaslight us by pretending the genocide is something else.
First, the mass slaughter of Palestinians was presented simply as a natural desire by Israel to eliminate “terrorism” on its doorstep following the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.
It was chiefly a story of Israeli “self-defence” that conveniently overlooked the preceding decades in which Israel had driven Palestinians off their land, either out of their homeland entirely or into ghettoes, then colonised the land illegally with apartheid-style Jewish settlements, and subjected the Palestinian ghettoes to brutal Israeli military rule.
In the coverage after 7 October, the Palestinians – long the victims of an illegal occupation – were viewed as squarely to blame for their own suffering. To suggest anything else – to worry that a genocide was unfolding – was a sure sign of antisemitism.
Then, as the slaughter intensified – as Gaza was levelled, hospitals wrecked, the population collectively punished with an aid blockade – the official story faltered.
So a new narrative was advanced: of international efforts to reach a ceasefire ending “the cycle of violence”, of the focus on securing the release of the hostages, of Hamas intransigence.
We were back to the familiar framework of an intractable conflict, in which both sides were to blame – though, of course, the Palestinians more so.
Now, as it becomes impossible to continue pretending that Israel wants peace, to ignore the fact that it is expanding the slaughter, not reining it in, the media strategy has shifted once again.
As the genocide reaches its “final stage” – as the Israeli Holocaust scholars Omer Bartov and Amos Goldberg warn – the media have largely lost interest. If there is no way to both-sides the genocide, then it must be disappeared.
And in media-land, there is always another story that can be promoted. There will always be another front-page lead rather than the most disturbing one of all, in which western leaders and the media are full participants in the live-streamed extermination of a people.
BBC buries the news
That is the context for understanding the media’s collective yawn as the three genocide reports dropped one after another this month.
Israel’s accusations that Amnesty’s report was antisemitic were entirely expected. What should not have been was the media’s largely indifferent response.
The BBC was a case study in how to bury bad news. Its flagship television news programmes – the dominant news source for Britons – ignored the story completely.
Meanwhile, its poor cousin, the 24-hour news channel, which draws a far smaller audience, did mention the Amnesty report, but captioned it: “Israel rejects ‘fabricated’ claims of genocide.”
In other words, when the BBC did offer very limited coverage, it skipped the news story of Amnesty’s findings and went straight to Israel’s predictable, outraged reaction.
In an investigation for Drop Site News last week, Guardian columnist Owen Jones spoke to 13 current and recently departed BBC staff. They said the corporation’s coverage of Gaza was heavily skewed to present Israel’s actions in a favourable light.
In a WhatsApp chat for senior BBC Middle East editors, correspondents and producers, one participant – incensed by the “fabricated claims” caption – wrote: “FFS! – It’s an open goal for those who say we’re frit [afraid] of upsetting the Israelis and keep on couching our stories in an ‘Israel says’ narrative’.”
The BBC’s website, by far the most influential English-language online news source, inexplicably ignored the Amnesty report for 12 hours after the embargo was lifted.
Even then, it appeared as the seventh item. For the following week, it was not included in the “Israel-Gaza” index on the website’s front page, making it unlikely it would be found.
This pattern has long been true in the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Palestine, but it has become far more glaring since the stakes were raised for Israel by its genocide.
As Jones’s investigation discloses, BBC management has tightly restricted control over the Gaza coverage to a small number of journalists known to hew closely to Israel’s view of events – and despite their editorial role provoking what Jones calls a “civil war” in the BBC newsroom.
Notably, Jones did not publish his investigation in the Guardian, where there have been similar reports of staff indignant at the paper’s failure to give proper weight to the genocidal nature of Israel’s actions.
Rigged algorithms
What the BBC has been doing is not exceptional. As soon as a light is shone into the dark recesses of the state- and billionaire-owned media, the same picture always emerges.
Last week, an investigation revealed that Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, intentionally rigged its algorithms to suppress reports from the biggest Palestinian news sources after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.
Palestinian news outlets saw their views on Meta platforms fall significantly after the attack – on average by 77 percent – when they should have expected to see far greater interest. By contrast, views of Israeli news outlets rose sharply.
Paradoxically, the investigation was published by the BBC, though notably the research was initiated and carried out by the staff of its Arabic news service.
Also last week, more than a dozen whistleblowers from Deutsche Welle, Germany’s equivalent of state broadcaster the BBC, revealed to Al Jazeera that a culture of fear reigns in the newsroom when it comes to critical coverage of Israel.
Similar reports from whistleblowing staff have exposed the rigged nature of the coverage – always in Israel’s favour – in other major outlets, from CNN to the New York Times and the Associated Press news agency.
In reality, the same skewed news agenda can be found in every newsroom in every corporate media outlet. It just requires whistleblowers to come forward, and for there to be someone willing to listen and in a position to publish.
Why? Because a genocide unfolding in plain sight cannot be made to appear normal without an enormous expenditure of effort from institutional media to close the eyes of their audiences. To hypnotise us into indifference.
State of anxiety
Too many of us are susceptible to this process – and for a number of reasons.
In part, because we still trust these institutions, even though their chief function is to persuade us that they are there for our benefit – rather than the reality that they serve the interests of the larger corporate structures to which they belong.
Those western structures are invested in resource theft, asset-stripping and wealth concentration – all, of course, pursued at the expense of the global south – and the war industries needed to make this pillage possible.
But also, it is part of our psychological makeup that we cannot sustain attention on bad news indefinitely.
To watch a genocide unfold week after week, month after month, and be unable to do anything to stop it, takes a terrible toll on our mental health. It keeps us in a permanent state of anxiety.
The corporate structures that oversee our media understand this only too well. Which is why they cultivate a sense of powerlessness amongst their audiences.
The world is presented as a baffling place, where there are inexplicable forces of evil that act without any comprehensible causation to destroy all that is good and wholesome.
The media suggest international affairs are little different from a game of whack-a-mole. Whenever the good West tries to solve a problem, another evil mole pops up its head, whether it be Hamas terrorists, Hezbollah terrorists, Syria’s former dictator Bashar al-Assad, or the mad mullahs of Iran.
With this as the framework for the Gaza genocide, audiences are left sensing either that what is happening to Palestinians, however horrifying, may be deserved or that investing too much concern is a waste of energy and time. Another crisis will be along in a moment equally demanding of our attention.
And so it will. Because that is precisely the way the corporate media works. It offers a conveyor belt of bad news, one bewildering event after another – whether it be another disgraced celebrity, or murdered schoolgirl, or an outbreak of war.
The media’s role – the reason states and corporations keep such a tight grip on it – is to stop us from gaining a wider picture of the world, one on which our hands look far more bloodied than the “terrorists” we sit in judgment on. One where a powerful western elite, its corporate empire headquartered in the US, runs the planet as nothing more than a wealth-extraction machine.
And so we, the publics of the West, shrug our shoulders once again: at “man’s inhumanity to man”, at “the cycle of violence”, at “the barbarians at the gate”, at “the white man’s burden”.
Nearly 15 months on, the Gaza genocide has become entirely normal, it has become just another minor, routine news item to be buried on the inside pages.
Jonathan Cook is a British independent journalist, who has covered issues of Palestine and Israel for much of his over 20-year career. He formerly wrote for the Guardian and Observer newspapers and is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
Do the numbers for your hometown
By Mike Ferner
Image by UNRWA
In Ft. Wayne, Indiana this September, I was arrested with a long time activist friend, Cliff Kindy, for blocking the entrance to a Raytheon Corp. facility. We both requested jury trials and the dates were set for mid-December and early January. Prosecutors dropped the charges in each case and the trials did not happen.
For my defense, I planned to bring Gaza home to jurors from Allen County, home to Ft. Wayne, with wire service photos and by extrapolating the effects of the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Palestine to their own county.
That same approach can be used for any city or county in the U.S. Simply find your population and area, then do the math based on Gaza’s population and area. The genocide statistics were published by Al Jazeera for its summary report on one year of Israel’s U.S.-funded genocide.
U.S. census figures show that Allen County’s population is 395,000 or 18% of Gaza’s 2.2 million people and its area is 660 sq. miles, roughly 4.5 times that of Gaza’s 144 sq. miles.
Here, then, is how to bring Gaza home to your city or county.
As of October 2024, Israel’s military has dropped over 85,000 tons of bombs – 591 T/sq. mi. on Gaza, far exceeding that dropped on Dresden, Hamburg and London combined in World War II.
For Allen County the comparable number is 390,000 tons of bombs at 591 T/sq. mi.
More than 43,000 Palestinian bodies, mostly of women and children, were recovered last year. Many thousands more remain buried under the rubble — reliable reports say up to 200,000. 97,000 have been wounded. Anesthesia is rarely available.
For Allen County the comparable numbers (18% of the above) are:7,740 bodies recovered
17,460 wounded
Up to 36,000 buried under the rubble.
Over half are women and children.
According to the Gaza Media Office, 34 hospitals and 80 health centers have been put out of service, 162 health institutions were hit by Israeli forces and at least 131 ambulances were hit and damaged. Israeli attacks on hospitals and the continual bombardment of Gaza have killed at least 986 medical workers including 165 doctors, 260 nurses, 184 health associates, 76 pharmacists and 300 management and support staff.
For Allen County the comparable numbers are 20 hospitals and health centers destroyed
30 doctors, 47 nurses, 14 pharmacists, 54 support staff killed.
24 ambulances damaged.
In the past year, 75% of Gaza’s population have been infected with contagious diseases from lack of sanitation, open sewage and inadequate hygiene. At least 10,000 cancer patients can no longer receive the necessary treatment
For Allen County the comparable numbers are296,250 people (75% of pop.) infected with diseases from lack of sanitation and open sewage.
379,000 people (96% of pop.) endure severe lack of food and have not had access to clean water for months.
79,000 face outright starvation.
1800 cancer patients do not receive necessary treatment
More than 10,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons under grave conditions with at least 250 children and 80 women among them.
For Allen County the comparable numbers are 1800 residents held in prison, 599 of them without charges
According to the U.N.’s OCHA, as of January 2024, 60 percent of Gaza’s residential homes and 80 percent of all commercial facilities have been damaged or destroyed. 18% of mosques have been damaged or destroyed.
For Allen County the comparable numbers are100,800 houses and 7,668 businesses damaged or destroyed
148 churches in Allen Co. destroyed or damaged
When the bombing finally stops, whoever attempts to rebuild Gaza – for luxury Israeli condos or refugee housing – will be exposed to unexploded ordnance (UXO), asbestos, PCBs, and carcinogenic ingredients from the toxic soup left by exploded bombs and artillery shells.
For example, in a heavily bombed area of Vietnam, Quang Tri Province (1832 sq. mi.), an intensive campaign to find and destroy UXOs has eliminated over 815,000 of them – everything from 1,000-pound bombs to cluster bombs and grenades. Given the area of Gaza and the tons of bombs dropped on it, some 64,100 UXOs may lie in wait.
For Allen County the number of UXOs would be 293,7000.
Do the numbers for your hometown.
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Mike Ferner is Special Projects coordinator for Veterans For Peace.
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