Friday, September 13, 2024

Murder in Beita: the IDF’s Killing of Ayşenur Eygi


 
 September 13, 2024
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Aysenur Eygi after her graduation from the University of Washington in May. Photo courtesy of Aysenur Eygi Family.

Beita is a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank a few miles from Nablus. Beita is an ancient town with houses dating back to the Roman occupation of Palestine. For the past few years, the residents of Beita, many of them farmers, have been under siege from militant Israeli settlers, who have seized their land, diverted their water and torched their fields and olive groves.

In 2013, a caravan of militant Israeli settlers who were part of the Nachala Movement, whose explicit goal is the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, seized a swath of Palestinian land on Mount Sabih that had been a communal olive grove for the Palestinian villagers in Beita for decades.

Without any authorization from the Israeli government, the settlers built an “outpost” on Mount Sabah with the aid of Israeli soldiers. The settlers proclaimed that one of the goals of the outpost was to “disrupt the contiguity” between Palestinian lands in the northern West Bank. The outpost was demolished several times by the Israeli government and quickly rebuilt after the bulldozers left, again with the assistance of IDF forces in the area.

In 2023, thousands of Israeli militants marched on Beita, demanding that the Evyatar Outpost be “legalized” by the Netanyahu government. The march was led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Belazel Smotrich, with security provided by Israeli police and the IDF. On June 27, the Netanyahu regime officially declared the land beneath Evyatar as state property land authorized the outpost as a settlement, along with four other outposts. Smotrich smugly said the decision to “legalize” the five outpost was in retaliation for the five nations that had recognized Palestinian as a state a few weeks before.

Since 2021, the villagers of Beita have conducted weekly protests against the illegal outpost, protests which have routinely been violently suppressed by the IDF and the settlers. On July 9, 2021, the IDF fired on hundreds of Palestinian, Israeli and international peace activists, wounding at least 379 people. Since 1967, at least 77 Beita villagers have been killed by Israeli forces, most of them during protests. In the summer of 2021 alone, seven Palestinians were shot and killed during the weekly protest, and nearly 1000 were injured.

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IDF forces deploying near the children’s park in Beita, before firing on demonstrators after a Friday prayer service. Image obtained by Washington Post.

It was into this fraught and dangerous situation that a young American peace activist named Ayşenur Aygi came to lend her support for the Palestinian farmers of Beita. On the morning of September 6, Ayşenur and other activists took a taxi from Ramallah 30 miles north to Beita, where she told friends she wanted to “bear witness” to the relentless theft of Palestinian land and the violent repression of Palestinian farmers who were trying to protect their farms, animals, water supply and orchards.

Ayşenur Eygi was not naive. She knew the score. The 26-year-old recent graduate of the University of Washington was a veteran campaigner who helped lead the Palestinian solidarity movement on campus and had gone to Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, where the demonstrators encountered brutal crackdowns by local cops and private security forces.

Referred to in most of the media as a “Turkish-American,” as if to diminish the meaning of her death, Ayşenur was born in Turkey, but moved with her parents to Washington state when she was a young child. She was raised here, went to school here, and grew up as an environmental and human rights activist here. She had a model for her activism in another young Washingtonian, the Evergreen College student Rachel Corrie, who’d also been an environmental organizer and pro-Palestinian activist. Like Rachel, Ayşenur went to the Occupied Territories as a peace activist with the International Solidarity Movement. Like Rachel, Ayşenur would be killed by the IDF. Like Rachel, Ayşenur’s death would be met with callous indifference by her own government.

Ayşenur went to Seattle Central College and the University of Washington, where she graduated this May, majoring in psychology with a minor in Middle East Languages and Culture. She mentored younger students and helped set up the anti-genocide camp on campus last fall, where she served as a media liaison, a mentor to younger student protesters and an organizer of teach-ins. Her friend Julia Majid described Ayşenur as an “amazing organizer” who was “energetic and passionate about justice…She was the heart of so much of what we did.”

Ayşenur was nervous. Who wouldn’t be?  This was her first demonstration under Israeli occupation. She’d arrived in the West Bank on September 3 and had already experienced the petty cruelties of daily life there. She told friends back in Seattle that she’d been refused permission by Ben Gvir’s police to visit the Al Aqsa Mosque. She described the indignities of Israeli checkpoints and the ominous, looming presence of the Apartheid Wall. And she was well aware of the fact that two weeks before she arrived in Beita, Daniel Santiago, a 32-year-old teacher from New Jersey, also volunteering with the ISM, had been shot in the thigh by an Israeli sniper at a Friday protest. (Young Palestinian men are routinely shot in the leg by the IDF at protests, often with the intent of disabling them from joining future demonstrations.)

So Ayşenur hung back with a couple of other ISM demonstrators as the local Palestinians began their weekly prayer vigil in a children’s park, directly across from a contingent of IDF soldiers. She told a friend: “I’m nervous because the Army is right there.” She was right to be worried.

As the prayer session ended, the IDF forces, which had by then encircled the group, closed in, forcing young Palestinian men and children back down the road toward the village, first by dousing them with tear gas, then almost immediately with live fire. As the Palestinian demonstrators retreated, the Israelis claimed some threw rocks at the heavily armed IDF soldiers, always a pretext for an even more violent response. The ISM later said none of its member had thrown stones and at no point were any of the Israeli soldiers threatened.

But Ayşenur wasn’t with this group anyway, she’d already retreated down the road toward the olive grove some 200 yards in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, several Israeli soldiers took up positions on the top of a hill and four or five others climbed on to the roof of Ali Maali’s house, parking their armored vehicle nearby. Maali told the Washington Post that the IDF frequently usurps his roof during the Friday prayers, because it gives them unobstructed views of the park, the road and the olive grove. On this day, Maali and his family huddled on the veranda of his house, trying to stay out of the view of the Israeli snipers.

As Ayşenur and her friend Helen scrambled down the road to the olive grove, Helen tripped on a rock, spraining her ankle. Ayşenur helped her up and Helen leaned on the young American activist the rest of the way to the shelter of the grove, where they sat down behind a tree until the shooting stopped around 1:30 in the afternoon.

The confrontation had died down. For about twenty minutes, Ayşenur stayed in the olive grove, talking about what she’d just witnessed when an Israeli sniper on the roof of a building fired a shot, striking a Palestinian youth who was standing about 20 yards from Ayşenur in the leg. Israeli snipers in the West Bank often shoot Palestinian protesters, especially young men, in the leg, often to cripple them and keep them from leading future protests.

Then a sniper fired again. Ali Maali heard the shots fired from his roof, telling the Washington Post, the sound “shook the house.” This time it was a kill shot, hitting Ayşenur in the head. She collapsed immediately. Her friend Helen yelled frantically for help, as she bled out from a head wound.

“We were standing in the street, and it was calm; nothing was happening. Soldiers climbed onto the roof of a house, and I saw a soldier aiming, and then I heard gunfire,” said Jonathan Pollack, a veteran Israeli peace campaigner and correspondent for Haaretz, who witnessed the demonstration and the Israeli response. “The first shot hit something metallic and then the thigh of a young man from the village, and then there was another shot. Then someone called my name in English and said they needed help. I ran about 15 meters and saw her [Eygi] lying on the ground under olive trees, bleeding to death. She had a gunshot wound to the head. I looked up and saw there was a direct line of sight between us and the soldiers…It was quiet. There was nothing to justify the shot. The shot was taken to kill.”

Ayşenur was lifted into a stretcher by paramedics and taken to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, where after attempts to resuscitate her failed, she was pronounced dead at around 2:35 p.m.–the third American citizen to be shot and killed by the IDF in the occupied West Bank this year.

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Biden falsely claiming that Aysenur was killed accidentally when an IDF sniper’s bullet “ricocheted off the ground and hit her.”

Ayşenur Eygi died in the same olive grove where Daniel Santiago had been shot, also by accident, according to Israel’s account, when IDF forces “fired live rounds into the air” aimed at driving off non-violent protesters.

“If Israeli soldiers are willing to shoot a non-violent unarmed American citizen from behind, imagine the level of violence they direct at Palestinians when no one is there to document the settler and IDF’s violence,” Santiago said. “The money I pay in my taxes as a teacher probably funded the bullet they have run through me.”

Earlier this year, Biden warned that “If you harm an American, we will respond.” But five days would pass before Biden said anything about the latest killing of an American citizen by the IDF and then his response was tepid, devoid of any trace of empathy for Ayşenur or her family. He merely regurgitated the absurd line coming out of Tel Aviv: “Apparently it was an accident, ricocheted off the ground and just got hit by accident. I’m working that out now.”

In a series of statements on her death, Ayşenur’s family condemned the Biden administration for accepting the Israeli and demanded an independent investigation.

In the midst of this terrible tragedy, our family has been crossing continents to gather and put our beloved Ayşenur to rest. We will always remember Ayşenur as a kindhearted, silly, and passionate soul whose face expressed all those qualities. We cannot speak of what happened to those expressions when her temple met a bullet fired by a trained Israeli soldier.

Ayşenur was an international observer who stood in witness of “violent extremist Israeli settlers [who] are uprooting Palestinians from their homes”–words President Biden himself used today. Despite this, President Biden is still calling her killing an accident based only on the Israeli military’s story. This is not only insensitive and false; it is complicity in the Israeli military’s agenda to take Palestinian land and whitewash the killing of an American.

Let us be clear, an American citizen was killed by a foreign military in a targeted attack. The appropriate action is for President Biden and Vice President Harris to speak with the family directly, and order an independent, transparent investigation into the killing of Ayşenur, a volunteer for peace.

The Israeli version of the shooting, which the Biden administration swiftly adopted, was quickly shown by witnesses, cellphone videos and a detailed investigation by the Washington Post to be not only implausible but absolute bunk. The murder of Ayşenur Eygi took place at least 20 minutes after the last confrontation between Palestinian villagers and IDF troops. Ayşenur never threw any stones and was never within 200 yards of anyone who did. The rooftop sniper had a clear view of where Ayşenur was standing, talking to her friend Helen, and she couldn’t be confused for a Palestinian “instigator.” For whatever reason, Ayşenur was targeted; the sights of the rifle focused on her head and shot. The bullet that killed her didn’t ricochet off of a tree or a rock or a dumpster. The sniper had a clear shot and took it. As Rachel Corrie’s father, Craig, said this week: “Israel does not do investigations; they do cover-ups.”

Biden’s desultory reaction to Ayşenur’s murder contrasts vividly with his response earlier that week to the killing of another American, Hersh Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who had been taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 and held captive for nearly 11 months, until he was shot in the head, apparently by his captors, during an armed raid by the IDF on the tunnel where he was being held:

I am devastated and outraged. Hersh was among the innocents brutally attacked while attending a music festival for peace in Israel on October 7. Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes. And we will keep working around the clock for a ceasefire and to secure the release of the remaining hostages.

Biden couldn’t even muster up enough compassion to call Ayşenur’s family, console them for the senseless killing of a bright young American and promise them that his administration would investigate the circumstance of her shooting. His demeanor spoke just as loudly as Melania’s infamous jacket: he just didn’t care. Of course, Biden is hardly alone his indifference to the deaths of American citizens at the hands of Israelis. Since Rachel Corrie’s murder by an IDF bulldozer operator, there have been at least 9 other Americans killed by the IDF. None of their families have received any justice (or even much sympathy) from either Israel or their own government…

Ayşenur Eygi
Jacob Flickinger
Mohammad Khdour
Tawfiq Abdel Jabbar Ajaq
Orwa Hammad
Mahmoud Shaalan
Omar Asaad
Furkan Dogan
Shireen Abu Akleh

The FBI has jurisdiction to investigate the murders of Americans overseas. Why not send them to Beita to enforce the rule of law, instead of Tweeting performative outrage while allowing the murderers to exonerate themselves? The question answers itself. The US/Israeli relationship is forged by bonds of impunity for both the killers and their weapons dealer.

Aria Fani, one of Eygi’s professors at the University of Washington, said Ayşenur went to the West Bank to “protect Palestinian farmers from settler violence. I know exactly what she would say right now if she were alive. She’d say, ‘The only reason I’m in the headlines is because I have American citizenship.’ Which I think is sadly true. We’ve become numb to Palestinian loss.”

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3

Zionism International is Working Both Sides of the Atlantic



 
 September 13, 2024
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In the Gaza genocide, now expanded to the West Bank, the US and UK have not only provided the main weapons of physical annihilation, they are also collaborating with their junior partner Israel in the war of public disinformation and deception. By now, it has become obvious to most observers in the US and UK that the provision of advanced weapons to the apartheid state, including thousands of American 2000-pound bunker-buster bombs, precision-guided air-to-ground hellfire missiles, and assorted other instruments of mass destruction, is part of an effort to wipe out the Palestinian civilian population through death and eventual deportation. Britain’s military corporation BAE provides Israel with parts of the F-35 fighter jets along with “systems for naval drones, missile guidance and components in fighter jets used against Palestinians in Gaza” (Lee-Doktor 2024).

Both governments are widely out of touch with their constituents. By May 2024, a Data for Progress poll indicated that 70% of likely voters, including 83% of Democrats, favored a permanent ceasefire and de-escalation of violence in Gaza. A similar YouGov poll found that 56% of Britons favored cutting arms shipments to Israel and an immediate ceasefire (66%). Despite these findings, neither of the leading political parties in the US nor the UK have taken any serious action to end human slaughter in Palestine (Data for Progress 2024; Smith 2024).

Zionism International’s Anglo-American Alliance

What explains the contemporary se political alignments of the US and British governments with Israel, which has become a pariah state in most of the rest of the world? The first thing to look at is the role of the political class and how their foreign policy in the Middle East (West Asia) has been designed to bring about the horrific situation in Gaza. The genocide is organized on the ground by Israeli military and state politicians and technocrats but that is possible only through its relationship to the larger goals of the sponsoring powers that work together toward shared hegemonic objectives in the region.

That the Israel lobby, also called Zionist lobby, plays a central role in enabling Israeli and very wealthy Jewish interests in the US and UK to instruct Anglo-American policy in Palestine, if not broader reaches of the region, is now indisputable. Mearsheimer and Walt (2008) lifted the veil on the Israel lobby in American politics at a time when few academics or journalists dared to explore the subject. Joined by the Anti-Defamation League, Christians United for Israel, and other constituent groups in the Israel lobby, an emboldened AIPAC has waged a money war on any politician not fully behind the US-Israel strategic alliance.

In mid-June 2024, an AIPAC-partnered super political action committee had spent $14.5 million to unseat Jamaal Bowman, a Democratic two-term incumbent congressman in New York’s 16th congressional district. Bowman had risked defeat by daring to criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza and called upon the US government to cut military aid to that country. AIPAC and associated Zionist groups are also among the largest contributors to favored political candidates, for the White House down to state legislative races, who can be relied upon as influencers and shields in the service of Israel’s agenda.

In New York, AIPAC and allied organizations spent their money by “filling television screens, stuffing mailboxes and clogging phone lines with caustic attacks,” causing Bowman to lose the party primary to a pro-Israel Democrat. It was the largest funding pool any interest group had ever spent on a political race and was one of several where AIPAC sought to unseat legislators deemed unfriendly to Israel. Cori Bush, another progressive Democratic incumbent, was also unseated in the primary for Missouri’s 1st congressional district with the aid of AIPAC’s major financial contribution to her rival.

AIPAC and its financial arm, the United Democracy Project (UDP), have a dual character, not only lobbying for Israel but also in defeating left-wing candidates who oppose both Israeli apartheid and overweening corporate power in American politics (Marcetic 2024). The linkage is important to recognize, as the apartheid system and its backers are directed against both Palestinians and the American working class and workers of all nations (Fandos 2024). One analysis of AIPAC found that the lobby’s “electoral efforts are largely in line with the interests of Wall Street and other corporate actors — the same interests that have, for years, fought to maintain a status quo of free market fundamentalism” (Marcetic 2024).

By March 2024, AIPAC, its super PAC, the UDP, and allied groups had already spent $30 million during the 2024 election cycle to unseat progressives who took a stand against Israel. The amount spent by the Israel lobby for the full 2023-2024 election cycle was expected to reach $100 million. “AIPAC has become a fundraising juggernaut in recent years, raising more money for candidates than any similar organization this cycle” (Piper & Fuchs 2024). It is clear that the Zionist lobby has Kamala Harris under its supervision, as she has been listless in responding to the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and mass murders and terrorism in the West Bank.

Where does AIPAC gets its money? Created in 2020-2021 and designated as a 501(c)4 social welfare organization, AIPAC, like other super PACs, is not required to disclose its contributors. This lobbying powerhouse prefers to keep such information under wraps. But according to a Jewish newspaper, The Forward, in 2023 its biggest funders included owners of pro sports teams, “heads of private equity firms; real estate titans; a Maryland congressman… the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret; the co-founder of the dance-exercise company Zumba; and the creator of Squishmallows,” a popular children’s toy (Barshad 2024).

As Bernie Sanders has pointed out, AIPAC is funded by corporations that are happy to support the defeat of progressive members of Congress who tend to stand up for both Palestinian rights and worker rights in America. Almost 60% of AIPAC’s money comes from corporate CEOs and other top executives from Fortune 500 companies. The largest single donor to the United Democracy Project is Jan Koum, the multibillionaire former CEO of WhatsApp and a regular Republican funder. The biggest institutional contributors to UDP come from FIRE, finance/insurance and real estate sectors (Marcetic 2024)

AIPAC is cited for developing the strategy of targeting candidates in both parties, a practice that corporate funders can be expected to copy in the coming years (Marcetic 2024). In money-take-all politics, this makes sense inasmuch as there is no real difference in the two parties’ position on Israel and other major foreign and domestic policy areas. Harris’s message, no less than Trump’s, is more military, more wars, more neoliberal capitalism, more fracking. Without a radical shift, what little separation exists between the parties will likely be extinguished in the years ahead, giving way to a final bacchanalian orgy of destruction of the planet and its people.

Neoliberal ideology, which has fetishized market fundamentalism, has encouraged the breakdown of moral and ethical social standards, destroyed any sense of a public realm, and has worked hand in hand with the neoconservative foreign policy agenda. This is true on both sides of the Atlantic. Similar to the US though on a smaller scale, Britain, going back to the Balfour declaration, has long allied with the Zionist cause, which in recent years has wielded great influence on the country through its lobby’s access to ministers, party donations, partnerships with British capital, and successful repression of progressive public opinion about Israel.

Zionism International’s Political Front

As opposition leader, Keir Starmer purged Labour’s ranks of MPs critical of Israel, taking cues from the lobby and marginalizing such critics as “anti-semites.” Starmer himself declared a few months before taking over the leadership of Labour, “I support Zionism without qualification” (Mendel 2020). More recently interviewed on Britain’s LBC radio, he stated that Israel has the right of siege in Gaza, including its cutting off of water and power (McShane 2023), an endorsement of genocide.

Since becoming prime minister in 2024, Starmer has put into operation the next phase of his pro-Zionist policy by arresting British critics of Israel through the employment of the draconian “Terrorism Act 2000, Section 12,” originally enacted under the Tony Blair government. The act covers a range of offences, including anti-Israel materials posted online. A journalist and pro-Palestinian activist, Sarah Wilkinson was arrested under the act in August 2024 after a raid on her house by 12 police who confiscated all her electronic devices (Wilkins 2024). She was threatened with a long prison sentence for posting online remarks about the “incredible” way that Hamas was able to launch its assault on 7 October.

The same month, an independent British foreign affairs journalist Richard Medhurst, who is also sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, was arrested at Heathrow Airport and charged under the act, which bans any writing regarded as favorable to proscribed organizations, such as Hamas. There is no conceivable application of this law to Jews or Israelis living in Britain who express a horrifying approval of terrorism, murder, and torture employed by the IDF against Palestinian civilians (Cook 2024).

Israel exercises direct power lines to British electoral politics and Parliament through such groups as Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), both of which actively lobby for the Jewish state. For the Tories, upon election to Parliament, an MP almost automatically becomes a member of CFI. Conservative cabinet members have come to expect regular donations from the lobby, which has amounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds given to at least one-third of all current sitting members of the party. Large numbers of Labour MPs have also been feeding at the trough. Twenty percent of Labour’s sitting MPs have been funded by pro-Israel groups or individuals – including 15 who have been directly funded by the Israeli state ((Oborne 2009; McEvoy, 2024a and 2024b).

A 2017 Al Jazeera documentary, “The Lobby,” exposed the fact that the Israeli government, working through its embassy in London, has had a direct hand in managing the various friends of Israel groups, including its multiple city branches. It also revealed that the Union of Jewish Students in the UK, which receives money from the Israeli Embassy, sends student delegations to Israel for propaganda immersion. Prior to the 2024 general election, 15 new MP candidates took funding from the LFI and CFI (McEvoy 2024d).

The twelve winning Labour candidates and three Conservatives were quick to accept the handout, a quid pro quo for their showing solidarity with Israeli and genocide policies. Pro-Israel organizations gave the Tories over £430,000 in donations or hospitality gifts, including 187 trips to Israel (McEvoy 2024b and 2024d). US elections and in a parallel fashion, though on a smaller scale, those in Britain are open doors for contributions from wealthy individuals and corporate elites, and the Zionist lobby has front-row seats in exploiting these opportunities to block Anglo-American politicians from invoking human rights standards on the apartheid state.

As the documentary also disclosed, Israel’s main propaganda unit, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, regularly funnels talking points to British MPs to get them to serve as spokespersons for Israeli interests, such as during Prime Minister’s Question Time. AIPAC is also channeling money to universities in Britain in support of the propaganda efforts organized by the campus-based think tank Pinsker Centre (named after a late 19th century Zionist). The Centre’s role is to construct a narrative of Jewish student victimhood that avoids even a word of condolence for Palestinian students whose relatives are being starved and slaughtered by Israeli Jews. Beyond the campuses, AIPAC seeks to create a stronghold in Parliament similar to the power it wields in Congress. “The Lobby” also exposed plots in the Israeli Embassy in London to take down public officials seen as critical of the apartheid policy or insufficiently pro-Zionist.

Israel and its modern-day political Maccabees have made their mark. Members of Labour Friends of Israel have employed the “anti-semite” card to suppress opposition. It succeeded quite well in purging Labour of pro-Palestinian MPs and party members, particularly during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership period (2015-2020). The “anti-semite” tag is equivalent to the use of “heretic” during the Spanish Inquisition. Though contemporary heretics may not be burned at the stake, they are likely to lose their party membership, their jobs, or their student status. The militant attitude of LFI incites fear and intimidation among those concerned about social justice.

Stuart Roden, hedge fund manager and chairman of the Israeli venture capital firm Hetz Ventures, based in Tel Aviv, “has given the Labour party over half a million pounds ahead of the UK’s [2024] general election,” part of the £1m he’s donated to Labour since 2023. Roden is also the principal funder of a Zionist educational program, “I-gnite,” which teaches British children that “the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are acting proportionately in Gaza” (McEvoy 2024c). In October 2023, Roden was filmed confronting pro-Palestinian protesters. He was not charged with interfering with the speech rights or feelings of Palestinian Britons or others involved in the demonstration.

AIPAC is just the newest of a number of pro-Israel influencers. These include the Jewish Leadership Council, the Zionist Federation, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, all elitist organizations amongst the 285,000 Jewish population in Britain. It was under Tony Blair, a member of Labour Friends of Israel, that the Israel lobby began to seriously make political inroads in the government, according to a 2009 (UK) Channel 4 investigative news program, Dispatches. The report also revealed that a press “watchdog” group on behalf of Israel, “Honest Reporting,” regularly challenged the Israel coverage in The Guardian and BBC. The group is headquartered in Jerusalem with another branch in New York City.

Its managing editor at the time, Simon Plosker, had previously worked for the group, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), the British equivalent of AIPAC, and for the Israel army press office. Bicom acts as an opinion creator within the British public, largely by issuing press releases to the British media, funding trips to Israel for British journalists, and organizing talks at British universities. Funding sources for Bicom have major investments in the occupied West Bank (Oborne 2009).

Israel makes little distinction between facts and propaganda. After the 7 October uprising, Honest Reporting falsely claimed that Palestinian journalists knew about the assault beforehand, a lie that its executive director admitted to a day later (Højberg 2023). This very likely caused dozens of Palestinian reporters to be targeted and murdered by the IDF, especially after Netanyahu’s spokespeople repeated the unproven allegation. Benny Gantz, a member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, tweeted “journalists found to have known about the massacre… are no different than terrorists and should be treated as such” (Darcy 2023; Shamir 2023). From 7 October 2023 to 24 August 2024, at least 116 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed by the IDF, according to the US-headquartered Committee to Protect Journalists.

Walling Off the Truth

Journalists in the US and UK have paid little attention to what is happening to their colleagues in Palestine. It is another indicator of the racial hierarchy by which western media assign the status of victimhood (see Sussman 2022). The state and mainstream media collaboration of the US and UK with the Israeli propaganda apparatuses and their operatives in Britain and America make a farce of the notion of “freedom of the press.”

Censorship operates in both countries not primarily as repression of the journalistic profession but at a deeper level of omission – a refusal to even discuss or analyze subjects outside the range of accepted hegemonic discourse. AIPAC and many trans-Atlantic journalists should properly be  registered as foreign agents of West Jerusalem. With British and American reporters acting as stenographers and PA disseminators official lies, it is independent journalists, and there are many, whom seekers of honest journalism have come to rely upon.

In the film “Zone of Interest,” the family of the Nazi and SS commander Rudolf Höss blithely basks in the pleasures of an idyllic and beautifully landscaped home walled off from the Auschwitz concentration camp next door. Walling off what anti-systemic information reaches the public is a central function of the state. Outside the Gaza death camp, journalists in America and Britain casually spread lies about the situation and ignore the tragedies of Palestinians and the historical realities of Zionist apartheid and genocide while enjoying the perks of their own insulated zone of interest.

References

Barshad, Amos (2024, 6 February). “A Rare Look into the $90 Million AIPAC Has Raised Since Oct. 7.” The Forward.

Cook, Jonathan (2024, 30 August). “UK Prime Minister Terrorizing Palestine Supporters.” Consortium News.

Darcy, Oliver (2023, 9 November). “News Outlets Deny Prior Knowledge of Hamas Attack After Israeli Government Demands Answers Over Misleading Report.” CNN.

Data for Progress (2024, 8 May). “Support for a Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza Increases Across Party Lines.” https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/5/8/support-for-a-permanent-ceasefire-in-gaza-increases-across-party-lines

Fandos, Nicholas (2024, 20 June). “AIPAC Unleashes a Record $14.5 Million Bid to Defeat a Critic of Israel.” New York Times.

Højberg, Jesper (2023, 24 November). “How an Israeli Media Watchdog’s Unsubstantiated Allegations Has Put a Price on Palestinian Journalists’ Heads.” International Media Support (Copenhagen).

Lee-Doktor, Joseph (2024, 18 July). “£1 billion subsidy for arms company exposed.” Declassified UK.

Marcetic, Branko (2024, 3 June). “The Corporate Power Brokers Behind AIPAC’s War on the Squad.” In These Times.

McEvoy, John (2024a, 13 February). “Labour MPs Have Accepted Over £280,000 From Israel Lobby.” Declassified UK

McEvoy, John (2024b, 23 May). “Israel lobby funded a third of Conservative MPs” Declassified UK.

McEvoy, John (2024c, 2 July). “Pro-Israel Tycoon Gives Labour Half a Million Pounds.” Declassified UK.

McEvoy, John (2024d, 27 August). “Israel Lobby Funded 15 New MPs Before Election.” Declassified UK.

McShane, Asher (2023, 11 October). “Israel ‘Has the Right’ to Withhold Power and Water from Gaza, Says Sir Keir Starmer.” LBC News (UK).

Mearsheimer, John and Stephen Walt (2008). The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Mendel, Jack (2020, 14 February). “Keir Starmer Interview: I Will Work to Eradicate Antisemitism ‘From Day One’.” Jewish News.

Oborne, Peter, video producer (2009, November). “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby.” Aired on Channel 4 (UK).

Piper, Jessica and Hailey Fuchs (2024, 9 June). “Bipartisanship or Republican Meddling? AIPAC Is Biggest Source of GOP Donations in Dem Primaries.” Politico.

Shamir, Jonathan (2023, 15 November). “Israel’s War on Journalists.” Jewish Currents.

Smith, Matthew (2024, 10 May). “British Attitudes to the Israel-Gaza Conflict: May 2024 Update.” YouGov.

Sussman, Gerald (2022, 27 July). “Russia-Ukraine Conflict: The Propaganda War.” CounterPunch.

Wilkins, Brett (2024, 20 August). “UK Continues Use of Anti-Terrorism Law to Arrest Palestine Defenders.” Common Dreams.

Gerald Sussman is a professor emeritus at Portland State University. His latest book is British and American Electoral Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism: Parallel Trajectories (Routledge). Professor Sussman can be reached at sussmang@pdx.edu.