Burying the lede in Gaza for 75 years – Prism

“You cannot continue to victimise someone else just because you yourself were a victim once — there has to be a limit.”

Edward Said wrote this nearly 50 years ago, but the limits he wrote about have long been crossed by Israel’s powerful propaganda machine, which has found plenty of allies in the Western media.

How else do you explain the continued circulation of the false story about the 40 beheaded babies — which emerged in Israel’s Kfar Aza Kibbutz following Hamas’ attack on Israel — one year ago? The story quickly made global headlines and received condemnation, including from US President Joe Biden, whose staff, it later emerged, had cautioned him from mentioning it.

Yet, those cautions fell on deaf ears when Biden said he had seen those images and then had to retract. When history reviews that moment, it will likely put Biden’s lies down to his old age and confused state of mind. However, to those of us long familiar with how “we” are reported on, we know “they” only see the worst of us.

As Said wrote in his book Orientalism in 1975: “In newsreels or news-photos, the Arab is always shown in large numbers. No individuality, no personal characteristics or experiences. Most of the pictures represent mass rage and misery, or irrational (hence hopelessly eccentric) gestures. Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad. Consequence: a fear that the Muslims (or Arabs) will take over the world.”

The Palestinian Arab, thus, must be put in its place.

While US presidents, sitting and hopeful, are quick to believe Israel’s version, it is nonetheless shocking to see them defend the damage caused by Israel’s airstrike on Rafah in May which, to be precise, charred to death scores of children. This was days after the International Court of Justice had ordered Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah. Israel would describe it as a “tragic mistake.” Unlike the imaginary 40 beheaded Israeli babies, here we saw a father hold up a decapitated baby in Rafah, but it did not make the headlines. Only prominent diaspora writers, with links to the Arab or Muslim-majority countries, wrote about it on their Substacks or social media; perhaps there was an op-ed or two in left leaning papers like The Guardian.

Were it for not social media, and phones recording the horrors of the genocide in Gaza, we would be dependent on Israel’s manipulation of these falsehoods. They do this to garner support, to shape policy, to ensure that any sympathy toward Palestine is quickly turned into a “do you support Hamas?”. And they have mammoth support from Western media and scholars and influencers.

As law professor, Khaled Beydoun, wrote following the Rafah massacre: “On a landscape ravaged by unhinged Israeli militarism and unchecked American might, the lie of headless Israeli children means everything; while the truth of beheaded Palestinian children means nothing.”

More than the depiction of Hamas as terrorists — that fighters hide in hospitals or among civilians, the sexual assault claims or the inability to accurately document the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, I am appalled at the Western media’s ignorance on the children impacted by this war. The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) estimated in March that at least 13,000 children had been killed by Israel, yet headlines did not show this. As one study showed, of 1,100 news articles surveyed between Oct 7 to Nov 25, only two mentioned young Palestinian victims. At least 6,000 children were killed during the aforementioned period. This is truly abhorrent.

Dehumanisation in plain sight

British data journalist, Mona Chalabi, has been documenting how Palestinians are reported on. She wrote on Instagram: “While Israeli victims are documented as people who were loved, Palestinians are uprooted, even in death.” Chalabi has been producing neatly packaged datasets documenting Israeli violence against Palestinians and how the media aids in the spread of their version. “Palestinian deaths are often mentioned in the context of vengeance (“retaliation”/“retaliatory”/“retaliated” appear 190 times in this dataset) and, unlike Israeli deaths/hostages, these victims are rarely mentioned by name.”

In her analysis of BBC News’ language for Israelis vs Palestinians, she found: “Israelis reject any comparison between the way Hamas kills civilians and the way Palestinian civilians die in their air strikes.”

The BBC also deserves special mention for their bias as documented in research which analysed stories between October 10 and December 2, 2023. They examined how many times words like “massacred” were used for Israelis (23) versus Palestinians (1) in that period.

Unsurprisingly, they found machine bias against Palestinians.

Meanwhile, many independent media have reported on the bias in US media coverage. The Intercept, for example, said “iterations of Israel and Israeli received more mention in New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times “even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli deaths.”

William Youmans, writing in Dawn MENA Media — an organisation founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 before his brutal murder in Istanbul — discusses a study he conducted on US TV shows like Meet the Press (NBC), Face the Nation (CBS), This Week (ABC) and Fox News Sunday (FOX) between mid October and mid-January. He found framing around Gaza “aligned far more with pro-Israel talking points”.

He references another study on cable news shows which “found pervasive patterns of privileging pro-Israel framing and narratives.” It also found that by the time 11,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza by early November, the Israeli hostages held in Gaza “were still getting more attention on American cable TV news.”

As Youmans notes, when the media reports Palestinians as “being left to die”, (and not by whom or how) it “softens Israel’s culpability.”

Ryan Grims’ story in The Intercept in April echoes similar findings. People who only get their news from cable “are more supportive of Israel’s war effort, less likely to think Israel is committing war crimes, and less interested in the war in general.” Meanwhile, people who get their news from social media, podcasts or Youtube “generally side with the Palestinians, believe Israel is committing war crimes and genocide, and consider the issue of significant importance.”

An April report published in the The Intercept exposed an internal New York Times memo, instructing staff to limit the use of Palestine “except in very rare cases.” The memo also asked staff to restrict words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land. This was done under the guise of maintaining “objectivity”, New York Times staffers told The Intercept.

“I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” The Intercept quotes a NYT newsroom source, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. “But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.”

These are not style guidelines. The dotted i’s and crossed t’s seem to be about deferring to Israel. What else explains their use of emotive words like “slaughtering” and “massacre” for Israelis, not Palestinians?

Decades of dehumanising Palestinians in the Western media has resulted in this genocide in Gaza. I am not calling it a genocide simply because I side with Palestine, or can see who the aggressor is, or because I saw the video of the father with his beheaded baby in Rafah.

The United Nations Human Rights (UNHR) council also says it’s a genocide. But it does not seem to matter to world leaders, the UN, the international courts, policy-makers etc. The presidential debate in the US saw both candidates clamouring over one another to prove their loyalty to Israel. But for many Arab and Muslim Americans, the issue of Gaza weighs heavily on their mind as they prepare to cast their vote, or not, in the November polls.

Silence is complicity

Two BBC journalists resigned in October 2023 accusing the organisation of bias in its coverage of the issue. Jazmine Hughes, magazine editor of The New York Times, resigned in November 2023 after objections were raised to her signing a petition by the Writers against the War in Gaza. About 1,000 US based journalists signed a petition calling on Western editors to “use precise terms that are well-defined by international human rights organisations including apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.”

An Associated Press reporter was asked by his employer to remove his name from the petition. David Velasco, editor of Artforum magazine, which published an open letter on the same issue and was signed by thousands of artists, was fired. The Los Angeles Times disallowed three staffers from reporting on Gaza if they signed a strongly worded letter criticising Israel, according to Semafor media.

Malak Silmi, a Palestinian American freelance journalist, wrote about why she quit journalism in the US in a moving piece for Al Jazeera in January this year. “I saw the journalism that I wanted to be a part of and that was possible, but learned that its standards could not be applied to my people. I saw the efforts that were put into getting the facts right and centering local Ukrainian voices. I saw what was possible for others but not for the Palestinian people.”

The double standards exhibited in the media have only widened the mistrust between it and the audience.

Legacy papers like the Wall Street Journal published a story in January suggesting links between Hamas and 12 workers of UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. The paper cited Israeli evidence when it reported that 12 members participated in the attack. However, as Semafor reported, it was an unsubstantiated claim. Responding to the claims, the paper’s editor, Elena Cherney, wrote: “The fact that the Israeli claims haven’t been backed up by solid evidence doesn’t mean our reporting was inaccurate or misleading, that we have walked it back, or that there is a correctable error here.”

This story had significant repercussions including a freeze on $450 million in aid from several countries at a time Gaza desperately needed it. It still needs it.

While the paper stands by the story, its former standards editor, Richard Boudreaux, admitted the Wall Street Journal, “leaned too heavily on Israeli voices and did not include enough Arab perspectives.”

This is exactly how Israel’s occupation is justified, how Palestinian deaths are reported.

Gen Z is here to turn the tide

The younger generation has been instrumental in leading pro-Palestinian protests on campuses across the US, despite harsh consequences and also harsh media portrayals describing them as dangerous. They have stood up to opposing protestors, university administrators, the police, even security guards like the one at City University of New York who told them he supports genocide and “killing all you guys.” Although he was suspended by the college, there was scant attention to this story compared to the many about a Palestinian protestor at Columbia who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” The university said it banned him from campus. Guess which of the two aforementioned was described as violent and a danger to society?

This young generation’s steadfastness is remarkable; they have found ways to bypass tactics like shadow banning. They have made lists of products to boycott, they are calling out all attempts to muzzle their speech in favour of Palestine.

Heck, the Western media even turned on Greta Thunberg after she voiced her support for Palestine. She was arrested in Copenhagen at a pro-Palestine rally last month.

This shift, however small, in news consumption is something the media has to come to terms with if it wants to regain lost credibility, especially with younger audiences. A poll by YouGov and The Economist in January found that half of Biden’s voters in 2020 said Israel was committing a genocide in Israel. Only 20 per cent said that was not the case. This is despite all the aforementioned media bias and internal memos on how to report on Gaza and the blackout on the genocide in Gaza.

The media just can’t parrot US foreign policy directives, which heavily side with Israel. They did it with Iraq under George W. Bush, swallowing the weapons of mass destruction narrative whole, without so much as asking a question. Now, it appears they are practicing embedded journalism with (and for) Israel, with one or two stories on Palestine thrown in for the appearance of fairness.

Edward Said wrote that Israel was in a state of delusion about itself. “In some ways, it is true that Israel’s early history as a pioneering new state was that of a utopian cult, sustained by people much of whose energy was in shutting out their surroundings while they lived the fantasy of a heroic and pure enterprise. How damaging and how tragic this collective delusion has been is more evident with the passing of each day. How long will the awakening take, and how much more pain will have to be felt, before the opening of eyes is fully accomplished?”

Something’s got to give. I don’t know what or when.