On
October 6, 2023, Hamas broke out of Gaza,
lobbed rockets, and
sent fighters into Israeli
territory. The attacks killed hundreds of
Israeli soldiers and civilians. Images of
violence and brutality were recorded and
distributed widely over broadcast news over
and over again, repeatedly showing abused,
bloodied, and crying women and children. The
violence was presented with voices of US and
Israeli officials asserting that the attack
was “unprecedented.” Israel retaliated
immediately and bombed the Gaza Strip, one of
the most densely
populated places
on the globe. Photographs of death and
destruction ran side
by side, each with only brief captions about
location. Many news outlets reported that the
violence came out of nowhere, offering no
historical context. The attacks therefore were
without motivation, attributed only to the
pure evil of Hamas and Palestinian terrorists.
German
media scholar Hektor Haarkötter,
who partners with
Project Censored for his work with the News
Enlightenment Initiative, was recently in the
US speaking on an
international roundtable at
a critical
communication conference and
said he was stunned by the coverage:
“When I saw the images of such violence
repeated many times, on rotation, I was
shocked. This would not be considered news in
Germany. It would have been seen as little
more than sensationalism.”
On
October 7, the AP reported that
US President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United
States “stands with the people of Israel in
the face of these terrorist assaults. Israel
has the right to defend itself and its people,
full stop.” On October 9, The Times of
Israel quoted Defense
Minister Yoav Gallant saying, “We are fighting
human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian directed his
threat at all Gazans on October 10, declaring,
“Kidnapping, abusing and murdering children,
women and elderly people is not human.” He
then announced, “There will be no electricity
and no water. There will only be destruction.
You wanted hell; you will get hell.”
In
a piece published on
October 8 titled “Media Calls The Attack On
Israel Unprovoked: Experts Say That’s
Historically Inaccurate,” the Huffington Post
pointed to the Israeli government’s “apartheid
against Palestinians” as a provocation. It
quoted IfNotNow,
an American Jewish group that opposes Israeli
apartheid, expressing their dread for the loss
of life and loved ones, Israelis and
Palestinians alike. It continued, “Every day
under Israel’s system of apartheid is a
provocation. The strangling siege on Gaza is a
provocation. Settlers terrorizing entire
Palestinian villages, soldiers raiding and
demolishing Palestinian homes, murdering
Palestinians in the streets, Israeli ministers
calling for genocide and
expulsion” are all provocations.
Indeed, multiple international human
rights groups have
defined the long-term Israeli occupation of
Palestinian lands as a system of
apartheid. The death toll on each side
exposes the false assertion that Israeli
violence is always retaliatory and that of
Palestinians is “unprecedented.” The UNOCHA documents
6,407 Palestinian deaths since 2008, compared
to 308 Israeli fatalities. Gregory
Shupak reported that
since 2001, more than ten thousand
Palestinians have been killed by Israeli
forces, with “nearly 9 out of 10 deaths this
century have been on the Palestinian side.” In
addition, the Israelis have made daily life in
Gaza miserable. As UK journalist Jonathan
Cook wrote,
“[Gaza’s] inhabitants—one million of them
children—are denied the most basic freedoms,
such as the right to movement; access to
proper health care, drinkable water, and the
use of electricity because Israel keeps
bombing Gaza’s power station.” But voices
such as Shupak and Cook are virtually absent
from US establishment news coverage of the
violence.
The
Hamas attacks were taken out of the context of
ongoing violence, presented without cause, and
in narratives that see only Hamas violence but
have rarely featured or condemned equivalent
Israeli violence against Palestinians.
Establishment media’s one-sided pro-Israel
coverage, established over many
years, fed into the growing consensus that a
major retaliation by Israelis would be
forthcoming. Early corporate news reporting
seemed to confirm its inevitability, with
almost no voices of reason or caution allowed to
enter the militarized revenge frame coalescing
around a major attack.
The
verbiage used by the New
York Times on
the Tribe of Nova music festival also
illustrates Big Journalism’s sensationalized,
inaccurate reporting. The
Times wrote
that the “massacre of its youth” and Israel’s
“75-year-old quest for some carefree normalcy”
met the “murderous fury of those
long-oppressed Palestinians who deny the
state’s right to exist.” The language of
the Times’ report—using
“murderous” and denial of Israel’s “right to
exist,” with “long-oppressed
Palestinians”—makes a mockery of what Gazans
have experienced.
Additionally,
it is not true that Palestinians deny Israel’s
right to exist. A quick look at the US State
Department’s summation of
the 1993 Oslo Accords states that the
Palestinian Authority “renounced terrorism and
recognized Israel’s right to
exist in peace” and “Israel accepted
the PLO as the representative of the
Palestinians,” concessions that undergirded
the two-state solution between Israel and
Palestine. But Rashid
Khalidi has called out
the “empty words about a two-state solution
while providing money, weapons and diplomatic
support for systematic, calculated Israeli
actions that have made that solution
inconceivable.”
Most
important among the systemic violence against
Palestinians is the growing weaponization of
Israeli settlers. As Israel was dropping bombs
on Gaza, Common Dreams reported that the
California-based Institute for Middle East
Understanding (IMEU) accused Israel’s
far-right National Security Minister, Itamar
Ben-Gvir, of enabling settler attacks by handing
out thousands
of military assault rifles to settlement
residents. “The extremist settlers Israel
is arming have spent years attacking
Palestinian cities in lynch mobs, with full
backing from the Israeli government.” IMEU
continued, “This year alone, they have killed
Palestinian civilians and set fire to cars and
homes with families inside.” Such stories
are virtually absent from
establishment media.
Gregory
Shupak examined the
editorial pages of major US newspapers from
October 7 to 9, concluding that none of
them provided readers with “information
necessary to comprehend what is happening and
why, and they consistently mislead readers
about key facts.” Some papers were openly
ravenous in their demonization of
Palestinians. For example, the Wall
Street Journal ran
an op-ed titled
“The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas,” telling its
readers that “Israel is entitled to do
whatever it takes to uproot this evil,
depraved culture that resides next to it.”
Calling for the destruction of Hamas and
extending the call to exterminate the
“culture” is a call for genocide.
It mirrored and promoted Israeli announcements
that they would turn Gaza into “hell,”
“rubble,” and a “city
of tents.”
Ironically,
on October 8, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz offered more
explanation and context than most US papers
when it criticized Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to “annex
the West Bank” and “to carry out ethnic
cleansing in…the Hebron Hills and the Jordan
Valley.” It pointed to the massive expansion
of settlements and increasing Jewish
presence on Temple Mount, near Al Aqsa
Mosque. In April 2022, Mondoweiss reported that
the Israeli military attacked Palestinians on
their way to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque seven
times in eight days, injuring dozens of
worshipers and arresting hundreds of
Palestinians. Israeli forces used
remote-controlled drones to drop teargas
inside the mosque. Meanwhile, Israel
facilitated the entrance of thousands of
Jewish settlers for the Passover holiday.
War
Propaganda: Babies were Decapitated and
Women were Raped
Sensationalized
repetition and media saturation of
decontextualized Hamas violence quickly
evolved into full-blown atrocity propaganda
with horror stories claiming that
Hamas had slit the throats of forty Israeli
babies, decapitating many of them. Visceral
baby slaughter is classic war propaganda,
first used in World War I with false claims
that German soldiers joyfully
bayonetted babies.
Similar stories convinced skeptical
Americans to support the First Persian Gulf
War, with the fake news story about Iraqi
soldiers tossing over three hundred Kuwaiti
babies out of their incubators. Roundly
debunked after the war, journalists published
the story uncritically, just as they eagerly
circulated the unverified decapitation story.
Alan
MacLeod investigated the
story that Hamas had slaughtered Israeli
babies, finding that it came from an anonymous
Israeli military source and was originally
reported by Israeli i24 News. Without
verification, Fox
News, CNN, MSN, Insider,
and the New
York Post picked
up and repeated the incendiary propaganda in
the US. The UK’s largest newspapers screamed
outrage as the salacious story was flung
across the front pages of the Times of
London, the Independent,
the Financial
Times, and
the Scotsman (as
documented by Mint
Press News).
The
key source for the false claim was an Israeli
soldier, David
Ben Zion,
a fanatical settler who has incited riots
against Palestinians, describing them as
“animals” who need to be “wiped out.”
Another
propaganda trope circulated to
justify war is the rape of women, made more
devious by its actual use as a military
strategy. The Intercept noted that
unverified claims that Hamas was raping women
had gone viral online, and President Biden
claimed that women were “raped,
assaulted, paraded as trophies.” Caitlin
Johnstone noted,
“We’re seeing claims about mass rapes being
uncritically pushed by the mass media, only to
see them retracted
as unverified after
the narrative has taken hold.” Any
legitimate journalist should recognize such
war tropes, and if not, should at least track
the stories’ origins and refrain from
publication until those sources are verified.
President Biden was forced to walk
back his
lie about seeing “confirmed pictures of
terrorist beheading children,” while talking
to leaders of US Jewish organizations at the
White House.
What
was the purpose of perpetrating such lurid
fake news, the stuff of visceral propaganda?
The Hamas attacks that killed civilians
were met with
outrage and widely condemned, even by those
who advocate for Palestinian rights, express
criticism of the “unprovoked” news frame, or
have criticized Israel’s
growing violence and worked to create humanitarian
spaces amidst
the cruelty. Certainly, the attacks
alone could
be considered justifications for Israeli
retaliation. But as Caitlin Johnstone argued,
that was not enough. Israel’s response was
about to dwarf the initial Hamas offensive.
Israel and its allies needed to frame the
attack in “the most shocking and rage-inducing
discourse in order to make Israel’s ongoing
murder of civilians in Gaza look appropriate.”
War
Crimes and Wiping Out Gaza
Writing
for Declassified UK, Jonathan Cook detailed how
Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Gaza violated
numerous international laws and the Geneva
Convention, pointing out that the Israel
Defense Forces (IDF) were committing war
crimes. “One of the fundamentals of
international law—at the heart of the Geneva
Conventions—is a prohibition on collective
punishment: that is, retaliating against the
enemy’s civilian population, making them pay
the price for the acts of their leaders and
armies.” He continued, “What Israel
is doing to Gaza is the very definition of
collective punishment.”
Two
days earlier on October 11, US Secretary of
State Anthony Blinken spread what can only be
called “fake news” on Sky News when he claimed,
“What separates Israel, the US and other
democracies…is our respect for international
law and the laws of war.” By October 14,
Al Jazeera reported that
in the first seven days of the conflict, an
estimated one million Gazans had been
displaced, according to the UN, and aid groups
said the situation in the besieged enclave was
“catastrophic,” as fourteen Palestinians were
being killed every hour. Israel had
dropped the equivalent of “a quarter of a
nuclear bomb on Gaza,” according to
the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights
Monitor. And by October 16, Euro-Med posted,
“The Stench of Death Looms Everywhere in #Gaza,
Immediate Halt to the Killing of Civilians
Required.”
The
saturation bombing of Gaza, where entire
apartment buildings filled with residents are
destroyed, taking
out entire families,
amounts to horrific collective
killings.
Israelis are committing numerous violations of
international law, as hospitals are on
the verge
of collapse, and
food, water, and electricity are blocked along
with humanitarian aid to
Gaza. An Israeli air strike targeted a
convoy, killing seventy-three Palestinians and
injuring 130 others as they attempted to move
south. Euro-Med Monitor condemned the
deliberate targeting of civilians being
forcibly displaced after
Israel’s orders to leave. It was an open
practice of forced transfer (transference)
outside international law and a “blatant
violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention.” NBC News reported the
airstrike on the convoy but failed to report
it as a war crime. A PBS news brief softened the
blow with a baseless speculation that it was
not clear “whether militants were among the
passengers.”
Just
as President Biden left for Israel, a bomb hit
the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza,
killing five hundred people, including
patients and doctors: a war crime. Israel
claimed that Hamas or Islamic Jihad was
responsible for the precision strike and huge
explosion. From the AP to
the New
York Times,
establishment media framed the story as a
dispute between Hamas and the IDF or as
an exchange
of air strikes between
them. Jonathan Cook called it
Western propaganda, saying, “If Hamas or
Islamic Jihad could cause the kind of damage
that happened last night, you would hear about
it happening in Tel Aviv or Ashkelon too. You
don’t, because they can’t.” Caitlin
Johnstone included the
text of a phone conversation presented by
Israel and also argued the unlikely veracity
of the evidence. Using altered or invented
audio and video, Israel has succeeded in the
past in delaying and planting doubt about
their role in such violence, at least long
enough to allow the story to do its damage.
For example, an altered video was used to
“prove” that an Israeli sniper did not
assassinate Al Jazeera journalist Shireen
Abu Akleh or
the unprovoked Israeli violence perpetrated at
her funeral. It took time for the dozens of
investigations to counter the gaslighting, and
the delay facilitated President Biden’s
failure to hold the Israeli military
accountable. For the time being, once again,
the denial allowed Biden to re-confirm US
support for Israel, this time allowing Israel
to carry on with the massacre of Palestinians
in Gaza.
Choosing
Humanity Over Killing and Destruction
While
condemning the Hamas attacks as a crime
against humanity, the Center for
Constitutional Rights also stated,
“It is our commitment to human dignity and the
preciousness of life that has long led our
organization to stand with Palestinians as
they resist Israeli colonization, occupation,
and apartheid.” The Center’s statement
expressed grief for “the many Israeli
civilians killed in the assault on their
communities on October 7,” while also decrying
“Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, which is in
danger of becoming a genocide.”
Common
Dreams reported on
protests calling for a ceasefire and an end to
the genocide in Gaza, organized by IfNotNow
and Jewish
Voice for Peace.
IfNotNow has stated, “We absolutely condemn
the killing of innocent civilians and mourn
the loss of Palestinian and Israeli life, with
numbers rising by the minute. Their blood is
on the hands of the Israeli government, the US
government which funds and excuses their
recklessness, and every international leader
who continues to turn a blind eye to decades
of Palestinian oppression, endangering both
Palestinians and Israelis.”
US
establishment media should consider
these
humanitarian narratives, in
contrast
to their standard militarized
revenge
frames, which only fan the
flames
of genocide that imperil the
Palestinian
people.
