{"id":278201,"date":"2024-10-28T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2024-10-28T12:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=278201"},"modified":"2024-10-27T05:14:09","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T05:14:09","slug":"israel-kills-the-journalists-western-media-kills-the-truth-of-genocide-in-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/10\/israel-kills-the-journalists-western-media-kills-the-truth-of-genocide-in-gaza\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel Kills the Journalists–Western Media Kills the Truth of Genocide in Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"

25 Oct 2024 – Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as \u2018self-defence\u2019 and opposition to it \u2018terrorism.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.<\/p>\n

They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity \u2013 if they covered them at all \u2013 with a \u201cHamas claims\u201d or \u201cGaza family members allege\u201d. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.<\/p>\n

Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.<\/p>\n

For a year, the networks\u2019 most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.<\/p>\n

That is why western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza \u2013 in what the World Court has judged to be a \u201cplausible\u201d genocide by Israel.<\/p>\n

That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis \u2013 civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive \u2013 as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.<\/p>\n

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That is why audiences have been subjected<\/a>\u00a0to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza\u2019s destruction as a \u201chumanitarian crisis\u201d rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.<\/p>\n

While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one<\/a> \u2013 in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.<\/p>\n

Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On Thursday night, it struck a residence<\/a> in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.<\/p>\n

In an indication of hiw deliberate and cynical Israel\u2019s actions are, it put its military\u2019s crosshairs on\u00a0six Al Jazeera reporters<\/a>\u00a0this week, smearing them as \u201cterrorists\u201d working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called \u201cGeneral\u2019s Plan<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a \u201cterrorist\u201d.<\/p>\n

These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide \u2013 from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.<\/p>\n

Sympathy for Israel<\/h3>\n

Perhaps the nadir of Israel\u2019s domestication of foreign journalists was reached this week in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed<\/a> that the network\u2019s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.<\/p>\n

In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable \u2013 but sadly was all too predictable \u2013 CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.<\/p>\n

Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained<\/a>, its interviews \u201cprovide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society\u201d.<\/p>\n

In its lengthy piece, titled \u201cHe got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him\u201d, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering.\u00a0Israeli soldiers are the real victims \u2013 even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.<\/p>\n

One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the \u201cvery, very difficult things\u201d he had seen and had to do in Gaza.<\/p>\n

What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli parliament that his unit\u2019s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.<\/p>\n

CNN reported: \u201cZaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n

Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there \u2013 because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their \u201cpsychological burden\u201d be the story.<\/p>\n

After a huge online backlash, CNN amended<\/a> an editor\u2019s note at the start of the article that originally read: \u201cThis story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, \u201ceverything squirts out\u201d.<\/p>\n

Banned from Gaza<\/h3>\n

Finally, a year into Israel\u2019s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.<\/p>\n

This week \u2013\u00a0in a move presumably designed,\u00a0as November\u2019s elections loom,\u00a0to ingratiate themselves\u00a0with voters angry at the party\u2019s complicity in genocide \u2013 dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote<\/a> to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists \u201cunimpeded access\u201d to the enclave.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t hold your breath.<\/p>\n

Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year \u2013 for a number of reasons.<\/p>\n

Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel\u2019s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2,000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.<\/p>\n

That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.<\/p>\n

Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.<\/p>\n

The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with \u201cthe terrorists\u201d or that they were being used as \u201chuman shields\u201d \u2013 the excuse Israel has rolled out<\/a> time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the \u201caction\u201d that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel\u2019s war crimes and its genocide.<\/p>\n

The media\u2019s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.<\/p>\n

In previous conflicts, western reporters have served<\/a> as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to the Hague.<\/p>\n

But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West\u2019s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.<\/p>\n

The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC\u2019s prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.<\/p>\n

After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel\u2019s door. They would implicate western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.<\/p>\n

The western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.<\/p>\n

Censoring Palestinians<\/h3>\n

Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations \u2013 including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian \u2013 are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.<\/p>\n

An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of the Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.<\/p>\n

Its editors recently censored<\/a> a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as \u201cthe holocaust of our times\u201d.<\/p>\n

Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland<\/a> made much during Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.<\/p>\n

That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.<\/p>\n

As staff who spoke to Novara noted, the Guardian\u2019s Sunday sister paper, the Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson<\/a> to smear as a \u201cblood libel\u201d any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.<\/p>\n

One veteran journalist there said: \u201cIs the Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.<\/p>\n

Other journalists report being under \u201csuffocating control\u201d from senior editors, and say this pressure exists \u201conly if you\u2019re publishing something critical of Israel\u201d.<\/p>\n

According to staff there, the word \u201cgenocide\u201d is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a \u201cplausible\u201d case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.<\/p>\n

Whistleblowing journalists<\/h3>\n