Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, wisely wrote in 1789: “Whenever the people are well informed, they may be trusted with their own government.”
Unfortunately, today’s media mind managers have forgotten that. The public’s right to know the truth about Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, enabled, financed and serviced by the United States, has been subordinated to currying the favor of special interest groups and moneyed interests.
Tranquilized by its intimate relationship to the national security state, the establishment media have been willing to propagate the pro-Israel views of the White House, State Department, the Pentagon, and most, if not all, members of the American political class.
British novelist, George Orwell, in a passage from his prophetic novel, 1984, aptly described the relationship that has evolved between the media and Israel; he wrote: “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
There is a tendency among journalists to believe in their individual autonomy, although most work in large, hierarchical, corporate media organizations. Many have convinced themselves that they are engaged in watchdog journalism, when they are, in fact, acting as stenographers for the powerful.
In the case of Israel, they quickly learn compliancy, what can and cannot be said to protect careers. While pro-Israel reporting and editorializing are rewarded, exact narratives and historical perspectives suffer repercussions.
Censors have become unnecessary because an ideological self-censorship has formed and congealed. Many journalists can recall instances when they were told not to antagonize powerful interests and advertisers, and can name principled journalists, like the late Helen Thomas and John Pilger, who were banished for saying the “unacceptable.”
Years of unexamined logic, unrevealed truths and self-deception in the coverage of Palestine-Israel and America’s defense of the Zionist colony have contributed to a labored understanding of7 October 2023 and its aftermath.
It was apparent soon after the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas’s insurrection that only Israel’s story would be told. It has never been put into the context of Israeli terror against the Palestinians for over seven decades. In addition, the media have yet to explicitly state that international law (Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949) affirms the right of national liberation movements, like Hamas, to resist—to use force against military occupation and colonization.
Astonishingly, fifteen months into the genocide, Israel’s war on an imprisoned stateless people under occupation continues to be characterized as “defensive.”
That it has been a U.S.-sponsored war against all Palestinians has been shamelessly withheld.
Israel has banned foreign journalists from Gaza. Consequently, it has fallen upon Palestinian journalists to tell of the horrors that Israel has inflicted on them, and it has been they who have paid a heavy price.
Since the beginning of the insurrection (October 2023-December 2024), Israel has killed 222 journalists and media personnel in Gaza. That is a war crime. Article 79 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, plainly states that all journalists, “engaged in dangerous professional missions in zones of armed conflict shall be considered civilians…[and] shall be protected.”
There are an estimated 85,000 news and editorial personnel in the profession in the United States. Although some have raised alarms over Israel’s targeting of reporters, persistent calls for fair coverage have gone essentially unheeded.
In November 2023, for example, 1,484 journalists signed a letter to leaders in Western newsrooms condemning the killing of reporters and their family members. They also encouraged newsroom editors to be “clear-eyed in coverage of Israel’s repeated atrocities against Palestinians.”
An earlier attempt was made in June 2021. Then, 514 journalists signed an open letter stating: “For the sake of our readers and viewers—and the truth—we have a duty to change course immediately and end this decades-long journalistic malpractice. The evidence of Israel’s systematic oppression of Palestinians is overwhelming and must no longer be sanitized.”
The continuing erosion of press freedom and independence are reflected in the Reporters Without Borders 2024 World Press Freedom Index. It ranked the United States 55 out of 180 countries indexed.
Editorial intimidation has not stopped some reporters from trying to end the whitewashing of Israel. In November and December 2024, for example, journalists at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) endeavored to expose the blatant pro-Israel bias that dominates its reporting.
BBC staffers stated that coverage consistently devalued Palestinian lives, ignored Israeli atrocities, and created a false equivalence between Israel and Hamas. They also called for an end to the practice of presenting Israel’s version of events as facts, and requested that more be done to provide regular historical context about Israel’s apartheid occupation that predates October 2023.
Journalists at CNN have, also, expressed frustrations over systematic and institutionalized bias toward Israel and the silencing of Palestinian perspectives in their newsrooms.
Written language is the craft of journalists and journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Israel, it has been distorted in order to normalize the abnormal, make the apocryphal real and the fraudulent legal. The culture of silence on Gaza, has made genocide—the most severe crime against humanity—the “accepted” backdrop of daily life.
The corporate media has abused language to sell the public on the idea that the genocide of Palestinians will somehow make Israel secure. I bristle each time I hear the word “war” or “conflict” repeatedly used to describe the horrors Israel has inflicted on Gazans.
Responding to an Israeli airstrike on 21 December 2024 that killed 25 Palestinians in Jabalia, including 12 members of one family, seven of them children, Pope Francis did not equivocate: “Yesterday children were bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war.”
Merriam-Webster tells us that war is “a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations.” Clearly, the Gaza Strip is not a state; it is illegally occupied land whose inhabitants have been under occupation and siege since 2007. What’s more, war implies a battle between equals or near-equals. The asymmetry in power between Israel and Hamas continues to be unreported.
Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These acts include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
Israel has committed the first four of the five acts. It has yet to transfer children out of the group. However, its imprisonment of 650 children from the occupied West Bank since October 2023, often for prolonged periods of time, could be understood as removal—separation from their communities.
Limited coverage has been given, if at all, to the number of human rights organizations that have meticulously documented and called Israel’s atrocities genocide—Amnesty International (5 December 2024); Human Rights Watch (19 December 2024); UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices (11 November 2024); UN Special Rapporteur Report (March 2024); and the International Court of Justice, “plausible genocide in Gaza” opinion (26 January 2024).
The Geneva Conventions criminalizes genocide and those complicit in it. False media narratives and omissions are part of that complicity.
That complicity, for example, was exhibited recently when the New York Times (8 January 2025) rejected an American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) paid ad that urged Americans to: “Tell Congress to stop arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza now!” The Times refused to print the ad unless the organization agreed to swap the word “genocide” for “war;” which they refused to do.
The use of passive phrasing is another way the public has been conned into believing that Israel has been the victim rather than the aggressor. Ambiguous headlines and statements, as well as omissions, have obscured the reality of the perpetrator. Doubt is cast, for example, on Israel’s culpability with passive language such as “father loses family in an airstrike,” instead of reporting that American-supplied bombs killed his family.
When Israel massacres starving women and children, blows up hospitals, kills, arrests and tortures doctors, carpet bombs Palestinians in a crowded tent camp in Rafah and opens fire on hungry Gazans desperate for food (Flour Massacre), its version of the atrocities go unquestioned.
Most of the structures in Gaza have been leveled or destroyed. Yet the media continues to parrot Israel’s claims that Hamas fighters are hiding in residential areas (that clearly no longer exist) or that they are targeting “terrorist” strongholds.
In addition, there has also been no shortage of deceptive newspeak language surrounding countries and organizations that have demanded an end to the carnage. Forces opposed to the genocide—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and the Islamic Republic of Iran—are portrayed as villains, aggressors and terrorists. However, the United States—funder of the genocide—is depicted as a neutral mediator.
Little attention has been given to Israel’s true scheme which is currently unfolding in the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Syria to reshape the Middle East. Under the subterfuge of security, Israel has taken and plans to hold water-rich areas in the southern areas of Syria and Lebanon, as well as the natural gas off Gaza’s coast; land it has always eyed and coveted for its Zionist dream of a “Greater Israel.”
For the better part of the last century, Zionism has been the most destructive force in the history of Palestine, the region and for international stability. Yet, it has seldom been accorded serious attention by media commentators and members of the U.S. political class. When members of the political class “trespass” to tell the Palestinian story or use unscripted terminology, they are met with the wrath of the corporate media. Such was the case when the late President Jimmy Carter published his 2006 book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.
History reveals that it has been dangerous and costly to keep the people uninformed. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Gaza are potent and lethal reminders. As gatekeepers of the news, your “first rough draft of history” on Gaza and the Middle East has been fictional. The last chapter, however, has yet to be written.
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