In 1945 civilians from the German village of Hurlach were marched into the midst of the horrors of newly liberated Kaufering 6, a sub-camp of Dachau. As they moved from the crisp spring air into the zone of stench and death and disease they protested that they did not know that this horror existed. Could it be true that people living in the midst of 11 such subcamps, 11 such sites of oppression and misery, did not understand what was happening to their fellow humans on their very doorstep? Could it be true of other Germans? The answer is that they knew enough to avoid knowing more, effectively giving consent to Nazi crimes by embracing ignorance. They turned their backs on those whose suffering should have made them weep and rage and take action. They were monsters, but they were human monsters, ordinary monsters.
We know that the protestations of innocence among ordinary Germans were hollow. Innocence is not knowing something, ignorance, on the other hand, comes from the word “ignore”. Ignorance is an act of will. But in our time are we not even closer, in our digital world, to the suffering of the Gaza Holocaust? The images of death, the sounds of pain and the voices of grief and fear penetrate our homes. We carry them in our pockets – we carry them in our pockets. It is likely that few of the people reading or hearing these words are among those that ignore this torrent of suffering, and many of us probably feel a duty to bear witness by enduring the sights and sounds and stories; knowing that the pain of doing so is but a distant muffled echo of the pain of those who must live these events in person. But we are not representative of our society. We are surrounded by those who embrace lies and hate, those who refuse to know, and those who understand that a wrong is being done, but who fail to take any real stand.
The people of Germany during World War II were not a different species than us and we are not immune from the same descent into inhumanity. Monsters are not born, they are made. They are made by a machine. Germany had a monster making machine, and we have our own.
The machine has many parts, but the mechanism at the centre is the news media industry. The more you look into their behaviour in reporting the Gaza Holocaust, the more horrifying their actions become. Their role in this regard is almost exclusively to promulgate callousness, ignorance, cowardice, confusion and spite. Not one day of the last 15 months has passed in which they have not radically and profoundly violated the journalistic standards and news values that are at the centre of their claims to professionalism.
It began with the shock of the attack on October 7th 2023. It was immediately obvious that the Israeli response was going to be far more deadly than the incursion into Israel. Few could have guessed the scale and the duration of the holocaust that was to come, but no reasonable person could not have known that thousands of innocent Palestinians were going to die. Did the media respond with the basic human duty to act to protect those innocents? They did not. They employed every iota of sensationalism and sentimentality they could, effectively whipping up fervour with no regard for what was about to be unleashed. Did the media feel that with the threat of mass death hanging over a people known to be trapped and defenceless it should at least practice strict vetting so as to not promulgate disinformation and misinformation? They did not. They allowed the Israeli government and dubious non-governmental organisations to spread lies – lies that many people believe to this day.
Many people believe that 40 babies were beheaded; many people believe that a baby was roasted alive; most people believe that there were mass rapes committed by Palestinians. Those lies are spread with the volume turned up to 11 and only a tiny minority of organs ever report when they are debunked – and they do so with far less fanfare. The New York Times published the malicious fabrications of “Screams Without Words” and received global coverage, while those who raised clear concerns that demanded answers were absent from the media. Israel’s prosecution service has just admitted that despite rigorous efforts they cannot yet find substantive evidence of a single instance of rape to build a case from. Not one single case where enough evidence exists to pursue a prosecution. That means that those who claimed to have proof of rape are liars. That means that those who claimed to have meaningful evidence of rape are liars. And that means that the news media who promulgated those claims as if they were all but proven are liars, liars, liars!
Nor do they have any compunction about keeping lies alive long after it is known to be a lie. When Joe Biden said “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” the follow up was more of a cover up. The White House “walk back” of the comments made absolutely no explanation of why they were said. No news media asked obvious questions about why the statement was made, including the most obvious question of whether this crucial leader responsible for the ongoing genocide was deliberately lying to promote slaughter or whether he himself had been deceived to that same end. Amidst an endless churn of media interest over Biden’s acuity and competence this explosive story was for some reason treated as a mere gaffe.
A similar mumbling silence descended on the worlds news reporters when Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister of Germany, claimed unambiguously to have seen a woman being raped “on camera”. The duty for journalists to expose the lies of high officials is clear and there could be no more urgent and grave circumstance than during a time of relentless daily slaughter. She lied blatantly and the purpose of the lie was to generate support for the killing of innocent people. Why was this not a massive story?
Meanwhile, all of the violence being inflicted on Palestinians is normalised, minimised and sanitised. “Lives lost when hospital struck” we are told. By whom? The passive voice has become so overused in headlines that it is like a sick joke and for some reason no matter how much ire it raises the habit remains, as if they are afraid that changing will just highlight how cruel and dehumanising the practice has been. Now attacks on hospitals don’t even make it into most news formats.
Imagine the drama of the stories coming out of Kamal Adwan hospital in its last days. Patients and medical staff dying in air strikes and sniper attacks even as they struggle to save the lives of those maimed in outside attacks. Think only of the story Mahmoud Abu Al-Eish, an injured 16 year-old boy who was in the foyer of the hospital, confined to a wheelchair while waiting for an x-ray, when quadcopters entered into the hospital shooting at will. He was killed along with another patient. There are pictures available of the dying boy as staff struggled to save his life. What could be more worthy of the so-called “news values” that are meant to shape editorial decisions? How could there be a more dramatic story than this high tech murder so reminiscent of dystopian science fiction? Most people in the West probably do not even know that there are small armed drones that literally hunt people down. Most people don’t even know that they hunt down and kill children, including small children. They hunt down and kill children, with reports suggesting that children are the most common victims of this form of violence.
There are so many stories that are too too moving, too novel, and too significant for any reasonable person to judge them unworthy of coverage, yet they remain unknown to most Western news consumers. Let me just focus on one small but important group of people: doctors. How many people know, for example, that the head of orthopaedics at Al-Shifa hospital, Dr Adnan al Bursh died in the notorious Sde Teiman detention centre of maltreatment? Testimonies about the circumstances of his death suggest that he died of internal injuries sustained through rape. This prominent man seems to have been raped to death and that is not judged to be particularly newsworthy.
The eyewitnesses who have travelled there and returned are almost absent from most coverage, including very prominent doctors. Where, one might ask, are the long prestigious mainstream interviews with people like Ghassan abu Sitta, or Mads Gilbert, or Nizam Mamode. The latter doctor is a professor of transplantation surgery who gained a little bit of coverage when he broke down giving testimony to a UK parliamentary committee. He said that after air strikes “The drones would come down and pick off civilians – children. We had description after description – this is not an occasional thing.” Mamode is certainly well-spoken and authoritative enough that you would think they would be clamouring to feature him in all forms of media, especially when you consider that he has made significant contributions to medical science and has appeared in the famous popular drama The Crown. Editors and producers should be hungry to profile and interview this doctor or others like him, but they are nowhere to be seen.
We can probably all think of stories we know that would shake our Western compatriots from their complacency – from statistics, to personal stories of loss, to statements of visceral hatred and criminal intent from Zionist leaders. Just a few such stories would serve to show most people that Israel’s actions are not merely tragic, excessive or insufficiently mindful of civilian suffering. The suffering they inflict is not incidental, it is part of their genocidal purpose, it is the armed conflict with the tattered remnants of some impoverished militias that is incidental – militias, by the way, whose only source of weaponry is now the unexploded ordinance used so profligately against their civilian compatriots.
Instead of manufacturing a false balance, the reporting should be relentless and one-sided because the events are relentless and one-sided. It is only at this late stage that our media are slowly moving away from framing each new day of massacres and hunger and cruel displacement with constant references to October 7 and hostages as if of Gaza’s population shared a collective guilt. This is a form of racism made to seem acceptable by making the false claim that Israel has some form of legal right to use military action as ‘self-defence’. The constant refrain that ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’, spouted ad nauseam by the likes of Piers Morgan, is the Big Lie of these times. It is a bad faith argument that falls apart once you admit that Palestinians have a right to self-defence and think through the consequences of that. But you never hear or read in mainstream analysis that Palestinians have a right to self-defence. Israel has the right to use legal avenues to seek the prosecution of individuals who committed crimes or ordered them to be committed; but the right to use military force in self-defence cannot be invoked in the case of ongoing aggression or occupation. In response to armed resistance Israel does not even have the right to use military force against armed groups outside of its internationally recognised territory, let alone inflict collective punishment, let alone commit genocide.
The media are fabricating excuses for Israel and creating false equivalence between murderer and victim. This is purely a response to power. They have internalised the need for fake balance so much that they avoid newsworthy stories that shatter that fragile construction. They evidently feel that they would fail if their hard news products do not leave room for confusion and ambivalence. Then they assuage their consciences by running colour pieces about the human cost, as if this were not the real story, as if the ground truth meant nothing in understanding the actual nature of events. A holocaust is occurring and only the most tiny amount of the violence has been in actual combat, yet these pathetic hacks call this orgy of genocide the “Israel-Hamas War”.
There are no two sides to this holocaust. There is no room for debate. There is truth and there is deceit. There should be no in-between, but in our age of post-truth politics, digital authoritarianism and focus-group-driven-fascism, the vast bulk of Western people live in a limbo of delirium, amnesia, emotional fatigue, and consumerist narcissism. That space is created by the monster making machine, with our news media at the centre.
The truth of what is happening in Gaza is available to our journalists in a flood, a deluge that keeps pouring out of that tiny territory with a force unlike anything the world has seen before. The most documented holocaust in history is everywhere and it takes a powerful act of will to avoid the truth. The worst thing of all is that in doing so the Western media are betraying the extraordinary work of their Palestinian colleagues. 203 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Abubakr Abed gave a recent speech pleading for solidarity and referring to journalists killed by being “immolated, incinerated, dismembered and disembowelled”.
I do not believe in heroes, but I struggle to find any other way of referring to the journalists of the Gaza Strip. Israel has excluded Western reporters, but there is no shortage of quality journalism coming out of the holocaust. There are things that are familiar to activists, but unfamiliar to the public such as the Flour Massacre, the Superbowl Massacre, the debunking of the lies about al-Shifa tunnels, the stories of starvation, the murder of people fleeing in “humanitarian corridors” or in “safe zones” and much else. These things we know largely because of the work of Palestinian journalists. They produce a surfeit of important stories. Therefore, as an editorial decision does it not behove Western media outlets to react to the banning of Western journalists by refusing to allow Israel’s blatant attempt to conceal the truth of its actions? Would it not make sense to say that if our journalists are not allowed to report we will use the large corps of journalists already there and soon Israel will see the futility of trying to prevent reporting and thus let our reporters in? That could have happened, but the Western world refuses to treat these professionals with the respect they deserve. In a recent interview award-winning correspondent Hind Hasan said that Arab journalists are treated as intrinsically “political”. To me this is a polite way of referring to despicable racism. Hasan mentions the killing of Shireen abu Akleh which was witnessed by five professional journalists. Five people who make a living from reporting on events witnessed the killing, but when it came to Western news media they were brushed aside in favour of Israeli hasbara-mongers whose profession is to push a predictably one-sided narrative with only a very tangential relationship to factuality.
Israel’s denials of wrongdoing are so predictable and so irrelevant to evidence of fact that it seems almost bizarre that they feature in our news at all. So often though, the news media insist on treating them as authoritative to the point where, as with the Abu Akleh killing, we are expected to accept their own self-exonerations. The implication is that as a Western power their institutions seek to ensure that their personnel act with legality. This is a racist lie. We don’t accept non-Western countries investigating their own war crimes as being authoritative. We should not accept it for any Western country and given Israeli citizen’s well-documented proven repeated unpunished criminal acts it is clearly a malicious practice to give any credence to their inevitable claims of innocence.
It is not merely the work of Palestinian journalists and witnesses that is given the right-of-hasbara-response treatment by our media. Third parties, regardless of how authoritative and disinterested, are treated as if they are partisans making their meticulously researched 400-page reports simply because they have beef with Israel and therefore Israel must be given equal space and time to deny the reports. It is not as if they ask Hamas their opinion on such reports, even though this slaughter is apparently the “Israel-Hamas War”.
Western media love Israeli hasbara to the point where self-evident information operations by intelligence organisations are amplified with wilful credulity by some and with malicious pro-genocide racism by others. Israel’s famous pager attack in Lebanon killed and maimed many civilians, especially healthcare workers. 300 people lost both eyes in the attack and 500 each lost one eye. Reports of children killed were available almost immediately as was shocking footage of civilians maimed in these attacks. The illegality was glaring. The attacks clearly violated the principle of distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets established in the Geneva Conventions. They are even more blatantly in violation of an additional protocol which states “It is prohibited to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed contain explosive material.” When this shocking crime occurred, though, there was an obvious simultaneous information operation to accompany it. The giveaway that makes this operation so evident was the immediate consensus around tone and themes. If you cast back your mind you may remember that within an hour of the first attacks there were many instances of the same puerile statement that thousands of Hizbullah terrorists had simultaneously had there testicles blown up. This childish sadism and triumphalism is frighteningly reminiscent of the way fascists and Nazis portrayed their early atrocities, yet it became the baseline emotion, and the angle from which the Western media approached the crime. Far from being the wary skeptics that journalists would like us to believe they are, they showed themselves to be easy marks whose culture of self-congratulation creates a herd of infantile sheep.
Now, with a ceasefire imminent Western news media and other institutional liberals are gearing up to rewrite history so that they were the voices opposing genocide all along. Amnesty International has already positioned itself as the superior voice because it waited for over a year before using the dreaded g-word, as if the case presented 10 months and thousands upon thousands of deaths earlier by South Africa at the ICJ was in any way inferior to their belated response. Those who abetted the genocide will now re-invent themselves as its greatest and most important opponents. We who stood against the lies of self-defence, we who called it genocide from the beginning, will be treated as the “premature antifascists” after World War II or the equally premature antiwar lefties of the 60s and anti-apartheid dissidents who were repressed for decades and then treated as irrelevant. The beauty of Western liberalism is that matter what horrid things you actually do, you can always claim to have been pulling in the other direction because of your innate and unquestionable “values” of equality, democracy, and happy Hollywood endings.
Now is also that rare moment when someone in my position is able to do something other than preaching to the choir, because a lot of you hearing or reading these words are going to be tempted by the post-ceasefire narratives of the resumption of normal service. They will lure you with the sense that belatedly the institutions of Western justice have started to move back into gear, enforcing norms and being a role model to lesser countries just as God and Voltaire intended.
However, this ceasefire will not be a ceasefire. It will bring much relief from the intensity of the current situation, but the people of Gaza will still be suffering under deprivation and continued violence. The genocide did not begin in 2023 and it will not end with a ceasefire. Worse still, history going right back to the opening of the First Intifada in 1987 has shown that each time Israel reaches a new watershed in the intensity of its violence it maintains a higher level subsequent level of normalised murder – banal slaughter that comes in dribs and drabs that (not coincidentally) is considered too regular and expected to be newsworthy. This has already been happening in the West Bank and East Jerusalem while attention is drawn away by the slaughter in Gaza. History also suggests that the next time there is an explosion of Israeli military force it could be of a similar magnitude to that unleashed in the Gaza Holocaust. This happened after the 2008-9 assault known as Cast Lead which established a clear pattern of behaviour. The more such violence becomes habitual, the less our news media deign to care about it.
Ceasefire notwithstanding, our activism must continue with as much dedication as ever. We are not fighting to end the current holocaust – perhaps that was never possible – but we must fight to stop the next. We have the greatest tool, the greatest weapon possible in that battle. We have truth. We have truths. Documented, demonstrable, incontrovertible truths that must be made into universal known verities. Things will change if we make it impossible for our political leaders, our academic leaders, and our news media to prevaricate. But be aware that the storyline will change next time, the scam will change. That is why it is crucial that we do not leave the self-defence lie unchallenged. That is why it is crucial that we do not allow them to imply that the genocide is ended with a ceasefire or is somehow only technically a genocide now that fewer people are being incinerated each week. Genocide is never acceptable regardless of the level of accompanying violence and it is not merely a legal fiction to call a slow genocide a genocide.
The more bitter truth that we must face, though, is that Israel has every reason to congratulate itself on its recent geopolitical victories in the region, including the massive immiseration of the people of Gaza. Undoing that immiseration is a monumental task. We have to work to abolish the genocide support systems that allow Israel to do this, and that means fixing our politics and fixing our media. We have to be resolute, we have to be meticulous, we cannot lose faith, and above all we have to support each other. We are not fighting to be winners, we are not fighting for victory over enemies, we are fighting for justice and peace. The struggle always continues.