Our Wednesday News Analysis | Israel kills the journalists. Western media kills the truth of genocide in Gaza

Children who were injured during an Israeli attack in the Jabalia refugee camp await treatment at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on 21 October 2024 (AFP)

"The world is indeed turned upside down,

and the West’s supposedly "free media”
is critical in making our upside-down world seem normal.

That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide.

Instead, western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers.

Their job: to take dictation from Israel."

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.

They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with "Hamas claims" or "Gaza family members allege." Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, and detached.

Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.

For a year, the global networks’ 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.

That is why western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on 7 October 2023, as intensely as they have a year of daily horrors in Gaza – in what the World Court has judged to be a "plausible" genocide by Israel.

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

Read more: Israel kills the journalists. Western media kills the truth of genocide in Gaza

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ANALYSIS | GAZA IS THE HORROR THAT CAN'T BE DENIED. BUT ISRAELIS WILL TRY

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-10-27/ty-article/.premium/gaza-is-the-horror-that-cant-be-denied-but-israelis-will-try/00000192-cf22-d4a2-ab97-cf2fe1640000

By Dahlia Scheindlin
Published October 27, 2024

Headlines have shifted to Iran, but Israel is still starving, bombing and expelling the population of northern Gaza. While Israeli society as a whole has activated its denial mode, the horrifying images – and the policy, statements and reality behind them – are causing some Israelis to protest war crimes, or even utter the word genocide

Palestinians praying over bodies of relatives, killed in an overnight Israeli airstrike, in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip, on Sunday.Credit: AFP

"Earlier this month, a group of Israelis wrote an open letter calling on the countries of the world to pressure Israel with all possible sanctions because "we are horrified by the countless war crimes that Israel is committing …

the constant massacres and destruction must be stopped immediately!"

…

They observed the accumulation of evidence of war crimes, starvation, expulsion, and the "Israeli media obfuscation of the atrocities.”

They closed with a plea: "The blood of the children, women, youth, and the elderly of Gaza, who are not Hamas members, will haunt us for generations.

We call upon the government of Israel and the IDF:
DO NOT COMMIT WAR CRIMES.”

(Disclosure: I have signed this letter.)"

Trigger warning – and be grateful for it, because I didn't have one last week when a photo of a girl with half a head appeared on my feed one morning. Her fuzzy pink wrap was almost indistinguishable from the part once inside her head, now splayed out around her body. Her face, however, was mostly preserved, her frozen eyes half-closed and yet gazing back at me.

No matter how much photographic, eyewitness, and real-time documentation we see, the battle over the truth rages in full force. And nothing inflames the debate more than the word "genocide."

For Palestinians, genocide is a descriptive fact – anything else is a lie. For international courts, it is a legal convention, the International Court of Justice is deliberating South Africa's charges, according to a high bar of evidence, while ruling that Palestinians have a plausible right to be protected under that convention. For many Israelis, the word is an antisemitic plot and a lie.

Israel's government already flatly denies lesser charges – war crimes, ethnic cleansing, a second Nakba. But the worse things get in northern Gaza, the more Israeli society activates its long-term modes of denial...

Read more: Analysis | Gaza Is the Horror That Can't Be Denied. But Israelis Will Try

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OPINION | RESISTANCE IS A JUST STRUGGLE

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-11-03/ty-article-opinion/.premium/resistance-is-a-just-struggle/00000192-ee0c-d3da-a5b7-ff1ea6fa0000

By Gideon Levy
Published November 3, 2024

A Palestinian boy carries a national flag during the funeral procession of four militants, in the West Bank, in October.Credit: John Wessels/ AFP

Israel has never had a government that is not a government of Jewish supremacy because it has never had a government that is not Zionist.

The decades-long battle for Palestinian freedom is among the most just struggles in the world today. The means that some of them employ are among the most heinous.

The means that Israel employs against them are equally and sometimes even more heinous, certainly in quantitative terms.

The Palestinians use abhorrent terrorism as a means to a just end and, in the case of Hezbollah and Hamas, also towards ends that are manifestly unjust; those of religious fundamentalism. Terrorism is a weapon of the weak and desperate, which does not necessarily give it legitimacy.

Israel uses its formidable military power to suppress their rights and their resistance. The fact that it does this by means of an army, not a terrorist organization, does not make its actions legitimate. Most of its actions in the past year were not legitimate.

Recent remarks by Haaretz's publisher, Amos Schocken, entered this picture – which in my view is clear and not at all complex – and set off a storm. His subsequent clarification, stating that Hamas does not belong to the category of freedom fighters, should have calmed the storm. But there are those who seek to heighten it.

There are those who seek to take revenge on Haaretz and want to see it shut down. The last established media outlet reporting the whole truth, especially over the past year, irritates many, and now they have an opportunity to retaliate.

But the criticism of Schocken's statement crossed ideological lines. Among the right, which would like to see a state with one TV channel and one newspaper under close supervision, there are also many in the opposing camp who were upset by the term "Palestinian freedom fighters." That's where the debate should be...

Read more: Opinion | Resistance Is a Just Struggle