The past two years have seen a catastrophic failure by western journalists to report properly what amounts to an undoubted genocide in Gaza.
First, why would any journalist give Israel the benefit of the doubt in Gaza – as we have been doing – when it is the party keeping out reporters? The media’s working assumption must be that Israel has excluded us because it has plenty to hide.
*When one party, Israel, denies journalists the chance to report, our default responsibility is to adopt a posture of extreme scepticism towards its claims. *
Second, and just as self-evidently, this explanation arrogantly discounts the work of hundreds of Palestinian journalists who have risked their lives to show us precisely what is happening in Gaza. It is to view their contribution, even as they are being slaughtered by Israel in unprecedented numbers, as, at best, worthless and as, at worst, Hamas propaganda. It is to breathe life into Israel’s self-serving rationalisations for murdering our colleagues – and thereby sets a precedent that normalises the targeting of journalists in the future.
And third – and this is the issue I want to grapple with tonight – the presence of western journalists in Gaza would not have made any dramatic difference to the way the slaughter of Palestinians was presented. Audiences would still have received a sanitised version of the genocide. Failure is baked into western media coverage of Israel and Palestine. I know this firsthand from 20 years of reporting from the region.
Career suicide
In the book Publish It Not (1975), Michael Adams, the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent in the late 1960s, sets out his struggles to persuade the paper to believe his accounts of systematic Israeli brutality following its military occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. His editors, like the rest of the media, preferred to believe Israel’s claim that its occupation was “the most enlightened in history”.
When Adams tried to challenge that assumption, by reporting on Israel’s ethnic cleansing of three Palestinian villages under cover of the 1967 war – the villages were destroyed and would later become a green space for Israelis called Canada Park – he was pushed out of the paper. He recounts that his editor told him “he would never again publish anything I wrote about the Middle East.”
Then there was Donald Neff, Time magazine’s bureau chief in the 1970s. He was eased out after reporting in 1978 on Israeli soldiers savagely beating Palestinian children in Beit Jala, a West Bank community near Bethlehem. It was a very tame story by today’s standards
Neff’s bureau staff – all of them Israeli Jews – responded in open revolt to his story. Official Israeli sources refused to speak to him. The Israel lobby in the US began a public campaign against Neff and Time. His editors were unsupportive, and the story was ignored by other US media. Isolated and exhausted from the attacks, Neff left his post.
I only learnt of these distinguished reporters’ troubles some time after I had similar experiences covering the region as a freelance – something I did for 20 years.
Why so craven?
The big question is why. Here is an outline of the various pressures, some practical and others structural, that keep the western media so craven towards Israel.
Partisan reporters : Historically, most publications – especially US outlets – have put Jewish reporters in charge of their Jerusalem bureaux, based on the probably correct assumption that, given Israel’s tribal political ideology of Zionism, Jewish reporters will have better access to Israeli officials. Which, in turn, tells us that these papers are chiefly interested in what Israeli sources have to say, not what Palestinians say. In truth, western media aren’t watchdogs. They don’t challenge the existing power imbalance, they reproduce it.
Many years ago, a Jewish journalist friend based in Jerusalem wrote to me after I first made this point public, stating: “I can think of a dozen foreign bureau chiefs, responsible for covering both Israel and the Palestinians, who have served in the Israeli army, and another dozen who like [the New York Times’ then bureau chief Ethan] Bronner have kids in the Israeli army.”
Meanwhile, the BBC openly backs its Middle East online editor, Raffi Berg, even though its own whistleblowing staff have accused him of skewing the corporation’s coverage of Israel and Palestine. Berg has not been shy in admitting his own tribal affiliation to Israel. In an interview about his “insider” book on Israel’s spy agency Mossad, Berg states that “as a Jewish person and admirer of the state of Israel” he gets “goosebumps” of pride hearing about Mossad operations.
Berg has a framed letter from Benjamin Netanyahu and a photo of himself with the former Israeli ambassador to the UK hanging on his wall at home. He counts a former senior Mossad official as a close friend. And when the journalist Owen Jones wrote a piece revealing the near-revolt of BBC staff at Berg’s role, Berg’s first thought was to seek legal help from Mark Lewis, the former head of UK Lawyers for Israel, well-known for using lawfare as a way to bully and silence critics of Israel.
The above is not surprising.
The US media is always in full support of US foreign adventures. In effect a propaganda arm of the US government. Never questioning what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, claims of WMDs in Iraq, or claims of the Syrian government gas attack[1] or the proclaimed 22 years of progress of the Afghan War.
And for a nation very worried about Russian influence in the 2016 election is seemingly blind to Israel AIPAC influence.
AIPAC in particular targeted two Democratic members of the House: Representatives Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York, each known for their progressive reputations and for being among the first in Congress to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. AIPAC spent $20 million to back their primary election opponents Wesley Bell and George Latimer, respectively, successfully unseating Bush and Bowman.
When the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was first formed in the 1950s, its aim was to counter international backlash after Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in the village of Qibya, and ensure there was no disruption in US funding to Israel.
AIPAC’s methods are direct and it “supports any candidate for Congress […] who is pro-Israel, and targets and punishes […] any candidate that is critical of Israel”, said Walter Hixson, a retired distinguished professor of history and author.
That modus operandi has been in full view in the run-up to Tuesday’s elections in the US, with a recent report by The Intercept revealing that AIPAC has spent money on more than 80 per cent of all electoral races.
It seems it is open season in US election regardless if it is from allowed [Citizens vs FEC] US corporations or Israel.
The US has the best Congress & media money can buy.
[1]
the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff.