“Journalists” - Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank
[First Published: December, 2023]
After October 7th, we saw countless people fully take in the atrocities committed by Hamas, and basically come out to say, “Oh, the Jews deserved it.” There is nothing really to be done about that demographic. Like other elements of the worst human behavior—rape, burglary, domestic violence—anti-Semitic speech too needs to be policed, and the events post-October 7th should remind the world why that is necessary.
However, what was really surprising is the support of intelligent people for the same “Pro-Palestinian” movement. The Middle East Journalism phenomenon is a reason for that.
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“What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel”
In 2014, a rare event occurred: a few months after Israel’s war with Gaza, a former AP journalist came out disclosing various biases that exist inside media coverage of Israel.
In the piece, a former reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press talked about a few facts that make Israel coverage different from anything that the Western World is commonly used to.
The article discusses the disproportionate media attention devoted to the Israel-Palestine conflict relative to other stories. It mentions that the Western press has become less an observer and more of an actor in the conflict. The article also highlights the lack of coverage of international NGOs, which are among the most powerful actors in the Israel story. It points out that the news tells us far less about Israel than about the people writing the news, emphasizing the role of journalists and their social milieu in shaping the coverage.
Some excerpts:
Hamas understood that journalists would not only accept as fact the Hamas-reported civilian death toll—relayed through the UN or through something called the “Gaza Health Ministry,” an office controlled by Hamas—but would make those numbers the center of coverage;
The construction of 100 apartments in a Jewish settlement is always news; the smuggling of 100 rockets into Gaza by Hamas is, with rare exceptions, never is;
The Islamic Resistance Movement has come to understand that many reporters are committed to a narrative wherein Israelis are oppressors and Palestinians passive victims with reasonable goals, and are uninterested in contradictory information.
Most consumers of the Israel story don’t understand how the story is manufactured. Hamas does.
The current spokesman at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, is a former BBC man.
A Palestinian woman who participated in protests against Israel and tweeted furiously about Israel a few years ago served at the same time as a spokesperson for a UN office.
Making of the Headline
Most notable recent form of misinformation came from the New York Times, which was quickly picked up by other media such as BBC, who, without first confirming with non-Hamas sources, distributed the statements accusing Israel of bombing a Gaza Hospital, causing a worldwide upheaval with millions coming out against Israel in Turkey alone.
What caused an overnight uprising against Israel, subsequently, was proven to be a failed rocket launch from one of the Gazas militant groups (a very frequent, but rarely reported, event). The quoted death of 500 people too was proven wrong. The rocket hit a parking lot and had barely any visible impact on the hospital. But the broader narrative stayed. And no coverage ever happened about Hamas’ very real repeated bombing of a hospital in Ashkelon, an Israeli city located north of Gaza.
One Los Angeles Times “reporter” spent days lecturing anyone who will listen that they can’t report on decapitated babies without seeing the bodies. Burden was on Israel, who was attacked, to prove their existence. But Hamas claimed Israel attacked the hospital, so this said reporter declared that the burden is on Israel 🤷♂️:
Reactions of other “expert” influencers followed largely the same logic:
With few exceptions, the only western media source that correctly assigned blame where it was due is the New York Post:
Unfortunately this hospital “blood libel” story did not happen in isolation. It has been 20+ years in the making.
This hospital “blood libel” story did not happen in isolation. It has been 20+ years in the making.
Consider, for example, NYT front page on October 8th - before any Israeli retaliatory response. NYT is using passive language to hide which side exactly caused 1,100 dead.
Another example is from April, 2022. One April night a Palestinian terrorist opened fire at people sitting at a Tel Aviv bar, ultimately killing 3 young men. Israeli forces found the terrorist and killed him. Over the next 48 hours, every western news organization covered the incident with versions of the following:
“Palestinian man was killed by IDF in Tel Aviv”
“Several Israelis and one Palestinian man die in the exchange of fire”
To the unfamiliar eye, everything might seem fine until one picks up on a pattern: Palestinian perpetrators are rarely called out, and Israelis appear to be dying from their own hands.
In preparation for graduate school, GRE—the test students in the US and Canada take in preparation for college—teaches to avoid passive language - as it is not precise. This lesson Journalists are quick to omit when handling stories that have the potential to make Israel sound like a victim. The pattern is not in error, but by intentional omission.
The pattern is not in error, but by intentional omission.
Then there is another form of bias: the two sides are equal perpetrators. When Hamas’ close relative, Hezbollah, launched a massive barrage of rockets from Lebanon towards northern Israel, which ultimately led to a displacement of tens of thousands of Israelis from Norther Israel communities, here too AP chose to simply state that both sides “trade[d] heavy cross-border fire" as if Hezbollah terror attacks are morally equivalent to Israeli countermeasures.
Does Israel’s IDF kill Journalists?
One other recent blood libel coming out of Gaza is that IDF kills journalists. This rumor actually started circulating since the start of the war, when the pro-Palestinian crowd got upset that their beloved twitter journalist, Refaat in Gaza, was eliminated as part of an IDF strike. Putting aside for a moment the circumstances of the strike, Refaat was far from a neutral bystander:
Such examples of clear pro-Hamas “journalism” are so widespread that Associated Press, in a rare event of self-censorship, sidelined one of its reporters after his social media history revealed a history of attacks on Israel, including likening it to the Nazi regime (foxnews).
However, many on-the-ground journalists have now been debunked as Hamas affiliated (“affiliated” - not just pro-Palestinian).
There is, for example, the case of UNRWA teacher/admin, Abdallah Mehjez, who urged Gaza civilians NOT to leave harm's way, and instead to serve as human shields. Before UNRWA, this terrorism promoter worked for the BBC (source).
And then there are the Reuters, AP journalists who witnessed themselves Hamas lynchings / kidnappings on October 7th and urged Gaza civilians to join in (source).
Yet another example is that of Al Jazeera-own, Hamza al-Dadouh, a member of Islamic Jihad's electronic engineering unit (think bombs and drones).
Altogether, among the said 100 journalists who have been killed in Gaza, all appear to have had little to do with “journalism” and everything to do with either Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Almost all of them celebrated the murder of Jews (report) - the least violent offense of which seems to have been the fact that journalists and freelancers directly on payroll by New York Times, CNN, Reuters, AP were the ones to take those high quality pictures of October 7th massacre - placing those very “journalists from Gaza” illegally on the territory of Israel during the very act of terrorism (politico), and begging the question of how much they knew about the events-to-take-place ahead of time.
Instead of acknowledging that vast amount of non-IDF media coming from Gaza is largely from Hamas (or ISIS) affiliates, the western media, has continued to insist that independent journalism in Gaza comes only through the IDF censors.
What is the standard for scrutiny?
Despite all the mentioned factors, critics will remain undeterred. They will point out the evident bias in the media against Israel as an even stronger justification for the IDF's retaliation against journalists who are perceived as "innocent."
If journalists were so antagonistic, wouldn't Israelis feel compelled to retaliate against them? Setting aside the fact that they might not be actual journalists, let’s examine a real journalist's situation when the IDF is accused of causing her death.
In 2022, Shireen Abu Aqla was killed while covering an active shootout between West Bank terrorist operatives and IDF.
Putting aside for a minute that she was in the live shootout situation—in which a journalist is presumed to take personal risks—multiple investigations launched from both the United States and internal investigative arm of IDF. Multiple stakeholders examined physical samples and ultimately concluded that no evidence was found of IDF’s involvement. Still IDF went above and beyond and apologized publicly for the death to have taken place—never mind that it was a 50/50 chance she could have been killed by one of West Bank terrorists.
Here, perhaps it is worth examining similar situations with other journalists who have died during other recent wars. Like the many journalists who have been killed recently in Ukraine. Or the countless journalists who were killed during the Iraq war. What were the investigations like around those journalists?
Do you remember any? No! Yep, that’s the whole point!
In most conflicts, the parties actually know who killed those journalists. Yet no one ever talks about it. In the case of Israel, however, standards change.
So perhaps before accusing Israel of killing Journalists, we ought to ask ourselves, is the world applying the same level of scrutiny to Israel as it would to any other conflict around the world.
So far, the answer seems to be a clear NO.