As the Israeli military relentlessly continues to launch bombing raids on the Gaza Strip, gravely injuring 1500 Palestinians, killing 212, of which 61 were children, Western media outlets report on the violence in a way that absolves Israel of its belligerence by portraying Hamas and the Palestinians as gruesome offenders.
Renowned media organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC News, and CNN have, under the deceitful veneer of “neutrality,” reported on the mounting Israeli violence in a way that places the heavily armed Israeli military on the same pedestal as the defenseless Palestinians brandishing mere pebbles in the face of a militarized, nuclear-armed apartheid regime.
Words and phrases such as “clash”, “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, “escalation in communal violence”, “complex heightened tensions”, and a plethora of similar euphemisms have been employed to perpetuate the myth of the “two sides”, and mitigate or conceal the terrorist motives of the state of Israel. In doing so, they catapult to the forefront of global headlines a picture in which the Palestinians are depicted as the provocative aggressors, the initiators of “violence”, and the Israelis as the helpless victims who have no choice but to “retaliate” in “self-defense.” An unsettling example of such ideologically loaded media language can be found in the BBC on a report published after the Israeli forces attacked unarmed worshippers in the Al-Aqsa mosque, firing stun grenades and tear gas during prayer on May 8th. The BBC reported, “Protesters hurled stones at the police at Damascus Gate in the Old City, and officers responded with stun grenades, rubber bullets and water cannon.” The language used here completely reverses the role of the two in the incident; the Palestinians are portrayed as the stone-hurling offenders while the Israeli officers are shown to be the the passive forces who only resorted to violence as a “response.”
Considering that Israeli terrorism is always framed to appear as a “response,” people often get the impression that Palestinians brought the atrocities on themselves, that their behavior somehow warranted Israeli aggression, that they wouldn’t have been attacked had they not resisted the terrorizing forces. This is gross recycling of the ancient colonial trope used by colonizers throughout history to justify their abominations against the colonized people. In the book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, authored by Caroline Elkins, Britain’s “murderous campaign” in colonial Kenya following the 1950s Mau Mau peasant uprising is described. In response to the uprising, the British established concentration camps for 1.5 million Kikuyu civilians and a brutal system of torture camps that may have claimed the lives of tens, perhaps hundreds of those who dared to rebel against the powers that had colonized their lands, culture, language, heritage, everything. In India, the Indian Occupation Forces systematically target Kashmiris who protest against the state terrorism. Extra-judicial killings, torture in custody, forced disappearances, and incarcerations are routinely carried out by the Indian forces to weed out any resistance that emerges in the region. All acts of violence committed by the occupying power are glossed over as actions of ‘self-defense’ against the native people vehemently resisting their colonization. In reality, colonizers cannot exercise a “right to self-defense” against those they have colonized. The UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 of 1982 recognizes “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”
Another misleading aspect of the Western media coverage of the Israeli apartheid is that the terms “Palestinians” and “Arabs” as well as “Jews” and “Israelis” are often used interchangeably. Not only does this misrepresent the apartheid as a religious conflict, which it is not, but also obscures the colonial dimensions since neither are the Palestinians identified as the colonized natives nor the Israeli forces as the illegally settled colonizer. By referring to Palestinians as “Arabs” and Israelis as “Jews”, the apartheid is contextualized with religion; readers might dismiss the situation as a mere “conflict” between two “rival” religious groups. This steals attention from the actual cause of violence in the region: Israeli settler-colonialism. Moreover, when Israelis are synonymized with “Jews” in these reports, it blurs the line between Zionism and Jewism and consequently threatens to promote anti-Semitic sentiments.
In a report published in The New York Times today, the vague headline, “Airstrikes and Protests Escalate as U.S. Steps Up Mediation,” decisively remains cryptic about who is launching the airstrikes upon whom, and this lack of clarity continues to propel the narrative that the current situation in Gaza is not illegitimate Israeli colonial expansion but a “complicated and nuanced conflict.”
Mainstream Western media remorselessly uses colonial and imperialist rhetoric to validate and justify Israel’s forced ethnic displacement of Palestinians and the illegal colonization of their land. Through language manipulation, censorship, and the use of inaccurate euphemisms, a false equivalence is established between the armed Israeli military and the defenseless Palestinians vulnerable in the face of these atrocities. The Israeli apartheid is inaccurately portrayed as a “conflict”, a “clash” between equals. As May 15th marked seventy-three years of the Nakba, the central issues which make peace elusive in the region, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, remain unmentioned in a plethora of Western news reports. In fact, the war crimes that Israel commits with impunity are grossly sanitized by these media organizations to assert Israel’s inapplicable right to “self-defense” and vindicate the Israeli apartheid.
Very well-written!