by Jonathan Cook, The Unz Review:
Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’
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 a “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, detached.
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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 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 October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater 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.
That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.
While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one – in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.
Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On Thursday night, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.
In an indication of hiw deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters this week, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.
Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.
These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide – from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.
Sympathy for Israel
Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached this week in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.
In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable – but sadly was all too predictable – CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.
Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.
In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims – even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.
One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.
What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.
