Source: CNN - Palestinians grieve for their dead relatives outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on July 20. At least 73 people were killed and around 150 people injured by Israeli gunfire in Gaza while seeking aid that day - (Saher Alghorra/The New York Times/Redux)

This article was first published at When Life Comes Crashing In and is syndicated here with permission of the author

What Israel and its enablers are doing to the people of Gaza right now is so terrible I find it difficult to comprehend it’s actually happening. Every day I see reports coming in - via Palestinians I follow on X - of the horrors being endured there. The gnawing hunger, the relentless bombings, the maimed, dying and dead children, the constant displacements, the shootings at the GHF ‘aid’ sites, the mothers and fathers crying over the bodies of their sons and daughters, the ruined hospitals, the gaunt, hollow-eyed medical staff, the operations without anaesthesia, the wounded bleeding out on the floor. I see all of it and yet sometimes I still struggle to really believe it. How could something so horrifying be happening? And, even more incomprehensible, how could it be happening in full view of the whole world and yet no-one with any power is lifting a finger to do anything substantive about it?

It’s an evil so all-encompassing, so total, that if a novelist or a screenwriter came up with it prior to it happening in real life I’m pretty sure they would have been told it was too extreme - that the villains were just too villainous, the events were just too hellish. After all, you can’t reduce the world to a simple binary of good and evil - that’s simply not believable and it doesn’t make for good drama. There should be shades of grey even in our fictionalised worlds.

Believable or not, however, it is happening. Incomprehensible or not we have to somehow wrap our heads around it. But for those of us in the West it’s almost impossible to do this because we live in a narrative bubble where allies of the West (like Israel) are the ‘good guys’ and only our enemies (‘terrorists’ like Hamas and ‘barbarians’ like the Russians) do evil things; a bubble where ‘people like us’ are most often the heroes, occasionally the victims, but never the villains.

So how can we comprehend what’s going on in Gaza? How can we frame it? How can we understand it? How can we live with it? And how can we live with ourselves in the face of it?

Fear not fellow Westerners - this is where our legacy media organisations step in. They can help us comprehend the incomprehensible, understand the un-understandable and bear the unbearable. They can - with the magic of their words - render something which is, in actual fact, in starkest black and white, into multitudes of shades of grey. They can - with the carefulness of their framing - help us ‘understand’ how ‘morally complex’ the ‘situation’ in Gaza really is. They can inform us - with all the authority of their years of faithful service to journalistic ethics - that both sides bear the blame for the carnage and that one must be careful not to get ‘too emotional’ about something which takes many years and quite a few free junkets to Israel to fully understand¹.

Western media employ a myriad of methods to perform this helpful service, methods which are perhaps best summarised by the findings of a recent report by the Centre for Media Monitoring analysing the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ October 7 attack².

According to the CfMM report, the BBC has taken scrupulous care to run almost equal numbers of humanising victim profiles for Israelis (201) as they do for Palestinians (279). The BBC also gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality. I am presuming the BBC would argue that this approach helps maintain the ‘balance’ in coverage between Israeli and Palsestinian deaths because otherwise you’d always be talking about Palestinian deaths. Palestinians have been, after all, suffering (at the very least) 34 x more casualties than Israelis over the last 20 months. If the BBC were constantly talking about Palestinian deaths and hardly ever talking about Israeli deaths this would come across as ‘partial’ and the BBC could not appear ‘partial’ because that would run counter to the broadcaster’s slavish devotion to journalistic ethics.

The report also documents the care taken by the BBC not to over-use emotive terms when describing Palestinian deaths. The BBC used emotive terms four times more for Israeli victims and applied the word ‘massacre’ 18 times more and the word ‘murder’ 220 times more to Israeli casualties. Given the vast majority of Israeli casualties in this ‘war’ happened on one day in October 2023 that is quite a remarkable achievement. While on the face of it this approach may not appear particularly 'balanced’ the Canadian public broadcaster CBC - in a letter responding to a complainant - has provided a helpful explanation for why our Western broadcasters tend to use emotion-laden words more for Israeli deaths than for Palestinian deaths - and that is because “Israel carries out its killings “remotely” instead of face-to-face”.

This, as those of us who have not been relying purely on mainstream media sources know, is far, far from the truth but Western media’s unquestioning assumption that Israelis are inherently ‘moral’ and Palestinians are inherently evil - an assumption nurtured by Zionist lobby groups and their own imperialist, colonialist & deeply racist governments for decades prior to October 7 - renders them unable to conceive of the possibility that it could actually be Israel - ‘our’ Israel - that is the ‘murderous’ and ‘brutal’ participant in this ‘conflict’.

The CfMM report also documented how the BBC has scrupulously avoided mentioning genocide allegations against Israel. Again, I’m sure the BBC would argue that this is done in the interests of fairness and balance. After all, it might be seen as being ‘partial’ to accuse just one side of committing genocide so it is obviously best to keep all mention of the word to the barest of minimums.

The BBC has worked even harder to avoid mentioning the genocidal statements of Israeli leaders. Despite overwhelming number of such statements - there are entire archives devoted to documenting them - the BBC has mentioned them precisely zero times. This, as far as I can ascertain, would also seem to be the approach of most other Western media outlets. Of course the BBC would no doubt argue that if such genocidal statements were given any airtime Israeli leaders look worse than Hamas leaders. This would, once again, make the BBC look ‘partial’ because, as all good Westerners know, Hamas is the very incarnation of evil so Israel cannot possibly be as bad as them.

The report revealed that another way the BBC seeks to maintain ‘balance’ and avoid frightening the bewildered herd about this ‘complicated conflict’ is to interview less Palestinians than Israelis (1,085 Palestinians v 2,350 Israelis). On the face of it this seems a slightly strange way of maintaining balance but one has to factor in the difficulty of finding Palestinians who aren’t affiliated in some way - however tenuously - with Hamas. One must also take into account the difficulty of finding Palestinian guests - or guests who are allies of the Palestinians - who haven’t made at least one social media post accusing Israel of genocide or of using starvation as a weapon of war. Guests who are affiliated with or sympathetic to Hamas or guests who post ‘pro-Palestinian’ material on social media would upset the ‘balance’ being pursued by the BBC. You can’t have blatantly biased guests spouting terrorist-supporting rhetoric and accusing Israel of genocide on national TV as this would - again - open the BBC up to accusations of being ‘partial’.

I am presuming that similar concerns lie behind CfMM’s finding that BBC presenters share the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian perspective. Due to the fact that Israel is ‘our’ ally, and taking into account the incontrovertible truth that our allies are always the ‘good guys’, it is absolutely fair and balanced to provide Israel’s perspective more frequently than the Palestinian perspective - particularly when you bear in mind the terrible barbarity of October 7 - the slaughter, the torture, the rape, the burnings, and the multiple beheadings of innocent babies³.

Another defence the BBC might put forward for sharing the Israeli perspective more frequently is what is referred to in media theory as the concept of ‘proximity’. This was nicely elucidated in an ‘independent review’ commissioned by New Zealand’s public broadcaster Radio New Zealand to deal with complaints over its Gaza coverage. The author of this review, one Colin Feslier (a former RNZ editorial policy manager and a government spin doctor), pointed out that it is perfectly fine for RNZ to preference Israeli perspectives over Palestinian perspectives because

Israel, as a result of tourism, trade, ‘western’ alignment and language (with English a common first and second language there) have [sic] a greater ‘news proximity’ to New Zealand than do Palestinians and Palestine. Stories may be chosen for these reasons and the inevitable result is a stronger perception of news relevance of Israeli stories. Coverage of stories with a Palestinian angle will tend to be less often reported.

As independent New Zealand journalist Mick Hall points out, Feslier

doesn’t condemn this approach in determining what news is relevant and what voices salient. Instead, he treats it in a value-neutral way, suggesting it simply reflects the utilitarian nature of news selection. He ambiguously cautions this should simply be “taken into consideration” when thinking about balance in Palestine-Israel news coverage.

As Hall further notes,

In framing the issue this way, he effectively offers ideological cover for Western cultural, structural and institutional bias in RNZ news output.

I’m sure all of those concerned about ‘balance’ and ‘bias’ in Western news media’s coverage of Gaza feel a lot better after reading that!

Finally, the CfMM report showed that only 0.5% of articles on the BBC website mentioned the context for the 7 October attack - that Israel had been illegally occupying the Palestinian territories for decades and blockading and regularly bombing Gaza for nearly 20 years. Again, I’m presuming the BBC would argue that this is due to the fact that mentioning context runs the risk of looking suspiciously like trying to make excuses for Hamas’ beyond barbaric slaughter, torture, rape, burnings, playing football with breasts, inserting nails in vaginas, and multiple beheadings and also the unconscionable act of throwing innocent babies into ovens and baking them on October 7, 2023.

Forgive me for resorting to sarcasm in discussing our media’s many and varied ways of preventing the multitudes who consume their ‘journalism’ from realising that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide, but sometimes sarcasm is the only way of driving home the blatancy of our media’s pro-Israel bias and the discursive contortions required to continue to deny that bias. On a selfish and purely personal note, sarcasm also helps release at least some of my anger at these institutions - institutions which are deliberately attempting to hide not only a crime against humanity of gargantuan proportions but also the complicity of their own governments in that crime. And lest we forget, these are the very same governments currently posturing on the world stage as arbiters of international morality and beacons of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’.

All the excuses offered up by our media about ‘balance’ and not wanting to appear ‘partial’ are, of course, purest BS. Western media outlets are perfectly happy to be ‘partial’ when it comes to reporting on Russia’s war with Ukraine. They have no concerns about seeming ‘partial’ or ‘emotional’ or by being seen as only prioritising the Ukrainian side in that war which is, by the way, actually a war, as opposed to what’s happening in Gaza which is not.

They’re also perfectly happy to be ‘partial’ when they’re reporting on the experiences of Israelis during and since October 7, 2023. As Jonathan Cooke notes, the BBC aired a documentary last year called Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again (still available to view on the BBC website) which featured eyewitness testimony from Israelis who had been at the Nova music festival on October 7, where hundreds were killed during the October 7 attack.

Cooke asks:

Did the BBC insist that the backgrounds of the Israelis interviewed were checked and disclosed to the audience as part of the broadcast? Were viewers told whether festival goers had served in the Israeli military, which for decades has been enforcing an illegal occupation and a system of apartheid over Palestinians, according to a ruling last year by the world’s highest court?⁴
And what would it have indicated to audiences had the BBC included such contextual information about its Israeli eyewitnesses? That their testimonies had less validity? That they could not be trusted?

The upshot of all these media tactics is to to pull a curtain over what’s happening in Gaza and wider Palestine - one of those heavy sheers that people put up on their bedroom windows so anyone looking in can see no more than shapes and shadows. It’s not that our media aren’t reporting on Gaza - they are - but it is how they are reporting it that blows smoke in our eyes. Even when they’re telling us about the most egregious Israeli war crimes - and they do report on at least some of them - almost every news story over the last nearly 2 years has managed to side-step the terrible reality of what these crimes really mean for those living and dying there. Reports about Gaza have been sanitised and both-sidesed to such a degree that it is difficult for those reading or watching them to truly grasp the absolute visceral horror of the dystopian hell that Israel has created.

If you try both-sides a conflict where one side has state-of-the-art weaponry, a limitless ‘defence’ budget (courtesy of its sugar daddy the United States and its allies), complete impunity to commit any crime no matter how egregious (again courtesy of the United States and its allies) and an openly admitted aim of clearing Gaza of the Palestinians and the other side has homemade weaponry and is being bombed, starved, besieged, imprisoned, tortured and, in some cases, raped to death then you’re going to end up with exactly what we’ve currently got - an eviscerated, anaemic, he-said-she-said, ‘humanitarian crisis’, bombs falling from the clear blue sky with no perpetrator in sight, 20 dead in Beit Hanoun for no reason, another 40 mysteriously dropping dead in Rafah, Israel says, Hamas-run health ministry says, Israel denies, Hamas uses ‘human shields’, Israel says more and everyone believes it even though it’s been lying through it’s teeth for the last 80-odd years and counting.

And while our media may deny it, it is impossible not to conclude at this point that this ‘balanced’, ‘neutral’ coverage is being done purposely - to confuse, befuddle and, perhaps most importantly, bore Western audiences into a haze of god-knows-whats-going-on-over-there-why-are-they-always-fighting in order to ensure a critical mass of people don’t start asking awkward questions about Israeli war crimes and Western complicity in those crimes.

Recently, however - primarily due to Israel’s barbaric strategy of using starvation as a weapon of ‘war’ - the horrors in Gaza have become so gruesome, so obvious, so undeniable, that even our media are struggling to provide the necessary window dressing to render them palatable to Western populations. And that is where our politicians step in; the men and women we have elected as our ‘representatives’.

The task of these ‘representatives’ at such moments is to clutch their pearls over the horrors they ask us to believe they are only just now becoming aware of and to make Very Serious Statements expressing their ‘deep concern’ and their earnest desire to see the end of this terrible ‘humanitarian catastrophe’. Such statements are calibrated to lull the population into the entirely false belief that these leaders are actually going to do something about this ‘catastrophe. Such statements, in other words, let all those who are starting to feel just a little bit uneasy about this ‘conflict’ go back to minding their own business safe in the knowledge our leaders have the situation in hand.

A number of these pronouncements have been released over the last week or so by Western politicians including the former human rights lawyer Sir Keir Starmer, now Prime Minister of theUnited Kingdom, and one of the United States’ most craven vassals.

Note how Sir Keir is careful to make sure that he doesn’t attribute the ‘suffering and the starvation’ in Gaza to Israel, or to anyone at all, despite it being ‘unspeakable’ and ‘indefensible’. He ends his first paragraph by noting that we are witnessing a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’.

I’ve already discussed in a previous article how phrases like ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ do a lot of heavy lifting for Israel and its Western media and political enablers, leaving people with a vague sense that whatever those in Gaza are going through it can’t really be blamed on anyone in particular - especially not Israel or any of its allies.

Starmer then mentions he is meeting with E3 countries to discuss how to ‘urgently stop the killing’ and ‘get people the food they desperately need’. Again, he makes no mention of who is doing 99.9% of that killing.

He does manage to acknowledge that it’s Israel that is blocking food from entering Gaza when he points out that there’s “a pressing need for Israel to change course”. The choice of wording here is deliberately vague and, given the sheer horror of what that state is currently engaged in, ridiculously anodyne. When you say there’s a pressing need for a state, to ‘change course’ the implication is that such a course change is still, ultimately a matter of choice for that state and that you and your E3 buddies are definitely not going to try and force it. I don’t recall Starmer ever winsomely wishing that Russia would ‘change course’ on Ukraine.

Next, no doubt due to the fingers of the Zionist lobby gently tickling his nether regions, Starmer makes sure he tells ‘all sides to engage in good faith and at pace’ in order to secure a ceasefire and the release of all the hostage. Starmer, of course, is fully aware that asking Israel to engage in ‘good faith’ after decades of very publicly displayed bad faith is beyond pointless, but statements such as these aren’t directed at Israel, they’re delivered to befuddle his domestic population.

He then closes by noting that the Palestinian people have the right to a state and that he’s keen for a “two-state solution which guarantees peace and security for Palestinians and Israelis”. The last couple of days have made very clear what sort of a state Starmer and his E3 friends envisage for the Palestinians - a tiny, powerless bantustan without any recourse to self-defence against Israeli aggression.

Another luminary to suddenly wake up and discover that things are grim in Gaza is former Secretary of State and presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton who declared to her followers on X in late July that "thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of starvation while trucks full of food sit waiting across the border" and called for "the full flow of humanitarian assistance" to be restored. Interestingly the article Clinton posted on X to support her comments - from UN News - managed to ramble on at quite some length about the starvation in Gaza without once mentioning the word ‘Israel’. An impressive accomplishment indeed.

Furthermore, as noted by Julia Conley in Common Dreams, Clinton failed to mention quite a few details about the starvation in Gaza, including

the Israeli blockade that has kept food from reaching Palestinians, more than 120 of whom have now died of starvation, or the at least $12.5 billion in military aid the U.S. has provided to Israel since the blockade first began in October 2023—in violation of U.S. laws prohibiting the government from giving military aid to countries that block humanitarian aid.

Clinton also neglected to apologise to U.S. college students - who have been calling Israel out since the very beginning of its genocidal assault on Gaza - for accusing them not knowing ‘very much’ about the Middle East.

A few days after Clinton had wrung her well-manicured hands in distress over the ‘risk of starvation’ in Gaza progressive superstar and all-round sharp-dressing good guy Barack Obama came out with his take on the situation.

Note the bloodless reference to the ‘crisis in Gaza’ - who knows why its happening & who is responsible for it - and the prioritising of the Israeli hostages before finally getting around to gently suggesting a ‘cessation of Israel’s military operations’.

It’s pretty obvious at this point that the main aim of both our Western mainstream media and our Western politicians regarding Palestine is, and always has been, to keep as many people in the dark about what’s really going on there as possible.

It’s OK if it’s just a few fringe nutters yelling about genocide. It’s even OK if it’s just a couple of thousand activists in London or New York or Paris screaming about war crimes or a few dissident journalists here and there spilling the beans about various aspects of the ‘conflict’. So long as those voices can be sectioned off from the mainstream- ignored, mocked or, as is increasingly the case in countries like the UK and Germany, censured via legal means, the lid can be kept on and the curtains can remain drawn.

Because the truth of the matter is that if the majority of the population knew what Israel had been up to for the last 76 years - never mind what they’ve been up to since October 7 - then Israel, and its Western backers, simply never would have gotten away with it.

In other words, our media and our politicians have been deliberately blowing smoke in our faces in order to give Israel the space to carry out their genocide - a genocide that has been years in the planning and which could not have been more clearly signalled in the days following October 7. Every media head and politician who has participated in this enterprise deserves to be marched to the Hague in chains. They are all directly and knowingly complicit in the crime of crimes and in a just world they would be made to pay dearly for that complicity.

Karyn Taylor-Moore is a recovering academic psychologist & a long-time leftist anti-imperialist from Ōtautahi

¹ An excellent insight into the tactics used by the Zionist lobby - worldwide - to keep the media in line - including, of course, all-expenses paid trips to Israel - is provided in veteran Australian journalist John Lyons’ 2017 biography, Balcony Over Jerusalem. Check out Kit Klarenberg’s article about this here.

² A number of reports into the Gaza coverage of other major Western media organisations - e.g., Australia’s ABC, US outlets CNN and MSNBC, CNN again, New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, Sunday Talk Shows on Sunday morning news talk shows on NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox and British papers The Times, The Telegraph, The Sun and the Daily Mail - have found that the methods used by the BBC to whitewash the genocide in Gaza are widely utilised across the entire Western mainstream media.

³ It was fairly quickly confirmed by the Israeli military that there were, in fact, no beheadings of multiple babies - or indeed of any babies at all. Furthermore, thus far there has been no evidence found of rape or of deliberate torture or burnings being carried out by Hamas on October 7. People will certainly killed on October 7 but no breasts were cut off, no nails were driven into body parts, no women were tied to trees, no families were tied together and burned, no babies were thrown into ovens, and etc.

⁴ Issues such as these were, in all seriousness, listed as reasons for why the BBC refused to screen two documentaries it had commissioned on Gaza - Gaza: Doctors Under Attack (about Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and murder of some 1,600 health workers) and How to Survive a Warzone (about the experiences of Gaza’s children since October 7, 2023.

Blowing Smoke in Our Eyes: How Western media and politicians have hid a genocide in plain sight