The media coverage of the genocidal war on Gaza shows that it is still ingrained in the western psyche that Israel, not its Palestinian victims, has the benefit of the doubt
Protesters gather outside the BBC Scotland building to show solidarity with the Palestinian people, in Glasgow on 14 October, 2023
Tim Llewellyn writes in Middle East Eye 29 October 2023
Israel to cut Gaza links after war, said a Financial Times headline last weekend, with no attribution or quotation marks. As if such a cut could happen.
What Israel says goes.
This sums up much of western mainstream media coverage of Israel and Palestine over the past 22 years, and especially the BBC’s. This is because, since the Second Intifada in 2001, the realities and origins of Israel’s 75-year campaign to oust or subdue the Palestinians have never been properly explained.
The long displacement of the Palestinian nation and its reduction by means of expulsion, attrition, containment and violence have rarely been granted corrective context in our media.
Now, it seems the BBC and others are making desperate attempts to put this right, with background analysis and explanatory programmes, such as the series last week on BBC Radio 4, Understand: Israel and the Palestinians. But it is all much too late.
Israel, after the 7 October attack by Palestinian fighters, has been able to grasp the moral high ground and portray the breakout and killings as “unprovoked”, with western reporters’ acceptance. It became, in the eyes of the West, simply a robust response to terrorism.
In the same FT, HA Hellyer, from the Royal United Services Institute, a London military think-tank, is quoted repeating points by analysts such as Greg Philo and Mike Berry, in their two books Bad News from Israel and More Bad News from Israel, and myself, in the Guardian and elsewhere, made during and after the Second Intifada.
Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage for the latest on the Israel-Palestine war
“There are scores of international journalists in Israel who can cover every detail of every atrocity,” Hellyer said. “But there is nothing of similar depth available when it comes to the incredible civilian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.”
This, crucially, he went on, has the effect of dehumanising Palestinian victims. “This means… ” he said, “that westerners are more immune to Palestinian civilian suffering than to Israeli suffering.”
So, basically, Israelis are “people like us”, and Palestinians are an incoherent and anonymous mass.
More …
