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During the Gaza war, it became clearer that one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews
and Arabs was also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role
with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to
understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.
Media coverage of Israel can be a contentious topic, with various perspectives on whether reporting is biased. Some
organizations, like HonestReporting and CAMERA, actively monitor and critique what they perceive as anti-Israel bias in the media.
They argue that certain news outlets may misrepresent facts or omit context, leading to a skewed portrayal of Israel.
Over a half century ago, the Six-Day War broke out. Israel defeated the Arab hordes that had gathered to attack and destroy
the State of Israel and to drive out or kill all the Jews residing in this insignificant piece of land, no bigger than the state of New Jersey.
The Arabs lost and Israel won that war. For the past fifty years, Israel has repeatedly tried to, once-and-for-all, end the ongoing conflict with
its Arab neighbors and to give the Palestinian-Arabs the choice of living within the State of Israel as citizens with the same rights as
Israeli-Jews, or to live in a state of their own which would be at peace with Israel. These Israeli efforts have been in vain. The Palestinian-Arabs
have allowed themselves to become the victims of Islamic terrorists who want nothing except the elimination of Israel and the death of the Jews
living there. These Islamic tyrants are more than willing to shed the last drop of blood of the Palestinian-Arabs which they control.
Here in 2024, the fruitless efforts by Israel and all reasonable people around the world to come to a peaceful and mutually
beneficial solution to a problem that been festering for more than 50 years are coming to a conclusion. Israel will do what is necessary to guarantee
the safety of its citizens. The terrorists working to destroy Israel and its people be damned! Enough is enough!
In 1948, the fledgling State of Israel, with barely a plane or tank to its name, was attacked by 5 well-trained Arab armies
and was miraculously able to win!
Today, 76 years later, as Israel fights for its survival, the Jewish State is again fighting five enemies simultaneously:
Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
The fifth and perhaps most difficult battle is with the mainstream media.
A significant percentage of the media distorts the facts, relies on Hamas figures, accepts “Palestinian” 'blood libels' and
seeks to convince the world that Israel is a colonialist, apartheid state that promotes genocide.
Today, aided by this segment of the media, there are those who wish to rewrite history.
This segment of the mainstream media wants the world to believe there was once a Palestinian state. But historical
facts clearly show that there is not a Palestinian state now and there never was one! There is no Palestinian People! There are only
Palestinian-Arabs!
This same segment of the mainstream media wants the world to believe there were fixed borders between that imaginary nation
and Israel. There was no such nation and there were no fixed borders! There was only an armistice line between Israel and the Jordanian-controlled
West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
This same segment of the mainstream media wants the world to believe the 1967 war was a bellicose act by Israel.
It was not! It was an act of self-defense in the face of blood-curdling threats to vanquish the Jewish state, not to mention the
maritime blockade of the Straits of Tiran, the abrupt withdrawal of UN peacekeeping forces, and the redeployment of Egyptian and Syrian troops.
All wars have consequences. This one was no exception. But the Arab aggressors utterly failed to take responsibility for the actions they
instigated.
This same segment of the mainstream media wants the world to believe that post-1967 Israeli settlement-building is the
key obstacle to Arab-Israeli peacemaking. The Six-Day War is proof positive that the core issue is, and always has been, whether the Arab world
accepts the Jewish people's right to a state of their own. If so, all other contentious issues, however difficult, have possible solutions.
But, alas, if not, all bets are off.
And this same segment of the mainstream media wants the world to believe the Arab world had nothing against Jews per se,
only Israel, yet these Palestinian-Arabs trample with abandon on sites of sacred meaning to the Jewish people. In other words, when it comes to
the Arab-Israeli conflict, these deniers of historical fact dismiss the past as if it were a minor irritant at best, irrelevant at worst.
It won't work!
Can history move forward? Absolutely. Israel's peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994 prove the point.
At the same time, though, the lessons of the Six-Day War illustrate just how tough and tortuous the path can
be.[1]
During the Gaza war in the summer of 2024, it became clear that one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated
conflict between Jews and Arabs was also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press had become less an observer of this conflict than
an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend the events, including policymakers who depended on
journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently sought, and failed, to productively intervene.
Following the unconscionable murder of 6 defenseless Israeli hostages at the end of August 2024, the media once more
displayed its bias against Israel and Jews. The six innocent victims had been kidnapped on October 7, 2023 by Hamas terrorists.
As in the United States, Israeli society is deeply divided on many fundamental issues. Yet, one thing they excel at
is uniting in their grief when tragedies like the murder of the hostages occur. What is difficult to comprehend, however, is how some U.S. and
European media outlets, in a striking display of hypocrisy, report these events as if they exist in a vacuum. On the
Cable News Network (CNN), you didn’t hear the word “murdered.” These hostages were alive, and then they were executed before the Israeli
army could reach them. But the headlines only read “six bodies recovered.” They just happened to die. The British Broadcast Corporation
(BBC) reported: “Israel recovers six bodies of hostages.” The implication? That these people simply ceased to live, as if by some natural
cause.
Pain in the Middle East is shared by all sides. Yet, when it comes to Israeli suffering, the narrative of aggression all
too often overshadows the reality of their pain. The murder of the six Israeli hostages was real pain, experienced by real people.
What these media outlets failed to understand was that by misrepresenting the truth, the media was complicit in
perpetuating the conflict. But this was precisely Hamas’s strategy: provoke a reaction, have the international community pressure Israel
to stop, and then continue their destructive terrorist activities.[2]
A change has come to media coverage of Israel, favoring fixed narratives and activist journalism over a tradition of
fact-based reporting. It’s been said that, with respect to reporting on Israel and the Mid-East conflict, the press has been gutted. The bureaus
have shrunk, and into that vacuum have come ideological voices instead of honest and unbiased reporting. Mid-East reporters have ended up serving
as the media arm of the hard left.
This mattered less when the conflict had fallen out of the headlines. But now that the heated war between Israel and Hamas
has come to dominate the global news cycle, this shift has dramatic consequences on regional tension amid a frightening spike in anti-Israel and
anti-Jewish sentiment around the world.
Examples of this shift abound. A 7,000-word piece in The Intercept cast doubt on a New York Times
investigation into the sexual assault and mutilation of Israel women by Hamas on Oct. 7; it was clearly aimed at undermining the credibility of
the reporting.
Early in the war the Times and others reported that Israel deliberately shelled the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, allegedly
killing hundreds - based on information provided by the Hamas-run Health Ministry - and later learning that it was almost certainly an errant shell
from a Gazan military group which killed a small fraction of that number.
An Israeli military operation at the al-Shifa hospital that resulted in the capture of a reported 500 Hamas and other
fighters and killed nearly 200 (a stunning fact that indicated the hospital wasn’t just a “hospital”) received only sporadic attention in The
New York Times, with headlines that instead focused on civilian casualties for well over a week before the truth began to be exposed on March 28.
In the midst of that, there was a vacuum of information about who Hamas was, their rule over 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza and any sense of
accountability for their actions in initiating and continuing the conflict.
In the late 1980s, every major American and European newspaper had a correspondent based in Jerusalem. Most of them spent
their time on the ground, in the then-occupied territories and Israel proper, covering the lives of “Palestinians” and Israelis and writing about
their complicated and painful realities as well as the political dynamics that surrounded them. They all used both Israeli and “Palestinian”
freelancers to support their work, but they did not replace going into the field to see for themselves what was happening.
In 2024, it is very different. A combination of the decline in newspaper resources for foreign reporting, the rise of an
activist strain of progressive journalism and the inability of journalists to report independently from Gaza itself has led to a skewed and all
too often confusing narrative, with a tendency to lean into a simplistic portrait of Israel as an aggressor in this conflict - despite the fact
that the country was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7 - and “Palestinians” as the victims.
It’s not that “Palestinians” are not suffering. They are, hugely, and one cannot diminish the reality of the fate of
“Palestinian” civilians during this conflict. The crushing loss of life, the deprivation of critical resources - from food instability to lacking
medical care to the constant stress of living in a war zone - is horrific. No one can ignore or be unmoved by the images and stories that have
emerged from Gaza. But reporting on this is more complicated than it appears. And let’s not forget who is ultimately responsible for
initiating the Gaza conflict and who is ultimately responsible for the continuation of the Gaza conflict – not Israel, but Hamas.
The media coverage of Gaza today is not coverage of a war. Why is there is so little interest in how Hamas operates in
Gaza today to accompany the understandable focus on the suffering of the “Palestinian” population? If one believes the Western media coverage,
it’s not a war. It’s a campaign against “Palestinian” civilians.
Independent journalists cannot enter the strip today, and Gaza’s side of the conflict is covered by locals - as it was
with Gaza before the war. “Palestinian” stringers are either intimidated by Hamas, or they are Hamas. You can only operate in Gaza if you
cooperate with the regime, i.e., with Hamas. This is not evident to many readers who see the coverage.
The press has been gutted. The bureaus have shrunk, and into that vacuum have come ideological voices.
The Associated Press (AP) has a bureau in Gaza. Hamas built 750 kilometers of tunnels under Gaza and that was
never once worth writing about? The reason why was that a government the U.S. deemed terrorist was in charge. The media couldn’t cover Gaza properly
once Hamas was in control. If you wanted to understand events there you couldn’t do it in the mainstream press.
A heart-rending piece on the front page of the Times about “Palestinian” civilians buried beneath the rubble of buildings
destroyed by Israeli air raids in Gaza had four bylines and one contributor credit. None of them was in Gaza, nor did the story point that
out. A Times spokesperson said: “We report from Gaza when permitted, and continue to work with local journalists in Gaza.”
During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting a reporter erased a key detail - that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and
being counted as civilians in the death toll - because of a threat to media reporters in Gaza. The policy then and now was not to inform readers
that the story was censored unless the censorship was Israeli. The AP’s Jerusalem news editor submitted a story on Hamas intimidation, only to
find that the story was never published.
Back home in America, media bias is most nakedly evident on elite American university campuses where the “Palestinian”
cause is just, no matter the atrocities committed by Hamas, and the Israeli response genocidal. The media has begun to reflect aspects of this
binary world view.[3]
"You can't empathize with what you don't know" – that simple psychological truth explains how Israel, the only democracy
fighting for its very survival against Jihadi barbarism, can be so easily demonized into an international pariah. When the global media
stubbornly ignores Israel's humanizing stories and downplays the evil of its enemies, while amplifying every anti-Israel allegation and/or
narrative, the resulting global isolation can existentially threaten a tiny country surrounded by bloodthirsty hostility and dependent on
international trade for its military and economic survival.
On 8 June 2024, a mere 13 hours after the New York Times (NYT) sent its news alert about four Israeli hostages
being rescued by the IDF, it sent a second news alert about hundreds of Palestinians killed in the rescue operation, as if Israel – rather than
the hostage-takers – should be blamed for those deaths.
The bravery, complexity and sacrifice of Israel's rescue operation were worthy of a major motion picture but hardly
noticeable in the New York Times' coverage, which emphasized civilian casualties in Gaza. The caption of 2 short NYT videos ("Israel Bombards
Central Gaza During Hostage Rescue Operation") and ("Gazans Describe Deadly Israeli Raid in Nuseirat") noted that the Israeli hostage rescue "left
more than 200 people dead, according to Palestinian health officials" without mentioning that a raping-and-beheading, jihadi terror organization
controlled the Gazan health officials providing those casualty figures.
A media researcher, Lilac Sigan, recently published an exhaustive study of the NYT's empathy gap when it comes to Israel,
looking at thousands of articles covering the current conflict, and concluded that "Palestinians received 4.4 times more empathy than Israelis in
general, and specifically the hostages."
There are essentially two parallel universes concerning Israel: 98% of the global media, which is totally indifferent or
actively hostile to Israel, and the Israeli and Jewish media, which cover Israeli victims and heroes, while highlighting Israeli humanity when
fighting forces of diabolical cruelty, and all while maintaining enough reporting independence to expose government corruption, military abuses,
and other problems.
How many global media outlets covered the February 25th interview of Emily Hand, the 8 year old Hamas hostage who turned
9 in captivity, and her father, who talked about the lingering trauma and challenges of that nightmare? International news organizations have been
all but silent regarding the 240 Israeli hostages that endured unfathomable conditions and cruelty. Imagine if those 240 hostages had been Gazans
kidnapped by Israelis: their plight would be given the same obsessive daily coverage as the media has given to Gazan suffering in the wake of
Israel's military campaign.
This severely skewed media coverage is at the heart of Israel's most serious strategic challenge, producing anti-Israel
bias at the United Nations (UN) and other Non Governmental Organizations (NGO)s, on universities, in most governments around the world,
and in global public opinion, effectively preventing Israel from conclusively defeating the Islamist terrorists that constantly threaten it,
whether Hamas or Hezbollah.
If for all of the news stories about Gaza's suffering civilians, there was just one showing Hamas's jihadi essence –
including hatred of Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) people, Christians, atheists and any other non-Muslims, and its brutal
rejection of free speech and assembly – would campus protestors be so blindly supportive of Gazans and hateful towards Israelis? While Qatar and
other Mideast countries have spent billions corrupting academia in ways hostile to Israel, students might not have been converted so quickly if
the news they consumed outside of the classroom didn't share the same overwhelmingly anti-Israel bias.
If for all the news stories about Gaza's civilian death toll, there was just one about how many Gazans in some way support
Hamas, would Norway, Ireland, and Spain so shamelessly recognize "a State of Palestine" (effectively incentivizing future terrorist atrocities by
confirming that they ultimately produce diplomatic dividends)?
The heavily distorted information landscape effectively dehumanizes Israelis by making the average uninvolved observer
acutely aware of Palestinian suffering while creating the impression that Israel has no widows, orphans, terror victims, or severely injured and/or
traumatized soldiers, and no humanity when dealing with the civilian population from which unspeakable atrocities against Israelis were inflicted,
unprovoked, on October 7th.[4]
In 2024, Bloomberg's Joumanna Bercetche erroneously reported that a possible Israel-Hamas ceasefire would involve
the exchange of hostages for "Palestinian political prisoners." But Palestinian prisoners who would be released under the proposal are in no way
"political prisoners" - they are terrorists, claimed by Hamas itself as "its operatives."
The Washington Post, in 2024, printed outright lies about the BDS and anti-Israel boycott movements. The Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions effort — known as BDS — singles out Israel for opprobrium. BDS portrays the Jewish State as both uniquely evil and solely
responsible for the lack of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. BDS has been endorsed by Hamas and other US-designated terrorist groups, and
prominent BDS supporters have called for Israel’s destruction. These are well-established facts, and they’re entirely missing in the Washington Post
report.[5]
How did the BBC report the murder of six Israeli hostages captured by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attack? Readers had to get past
the BBC's confusing headline "Israel says bodies of six Hamas hostages recovered" and the first five paragraphs of the report to find out that the
story was about six Israeli hostages who were murdered by Hamas. The BBC’s report went on to extensively promote statements from a variety of
Israeli sources blaming the Israeli government (rather than the terrorists who murdered them) for the deaths of the six hostages and for the
failure to reach what was erroneously described as “a hostage exchange deal”. Apparently, the BBC was quite happy to promote the false notion of
equivalence between convicted Palestinian prisoners – including many serving lifetime sentences for murdering Israelis – and Israelis abducted and
held hostage since October 7th.[6]
October 7, 2023 was the largest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Hamas and other Iranian-backed proxies
invaded Israel, murdering more than 1200 people and taking hundreds of hostages. Many were killed in the most gruesome fashion imaginable: parents
were tortured in front of their children, the elderly were slaughtered at bus stops, families were burned alive in their own homes, babies murdered
in cribs, all while gleeful terrorists proudly filmed their handiwork.
October 7 was also the largest invasion and attack by Islamist terrorists in modern history. It was an attempted genocide
by a group that calls for Israel’s destruction. The Washington Post, however, called it “armed resistance.” This was the phrase used in the Post’s
Aug. 28, 2024 dispatch, “What to know about Palestinian militant groups operating in the West Bank.” Ostensibly a primer about terrorist groups
operating in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), the article misinformed more than it informed.
The Post claimed that “Palestinians” have engaged in armed resistance since the state’s founding in 1948, when an estimated
750,000 “Palestinians” fled or were forced from their homes. Notably “armed resistance” is a euphemism used by U.S. designated terrorist
groups like Hamas to refer to terrorism. The Post was literally echoing terrorist rhetoric. It also was dead
wrong![7]
In September 2024, it could be said that the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), throughout the 10 months of war between
Israel and Hamas in Gaza, suffered from schizophrenia.
WSJ’s opinion page had been one of mainstream media’s most sympathetic to Israel and its fight against terrorism.
However, the same could not be said of the Journal’s news section. Since Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on October 7, HonestReporting
had called out the Journal numerous times for its subtle (and, sometimes, unsubtle) bias against Israel and Israel’s justified war against
Hamas.
This bias took the form of misleading its readers by leaving out vital context, whitewashing Hamas, and relying on Hamas
propaganda as a legitimate news source. And it was not only reports on the current conflict between Israel and Hamas that were misleading and
lacking a proper context, but so also were earlier articles relating to Israel and its Arab citizens and neighbors.
Another aspect of The Wall Street Journal’s biased reporting was its whitewashing of Hamas. Even on October 7, as Israeli
forces were battling Hamas terrorists in southern Israel, the Journal published an “explainer” piece on the internationally-recognized terror group
that included the false claim that Hamas was focused on creating an independent Palestinian state and had been open in recent years to a two-state
solution. The piece ignored the fact that Hamas views this “openness” as a temporary step in achieving its ultimate goal of destroying the Jewish
state. Aside from whitewashing Hamas, The Wall Street Journal’s reporting bias also extended to its uncritical reliance on Hamas as a source.
Apart from its implicit bias, another issue with The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict was
(and still is) its reliance on contributors with a history of hostility to Israel, who helped contribute to the distorted framing of the
newspaper’s narrative.[8]
The Asserson Report, which was released in September 2024, was led by British-Israeli lawyer Trevor Asserson
and analyzed the first four months of BBC coverage during the Israel-Hamas war. It found a pattern of bias by the BBC against
Israel. In the report, it was exposed that the BBC violated its own editorial standards 1,553 times over a four-month period beginning
October 7, 2023. The report underscored the BBC’s consistent downplaying of Hamas terrorism and its biased depiction of Israel as the
aggressor.
CAMERA Arabic translated social media posts from BBC employees that incontrovertibly showed they did celebrate
terrorism.[9]
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References:
- Why History Matters: The 1967 Six-Day War, David Harris, The Huffington Post, 5 June 2015.
- Media hypocrisy compounds Israel’s pain, Yair Nativ, Boston Herald, 3 September 2024.
- The ‘Tectonic Shift’ in Media That Changed Perceptions of Israel: ‘What’s Left Is a System Run by Activists’,
Sharon Waxman, www.thewrap.com, 1 April 2024.
- Media Bias Threatens Israel's Survival, Noah Beck, THE INVESTIGATIVE PROJECT ON TERRORISM,
2 July 2024.
- The Washington Post outright lies about BDS and anti-Israel boycott movements, CAMERA, 4 September 2024.
- How did the BBC report the murders of six Israeli hostages?, Hadar Sela, CAMERA, 4 September 2024.
- The Washington Post: Murdering Jews is ‘Armed Resistance’, Sean Durns, CAMERA, 4 September 2024.
- Skewed Stories: The Wall Street Journal’s Biased Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War, Chaim Lax, United with Israel,
5 September 2024.
- The Asserson Report, CAMERA, 10 September 2024.
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