You're a well-known anchor at a major American news network
covering an ongoing story
about an allied country engaged in a military assault
againts a population in a territory it illegally occupies.
In the midst of this, a story breaks that your ally's military has now bombed
a building that houses journalists.
Is your reaction going to be dismay?
Condemnations? Demands that journalists and other civilians be
protected? Or is your response going to look a lot like CNN's Brian Stelter’s?
I think the obvious question that comes to mind is
what were the Israelis supposed to do?
If they are sure, if they had intelligence that can be
vetted, that Hamas was using these news bureaus
as a shield, as a hiding place?
What were the Israelis supposed to do?
Covering Israeli occupation and apartheid seem to be excruciatingly difficult
for many major media outlets, especially here in the United States.
There's a lot of sanitization of language,
whitewashing of the situation
and an erasure of the real power imbalance that
exists between Israelis and Palestinians,
even an erasure of Palestinian humanity.
Do you support the protests, the violent protests
that have erupted in solidarity with you and other
families in your position right now?
We've seen this type of rocket fire during major
operations, in major wars.
Violence spiraling out of control in the Middle East,
fires in Tel Aviv. Military strikes a neighborhood
in Gaza. That began as a land dispute in Jerusalem.
Since May 11, the Israeli military has
been bombing Gaza.
The airstrikes followed an escalation of ongoing
Israeli state violence when worshippers at the
Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem were attacked by
Israeli police during the last days of Ramadan.
And this was following ongoing Palestinian
resistance against the forced and
illegal displacement of Palestinian families from
the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied
East Jerusalem to make room for more Israeli
settlers, a situation that isn't
unique to this neighborhood.
Almost immediately, English language news media, especially U.S.
outlets, chose a side under their guise of objectivity.
And we can see it in the language that's been used.
State-sponsored illegal forced displacement
became “evictions”, something
Mohammed El-Kurd, a resident and writer from
Sheikh Jarrah, called out on CNN.
To start, it's not really an eviction. It's forced
ethnic displacement, to be accurate,
because an eviction implies legal authority, while
the Israeli occupation has no legitimate
jurisdiction over the eastern parts of occupied
Jerusalem under international law.
Israeli police attacks on Palestinian Muslim
worshipers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque
became "tensions" or "clashes," a term which
not only erases the genesis of the violence an
occupying state force inflicts on the people
it occupies, but also obscures the power imbalance
between Israelis and Palestinians.
A decades-long
Israeli occupation of Palestine and a
now recognized system of apartheid becomes
a "conflict," another term which presents the
occupier and the occupied as equals.
The Israeli military assault on Gaza, which at the
time of filming this has claimed over 230
Palestinian lives, becomes a "war" between a
heavily armed country and the people living
on a tiny strip of land that it occupies.
And if the war isn't with Gaza, then the war is with
Hamas, whose military wing is up against
one of the world's most technologically advanced
and well-funded militaries, which is also the only
country in the region with nuclear capabilities.
And I'll throw it to John Oliver to
quickly explain why Hamas rockets and Israeli bombs just don't make for a meeting of equals.
...the use of the phrase “tit for tat war” in a conflict
where you just pointed out one side has suffered
over 10 times the casualties,
something which speaks to both
the severe power imbalance
at play here and how that often gets obscured by
how we choose to talk about it.
In addition to sanitized language, there's also the passive voice which
suddenly becomes dominant in an industry where that's a big grammatical no-no.
Palestinians aren't killed by Israeli bombs.
They die. Israelis, however, are killed.
Buildings aren't destroyed by Israeli airstrikes.
They collapse after Israeli airstrikes.
And mainstream coverage, even when it's
good, like the “Last Week Tonight” segment, still often presents current events
devoid of seven decades of context.
The recent events in Jerusalem can't simply be reduced to a flare-up or
an escalation. Describing these events in this way and demanding a restoration
of calm, whatever that means, diminishes the greatest act of violence
that is inflicted on Palestinians on a daily basis — the occupation.
All coverage and context needs to go back to that.
Sheikh Jarrah does not exist in and of itself.
It exists in the context of seven decades of
settler colonialism, whose purpose has
been the dispossession and
subjugation of the indigenous population.
Attacks on Al-Aqsa don't exist in and of
themselves, but are part and parcel
of a long existing Israeli strategy to dismantle and
discourage Palestinian mass gatherings.
This is especially true in this particular case
when the attack followed protests against the
continuing state backed Judaization of Jerusalem
by forcing out the Palestinian population.
And we can't talk about the West Bank without talking about how among almost
3 million Palestinians, there are more than 700,000 illegal Israeli settlers.
We can't talk about Jerusalem without pointing
out how the Israeli-controlled city has a policy of
keeping the ratio of Palestinians to Israeli Jews
40:60.
That's an official policy to ensure Jewish dominance of the city.
And then Gaza? We can't talk about Gaza without mentioning that it's a small
strip of land the size of Detroit, home to 2 million Palestinians.
There is no official border that demarcates it, and it's under siege from
Israel by land, air and water.
Of the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza,
1.4 million are refugees who were expelled from or
fled their homes due to the ethnic cleansing
campaign carried out by Jewish militias before
Israel's creation in 1948.
These refugees, like all Palestinian refugees,
were blocked by Israel from ever returning to their
homes, despite the United Nations demanding
that they be allowed to.
Now, American mainstream coverage of Israel, of occupied Palestine, isn't surprising when we look
at how closely aligned the media establishment is with not only the American government but its
foreign policy interests.
It's the same reason that this happened,
that the American mainstream uncritically
reported and amplified an Israeli
strategy to make Hamas think that the military was
going to do a ground invasion.
And Israeli and pro-Israeli voices and perspectives
dominate cable news shows
and even daytime shows
despite the vast amount of Palestinian commentators available.
Do the Palestinians, even though they don't have a
state, do they have the right to
defend themselves?
What do you mean? They have the right to defend
themselves from who?
We are not attacking Palestinians.
What we have here is a terrorist organization,
Hamas, on one side and our ally, democratic
ally, Israel on the other side.
And therefore, we have a responsibility to support
Israel and its right to defend itself.
And it's not surprising that The New York Times,
the leading newspaper of record, continues to use
language and reporting, which at best
equalizes Palestinian and Israeli violence and
suffering and at worst
dehumanizes Palestinians.
Since 1984, every New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief has
lived in a West Jerusalem home
that was ethnically cleansed of its inhabitants
during the Nakba, which is what Palestinians call
what happened in 1948.
And the Times also has had staff and reporters
covering the occupation in various capacities who
have children who served in the IDF.
How many Palestinian Jerusalem bureau chiefs has the Times had?
How many Palestinian staff reporters does it have on the ground?
Or how many Palestinian ground reporters does any other major American
newspaper or cable outlet have on the ground?
Now, everything that I just laid out might make the situation
seem so incredibly dire, but this time there
has been a bit of a shift.
This is a war crime.
This is ethnic cleansing. You know, they can do all
their propaganda and
say that this is a private land dispute,
but looking, it doesn't take much. Looking at the
history of this country and
seeing how this country came about. It came
about by stealing people's
homes and stealing people's lands and destroying
people's villages.
Palestinians are at best third-class citizens in the
nation of their birth. The idea that it's even
remotely controversial to call what Israel has
imposed on Palestinians a form of apartheid
is laughable.
United Jerusalem is a city that is a success story
and will continue to be so.
OK, well, according to Israeli reports, only seven
percent of the building permits issued in
Jerusalem over the past few years have gone to
Palestinians. They make up 40 percent of the
city's population.
What we need is more than the cessation of
violence. We need sanctions against Israel in order
to put pressure on one
of our time's apartheid regimes.
For the record, destroying a civilian residence
sure seems like a war crime, regardless of whether
you send a courtesy heads up text.
Bolstered by the recent Human Rights Watch
report, which supports what Palestinians have said
for decades, terms like apartheid and ethnic
cleansing have made it into the mainstream.
And while there is a long way to go to significantly shift the narrative into
one which doesn't give equal time, space and moral footing to the occupied
and the occupier, there are some suggestions that we are witnessing a change.
And there is a part of me that wonders,
in addition to the rising tide of progressive politics,
how much of a role did the reckoning
over racism in the U.S. media last summer
following the George Floyd protests
have to play in some of these changes?
What we're seeing today is that Israel's structural racism and violence
are no longer deniable.
And both those who watch the news and those who make
the news are boldly challenging the media and political establishment to call
out Israeli apartheid and to stop protecting it and enabling it.
So in the midst of filming this, we actually saw a leak of an internal CNN
memo that said that the Ministry of Health in Gaza should be referred to
as "the Hamas-run Ministry of Health."
You can't make this up. Thanks so much for watching.
Stay tuned, because we here at AJ+ are working on a new show,
called “Backspace,” which does a lot more of this: media critique.
We'll see you guys soon.