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Since its Caesarean birth in 1948 in Palestine, with the colonial powers acting as the midwives, the state of Israel has played the role of victim capitalising on the legacy of holocaust during the second world war. The allied powers that defeated Hitler’s war machine bore the guilt of remaining silent when it was known to them that holocaust was being committed by the Nazis against the Jews in Europe. Their support for the state of Israel stemmed from this guilty conscience and the leaders of Israel have used that ‘moral capital’ to the hilt all along the history of their state. Every time their government was caught violating human rights of indigenous Palestinian Arabs they promptly encashed on this capital to get off the hook. The fact that most of the media, print and electronic, belonged or is dominated by the Jews in Europe and America, has helped. After all, this is the era of big lie, whoever manipulates truth and distorts facts gets away with murder. What is true at local level holds true in international context, given the supremacy of the dictum ‘ might is right.’
When Hamas militants, driven to the wall by Israel’s continued occupation, sprang a surprise attack on 7 October last year, killing 1,147 civilians and security forces, crossing into Israel from Gaza, it was easy for the present government of Israel to draw the heartfelt sympathy of most of the Western countries instantaneously, not least because of the sensational coverage in Western media.
But the one-sided coverage of the attack exaggerated acts committed by the militants, portraying them as ordinary criminals and rapists. No one bothered to consider the context of the attack, viz the continued occupation and miseries of the Palestinians, not to speak of the wanton killings by Israeli army that provoked the attack. Israel once again bathed in the profusion of commiseration from its trusted allies in the West, aided by their media that promptly painted the militants as hateful terrorists bent on mindless bloodletting. World leaders, from America to Europe, made a beeline to Tel Aviv to personally condole the deaths of Israelis and to condemn Hamas as evil. One by one, they repeated the words, ‘ Israel has the right to defend itself’, as if it was ever in question. Emboldened by this blank cheque, Israel launched a full scale war weeks after the 7 October attack , mobilising its army, navy and air force against the lightly armed guerrilla force of Hamas. That this all out war would take a heavy toll of civilians was a foregone conclusion. Western allies of Israel not only turned a blind eye to the deaths and destructions set in motion in Gaza by the massive Israeli invasion, they made available arms and ammunition in continuous abandon. The Western media toed the official line of their governments and gave moral support to the disproportionate response by Israeli defence forces from the very beginning. For the first few months, Western television channels like CNN, Fox News and BBC and newspapers like New York Times, Washington Post etc. hardly covered the events on the battle ground of Gaza, giving preference to news about domestic politics and sports. Of all news media, the Doha-based television channel Al Jazeera gave detailed news about the devastating war in Gaza, covering every attack that took place daily as a matter of routine, causing deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children. In doing this the channel was faithful to facts and did not stray from the goal of journalistic objectivity. It had the reporters and camera crew on the ground with the war in the backdrop. Not a single of its news broadcast and investigative reports has been faulted for lack of probity or for exaggeration by fact checkers. Still, the truthful representation of facts on the ground irked the Israeli leaders so much that under their orders Palestinian journalists working for Reuters and particularly for Al Jazeera were targeted for killing. As of the present, 147 Palestinian journalists have lost their lives at the hands of Israeli army, all victims of targeted killings. This is in continuation of an old policy of Israeli government to silence the vigilance of Palestinian media workers engaged in tour of duty in occupied Palestine. The most gruesome of these coldblooded targeted killings was the shooting of Al Jazeera journalist Shirin Abu Ackley by an Israeli sniper about a year back. In spite of international condemnation no official investigation of the killing has been undertaken because of the refusal of Israeli government to do so and moral support given by its staunchest ally, America.
During the ongoing war in Gaza, the most reprehensible act of targeting Palestinian journalists saw the revenge killing of the entire family of Weil Dahdouh of Al Jazeera who lost his wife, journalist-son, daughter and grand children. Only he has survived after a drone attack, a survival crueller than death, given the enormity of his tragic loss. Confronted with these cases of targeted killings of journalists, Israeli government’s stock reply has been that Hamas militants were travelling with the journalists using them as shield. America and other Western governments have promptly accepted this explanation and refrained from holding Israel to account. More shocking has been the failure of Western media in covering these targeted killings of Palestinian journalists, not to speak of collective punishment of the Gaza residents. The use of double standard by Western powers and their media in judging the acts of omissions and commissions by the two sides in the conflict has become apparent in case after case of human rights violations in Gaza and the West Bank since October last. The hypocrisy of some of the big powers in this respect beggar’s description, the recent instances having excelled all the previous records of moral decrepitude. In the face of naked truth about savagery and atrocity being committed by Israel on the specious ground of self defence, the dissimulation by the Western media has been of a piece with the cynical attitude by the politicians towards the tragedy of the Palestinians. Even the spontaneous demonstrations of protest in the streets of big cities and lately the encampments of students in the campus of many elite educational institutions in America and Europe have been given short shrift or treated with a biased narrative by most television channels and newspapers in America and Europe. In many cases discretion has been considered to be the better part of judgement by media because of possible backlash from financiers and advertisers represented by Jewish interests. Either because of habitual bias or for fear of financial loss media in the West has become a handmaiden of the Israeli power brokers and extremist war- mongers.
In Israel all information about the Gaza offensive have been controlled and filtered so that the public are fed only with news that mobilise their support in favour of the government, whitewashing its failure to protect Israeli civilians from external attack and its unfolding war crimes in Gaza. Under tight censorship, Israeli press and television channels have successfully placed a lid on information being spilled out in the open that might distance the public from the extremist government. In print media only the daily Haaretz has been able to publish news objectively from the very beginning and its columnist Primo Levy makes regular appearances in TV channels like Al Jazeera, making scathing remarks about the excesses committed by the Netanyahu-led government in Gaza. But these are exceptions that prove the rule viz Netanyahu government’s strict policy of press control.
In spite of the dangerous situation in Gaza that became the reality after war was declared by Israel and under constant targeting by its army, the journalists and field staff of Al Jazeera have been tirelessly covering the genocidal war in Gaza, live-streaming every incident of deaths, destructions and widespread misery of daily life of Palestinians still struggling to survive. But for this painstaking coverage by Al Jazeera team, the enormity of the tragedy caused by the war would have remained out of sight and therefore out of the mind of the global community, at least for now. In recognition of this heroic performance of their professional duty, the UNESCO has given the prestigious annual Freedom of Press Award to the journalists and staff of Al Jazeera. There could not be a better candidate for the award this year.
But Netanyahu government is not convinced that Al Jazeera is honest and straight forward as a media. It has always been critical and hostile to the third world TV channel that rivals titans like BBC and CNN in its global coverage. Exasperated at the channel’s audacity in exposing its war crimes in Gaza, the Netanyahu government recently passed a law banning media like Al Jazeera on grounds of national security. Last week the war cabinet took a decision to ban Al Jazeera from its operation in Israel. Police raided the office of the channel in East Jerusalem and seized all equipments, effectively shutting off Al Jazeera’s operation. In a way this is a compliment to Al Jazeera as the ban exposes the moral bankruptcy of the present Israeli government and its cowardice to face the truth about its policy of occupation and practice of apartheid. Israel never stood as starkly naked as it does now, engaged in prolonged acts of human rights violations and war crimes to which has now been added the opprobrium of stifling free press. Only totalitarian regimes that hold human rights and democratic values in contempt go to such abject lengths.
In a recent television interview the former Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney asked secretary of state Anthony Blinken as to why Israel was getting such a bad publicity in global media. In his reply secretary Blinken mentioned the role of social media and inferred that behind the detail coverage of the war in Gaza social media may have played a crucial role. Though he did not mention Al Jazeera in this connection, it is quite plausible that some inputs to the daily news coverage might consist of materials from social media used by individuals near places of occurrence. But this should not detract from the risky attempts made by the Al Jazeera crew to cover events and emergencies in real time. This is apparent from the background of the news coverage which are places like hospitals, schools or refugee shelters where an attack has taken place or the victims are seen immediately after the incident. This gives the lie to assertions by reporters like Christian Amanpour of CNN who think that most of the TV coverage of the war is second hand and journalists are not ‘on the ground’. If the Al Jazeera TV reporters were not in ground zero the number of casualties among them would not be so high. Coverage of war from the battle front has always called for courage and physical prowess of agility. In covering Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza the reporters and field staff of media, such as that of Al Jazeera, have displayed these qualities and skills for more than their due share.