Western media coverage of the war reflects the cultural perception that Palestinian and Israeli lives are not equal.
PATRICK GATHARA FROM AL JAZEERA
It has been more than two weeks now since another war in Gaza started. More than 6,500 Palestinians have been killed by relentless Israeli bombardment and 1,400 Israelis died in the attack by the armed Palestinian resistance group Hamas on southern Israel.
Watching the media coverage of these events, I have been struck by the stark difference between how the killing of civilians has been covered on both sides.
Many Western media outlets insist on highlighting the immorality of killing and brutalising Israeli civilians, as Hamas has undoubtedly done, while soft-pedalling the immorality of the Israeli military’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians by carpet bombing the Gaza Strip.
In one remarkable interview on BBC Newsnight, when Husam Zomlot, the Head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, said that seven members of his family had been killed by Israeli bombs, the reaction of his interviewer was to offer perfunctory condolences and immediately proclaim that “you cannot condone the killing of civilians in Israel”.
Zomlot had not offered his personal tragedy as justification for Hamas atrocities but as an answer to a direct question about what happened to them. Yet having done so, he now found himself being asked to condemn, not those who murdered them, but those who killed others.
It is worth noting that in all the interviews I watched of Israelis who had similarly lost loved ones, I have not come across a single one where the victims have been asked whether they condoned the actions of their government or disavowed the labelling of Palestinians by the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, as “human animals”. None have been asked to condemn what some are controversially describing as an unfolding genocide and the expulsion of civilians in Gaza.
“We are preconditioned not to see Palestinian humanity because colonialism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia are still the dominant lens through which states, institutions, people, and media in the West view the world (although geopolitical interests are, of course, also at play),” editorialises The New Humanitarian, contrasting the glorification of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion with the delegitimisation of Palestinian struggle against invasion, dispossession and ethnic cleansing.
Few outlets have bothered to ask how over two million people came to be packed into a tiny strip or discuss the 16-year blockade that has turned the territory into what is widely acknowledged as an open-air prison.
These inadequacies and distortions in the media coverage of the war in Gaza reflect a reality that is often obfuscated by claims of “journalistic objectivity”. The truth is, journalists’ discretion over what is fit to publish has never been absolute; it has always been circumscribed by the values and culture of the society in which they operate.
The late American media ethicist, John Calhoun Merrill, asserted that “a nation’s journalism cannot exceed the limits permitted by the society; on the other hand, it cannot lag very far behind”.
Recognising how culture interacts with journalism is the key to understanding these biases, many of which are rooted in history. What we are seeing in the coverage of the war in Gaza is, in the first instance, a demonstration of the largely unacknowledged societal limits imposed on journalism.
There is obvious censorship. Opinions that humanise Palestinians or that deviate from the official line of unconditional support for Israel have been suppressed. There have been clampdowns on protests and expressions of solidarity with the Palestinians, threats to arrest people for flying the Palestinian flag, and attempts by Big Tech companies to remove or shadow-ban pro-Palestinian content.
