How many foreign reporters are in Gaza? None. The Palestinian reporters who fill the void often pay with their lives.
There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas.
They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel’s unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors.
Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.
And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.
The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination.
At least 134 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992.
Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.
Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza.
Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.
Al Jazeera Media Network is appalled by the Israeli occupation authorities' refusal of the critical medical evacuation requests for its camera operators, Fadi Al Wahidi and Ali Al-Attar. https://t.co/VwkCV41ypD
— Al Jazeera PR (@AlJazeera) October 22, 2024
The Israeli military has branded as “terrorists” six Palestinian journalists in Gaza who work for Al Jazeera.
“These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel’s onslaught in Gaza,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said. “Declaring them ‘terrorists’ sounds like a death sentence.”
[Meanwhile an Israeli journalist has taken direct part in combat while acting as a reporter.]
The scale and savagery of the Israeli assault on the media dwarfs anything I witnessed during my two decades as a war correspondent, including in Sarajevo where Serb snipers regularly took aim at reporters.
Twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995. Twenty-two were killed when I covered the war in El Salvador. Sixty-eight journalists were killed in World War II and 63 were killed in Vietnam.
But unlike in Gaza, Bosnia and El Salvador, journalists were usually not targeted.
URGENT! These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel's onslaught in Gaza (with 130+ of their colleagues killed in the last year). Declaring them "terrorists" sounds like a death sentence.
They must be protected at all cost. https://t.co/8AHQ0F4f4l— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) October 23, 2024
Israel’s assault on press freedom is unlike anything we have experienced since William Howard Russell, the godfather of modern war reporting, sent back dispatches from the Crimean War. Its onslaught against journalists is in a category by itself.
Representative James P. McGovern and 64 House members sent a letter to President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for the United States to push for Israel to allow unimpeded access for U.S. and international journalists. In July, over 70 media and civil society organizations signed an open letter calling on Israel to permit foreign reporters into Gaza.
Israel has not budged. Its ban on international journalists in Gaza remains in place. Its genocide grinds forward. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed and wounded daily. During October, Israel killed at least 770 Palestinians in northern Gaza.
Israel spins out its lies and fabrications, from Hamas using Palestinians as human shields, to mass rape and beheaded babies, to a captive press that slavishly amplifies them. By the time the lies are exposed, often weeks or months later, the media cycle has moved on and few notice.
Israel’s wholesale censorship and assassination of journalists will have ominous consequences. It further erodes what few protections we once had as war correspondents. It sends an unequivocal message to any government, despot or dictator that seeks to mask its crimes.
It heralds, like the genocide itself, a new world order, where mass murder is normalized, totalitarian censorship is permissible and journalists who try and expose the truth have very short life expectancies.
Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press.
Those who wage war, any war, seek to shape public opinion. They court the reporters they can domesticate, the ones who prostrate themselves before generals and, although they do not openly admit it, seek to stay as far away from combat as possible.
These are the “good” journalists. They like to “play” at being a soldier. They enthusiastically assist in disseminating propaganda in the guise of reporting. They want to do their part for the war effort, to be part of the club. Sadly, they constitute the majority of the media in the wars I covered.
All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.
These domesticated journalists and news organizations are, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “prisoners of the language of power.” They dutifully parrot the official lexicon — “terrorists,” “peace process,” “two state solution” and “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
The New York Times, The Intercept writes,
“instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.”
“The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine ‘except in very rare cases’ and to steer clear of the term ‘refugee camps’ to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars,” The Intercept notes. “The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.”
“There is no battle between power and the media,” Fisk noted. “Through language, we have become them.”
Retired General David Petraeus, one of the authors of the 2006 U.S. Counterinsurgency Manual used by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, argues that persuading the public that you are winning — even if, as in Afghanistan, you are trapped in a quagmire — is more important than military superiority. The domesticated media is vital in perpetrating this deception.
Then there are the real journalists. They shine a light into the machinery of power. They tell the truth, for as the poet Seamus Heaney said, “There’s such a thing as truth and it can be told.” They make public the cruelty, mendacity and criminality of the powerful. They expose the collaboration of the domesticated media.
To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years. WikiLeaks published a 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document where British government officials equated investigative journalists with terrorists. The animosity is not new. What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.
Israel has not defeated Hamas. It has not defeated Hezbollah. It will not defeat Iran. But it must convince its own public, and the rest of the world, it is winning. Censorship and the silencing of journalists who expose Israel’s war crimes and the suffering Israel inflicts on civilians is an Israeli priority.
It would be reassuring to call Israel an outlier, a nation that did not share our values, a nation that we support in spite of its atrocities. But of course, Israel is an extension of ourselves.
As the playwright Harold Pinter said:
“US foreign policy could be best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it is so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”
In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said:
“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
The most important impediment to Israel’s mass hypnosis are the Palestinian journalists in Gaza. This is why the kill rate is so high. It is why U.S. officials say nothing. They, too, hate real journalists. They, too, demand reporters domesticate themselves to scurry like rats from one choreographed press event to the next.
The U.S. government says and does nothing to protect the press because it endorses Israel’s campaign against the media, as it endorses Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Journalists, along with the Palestinians, are to be extinguished.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This article is from Scheerpost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This interview is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
This would have not been possible but for the Biden/Harris administration. Something for real leftists to consider when they vote remembering that both Jill Stein and Cornell West who utterly oppose this (Jill Stein is Jewish) are or should be on the ballot. If they’re not, you can write in their names.
The Israeli governments recent statement about ethnic cleansing says everything one needs to know about Israeli politics, just in case they didn’t know previous to the statement being made.
The POTUS needs to understand he cannot hide behind his bully pulpit. That crap is for. guys like Trumpinstein.
Murdering journalists is unofficial US policy. Since none of this would be possible without the massive financial, political, and military support of the US, we can see that this is US policy by proxy. The US did nothing when Shirreen Abu Akleh was murdered in broad daylight on camera, and she was a US CITIZEN ffs!
The US rewards Israel with more money and weapons, despite the cheap rhetoric and lies. In this context, the US provides incentives for more atrocities and to murder more journalists, doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers etc.
And what’s more, both so-called candidates for POTUS are fine with this. Not one peep from either one of them about any of it. The Genocide is almost absent in the Anglosphere mass media, while the Freak Show election hysteria is ubiquitous. The genocide, bombing of Lebanon (and Syria) are front and center in most of the rest of the world’s media.
What is also very disturbing: even some regular commenters here, who are informed intelligent people, will vote for the DT or KH, That’s what you are voting for folks. Both sides make pathetic excuses, but you will be complicit in genocide. The history books will note that, and the Global Majority around the world note it. Why did “good” Americans vote for Genocide, murdering doctors, nurses and journalists? Are Americans just apathetic and evil?
I truly believe Karma is coming soon for all those who have armed and covered for Israel’s genocide. Barclays has been pressured into divesting from Elbit Systems. This is just the beginning. Humanity will not accept this genocide. There will be consequences for the cowards propping this atrocity up. Heads are going to roll. Siding with genocidal empire may seem like a safe bet, until it isn’t.
They are all coming for the Journalists now. See my recent post on CN here please:-
All dictatorships begin by outlawing & criminalising speech. First they come for the journalists. Look what is happening! In Australia they are very close to passing a new law to silence debate” Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 [Provisions]” hxxps://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Environment_and_Communications/MisandDisinfobill
Not about silencing “Misinformation” at all, it is about silencing truth & debate.
_____
Another little doozie is Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth)
What does the law say?
Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful for someone to do an act that is reasonably likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” someone because of their race or ethnicity.
A very famous Australian Journalist Mary Kostakidis (SBS News anchor for 20yrs) is currently defending herself from this Gov funded monster & its process due to a complaint by The Zionist Federation of Australia for writing a Journalistic article re the Gazza/Israel situation.
Might send her bankrupt to defend herself.
Laws that allow “Race/religion” groups to claim “offence”…really…& the costs of process is the “punishment” along with I guess “damages”…boy oh boy. Put simply its all about silencing truth & dissent.
We ALL have to fight the ignorance in any way we can…with word of mouth EVERYWHERE we can….or go down the “Bolsheviks” tricks way again.
Only people who have something to hide turn brutal…and the Zionists HAVE PLENTY to hide.