And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings …
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.
– Pablo Neruda, ‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’
As I write this column, Neruda’s passionate lines come alive. A ceasefire has been announced but aerial bombardments along with a ground offensive continue to ravage the already ravaged Gaza Strip. The right to “self-defence” after the October 7 attack by Hamas that Israel is seeking, and which its western allies are more than willing to acquiesce to, apparently needs every minute it can squeeze out for its unmitigated bombing and sniper fire. Strategic imperatives require a few more hundreds of Palestinian lives, a few more newly born babies dying in their mothers’ arms. These are days when the genocide of a whole people has been rendered a pedestrian, every day thing; these are days when every law in the compendium of humanitarian legislations has been rendered null and void, not once but time and time again.
It is against this dark backdrop that we need to understand the new language of power that seeps into news coverage. There is now an implicit understanding that a “certain level” of civilian deaths, even the deaths of infants in incubators, is absolutely kosher because they are helping Israel achieve its military objectives. The other term frequently cited in the coverage of Israel’s war against Gaza is “human shields”. It miraculously renders Israel’s merciless bombardments completely justified and turns every ordinary Gazan an accomplice in the crimes attributed to Hamas just by virtue of being a resident of the region.
When the word “terrorist” is used, it is immediately presumed to signify the crimes perpetrated by Hamas – there’s no question of using it to define the brutalities of the state of Israel, not just now but over seven decades of settler occupation. Such is the twisted logic of the times.
The year 2023 is coming to an end. Its biggest news story without doubt is the Hamas attacks on southern Israel of October 7 that claimed at least 1,200 lives and their bloody aftermath which has led to at least 14,854 people being killed in Gaza, according to local government estimates, more than 6,150 of whom were children, and 1,200 were in Israel.
Two pernicious developments have emerged from Gaza’s theatre of war which could potentially alter the nature of journalism forever: first, Israel’s aggregated use of information as an accessory of military combat; and second, its strategy to consciously target and kill independent journalists covering the war.
To understand the first, we must also acknowledge Israel’s undisputed prowess in the information technology sector. The country may account for just a minuscule percentage of the world’s population but it attracts 13% of international cyber security investments. The US plays a major contributory role, and some of the foremost tech giants of the world, from Google and Microsoft to Intel and Cisco, have their research centres in Israel.
Israel’s war on Gaza signifies a marriage between its formidable infotech capabilities and its military objectives. The Israel Defense Force (IDF) termed its 2021 conflict with Hamas as the world’s “first artificial intelligence war” and its latest bombardments reveal how AI systems have now become an intrinsic part of the war machine, exponentially raising the efficiency of genocidal assault.
As Brian Merchant, the tech columnist at Los Angeles Times, notes, “AI could be used to accelerate or enable the destructive capacity of a nation convulsing with rage, with potentially deadly errors in its algorithms being obscured by the fog of war.”
There have been many instances of such “deadly errors” having been perpetrated on the citizens of Gaza but which remain lost in the fog of war.
Communications hardware combines with information software in Israel’s calculus of terror. In order to shape opinion and create constituencies of support for its war, both domestically and globally, it has developed an extremely sophisticated media outreach. A ceaseless pipeline of ads, videos, television and newspaper reportage, analyses, posts and tweets have complemented its unending artillery fire. Ghastly visuals of the Hamas’s strikes of October 7 were deployed systematically in the initial weeks to swamp out the massacres that the IDF were conducting on an infinitely wider scale in Gaza. Every image that was put out was accompanied by impassioned claim of being a terrorised country under siege, when the truth was that it was the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza strip who had been under siege for years and were now facing imminent death and destruction.
This cynical upending of reality played out on screens across the world, including in India. The narrative allowed Israel to continue with its bombardments and retain the support of its allies amidst growing protests against its actions breaking out from across the world, along with calls for restraint. According to data released by X/Twitter and reported by Politico, 30 ads targeted at working professionals in European cities were released in a little over a week starting from October 12, and were seen millions of times. They were marked by disturbing, triggering images, projecting Hamas as another ISIS.
Politico reports: “In one ad, titled ‘Babies Can’t Read The Text in This Video But Their Parents Can,’ a lullaby plays against the backdrop of a rainbow and a unicorn flies across the screen. The ad says, ‘We know that your child cannot read this,’ but pleads with parents to sympathise with those whose children were killed during the attack on Israel.” The irony is that while this ad was playing out, the death toll of children in Gaza had already touched 583, yet in the scales of public perception their lives mattered far less.
Disinformation was very much a part of the mix, a point made apparent right from the initial days when the “beheaded babies” story did the rounds. While the Palestinians have also tried to prime their own narrative, the difference was that not only was the sophistication of the Israeli public relations factory totally missing in such attempts, Israel’s successful propagandising of Palestinians as “human animals” had ensured that even the willingness to engage with their narrative was missing. It was easy to believe the propagandists when they maintained that those dead babies Gazans were desperately holding to their chests were not once living, breathing beings, but dolls painted to appear wounded.
A military that weaponises information is also hostile to independent journalists. The IDF will go down in history as having targeted journalists in a killing spree. According to the most recent figures released by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 53 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 7. Many more have lost close family members. Many have been seriously injured. Some found themselves under IDF detention.
Also read: Faces of Tragedy: The Journalists Killed in the Israel-Gaza War
These are strategic killings, a fact which becomes obvious when the Gaza death toll is compared to that of the Ukraine-Russian hostilities. Raging since February 2022, that Ukraine-Russian war has thus far claimed lives of at least 17 mediapersons. International humanitarian law considers journalists reporting from theatres of conflict as having the same rights to safety and security as civilians, unless they themselves are participants in the combat.
The Wire has published a remarkable letter pledging support to the reporters in Gaza which has been signed by journalists across the world (‘US-Based Reporters Condemn ‘Israel’s Killing of Journalists in Gaza’, November 16). It goes on to say, “We join press associations including Reporters Without Borders, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association, and the International Federation of Journalists in demanding an explicit commitment from Israel to end the violence against journalists and other civilians. Western newsrooms benefit tremendously from the work of Gazan journalists and must take immediate steps to call for their protection.”
The letter ends with a passionate call to journalists “to tell the full truth without fear or favour” and demands that they use “precise terms that are well-defined by international human rights organisations, including ‘apartheid,’ ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide.’ To recognise that contorting our words to hide evidence of war crimes or Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is a journalistic malpractice and an abdication of moral clarity.”
It is truly in historical junctures like these that Neruda’s importunate lines linger, urging us as journalists to “Come and see the blood/in the streets!”
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Silkyara tragedy wouldn’t have happened if the courts and the media had done their job
The intention behind the Char Dham road widening project, with its grandiloquent name, ‘Char Dham Mahamarg Vikas Pariyojna’, was to provide “disaster-resilient roads to pilgrims”; at least that is what Prime Minister Modi told the country in an election speech delivered at Dehradun on December 27, 2016. Today, it is clear that the making of the mahamarg has not been “disaster-resilient” and it has, in fact, left a trail of calamities with the Silkyara development being the most recent.
This project continued despite warnings that it was triggering landslides (even the land subsidence in a large part of Joshimath town has been attributed to it), signaling the extraordinary political will to see it through, no matter the consequences. Early court rulings that expressed reservations over the project were swept aside. To instrumentalise that political intent, the Char Dham project was combined with strategic interests and national security. When the case came up before the Supreme Court, the Hon’ble judges, among whom was the present Chief Justice, ruled that “armed forces’ infrastructure needs have to be met to safeguard borders, and highways that are of strategic importance cannot be treated the same way as those in other hilly terrains.”
As one of the petitioners in that case put it, “Someone high up in political power wanted highways on the Char Dham yatra. And the Army then became a reluctant participant” (‘Char Dham: How Much Will Wider, Landslide-Prone Roads in Uttarakhand Serve National Security?’, December 20, 2021).
If the apex court failed to red flag the project, so did much of the media. In fact, the Supreme Court verdict was met by headlines like ‘Char Dham Yatra: Good News! High Court removes upper limit, now anyone can go on Char Dham Yatra!’ Such manufactured exuberance on the part of the media was part of the carefully calibrated publicity that accompanied the project.
In February 2018, the PIB put out a statement on the cabinet having approved the Silkyara Bend-Barkot Tunnel as part of the “ambitious” Char Dham project. It went on to say that the tunnel will provide “all weather connectivity to Yamunotri, one of the dhams on the yatra, encouraging regional socio-economic development, trade and tourism within the country. It will reduce the travel distance from Dharasu to Yamunotri by about 20 kilometre and travel time by about an hour.”
So, to reduce by an hour a journey to the Yamunotri temple, this tunnel was undertaken in the fragile Himalayan terrain. It had a budget of Rs 1,383.78 crore, which has most probably been exceeded, and while it was projected to take four years to build, it has already crossed five years.
With the agony undergone by 41 workers hired by the project playing out live on television screens, the Union government now wants to end all the unwanted media noise over the project. On November 22, it issued an advisory to private news channels: “Refrain from sensationalising Uttarakhand tunnel rescue operations, be sensitive in reporting.”
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Readers write in…
Gaza’s in the news, but what about atrocities in India?
Sashi Daniels writes in: “While The Wire and other portals seem to find the time and space to devote to the ongoing Gaza crisis, it seems that local atrocities simply fly under their radar. For instance, the Indian Express of October 4 carried a report of over 900 people arrested in Assam under the state’s “child marriage” Act. These and other atrocities against Muslims are ongoing and appear unworthy of your concern. Perhaps you should find time to dwell on the plight of Muslims in Assam.
“Then there is the much tom-tommed approach of Rahul Gandhi: “Nafrat ke bazaar mein mohabbat ki dukan”. Perhaps you and others should get around to asking him about the ongoing atrocities against Christian Adivasis in Chhattisgarh. Their (Congress and INDIA) silence is deafening.”
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Unprecedented violence in Gaza
Dr. Roshmi Goswami, co-chairperson and Sushil Pyakurel, bureau member, South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR): “SAHR, a regional network of human rights defenders, joins thousands of people across the globe who stand for humanity to express outrage and condemnation at the appalling violence in Gaza, unprecedented anywhere in the world in this century…
“While SAHR stands firmly against any kind of terror attacks, especially against innocent civilians of any community, it recognises the decades of historical injustices and apartheid against the Palestinian people and calls for the urgent need for a just and political resolution. SAHR respects the State of Israel’s right to defend its citizens and territory while reiterating that the State of Israel is bound by an absolute obligation to comply with international law and international humanitarian law. We further call for the adherence to the latest UN Resolution adopted by 120 responsible countries calling for a ceasefire and cessation of hostilities and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations…
“SAHR in solidarity with the global and regional human rights community demands from Israel and its supporters to immediately end this catastrophic and horrific assault, paving way to a lasting ceasefire to save lives and allow for urgent and emergency humanitarian aid and services to the affected areas and people. It calls upon the world leaders to pressure the Government of Israel to end the siege on Gaza and facilitate a ceasefire and peace process. Simultaneously, SAHR demands that Hamas immediately release the Israelis taken as hostages and firmly urges the relevant authorities from both Palestine and Israel to adhere to international law and international humanitarian law to ensure civilian lives are protected.”
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Yes, the SC has let us down
Sumanta Banerjee: “I read with interest the Wire article, ‘The Supreme Court Never Fails to Disappoint’ (November 20). The writer needs to be congratulated. He echoes my thoughts. A fortnight ago, I wrote an open letter addressed to CJI Chandrachud, expressing similar concerns.
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Indian anti-apartheid crusader
N. Jayaram: “Social media reminded me of an online memorial organised by the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation after the passing of a great intellectual, international civil servant and human rights activist, Enuga S. Reddy: three years ago.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQAwOTOxx8)
He was reputed to have got to know each and every leader in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and to have been held in high esteem by them all. Gratified that the Republic of South Africa, where he’d gained so much respect, has done the decent thing.
Important to remember this as the genocidal policies of another apartheid regime is playing out. But now, whither Indian diplomacy, wither Indian statesmanship? https://thewire.in/diplomacy/brics-meeting-israel-hamas-gaza
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End note: The Wire piece, ‘Hunger and Unemployment in Modi’s Amrit Kaal’ (November 10), draws attention to an important paradox that citizens in this season of elections must certainly take note of: The scheme to distribute free food grain to 80 crore poor Indians, which was first introduced during the pandemic to help people tide over unemployment and ill health, will now be extended by another five years. The fact that this decision of the government was made public during the Chhattisgarh election campaign indicates the political intent to capitalise on what is being sold as ‘Modi’s guarantee’. The piece points out that “PM Modi cannot explain why the fastest growing economy, which is poised to become the third largest by 2028, should distribute free food to 80 crore people. Is free ration to be provided for another five years because India is rapidly prospering and entering the Amrit Kaal? On another note, if India is growing fast, why is it slipping further in the Global Hunger Index? The 2023 Global Hunger Index saw India slip four places to rank 111 out of 125 countries.”
Meanwhile, the Right to Food campaign expressed strong opposition to these efforts to portray the National Food Security Act 2013 (NFSA) as the present government’s own initiative through the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY). It saw it as a “misrepresentation” intended to gain political favour rather than address the real needs of people. It pointed out that the constitutional guarantee of the NFSA is a legal entitlement to ensure food and nutritional security for every Indian citizen, rather than a political promise or handout.
Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in
