According to John Newsinger’s A People’s History of the British Empire, it was the outsourcing of genocide that gave Britain the edge over its European imperial rivals. By ensuring an arm’s length distance from the mass slaughter carried out on its behalf, the British state was able to project the image of a more benevolent empire, even at times publicly criticising the brutality of its client regimes.
It was an unprecedented feat of propaganda, and it’s not hard to spot its enduring legacy in how atrocities against the Palestinian people have been widely reported over the last year. Much like the crime boss on an image cleanup mission to disassociate from the thugs on his payroll, the US and UK governments have attempted to hide their bankrolling of Israel’s military machine behind soft criticism and empty pleas for restraint. And the mainstream media, on the whole, has bought it.
It’s complicated, of course, and at first glance, the coverage of Gaza over the last year has hardly followed Israel’s official script. When ITV captured shocking footage of the Israeli military shooting and killing a man clearly holding a white flag, it pushed the story against the grain of official Israeli denial and obfuscation. Nor did the BBC wholly accept the Rishi Sunak government’s framing of peaceful demonstrations in support of Gaza as terrorist hate mobs.
Indeed, the unprecedented outpouring of public sympathy for Palestinians across the democratic world undoubtedly owed much to the real-time broadcasting of the wholesale destruction of life in Gaza and what legal experts were increasingly calling a genocide in action.
Shaping the narrative
So what’s going on? First, we can’t ignore the news values of scale and timing. If relatively more attention has been paid to the violence unleashed on Palestinians since October 7 than that faced by Israelis on October 7, it is only because the former is both ongoing and now over 40 times the scale of the latter.
Perhaps not surprisingly, these two rather obvious facts were hopelessly lost on a recent “study” carried out by a pro-Israel law firm with zero expertise or experience in media analysis and funded by an “Israeli businessman”.
The media also don’t instinctively like giving aggressors or invaders an easy ride. When Western allies are the invading, conquering or oppressing state in any given conflict, they are either largely ignored (the US- and UK-backed Saudi war on Yemen is a case in point) or subject to exactly the kind of soft and contained criticism that the empire is given to make of its more wayward client regimes.
There’s a further complicating factor: Netanyahu has made no attempt to hide his friendship with sworn enemies of the West, including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and even, to some extent, Vladimir Putin. Added to that is his deep personal connection to Donald Trump – a president whose embittered relationship with the US security establishment was historically matched only by John F. Kennedy’s. All this has undoubtedly given rise to a degree of discomfort and something of a split within the ranks of the Washington/London power structure. And it doesn’t take much for such unease and uncertainty to be reflected in news narratives.
Also read | Backstory: The Year of Genocidal Journalism But the real problem lies in what this nuance obscures. For a start, it distracts from the subtle but profoundly significant advantage of Israeli officials in shaping agendas and, crucially, the language of reporting. This much has been demonstrated consistently by any credible and serious analysis of mainstream media coverage of Israel-Palestine going back decades. In the current conflict, anyone who’s had the news on, even in the background noise, will recognise the boundaries of what can and can’t be said.
So, for instance, it is perfectly acceptable to describe the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military as “attacks in retaliation for” October 7. But it was much more difficult to describe the indiscriminate killing of Israelis by Hamas and other militants on October 7 as “attacks in retaliation for” any or all of the crimes of what is now almost universally recognised by human rights groups as a brutal apartheid regime. There is one particularly notable feature of the language adopted by British broadcasters post-October 7. This is the way in which any reference to Hamas is commonly followed by some form of words that make clear it is a terrorist group according to the UK government.
Veteran BBC reporter Jon Simpson made an impassioned defence of this convention against pro-Israel critics in the aftermath of October 7, who were furious that the BBC still felt any need to qualify the terrorist label. Simpson argued that it’s not for the BBC to simply accept at face value that Hamas is a terrorist organisation just because the United Kingdom, United States, Israel and some other governments say it is.
A more pertinent question entirely overlooked in this pseudo-debate is why broadcasters feel the need to qualify any reference to Hamas in this way. It’s a question that has nothing to do with whether or not Hamas is or should be considered terrorist, but rather the double standards applied in respect of reporting on Israel.
For instance, a number of countries have accused Israel of state-sponsored terrorism as well as being an apartheid regime, yet this is almost never mentioned by reporters in respect of Israeli official sources. And since October 7, a total of 33 countries have classified Israel’s assaults on Gaza as a genocide, along with a cross section of international legal bodies and human rights groups.
Yet there is no pressure on BBC journalists to repeatedly point this out to viewers, no perceived need to provide context in the way that even the reporting of casualties by the “Hamas-run” health ministry is routinely subject to caveat.
Indeed, claims by Israeli officials – from beheaded babies to Hamas control centres located under hospitals – have been far too often accepted at face value over the last year and widely reported as fact, long before they were thoroughly debunked. Even now, despite the overwhelming evidence of indiscriminate bombing of civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza, BBC reporters still adopt the language of Israeli propagandists in framing similar massive bombing campaigns in Lebanon as “strikes targeting Hezbollah”.
Hiding complicity
But these double standards pale into insignificance compared to the media’s blind spot over not just the active complicity of the West but its continual sponsoring of what even the International Court of Justice has ruled a potential genocide on the Palestinian people.
The problem is not just the obscene use of taxpayer money to fuel a war that public opinion is overwhelmingly against. Arms manufacturers are also massively profiteering from Gaza, as they did from Ukraine and as NATO military spending escalates at an unprecedented rate.
After uncovering that the CEO of BAE Systems had personally pocketed almost £1 million cash from the Gaza genocide, arms trade investigators told me that a number of broadcasters expressed interest in covering the story, before promptly dropping it prior to airing. Making a personal killing from mass killing was not, it seems, sufficiently newsworthy.
The depth of US and UK military and intelligence involvement is often obscured or, more often, completely ignored by mainstream media. Declassified UK has reported on the use of the UK military base in Cyprus to deploy US special forces to Israel, as well as on hundreds of cargo shipments and frequent spy plane flights over Gaza and Lebanon. Yet consumers of mainstream media would have no idea that such hands-on involvement exists.
What’s more, in conjunction with the massive imbalances over language, this blind spot presents a trap for some pro-Palestine critics of the media who are given to perceive Israeli propaganda as uniquely and universally powerful.
There’s certainly good reason to believe that the pro-Israel lobby in the United Kingdom, United States and elsewhere operates through a shadowy and extensive network of political influence. But the trap lies in mistaking this influence as some kind of autonomous power leverage that Israel wields over the West, with the effect that US/UK/EU governments are reluctantly or unwittingly forced into complicity by the sheer extent and agency of the pro-Israel lobby.
And it is the product of an age-old truth: that real power tends to erase itself. In the end, the pro-Israel lobby only exerts the influence that it does because it is enabled by powerful, vested interests within the countries in which it operates.
Any wider and honest look at how Israeli apartheid evolved historically can’t ignore this enabling, from the Balfour Declaration to the Camp David Accords, when US power effectively underwrote Israel’s determination never to allow a contiguous and genuinely independent Palestinian state.
A true balanced depiction of the horrors that have taken place over the last year calls not for equal treatment between the oppressor and oppressed, or between the victims of a heinous terror attack over two days and the victims of industrialised mass slaughter over 12 months. Rather, we should question where the balance is struck between attention to the atrocities and war crimes carried out by Israel and critical scrutiny of its paymasters – between the hit man and the crime boss who is supplying the guns and calling the shots.
Justin Schlosberg is a professor of media and communication at University of Westminster.
This article has been republished from Jacobin. Read the original article.
