Jonathan Cook
GLOBAL RESEARCH

One is that, nearly a year into what the World Court has termed a “plausible genocide”, where Israel has kept out western journalists and killed off most Palestinian journalists, as well as driving out international aid organisationsand the United Nations, there is almost no one left to tell us what is happening.

We have only snapshots of individual suffering, but not the big picture. How many Palestinians are dead? We know there are at least 40,000 killed by Israel – the deaths recorded by Palestinian officials before the health system collapsed. But how many more? Double that figure? Quadruple it? Times it by 10? The truth is, no one knows.

What about the famine in Gaza that has been raging for many, many months as Israel has systematically blocked aid into the enclave, in line with its promise last October to deny the Palestinians there food, water and power?

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, because the pair’s starvation of Gaza is a crime against humanity.

But the prolonged famine is presented as a near-victimless crime. Where are the dead from this famine? They are certainly not on our TV screens or on our front pages.

The true death toll will probably never be reported, just as it wasn’t after the West’s Middle East bloodbaths in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Western politicians have no interest in knowing the truth, and the western establishment media has no interest in discovering it.

Democracy Gutted

The news from Gaza is being actively buried for another reason. Israel’s genocide continues to be tangible, shocking proof that western capitals are not the bastions of democracy and bulwarks against barbarianism they claim to be.

Western politicians have been utterly complicit in the genocide – a fact impossible to hide from their publics. The killing could have been stopped at any point, had the Biden administration so willed it.

Ordinary people have made clear they want the slaughter to end, which is why Biden has to pretend to be “working tirelessly” to negotiate a ceasefire – a ceasefire he could impose whenever he chooses to.

Israel is entirely dependent on US military, diplomatic and financial largesse, as is only too clear from the 50,000 tonnes of weapons the Biden administration has so far shipped to Israel since last October.

But the truth is that western politics is now entirely unresponsive to popular demand. The last vestiges of democratic accountability were gutted many years ago as the West’s political systems were completely captured by powerful globe-spanning corporations.

Tens of millions of people turned out on the streets of Europe to try to halt the US and Britain’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, and it made not a jot of difference.

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The US, France and Britain have been and remain the main abettors of the Israeli homicidal project. [Wikipedia admits:] As of 2010, the U.S. military maintained two classified, pre-positioned War Reserve Stocks in Israel valued at US$493 million.^[75]Since 1976, Israel had been the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance. In 2009, Israel received $2.55 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants from the Department of Defense.^[76] All but 26% of this military aid is for the purchase of military hardware from American companies only.^[76]

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The situation with Gaza is even worse. It is not just that, as before, no one in power is listening. Those opposing Israel’s genocide, and western complicity in it, are being utterly maligned. The millions marching against the slaughter are reported as “tens of thousands”, while being actively smeared as “antisemites”.

Western states – and their self-professed “defensive alliance”, Nato – are not there to represent the public interest. They have become chiefly vehicles for the promotion of the narrow interests of a corporate elite, whose purpose, in turn, is to siphon into private hands the profits from publicly funded, permanent wars.

Profits from Slaughter

It isn’t just arms manufacturers and the hi-tech industries, with their booming surveillance businesses, whose shares are soaring on the back of the slaughter in Gaza and Ukraine.

Bloomberg reported last month that Israeli air strikes on Gaza had turned the homes of 2.3 million Palestinians into 42m tonnes of rubble. That’s enough to fill a line of dump trucks from New York to Singapore.

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An Israeli Merkava ("Chariot") tank in maneuvers)

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 It won’t be Gaza companies raking in the profits from the mammoth clean-up operation. After a 17-year blockade of the enclave by Israel, Gaza’s industrial and commercial sector barely existed even before Israel’s current wrecking spree. The beneficiaries, once again, will be western corporations.

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If the “day after” ever arrives, it will be western corporations bidding to rebuild Gaza – and most likely not for the current Palestinian inhabitants. Israel wants them either dead or ethnically cleansed from the territory.

A razed, emptied Gaza will be a tabula rasa. Expensive new beachfront properties can be marketed to wealthy Israeli Jews. New industrial zones and ports will be able to export easily to Europe and North Africa.

And that’s before we consider who gets to exploit the bountiful natural gas just off Gaza’s coast, which western corporations have been greedily eyeing for the past two decades.

Excuses for Repression

Western corporations have been growing ever fatter at the same time as western publics have been required to submit to endless belt-tightening.

The UK’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, who understands that his own political survival depends on continuing this corporate raiding of the public wealth, is busily managing Britons’ expectations.

Armed with a massive parliamentary majority, he had no message of hope or change. He told the British public last week that “things are worse than we ever imagined”. There was no reference to why they might be so bad, beyond predictable political point-scoring against the previous government.

Starmer warned of the need to “do things differently”. But the difference he offered was actually a commitment to more austerity – the signature policy of his predecessors.

And, just as Starmer’s agenda is one of no change on the domestic front, it is also one of no change on foreign policy. The endless wars will continue.

The new British government, like the old one, keeps peddling excuses to continue to sell arms to an Israeli military using them to massacre civilians.

Both Starmer and Harris are faithful creatures of a permanent bureaucracy that was long ago captured by the West’s profit-hungry corporate war machine.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy grovelled before Israel on 2 September as he announced he was suspending eight percent of such sales after he had been warned of their possible use in Israeli war crimes. It is apparently fine to send the other 92 percent of military contracts, including components used in Israel’s squadron of F-35 warplanes, to a regime actively engaged in genocide.

Meanwhile, the new government, like the old one, pursues with what it calls “laser focus” wider business opportunities with Israel.

In the US, Kamala Harris, shoe-horned in as the Democrats’ presidential candidate to replace Joe Biden, without a single vote cast, is sold by a compliant media as the candidate of “joy” – vapid political messaging as void of content as former President Barack Obama’s much-celebrated slogan of “hope”.

Israel-Palestine War: Don’t be Fooled. Biden Is Fully Signed Up to Genocide in Gaza

“Joy” is serving as an excuse to repress. Demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention as it crowned Harris protested against her and Biden’s near-year-long complicity in the Gaza genocide. But they were not going to be allowed to sour the “joyful” mood inside. They were forcefully swept out of view by police.

In her first interview since being nominated, Harris promised US support for the genocide in Gaza would continue – even if, as seems quite possible, it robs her of a handful of swing states in November and ensures Donald Trump is elected president.

The ‘Antisemitism’ Formula

Both Starmer and Harris are faithful creatures of a permanent bureaucracy that was long ago captured by the West’s profit-hungry corporate war machine.

Its most favoured son is Israel, a highly militarised state – a colonial outgrowth of the West – implanted into an oil-rich Middle East like a bone stuck in the back of the throat. Israel is there to advance an openly belligerent Jewish supremacism, mirroring a western supremacism that nowadays prefers to veil its imperial ambitions.

From early on, Israel’s backers were given a perfect cover story for the crimes they sponsored against the native inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians – and one that could be adapted to justify Israel’s permanently warlike posture in the region.

In a self-serving narrative promoted by the West, the continuing threat of antisemitism required Jews to have their own militarised fortress state – a modern Pale of Settlement – as a bulwark against a future Holocaust.

Western capitals accepted one marker only of whether westerners were rehabilitated from their earlier Jew-hatred: they must agree to indulge Israel’s every military wish.

Those in the West who armed Israel and helped it expel the native Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, those who turned a blind eye as it built the region’s only nuclear arsenal, those who encouraged its wars against its neighbours, and those who lobbied for the undermining of international law in the pursuit of those wars, proved themselves to be free of the virus of Jew-hatred.

Those who opposed western imperialism and the excesses of its favourite Middle East client state, those who stood up for human rights and international law, could be dismissed and denounced as antisemites.

That well-worn formula, extraordinary as it seems, has persisted even as Israel has pursued Jewish supremacism to its logical end-point in Gaza: exterminating the population there.

Those in favour of arming a genocide are the good guys. Those opposed are the antisemites and supporters of terrorism.

Independent journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists are now being rounded up and intimidatedunder draconian anti-terrorism laws in Britain.

Social media platforms are limiting the reach of posts critical of Israel, herding opposition to the genocide into small online ghettoes.

Universities are starting to draft new rules to make being a Zionist – subscribing to Israel’s extremist political ideology – a protected characteristic, no different from being born Hispanic or Black.

The aim is to silence all Palestinian solidarity activism on campus as equivalent to racism, extinguishing any chance of a repetition of the large protests that swept US universities during the spring and summer.

Inversion of Reality

For good reason, western establishments are making it impossible to explain the roots of Israel’s genocide. They are excising the very terminology needed to begin that conversation.

Zionism is an ideology that originated centuries ago, embedded in an antisemitic Christian fundamentalism that required forcing the Jews of Europe to “return” to the Holy Land. That way, a supposed biblical prophecy would be fulfilled, bringing about an end times in which Christians alone would find redemption.

Little more than a century ago, Zionism started to make inroads into the thinking of a small European Jewish elite, who saw Christian antisemitism as a path towards the creation of a Jewish state they could rule on licence from the West.

The antisemitic Christian Zionists wanted the Jews out of Europe and ghettoised in the Holy Land – and so did the new breed of Jewish Zionists.

Theodor Herzl, the father of Jewish Zionism, precisely understood this confluence of interests when he wrote in his Diaries: “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

To understand how and why Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and why it is being allowed by the West, it is vital to analyse the historic role played by Zionism, and how antisemitism has been weaponised over decades to serve as the perfect cover for the dispossession, and now extermination, of the Palestinian people.

Which is precisely why, on his path to power, Starmer, Britain’s new prime minister, made sure to conflate anti-Zionism – opposition to Zionism – with antisemitism.

The corporate war machine requires of anyone it allows near the centres of power to prove that they will maintain this inversion of reality: that those who support war are the good guys, and those who oppose genocide are the antisemites.

In trying to turn reality back onto its feet, Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, doomed himself to endless smears.

Now those who try to maintain – in the face of a genocide – their grasp on reality, as well as their humanity, find themselves similarly vilified.

Genocide by Proxy?

This is the hidden context for interpreting the ever-more dangerous developments unfolding around the Gaza genocide.

Israeli political and military leaders are split on where to head next.

There are those ready – having laid waste to Gaza – to do a deal on the remaining Israeli hostages, pull back somewhat and let the rest of the genocide gradually play out.

Aluf Benn, editor of Israel’s venerable Haaretz newspaper, recently set out the emerging plan for “the day after”.

Israel will split Gaza into northern and southern territories along the Netzarim corridor, and starve anyone in the north to death if they refuse to leave.

North Gaza will be settled by Jews, attracted by its “convenient topography, a sea view, and proximity to central Israel”.

South Gaza, packed with destitute, homeless and often maimed refugees deprived of housing, schools and hospitals, will be left to rot under an Israeli siege, an intensification of Israel’s policy before 7 October. The media, it is expected, will lose what little interest it already exhibits in the plight of Palestinians there.

Benn avoids mentioning what happens next. The enclave’s population will face a long, cold, wet winter with no power or sanitation. Starvation will deepen, epidemics will spread.

A genocide by proxy.

Unless, that is, neighbouring states, most especially Egypt, can be blackmailed into agreeing to become complicit in Gaza’s ethnic cleansing.

This is the view of much of the military command, expressed in defence minister Gallant’s reported “shouting match” with Netanyahu at a cabinet meeting on 30 August over the prime minister’s continuing moves to obstruct a hostage deal with Hamas.

It is also the impulse behind the huge protests in Israeli cities this week, and the calling of a general strike by the main labour union, after six hostages were brought back from Gaza dead.

Two Birds, One Stone

The question is whether Netanyahu’s government can be persuaded to stick to this “minimalist” genocide.

Impatient to complete the slaughter in Gaza, and aware that Israel is already a pariah state in the eyes of non-western states and now, increasingly, with western publics, the far right in Netanyahu’s government see only opportunity. They wish to block a ceasefire indefinitely, and use that time to expand the genocide into the larger, more prized Palestinian territory of the West Bank.

This is Israel’s version of killing two birds with one stone. It is also the only way for Netanyahu to keep his far-right coalition together and exploit his role as “wartime leader” to put off his date with the courts in his long-running corruption trial.

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Last week’s large-scale attacks on major West Bank cities, with Israeli officials warning the population to be ready to flee invaded areas at short notice, are a foretaste of what is intended.

Having received no meaningful pushback from western capitals over the Gaza genocide, the Israeli right has grown more confident that the same template can be rolled out for the West Bank.

Foreign Minister Israel Katz noted that invasions of the West Bank would be handled “exactly as we deal with terror infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian civilians”.

In response, a US official indicated that Washington was ready to sign up to an expansion into the West Bank of Israel’s war against the Palestinian people: “We recognise that localised evacuation orders may be necessary in certain instances to protect civilian lives during sensitive counter-terrorism operations.”

The sense of urgency has only been underscored to Israeli leaders by the World Court’s recent ruling that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal and constitutes apartheid rule.

Rampaging through the West Bank can be justified indefinitely on the pretext of foiling an “Iranian-backed terror threat”.

And US support will only deepen if Trump wins in November. Should he manage to foreclose on Nato’s proxy war in Ukraine, the military resources expended there can be redirected towards Israel.

Israeli Pyromania

Netanyahu and his allies understand that his solution for the “Palestinian problem” risks a regional conflagration, which is why they need to drag the US deeper into the mire.

And they have multiple potential provocations up their sleeve that can further entangle Washington in neutralising a regional “axis of resistance” that stands as an obstacle to Israel’s military hegemony in the region.

Itamar Ben Gvir, the fascist minister in charge of the police, is seeking to light a match under al-Aqsa in occupied East Jerusalem. His police militias have been running protection for Jewish extremists breaking into the mosque complex to pray there. 

On 26 August, Ben Gvir stepped up his incitement by calling publicly for the first time to build a synagogue inside al-Aqsa.

But the real target is Iran and groups allied to it. Netanyahu’s pyromania has extended to a series of executions assassinations designed both to humiliate Tehran, the main sponsor of resistance, and its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, while making negotiations to end the bloodletting in Gaza impossible.

Back in April, Israel struck Iran’s consulate in Damascus, killing 16 people. And on 31 July, it assassinated Hamas’ political leader and chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, while he was being hosted in Tehran.

A day earlier, Israel killed Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah military commander, in an attack on the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

Simmering Border

Netanyahu knew the inevitable consequences.

Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ much less compromising military leader, has filled the void left in the group by Haniyeh’s execution. 

And both Hezbollah and Iran have even stronger grounds for launching retaliation operations against Israel that could quickly spiral into an all-out war. 

That came close to happening late last month with an exchange of heavy fire across the Lebanese border, with Israeli warplanes bombing more than 40 sites in Lebanon while Hezbollah launched more than 300 rockets and drones at military sites in Israel.

Israel’s northern border has been simmering for months.

Senior Israeli politicians have been noisily demanding that the Israeli military destroy south Lebanon and reoccupy it. In June, Israel was reported to have approved a plan for a war in Lebanon. The US envoy to Lebanon was said to have told Hezbollah that Washington “won’t be able to hold Israel back”.

The New York Times has reported soaring recruitment of Palestinians in Lebanon by armed Hamas brigades there, adding another unpredictable element to the mix.

And in a useful feedback loop for Israel, the more it can provoke Iran, the greater excuse it creates to repeat the Gaza genocide formula in the West Bank, bombing its cities and driving out its population. 

Foreign Minister Katz has been setting out precisely this thesis in English-language posts for western audiences, suggesting that Iran is smuggling weapons through Jordan into the West Bank.

He claims Tehran is “working to establish an eastern terror front against Israel through special units of the IRGC [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], involved in smuggling weapons, funding, and directing terror organisations”.

Western politicians and media are never going to admit that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. The moment they do, the veil of illusions fostered for decades about Israel – designed to conceal the West’s complicity in Israeli crimes – would be torn away. 

In committing a genocide, a state crosses a threshold. It cannot be armed into moderation. Nor can it be reasoned into peacemaking. It must be aggressively isolated and sanctioned. 

There is no sign western establishments are willing to do that for one very simple reason: they cannot afford to do it. 

So they will continue feeding the war machine until either we stop them or its lethal games blow up in all our faces.

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The original source of this article is Middle East Eye

Copyright © Jonathan Cook, Middle East Eye, 2024

Jonathan Cook
This post has been upgraded due to relevancy

Western media can never truly report the extent of Israel’s criminality because to do so would be to expose their long-running complicity in those crimes

Leaks from within CNN reveal that for months its executives have been actively imposing an editorial line designed to reinforce Israel’s framing of events in Gaza, to the point of obscuring atrocities by the Israeli military.

The dictates, say insiders, have resulted in senior staff refusing to accept assignments to the region “because they do not believe they will be free to tell the whole story”. Others suspect they are being kept away by editors who fear they will fight the restrictions.

Internal memos insist that stories be approved by the station’s Jerusalem bureau, where staff are widely seen as partisans who slant reports in Israel’s favour. Palestinian perspectives are tightly restricted.

“Ultimately, CNN’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice,” one staffer told an investigation by the Guardian newspaper.

According to staff accounts, CNN’s pro-Israel directives come from the very top – Mark Thompson, a TV executive who was hired from the BBC. Thompson, the Guardian article notes, was remembered by BBC staff for “bowing to Israeli government pressure on a number of occasions” – presumably one of the qualifications that won him the job heading CNN.

It was he who notoriously championed in 2009 the BBC’s controversial decision for the first time not to air the annual fundraising appeal of the Disasters Emergency Committee, which is a group of major British charities, because the monies were going to Gaza after Israeli bombing had devastated it.

Alongside the unhappiness at CNN, there is reported to be disquiet at the BBC. Staff, including senior presenters, held a meeting last month with Director General Tim Davie, one of Thompson’s successors, to accuse the corporation of anti-Palestinian bias.

They expressed concerns about the “dehumanising” language used to describe Palestinians killed in Gaza and the BBC’s failure to cover important stories reported by Al Jazeera and other networks.

A source told the Deadline website that the group of dissenters was surprised by Davie’s candour. He is said to have admitted that the pro-Israel lobby “was more organised than Palestinian supporters in its dealings with the BBC”.

Skewed agendas

None of this should come as a surprise.

highlighted the clearly skewed priorities of western news agendas since Hamas broke out of Gaza on 7 October – some 17 years after Israel began imposing a military siege that had already left the enclave barely habitable.

In the carnage that day caused by Hamas’ attack – as well as Israel’s indiscriminate violent response – some 1,139 people in Israel were killed.

As MEE has noted previously, the entire western press corps, not just CNN and the BBC, has failed in its basic duty to present a balanced picture of what has been going on over the past four months.

It has also failed to treat Israeli claims with the scepticism they deserve, especially since Israel has a long track record of being caught out in lies and deceptions.

Paradoxically, given its exposure of concerns at CNN, many of the accusations of journalistic failure levelled at CNN and the BBC could be directed at the Guardian newspaper too – or any other establishment media organisation.

Following Hamas’ 7 October break-out, Israel unleashed a devastating assault on Gaza’s population – so far leaving tens of thousands of Palestinians dead or missing under rubble.

Yet all western media misleadingly continue to frame Israel’s rampage in Gaza – including the collective punishment inflicted on civilians by denying them food and water – variously as “retaliation”, “a war with Hamas”, and “an operation to eliminate Hamas”.

Western media have also largely avoided characterising as “ethnic cleansing” the Israeli military’s order for Palestinians to leave their homes. As a result, 1.7 million have been trapped in a small area in southern Gaza where they face relentless bombing.

Similarly, there has been almost no mention of a long-held plan by Israel – which it now appears close to realising – to drive Gaza’s population into the Sinai desert, in neighbouring Egypt.

And the same media outlets have refused to connect the all-too-obvious dots that Israel – in destroying most of Gaza’s homes, forcibly shutting almost all of its medical facilities and cutting off food and water, while also demanding international defunding of Unrwa, the United Nations’ main aid agency to Gaza – is pursuing an openly genocidal policy.

Israel is making Gaza unlivable, just as Giora Eiland, adviser to the Israeli defence minister, vowed Israel would do at the outset of its assault: “Gaza will become an area where people cannot live.”

When the media do refer to genocide, it is strictly in the context of the International Court of Justice’s decision to put Israel on trial for the “crime of crimes”. Even then, the establishment media have largely minimised the significance of the World Court’s ruling, or even spun it as a victory for Israel.

Astonishingly, the ICJ’s panel of 17 justices has proven to be far more courageous than western media journalists.

Feeble whistleblowers

It is notable that, although the Guardian refers to a “backlash” at CNN, the only meaningful evidence for that backlash is a group of journalists airing their grievances anonymously to the Guardian.

The self-professed “fearless truth-tellers” at CNN and the BBC have, by their own admission, exposed themselves as too cowed to report truthfully about Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.

It is not journalists and on-the-ground reporting that is shaping the news coverage, they complain. It is well-paid media executives, looking over their shoulders at corporate advertisers, government officials and a pro-Israel lobby tightly networked into both.

The journalists cited by the Guardian are too afraid even to go on the record with their criticisms. They are the very feeblest kind of whistleblowers.

They lack even the minimal courage shown by the 800 US and European officials who signed a statement condemning their governments for sidelining expert advice and risking complicity in “one of the worst human catastrophes of this century”.

Where are the Western journalists demanding that Israel stop its campaign of assassinations of Palestinian journalists? Or that Israel end a media siege that prevents foreign correspondents from reaching a genocide zone unless they are embedded with Israeli soldiers?

Why are journalists not raising these matters in public, or putting the Israeli government officials they so regularly host on air on the spot by demanding an explanation?

There is also a fundamental misunderstanding demonstrated by the comments CNN staffers have made to the Guardian. One observed: “There’s a lot of internal strife and dissent. Some people are looking to get out.”

Another noted of the Jerusalem bureau’s role that “critical changes – from the introduction of imprecise language to an ignorance of crucial stories – ensure that nearly every report, no matter how damning, relieves Israel of wrongdoing”.

But while CNN may be the worst of a rotten bunch, the simple truth is that there are no establishment media destinations where these disillusioned journalists are going to find that they can speak freely about Israel’s crimes, let alone about its overarching genocidal goals.

Should they really try to act as truth-tellers, they are most likely to share the fate of Antoinette Lattouf, a journalist fired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for reposting a report by Human Rights Watch on Israeli atrocities.

Lattouf had been the focus of a pro-Israel lobby campaign demanding her dismissal after she investigated the veracity of a video purporting to show protest crowds in Sydney chanting “Gas the Jews”.

As usual, the story was unquestioningly reported by much of the western media. Last week, a lengthy New South Wales police investigation concluded that the audio track had been faked.

Middle East Eye

Jan 22, 2024 #RealTalk
Australian-Lebanese presenter Antoinette Lattouf was fired by Australia's ABC just three days after she started. It has now surfaced that her firing may have been orchestrated by a pro-Israeli WhatsApp group. Now she’s fighting back, and she joins us to speak about it on Real Talk online. (Note: After this interview was recorded, ABC issued a statement saying that Lattouf was not fired. Lattouf responded on Twitter, saying: “If I wasn’t sacked, what was it?”) #RealTalk is a Middle East Eye interview show hosted by Mohamed Hashem that delves into the stories and experiences of a diverse range of guests.

Left in the dark

One of the main criticisms of CNN’s coverage under Thompson is that he has insisted on a pro-Israel framing. One management memo states: “We must continue always to remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of civilians”.

According to the insiders, CNN has used Hamas’ 7 October attack “to implicitly justify Israeli actions, and that other context or history was often unwelcome or marginalised”.

As one staffer observed: “Every action by Israel – dropping massive bombs that wipe out entire streets, its obliteration of whole families – the coverage ends up massaged to create a ‘they had it coming’ narrative.”

Western media can never truly report the nature and extent of Israel’s decades of criminality. Doing so would be to expose their long-standing complicity in those crimes.

But as MEE has detailed previously, it is not just CNN that has been determined to impose a bogus balance that usefully allows it to equivocate over genocide.

For months on end, the BBC and other outlets have revisited the historic horrors of 7 October, all too often at the expense of broadcasting the current horrors of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.

The discovery, for example, of a mass grave last week in northern Gaza, the victims handcuffed and with signs that they had been tortured before execution, has been buried by the Western media.

As Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch, wondered in a tweet: “Why isn’t this a bigger story?” Who can doubt it most certainly would have been, were the bodies Ukrainian and were Russia, not Israel, in the frame?

There is a pattern of omitting evidence that contradicts Israel’s official narrative, and one that began with the events of 7 October – supposedly the vital, immediate context CNN executives claim needs constantly emphasising as the “cause of this current conflict”.

Astonishingly, for weeks western outlets have refused to report on Israeli media investigations that have re-evaluated the events of October 7 and upended official Israeli claims.

Western audiences have been left completely in the dark.

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Since 7 October, Israel and the Western media have promoted the story that Hamas burned Israelis alive – apparent savagery that quickly became the chief justification for Israel’s genocidal bombing and starving of Gaza’s population. But Israeli media investigations strongly indicate that it was not Hamas but Israel itself that incinerated many of its citizens with tank shells and Hellfire missiles fired by Apache helicopters.

Those reports reveal that Israeli commanders, blindsided by the Hamas attack, invoked the military’s notorious “Hannibal directive”, which requires Israeli soldiers to stop Israelis being taken hostage, even if it results in their being killed.

This “mass Hannibal”, as one Israeli commander called it, has been set out in great detail by veteran military correspondents at the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

Similarly, none of the Western media have seen fit to report that the Israeli military’s own ethics adviser, Professor Asa Kasher of Tel Aviv University, has called the Israeli military’s actions that day “horrifying” and in urgent need of investigation by a state commission of inquiry.

He told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper that he suspected the invocation of the Hannibal directive against Israeli civilians, rather than captured Israeli soldiers, was against Israeli law.

Career suicide

The problem is not just that the western media have acted as one in blanking out persuasive evidence of the crimes Israel committed on 7 October. They have also, again as one, been credulously ascribing particularly barbarous crimes to Hamas on the most tenuous of evidence – unsubstantiated claims that Israel has then been using to justify its genocidal rampage.

That started in the immediate wake of 7 October with allegations that Hamas had variously beheaded babies, hung them from washing lines and roasted them in ovens. These claims were even echoed by the White House.

There is still zero evidence for any of them.

CNN staff are upset that Hadas Gold, one of its reporters in Jerusalem – part of the unit vetting all copy about Gaza – uncritically recycled lies from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

She described Hamas’ denials about the beheaded babies as unbelievable “when we literally have video of these guys, of these militants, of these terrorists doing exactly what they say they’re not doing to civilians and to children”.

In fact, no one had seen such videos, least of all CNN. She was simply repeating the falsehoods she was being told by Israeli officials and passing them off as incontrovertible facts. But this abandonment of the most basic of journalistic principles is not restricted to CNN. Most of the Western media hurried to accuse Hamas of murdering and beheading babies.

Caution can safely be thrown to the wind when it comes to claims against Hamas, when no Western journalists would ever dare to so recklessly promote evidence-free claims against Israel. They do not need a memo from management to understand that it would be career suicide.

Which is why academic research into coverage of Israel and Palestine always reaches the same conclusion: that media bias against Palestinians is off the charts.

For instance, a study of the BBC’s first month of coverage of Israel’s attack on Gaza found a complete inconsistency in the language used.

The terms “murder”, “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” were used constantly to describe, and remind viewers of, the deaths of Israelis on the single day of 7 October. Those terms were not used once in covering the many weeks of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians.

As ever, the media implicitly confers a legitimacy and legality on Israeli violence, even when it is committing genocide, that Palestinian violence is automatically denied.

Blackout of Hamas

This problem very much infects not just the popular press but the so-called serious, “liberal” media too.

The Guardian has followed the New York Times in not only failing to report on the horrors Israel unleashed on its own citizens on 7 October. Both have also actively promoted the evidence-free claim against Hamas that it carried out “systematic” rape that day, using sexual violence as a weapon of war.

The New York Times breathed credibility into this claim in a widely shared feature story in late December. The family of the supposed primary rape victim cited by the New York Times immediately accused the paper of advancing a falsehood and of manipulating them. There were other major discrepancies and inconsistencies in the report.

After mounting internal protests among staff over the poorly evidenced story, the paper has indefinitely postponed an episode of its flagship “The Daily” podcast that was supposed to expand on the Times’ original story.

The Intercept set out the New York Times’ dilemma: either “run a version that hews closely to the previously published story and risk republishing serious mistakes, or publish a heavily toned-down version, raising questions about whether the paper still stands by the original report”.

Even so, despite these evident weaknesses, the Guardian regurgitated the Times’ story precisely – based on the same discredited Israeli sources.

What makes these misrepresentations of the factual record so easy is the media’s exclusive reliance on, and reflexive trust of, Israeli sources.

The Guardian’s investigation of CNN, again paradoxically, cites concerns from staff that management has insisted on a blackout of Hamas statements, arguing that anything it says is “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda” and therefore “not newsworthy”.

One staffer noted: “CNN viewers are being prevented from hearing from a central player in this story… It is not journalism to say we won’t talk to someone because we don’t like what they do.”

But this is standard media practice when it comes to Hamas. The BBC and other outlets indicate their inherent ideological bias in appending their governments’ self-serving designation of Hamas as “a terrorist organisation”. They would never dare describe Israel – quite accurately – as “on trial for genocide by the International Court of Justice”.

As former UK ambassador Craig Murray noted, the BBC led their news with an eight-minute segment recycling unevidenced Israeli allegations of involvement by UN refugee agency staff in Gaza with Hamas. The BBC’s reporting effectively rationalised the UK government’s decision to defund Unrwa, even in the face of an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe there.

It was Channel 4, in an all-too-rare moment of true journalism, that later showed that the documents sent by Israel to the UK and other governments provided no evidence to back up its claims.

It is precisely the anti-journalistic decision to ignore Hamas’ views, as well as sidelining wider Palestinian perspectives, that gives Israel and its lobby groups free rein to spread their own inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.

All too often, Hamas is pre-judged as guilty, whatever it is accused of. This vilification process even extends to those showing solidarity with Gaza’s suffering, including millions who have marched in western cities. They have been repeatedly labelled and vilified as Hamas supporters.

The real pressures

The Guardian offers various explanations for why CNN has failed so dismally to cover properly the slaughter in Gaza. All have an element of truth about them.

CNN is indeed afraid of antagonising the US government and challenging a critical part of its foreign policy agenda.

There are undoubted commercial pressures from advertisers. The Israel lobby can be confident its threats will be taken seriously when journalists face being accused of antisemitism for stepping out of line. And all of these pressures are compounded by the difficulties its journalists face in accessing Gaza.

But what the Guardian does not want its readers to notice is that all of these pressures apply not just to CNN but to every other corporate media outfit, including the Guardian itself. Which is why the failures are across the board, not confined to one or two broadcasters.

And those pressures are not just current ones. They are there all the time. Which is why the state-corporate media have refused to treat with any seriousness the arguments of leading Israeli and international human rights organisations that Israel is an apartheid, racist state, and one that systematically oppresses Palestinians.

But even these explanations fail to tell the whole story. The deeper truth is that western commercial media is no more separate from the corporate interests of its advertisers than a state broadcaster like the BBC is from the key interests of the state that funds it. They are integrally tied together.

The large corporations and billionaires that own the media are heavily invested in the arms and fossil fuel industries that require the West’s continuing colonial-style, military dominance of the planet and its resources.

Israel has long been the lynchpin of western establishments’ control of the oil-rich Middle East, and a testbed for weapons, new technology, surveillance and missile interception systems.

Although it is rarely mentioned, it is Western bombs currently devastating Gaza, and it is Western-financed technology that protects Israel from retaliation. Without endless Western support, Israel would never have been established on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland. And, without unstinting backing, it would long ago have been forced to make peace with its neighbours.

It is with this context – and only this context – that the media’s consistent, predictable and reflexive coverage of the region can be explained. Israel is invariably given the benefit of the doubt, even when its crimes are unmistakable, while the Palestinians are assumed to be committing savagery, even when the evidence is flimsy or non-existent.

The reality is that the Western media can never truly report the nature and extent of Israel’s decades of criminality. Because to do so would be to expose their long-standing complicity in those crimes.

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