Propaganda and the Destruction of Gaza

Western media turns a blind eye to Israeli fascism

From Human Rights Watch

Correction: a previous version of this essay included a mis-translated quote by the Israeli defence minister. It read, “There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything.” In actuality, Gallant said, “We will eliminate it all,” not “everything.” For another one of Gallant’s quotes, I noted that he was referring to Hamas, not Gazans, when he said “human animals.”

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We all know that what’s happening in Gaza is brutal and heart-rending. But if you read the New York Times or some other mainstream media source, you might be shocked to learn about the specifics of what Israel is doing. It seems almost fantastical and inexplicable that Israel would be executing medics and then dumping them in mass graves. How could this be the case?

Why is a prominent Israeli journalist calling for Gazans to be corralled into a concentration camp? Is it abnormal for a member of the Knesset to say that Gaza needs to be “flattened” and that for its residents "there is but one sentence, and that is death."?

Why have there been so many instances of IDF soldiers raping Palestinians? And then when Israeli soldiers get arrested for rape, why are there protests calling for their release? And then why do members of Netanyahu’s cabinet express support for the rapists and condemn those who brought their crime to light?

Why does the IDF use a “sub-army of Palestinian slaves” (to quote a former IDF soldier) to inspect potentially booby-trapped houses rather than dogs?

Netanyahu has officially announced that the IDF will realize Trump’s plan for “voluntary migration” in Gaza. He says “This is the plan. We are not hiding this.” Why is he so brazenly saying that he wants to ethnically cleanse Gaza?

The truth is that none of this is very surprising if you know about Israeli history or if you’ve been paying attention to Israeli media and politics.

Even before October 7^th, Israel was an extremely racist society where the majority of Israelis Jews viewed Jews as ethnically superior to Palestinians. The majority of Israelis agreed that “most Jews are better than most non-Jews because they were born Jews.” The majority supported segregating Jews from Arabs. Ninety percent of Israelis said they would be disturbed if their daughter befriended an Arab boy. As early as in 2012, the majority of Israelis openly expressed support for apartheid, wishing to strip West Bank Arabs of the right to vote if Israel were to ever officially annex the territory (of course, Israel de facto controls and governs the West Bank, where Palestinians lack the right to vote and are subject to a different system of laws and courts than Israelis).

In fact, less than a third of Israelis even objected to calling Israel an apartheid state. Back in America, if you said that, you were called an antisemite. This is precisely what happened to me, someone with a Jewish mom who grew up celebrating Passover!

A prominent member of the current Israeli cabinet, Itamar Ben Gvir, was convicted by an Israeli court for supporting Kach, a Kahanist party and terrorist organization, of which he was once a member. Kach advocated a ban on marriage and sex between Jews and non-Jews; the annexation of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan, and Sinai; and the mass expulsion of Palestinians. Support for ethnic cleansing is not a fringe view in Israel. Back in the 1980s, leaders of Likud (Netanyahu’s party) were contemplating expelling the Palestinians from the occupied territories.

Bezalel Smotrich, another prominent member of the Netanyahu cabinet, literally refers to himself as a fascist. Do you think people in America know this? Do they know that their tax dollars are being sent to a government filled with fascists who wish to ethnically cleanse (and, as it’s beginning to seem, exterminate) another ethnic group? They have no idea!

Fascism in Israel

From The Guardian

Israel is ruled by fascists. This shouldn’t be a controversial statement, especially given that one of Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers identifies as a fascist and that another minister is the leader of the Kahanist party Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”).¹ I am not alone in viewing Israel’s government as fascist. Before the Gaza War, Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell, who headed the department of political science at Hebrew University, was concerned about rising fascist trends in his country. Nine years ago, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak warned that the Israeli government had “been infected by the seeds of fascism.” Other scholars who share my view of Israel’s descent into fascism include Shaiel Ben-Ephraim and Holocaust historian Daniel Blatman.

Fascism has been present on the Israeli right for as long as Israel has existed. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and other scholars published a letter in the New York Times in 1948 warning that Herut (the political party founded by Menachem Begin which became Likud) was “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

Historian Robert Paxton defines fascism as such:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without legal or ethical restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

I shouldn’t have to address the issue of external expansion because it’s so obvious. But, if you only read the New York Times or some other mainstream publication, I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t know Israel has illegally occupied a chunk of Syria for over half a century and is currently militarily advancing further into Syria and bombing the country.

Besides eternal, glorious war, the other main aspect of fascism is militant ethnic chauvinism and millenarianism based on a national myth of divine selection and/or historical destiny—which is clearly present in Israeli society and politics. The ideology of total war, expulsions, annihilation, mandatory Orthodox religious law, and ethnic supremacism²—associated with Kach and Kahanism—has now crept into the Israeli government via the political parties Otzma Yehudit and Mafdal–Religious Zionism. And to a large extent this is the ideology of Likud, too. Netanyahu himself has played a significant role in promoting and normalizing fascism in Israel.

Writing in Harper’s, Bernard Avishai wrote the following about the Israeli right:

Given what Jews endured in the twentieth century, it would be tactless to call these Religious Zionist disciples fascists. Let’s just say they celebrate a nation that is enjoying divine election and frustrated glory, surviving through permanent, agonal war; a nation united by blood and faith, covering up irredentism with a rhetoric of covenanted motherland, educating by indoctrination, devoted to a code of behaviour defined by hierarchy, and spreading cynicism about democratic norms, including the very idea of dispassionate truth.

Evidently I have less tact than Avishai. It certainly is provocative and controversial to call the Israeli government fascist. But the reason this is provocative is not because they aren’t fascist, but becuase we’ve been conditioned to think they aren’t. Perhaps it is because I know what my Jewish kindred endured at the hands of fascism in the past that I feel the need to call a spade a spade.

“A good Arab is a dead Arab” and “Kahane lives,” reads this graffiti on a Jerusalem mosque. From Reuters

Israel’s National Myth

The persecution and systematic destruction of European Jewry in the 19th and 20th centuries lent much sympathy to the Zionists’ ethnic nationalist project in the Levant, and for good reason. Though I am generally opposed to ethnic states, I think the Jews have perhaps the most reasonable claim to one—just not at the expense of another people.

Israel was founded on a national myth. The widely believed and government-endorsed narrative is that the Palestinian desert was sparsely populated and that the Jews came and made the desert bloom after a brief virtuous war against the Arabs. The native Palestinians needed to be cleansed—either through mass killing or expulsion—so that a Jewish nation could be built on their ruins.³

As Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote, “As early as 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Chaim Weizmann called for a Palestine ‘as Jewish as England is English’. And Chaim Weizmann . . . was one of the moderates.”

In 1937, David Ben-Gurion wrote the following in a letter to his son:

We must expel Arabs and take their places ... and, if we have to use force – not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places – then we have force at our disposal.

The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, a.k.a. the Nakba, has been documented in excruciating detail by historians, but it is absent from the Israeli consciousness. Nakba denial, and the denial of the existence of a Palestinian people altogether, is common in Israel. To quote Golda Meir (who is adored in the West): “There is no such thing as Palestinians.”

There is a law on the books in Israel that allows the minister of finance to revoke funding from publicly financed institutions, such as schools, that commemorate or mourn the day that Arabs were expelled from Israel in 1948. The current minister of finance—the guy who self-identifies as a racist and a fascist—once stated to an Arab lawmaker that it was a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t “finish the job” and expel him in 1948.

Of course, while the Nakba cannot be mentioned in a apologetic sense, it is perfectly fine in Israel to speak about it wistfully and to call for another one. As prominent Israeli journalist Nava Dromi said of the Palestinians, “[T]here are no innocents… In 1948, they brought the Nakba on themselves. Now they’ll have a second Nakba, but for real, to finish the job for Ben-Gurion.”

“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

From Reuters

Dromi’s statement calling for a second Nakba was made on Channel 14. Channel 14, one of the most popular TV channels in Israel, is like their equivalent of Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines, a.k.a “Hutu Power Radio,” the Rwandan radio station that broadcast from 1993 to 1994 calling for the genocide of Tutsis. Channel 14 hosts journalists who repeatedly call for the expulsion or extermination of the Palestinians. For example, the host of the channel once said, “The enemy is not Hamas, it’s Gaza. The enemy is not Fatah, it’s the Arabs of Judea and Samaria... When you say ‘population’ – there’s no population. [In Gaza] there are two and a half million terrorists… If there are no innocents in Gaza, then there is no reason for the ‘knock on the roof.’”

Another guest on Channel 14 said, “We need to bombard them indiscriminately. We’re doing it discriminately, and that’s not a good thing.”

Regarding combat in civilian areas, a Channel 14 panelist once said that you need to open fire when you spot civilians. The host asked, "Shoot at civilians?" And the panelist replied, "Certainly! They are not civilians." The studio audience applauded.

Channel 14’s website and app presented a statistic throughout much of the Gaza War that counted "the number of terrorists we've eliminated," with the number merely being the total number of Palestinians killed.

Israeli human rights groups compiled a list of more than 150 statements calling for war crimes against Palestinians—including indiscriminate killing, mass expulsion and starvation—and more than 50 statements calling for genocide from Channel 14.

From PBS

Interpreting intent is very difficult, and as a consequentialist, I don’t even view intent as morally important per se. But the crime of genocide depends on intent, and in my view, there is significant evidence of Israeli intent for genocide.⁴ If you reserve the word “genocide” for a more conspicuous instance of the purposeful mass killing of civilians—fine. But if you believe Srebenica was a genocide but Gaza is not, I’m afraid you’re living in an upside-down Orwellian make-believe world.

In June 2024, the official Israeli Twitter account tweeted that "Gazan civilians participated in the horrific events of October 7.” The tweet included a video in which a former Israeli hostage said, “There are no innocent civilians there.”

On October 9, 2023, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

To Israeli troops, Gallant said, “I have released all restraints . . . You saw what we are fighting against. We are fighting human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza. This is what we are fighting against.” (Though in this clip, when he says “human animals” it seems he’s referring to Hamas, not Gazans.)

IDF Major General Ghassan Alian said, “There will be no electricity and no water (in Gaza), there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell,”

Another cabinet minister tweeted, “We will fight the terrorist organization Hamas and destroy it. All the civilian population in [G]aza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

Israeli president Isaac Herzog said, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true.”

Given that Israelis are constantly fed a barrage of genocidal rhetoric from their media and their government, it’s not surprising what they think about the Gaza War. In May 2024, thirty-nine percent of Israelis thought the IDF’s actions in Gaza had “been about right,” 19% thought it had “gone too far,” and 34% thought the IDF had “not gone far enough.”

Back in October of 2023, it was clear to me that Israel would engage in a enormously destructive revenge operation in Gaza, of which the mass killing of civilians would be a feature and not a bug. This is why, in a letter to the New York Times, I urged the US to cut off military aid to Israel immediately after October 7th.

To quote one IDF officer on his service in Gaza:

A lot of us went there, I went there, because they killed us and now we’re going to kill them . . . . And I found out that we’re not only killing them – we’re killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We’re destroying their houses and pissing on their graves.

From AP

Western Propaganda

There is a narrative in the West that Israel is merely conducting a war against terrorists and that the attacks have been restrained and comparable to those of other urban wars. But this is not true. The NGO Airwars (whose reports are cited by such outlets as The Economist and The Financial Times) investigates and documents casualties from war. Airwars’s investigation of the Gaza War has been so meticulously that the only month of the war they have yet investigated in full is October of 2023, about which they wrote the following:

By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.

By blocking humanitarian aid and repeatedly attacking known aid worker locations, Israel deliberately manufactured a famine in Gaza. Israel repeatedly ordered Gazans to evacuate to “humanitarian areas,” which were subsequently bombarded. Israel has systematically destroyed civilian infrastructure in Gaza, such as agricultural land, health facilities, schools, university buildings, government buildings, religious institutions, and cultural sites.

Again, none of this is surprising if you know about Israeli society and politics. But Americans and people in the West more generally are clueless about this. The American news media has behaved like an arm of the US state, spreading propaganda, lying by omission, and sometimes just straight-up lying.

At times, mainstream media outlets will report on Israeli atrocities, which is good. I think this indicates that the reporters at these organizations are not intentionally spewing propaganda. They’re trying to report honestly, but there’s a widespread pro-Israeli bias that affects every aspect of their journalism.

Repeated quantitative analyses of mainstream media have shown a strong bias against Palestinians. Shows like Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and Fox News Sunday overwhelmingly feature pro-Israeli voices compared to pro-Palestinians ones. The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and New York Times disproportionately emphasize—by a staggering margin—Israeli deaths over Palestinian deaths.

From The Intercept

They consistently use emotionally charged language to describe Israeli deaths, referring to “atrocities” and “massacres,” whereas Palestinian deaths are cloaked in bureaucratic and fuddled language. When Palestinians are killed, it’s not uncommon for Western media to omit Israel entirely from the headline, and often they’ll attribute to the news to Hamas, attempting to further delegitimize it. The New York Times operates according to a style guide that tells its journalists to avoid word such as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory.”

Assal Rad put it thus:

Rather than challenging statements from the Israeli government and military, or the U.S. government which repeats without question whatever Israeli officials say, mainstream Western media has largely acted like stenographers of state-run media. In headline after headline, Western outlets have repeatedly failed to mention Israel at all when reporting death tolls from airstrikes in Gaza and Lebanon; used passive voice when attacks are actually attributed to Israel; cast doubt when Palestinians are killed; and dehumanized Palestinians with subtle differences in word choice used to describe Israelis.

The Western media consistently ignores massacres of Palestinians. Two weeks ago, on Eid al-fitr, Israel killed a bunch of Palestinians. This was reported in some of the Israeli press, in Al Jazeera, and in alternative media in the West. But if you type “israel kills palestinians on eid new york times” into Google, you will find that the venerable New York Times has opted to not cover the story.

Again, this is not surprising. The New York Times has been propagandizing the American public about this war for a long time. To this day, they still have not reported that Human Rights Watch, perhaps the world’s preeminent human rights organization, believes Israel is committing acts of genocide in Gaza. Human Rights Watch released a report on this over four months ago.

These are the newspapers that lied and manufactured consent for the Iraq War. They’ve so thoroughly propagandized the American public that people basically have no idea that the US has been illegally occupying a third of Syria for a decade. Do Americans even know that it’s against international law for the US to bomb countries that have not attacked America? Thanks to the Western media’s everlasting allegiance to the US foreign policy blob, what used to a view held by dozens of Western experts regarding Russia and NATO is now widely regarded as treacherous Putin-apologism.

I would like to make this overwhelmingly clear: if you get your news from the New York Times or some other prominent American news outlet, you have been lied to. Consequently, your view of the world should be extremely warped. This might explain why you were unaware that there was a self-avowed fascist in the Israeli cabinet or why you were unaware that one of the most popular TV stations in Israel constantly calls for the extermination of the Palestinians.

American propaganda does not legitimate violence by directly lying to the people or indoctrinating them with the zeal to kill. Rather it slowly destroys the truth by elevating certain narratives and silencing others, allowing for grave atrocities to occur while most remain indifferent and those with power to either look away or deliberately facilitate the atrocities.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

— George Orwell

Despite severe restrictions on journalistic access to Gaza by the Israelis, we have on at least seven occasions found mass graves with hundreds of bodies in Gaza. Among the buried are decapitated, blindfolded, handcuffed, and mutilated bodies with signs of torture. How many more mass graves will be found before the Western media starts properly reporting on what Israel is doing?

From the New York Times

1. Leading historians on fascism even believe that America is governed by fascists.

2. Even among Israel’s “liberal” Western defenders, Israelis are viewed as an unimpeachably moral people, incapable of the kind of base bigotry and violence of other national groups.

3. Sometimes Nakba supporters will attempt to defend it by arguing that the Arabs would have done the same thing, had they won the ’47-’48 war. Perhaps this is true; it wouldn’t surprise me. But it obviously does not morally legitimate ethnic cleansing. If the Arabs had won that war and subsequently ethnically cleansed the Jews, I would have strongly condemned that as well.

4. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Aryeh Neier (the co-founder of HRW), and a U.N. Special Committee have all found Israel to be committing genocide in Gaza.