By Dr. M. Reza Behnam

In a world where press freedom is under siege, journalists in Gaza risk their lives to report the truth, while the global media remains complicit in silencing their voices.

As gatekeepers of the corporate information bazaar, you have served Israel well. Echoing the propaganda of Tel Aviv and Washington has become mainstream fare, with omission at the heart of the campaign.

Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, judiciously wrote in 1789: “Whenever the people are well informed, they may be trusted with their own government.”

Unfortunately, today’s media mind managers have forgotten that. The public’s right to know the truth about Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, supported by the United States, has been subordinated to currying the favor of special interest groups and moneyed interests.

You have been tranquilized by your intimate relationship with the national security state, ever willing to espouse the pro-Israel views of the White House, State Department, the Pentagon, and most, if not all, members of the American political class.

British novelist George Orwell, in a passage from his prophetic novel 1984, aptly described the relationship that has evolved between the establishment media and Israel; he wrote: “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

There is a tendency among journalists to believe in their individual autonomy, although most work in large, hierarchical, corporate media organizations. Many have convinced themselves that they are engaged in watchdog journalism when they are, in fact, acting as stenographers for the powerful.

In the case of Israel, journalists quickly learn compliance: what can and cannot be said to protect careers. While pro-Israel reporting and editorializing are rewarded, exact narratives and historical perspectives suffer repercussions.

Censors have become unnecessary because an ideology of self-censorship has formed and congealed. Many journalists can recall instances when they were told not to antagonize powerful interests and advertisers, and can name principled journalists, like the late Helen Thomas and John Pilger, who were banished for saying the “unacceptable.”

Years of unexamined logic, unrevealed truths, and self-deception in the coverage of Palestine-Israel and America’s defense of the Zionist colony have contributed to a labored understanding of October 7, 2023, and its aftermath.

It was apparent soon after the October insurrection that you intended to focus on Israel’s story. The Islamic Resistance Movement’s (Hamas) act of resistance on that day has never been put into the context of Israel’s terror against the Palestinians. And you have never made it explicit that international law (Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949) affirms the right of national liberation movements—like Hamas—to resist, to use force against military occupation and colonization.

Astonishingly, fifteen months into the genocide, you continue to describe Israel’s war on an imprisoned stateless people under occupation as “defensive.” What you shamelessly leave out is that it is a war against all Palestinians, sponsored by the United States. Also missing from your coverage and analysis is Tel Aviv’s plan to grab more land to further its design for a “Greater Israel,” and to capture the water and other vital resources of its neighbors, Lebanon and Syria.

Israel has banned foreign journalists from Gaza. It has been Palestinian journalists who speak of the horrors that Israel has inflicted on Palestinians, and it has been they who have paid a heavy price.

Since the beginning of the insurrection (October 2023–December 2024), Israel has killed 222 Palestinian journalists and media personnel. That is a war crime. Article 79 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions clearly states: all journalists “engaged in dangerous professional missions in zones of armed conflict shall be considered civilians…[and] shall be protected.”

There are an estimated 85,000 news and editorial personnel in the profession in the United States. Although some have raised alarms over Israel’s targeting of them, persistent calls for fair coverage have gone essentially unheeded.

In November 2023, for example, 1,484 journalists signed a letter to leaders in Western newsrooms condemning the killing of reporters and their family members. They also encouraged newsroom editors to be “clear-eyed in coverage of Israel’s repeated atrocities against Palestinians.”

An earlier attempt was made in June 2021. Then, 514 journalists signed an open letter stating: “For the sake of our readers and viewers—and the truth—we have a duty to change course immediately and end this decades-long journalistic malpractice. The evidence of Israel’s systematic oppression of Palestinians is overwhelming and must no longer be sanitized.”

The continuing erosion of press freedom and independence is reflected in the Reporters Without Borders 2024 World Press Freedom Index. It ranked the United States at 55 out of 180 countries indexed.

Editorial intimidation has not stopped some reporters from trying to end the whitewashing of Israel. In November and December 2024, for example, journalists at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) endeavored to expose the blatant pro-Israel bias that dominates its reporting on Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

BBC staffers stated that coverage consistently devalued Palestinian lives, ignored Israeli atrocities, and created a false equivalence between Israel and Hamas. They also called for an end to the practice of presenting Israel’s version of events as facts, and requested that more be done to provide regular historical context about Israel’s apartheid occupation that predates October 2023.

Journalists at CNN have also expressed frustrations over systematic and institutionalized bias toward Israel and the silencing of Palestinian perspectives in their newsrooms.

Written language is the craft of journalists and journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Israel, it has been distorted to normalize the abnormal, make the apocryphal real, and the fraudulent legal. The culture of silence on Gaza has made genocide—the most severe crime against humanity—the “accepted” backdrop of daily life.

Examples abound of how language has been misused to sell the public on the idea that the genocide of Palestinians will make Israel secure. I bristle each time I hear journalists use the word “war” or “conflict,” used repeatedly, to describe the horrors Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians.

You have been driven to accept the Israeli regime’s narrative that its crime of extermination in Gaza is a “war,” while recognizing that it is not.

Responding to an Israeli airstrike on December 21, 2024, that killed 25 Palestinians in Jabaliya, including 12 members of one family, seven of them children, Pope Francis did not equivocate: “Yesterday children were bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war.”

Merriam-Webster tells us that war is “a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations.” The Gaza Strip is not a state. It is illegally occupied land, and its inhabitants have been under occupation and siege since 2007. War also implies a battle between equals or near-equals. The total asymmetry in power between Israel and Hamas continues to be unreported.

– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.