If Palestinians were granted the same level of humanity as an Israeli, Western complicity in Israel’s genocide would become immediately impossible, writes Owen Jones [photo credit: Getty Images]
From the start of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, Western media could hardly have been less subtle. Palestinian life is deemed to have very little worth, or indeed no real value at all. To be crude: Israelis are ‘us’, Palestinians are ‘them’.
Sky News offers a hideous case in point. In mid-October, an Israeli missile strike blew up yet another school in Gaza, with at least 23 Palestinians originally reported killed, 15 of them children.
Around the same time, Hezbollah fired a missile at an Israeli army base in northern Israel, killing four soldiers. The editorial choice taken by Sky News about how to cover these developments was, to say the least, revealing. Its headline: “Israel names teenage soldiers killed in Hezbollah attack — as ‘23 die’ in Gaza school strike.”
Sky News could hardly have been less subtle. These were 19-year-old Israeli combatants: it is not to relish their deaths to point out they were engaged in an armed onslaught, rather than desperately struggling to survive on its receiving end, and yet they were humanised as ‘teenagers’. The perpetrator was named.
Meanwhile, the scare quotes around the 23 slaughtered Palestinians — their ethnicity unmentioned — sowed doubt. No perpetrator was referred to.
Throughout the day, Sky News presenters not only solemnly read out the full name and rank of each of the killed Israeli soldiers — each was accompanied by photos.
News anchor Kay Burley said with clear sorrow: “All of them were just 19 years old.”
Yet none of the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians — not combatants — butchered by the Israeli military received such a roll call from Sky News, including those much younger than these Israeli soldiers.
When Al Jazeera produced a video which speedily named each of the officially registered Palestinian victims, starting with the youngest, it took over 20 minutes before it reached the first 20-year-old killed.
The Western broadcast media will invite their audience to mourn the deaths of adult Israeli soldiers as grave tragedies — not a practise it has ever offered for the 710 Palestinian newborn babies estimated to have been killed by Israeli soldiers in the first year of the onslaught.
Are Palestinians ‘worthy’ of mourning by Western media?
This disparity in coverage can have some truly perverse manifestations.
A recent CNN article was headlined “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him: Israeli soldiers returning from war struggle with trauma and suicide”, complete with an editor’s note that originally warned, “This story contains details of suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”
It went on to describe the suicide of a 40-year-old “father of four”, Eiliran Mizrahi, who fought in Gaza but was afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder and took his own life.
After a protracted discussion about his emotional anguish as the driver of a D-9 bulldozer, you finally discover from his friend Guy Zaken — the co-driver — what had caused this trauma: CNN claimed they had “run over terrorists, dead and alive in the hundreds,” claiming they “had to”.
Zaken added “Everything squirts out,” the memory of which meant he can no longer eat meat. After outrage on social media, the editor’s note was updated to include a warning about “violence”, too: CNN was shamed into acknowledging the humanity of barbarically killed Palestinians.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnWhat do you even say at this point? Western media outlets are publishing entire pieces inviting us to feel sorrow for Israeli soldiers traumatised by the obscene war crimes they are committing.
The all-encompassing definition of ‘terrorist’ used by the Israeli army aside, running over a living human, irrespective of who they are, is a war crime: if they are dead, that remains true, as per the Geneva Convention prohibition of the desecration for the dead.
The idea that a piece could ever be published encouraging sympathy for Palestinian militants describing their trauma at following orders to run over hundreds of living Israelis is clearly unthinkable.
If Palestinians were truly regarded as actual humans — let alone with lives of equal worth — then the publication of this piece would have been impossible.
Yet these examples merely reflect the pattern of media coverage from day one. At its worst, that included focusing on war crimes which did not happen — as opposed to those which certainly did — on October 7.
There remains more outrage and disgust at the beheading of Israeli babies — which was entirely fictional — than the all-too-real slaughter of countless Palestinian infants.
And as multiple studies have consistently uncovered, coverage per killing of a Palestinian receives far less than that of the killing of an Israeli.
Emotive words such as ‘massacre’ and ‘slaughter’, or humanising words such as ‘grandmother’ or ‘father’, have been proportionately used far more for Israeli victims of violence, too.
The Israeli analyst Ori Goldberg succinctly described to me the state of mind which prevails over much of Israeli society: “No one but us is real.”
But this also applies to Western media coverage. An Israeli is treated as belonging to the Western universe, and as such is ‘real’, with hinterlands, emotions, hopes, dreams, and cultural familiarity.
A Palestinian, on the other hand, is alien, at best an abstraction, one regarded with suspicion, characterised by some kind of creeping guilt.
If they were granted the same level of humanity or ‘realness’ as an Israeli, Western complicity in Israel’s genocide would become immediately impossible, with devastating consequences for the complicit. The level of depravity currently being unleashed every single day would be regarded as utterly intolerable if the victims were “us”.
The Western media has done all it can to ensure those suffering the consequences of a genocidal onslaught have remained ‘them’.
Owen Jones is a British journalist, columnist, and political activist. He is the author of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class and The Establishment – And How They Get Away With It.
Follow him on X: @OwenJones84
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.