Since the very beginning of this genocide, the Israeli government has been saying the quiet part out loud, using dehumanizing rhetoric like “human animals,” and expressing their desire for vengeance by invoking the Biblical commandment to destroy the people of Amalek.
One year in, with the fates of 97 Israeli hostages still unknown, they are just as brazen about their game plan. “It’s time to neutralize the whole axis of evil,” a former Israeli military official told CNN. “We started with Hamas, then Hezbollah. It is now the time for Iran, maybe Syria.” Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly shown off maps of the Middle East that show the complete elimination of Palestine, while his top ministers brazenly speak of establishing a “Greater Israel” that encompasses parts of Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
How did we find ourselves here, despite ample evidence of Israeli war crimes, genocide and expansionist motivations? For over a year, a perfect storm of selective media coverage, propaganda mobilization and the military-industrial complex has justified Israel’s endless escalations and demanded more blood.
War profiteering
It’s like clockwork. As the Middle East is bombed, the Western weapon industry thrives.
In the days after Israel initiated its ground invasion of Lebanon and Iran launched ballistic missiles toward Israel, several major U.S.-based defense contractors — Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and L3Harris Technologies — saw their stock prices surge. Meanwhile, investigative reporters note that at least 50 members of Congress or their family members hold investments in these and other defense companies.
A tally by Brown University’s Costs of War project found that the Biden-Harris administration has spent at least $22.76 billion to support Israel’s war on Gaza and its operations against Yemen’s Houthis, including a record $17.9 billion since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack. That number is only going up: The U.S. Defense Department has also confirmed that it will send American troops and an air defense battery to Israel to defend against Iranian attacks. Both U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been adamant that no strings will be attached to these funds, now or in the future.
The entire system and relationship between the defense sector and the political establishment is designed and thrives to maximize profits at the cost of human lives. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has studied America’s role in the so-called war on terror, Washington and its military-industrial complex once again stand the clear winner in this genocide.
Dehumanization and propaganda
Why has the world sat back and allowed Israel to kill at least 41,000 Palestinians — per Brown University’s recent analysis, that number is actually at least 100,000 — while politicians and defense contractors enriched themselves and the Israeli government carried out its vision of conquest and death?
Palestinians have been dehumanized to the extent that intentional starvation, bombardment and human suffering have not just been normalized, the objective of complete extermination of the “other” is within sight.
Weeks after Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant unhesitatingly designated Palestinians living in Gaza as “human animals,” Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Arieh King called members of Hamas “subhuman,” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu classified Palestinians as “children of darkness” while calling Israelis “children of light.”
By claiming self-defense against people that are inherently barbaric, they perpetuate violence against children and innocent civilians in the name of the war on evil. We have a moral duty to deconstruct the language and the ideology of political Zionism, to understand how this rhetoric serves as powerful propaganda in constructing the “victims” versus “enemies” narrative into the mainstream.
But instead of seeing through this rhetoric, the mainstream media has become complicit in uncritically spreading the Israeli and Western governments’ narrative. In service of their agendas, the global media coverage — shaped by Western outlets — has successfully reinforced Israeli propaganda and legitimized genocide against Palestinians. The international opinion has been constructed by Oct. 7 rather than 75 years of displacement, occupation and dehumanization of Palestinians.
‘Colonizer’s journalism’
Analyses by the Centre for Media Monitoring have shown “overwhelming” and disproportionate pro-Israel biases and Islamophobic rhetoric in the broadcasting coverage by the Western media. Researchers found coverage by 28 mainstream news publications including BBC, CNN World, Sky News, The Guardian and The New York Times willfully exaggerated Israel’s purported right to self-defense over Palestinians’ rights. The brutal reality of Palestinian occupation, dismemberment and dispossession from their land was sidelined.
Critical voices from human rights organizations, academic institutions and watchdog groups are rebuffed and silenced on grounds of being antisemitic. Offering important context – including the historical violence perpetuated by Israel and Israel’s age-old campaigns to prevent ceasefires and peace deals – is seen as victim-blaming rather than an enrichment of the discourse of settler colonialism and its modern-day objectives.
As the renowned Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu says, “The world tells us that nothing can justify Oct. 7, and yet everything Israel has done can be justified by Oct. 7.”
The “narrative battle” has been weaponized to demonize, dehumanize and vilify the “other.” Investigative reporter Vidya Krishnan calls it an example of colonizer’s journalism,” writing in Al Jazeera: “It is journalism done by practitioners from colonizing countries who take pride in their imperial conquests … These journalists seem convinced that their countries have fought and defeated particularly immoral and powerful enemies throughout history, stopped evil in its tracks, protected civilisation, saved the day.”
The dominant coverage of the conflict shows a series of decontextualized events mired in violence beginning from Oct. 7, labeling them as aggressors while systematically ignoring decades of structural violence. Disproportionate violence is exacted on the “enemy other” by invoking the right to “self-defense,” despite aggression that exceeds every definition of proportionality, rationality and international law.
Western media have been complicit in running the rhetoric of Israel as a “victim” party against the “enemy” Palestinians by normalizing the structural violence exacted upon all these years as justified to contain terrorism. Civilian casualties in Gaza are characterized as “collateral damage,” and arbitrarily and forcibly detained Palestinians, including minors, are described as “prisoners”; for Israelis, we see them described as “civilian casualties” and “hostages.”
Such characterization is actively used to ensure unbridled carpet bombing in the name of shattering Hamas’s resistance. For example, Israeli officials say the IDF bombed Al-Shifa Hospital to attack the Hamas headquarters located there. No Hamas headquarters were found there, but the Israeli narrative became the voice of the mainstream. Just remember the claims of “beheaded babies” that were circulated by Israeli forces – while they have since been debunked, the claims are still being echoed by President Biden and other Israeli apologists.
Media outlets have not learned their lesson a year later about uncritically parroting the IDF version of events; on Aug. 26, the BBC reported that “Israel has said it carried out a wave of pre-emptive strikes across southern Lebanon to thwart a large-scale rocket and drone attack by Hezbollah.” Meanwhile, CNN staffers have revealed that their content was actually being filtered and approved by the Jerusalem Bureau. The international news outlet has censored content, employed a passive tone to justify IDF’s actions, and sidelined the voices and testimonies of non-combatant Gazans, staff said.
Despite Israeli officials’ transparency and brazenness — despite our unprecedented ability to watch this genocide unfold on our phones, to see through the IDF’s flimsy excuses and dissect its propaganda campaigns — Israeli economic and imperial interests have found reliable allies in our global media and political apparatus.
