The war of extermination in the Gaza Strip hardly reaches the Israeli public, not only because Israel closed the doors of the Gaza Strip to the media and used the sword of military censorship, but also because the overwhelming majority of Israeli journalists closed the door to criticism as well, and chose to side with the political and military levels in the battle. “We win together” over Gaza and over the truth.
Israel no longer needs to activate the sword of military censorship, nor even to stimulate the urge to self-censor within journalists.
From Channel 12 journalist Danny Koshmero, who appeared in the studio carrying a rifle, to Channel 14 anchor Lital Shemesh, who was wearing a gun while presenting the news bulletin, Israeli journalists turned a rifle fighting with the army, and the furthest they got close to the truth was by landing as guests of honor on the back of a tank roaming the Gaza Strip. And it reiterates what the propaganda machine repeats, according to the expression of an Israeli commentator.
“Excuse us”
Therefore, it is not a coincidence that these people did not fall in the war, because they were outside the battle in the first place, and if they were inside it, they would not be targeted by Israeli weapons.
For them, a sentence said is enough to lift the blame and justify the amount of lies flowing, as Yonit Levy of Channel 12 did when she addressed her audience, saying, “This is the appropriate place to tell our viewers, male and female, that we are in an unprecedented situation. The State of Israel has never been afflicted by an event of these dimensions (…), so we say “Here, we also have not known an event of such dimensions. We apologize in advance if something does not meet your standards.”
Therefore, an Israeli journalist did not feel embarrassed as he shouted in the midst of the destruction, joyfully and in a hysterical state, “Gaza has disappeared.” It was not difficult for another colleague to join an Israeli force while he addressed his viewers excitedly, “We are now preparing for a bombing operation, guys.”
Many of those affiliated with the media industry in Israel decided to join the propaganda battle in the name of defending “the state.” “Talk about objectivity has become meaningless,” as a content creator and director of a media services company named Naam Shalo put it in an interview with Haaretz. “I I tell customers every day: If something like this had happened in your country, your response would not have been less strong.”
Netanyahu’s battle
A number of them chose not only to side with the army, but also with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even when they know that the matter is not only an existential battle facing the entity, but rather a fateful battle facing the prime minister in his quest to prolong the war in order to prolong escaping legal prosecution.
It was not for nothing that Netanyahu, in the first week of the war, appointed – in an unusual step – a liaison between his office and Israeli military correspondents. He chose Eli Feldstein, the former spokesman for the Minister of Internal Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, despite the existence of the position of army spokesman, while the position of army spokesman was held. Usually, the media is in contact with the Minister of War and the Chief of Staff, not with the Prime Minister.
The rare media outlets that tweet – only a little – outside the crowd are subjected to the threat of withholding advertisements from them, for example, as is the case with Haaretz, despite the fact that the newspaper is generally lined up in the trenches of the “We win together” battle, and what is published in it in terms of criticism is left to opinion articles where commentators write. Like Gideon Levy.
Sterile images
It goes without saying that the extent of the destruction in Gaza is completely absent from the screens and pages of Israeli newspapers, where only the army’s operations and its alleged successes appear, which are always sanitized by the blood of innocents.
There are no pictures of the horrific destruction, nor of the bodies lying in the streets being eaten by birds, nor of the hospitals that have been turned into graves.
On the other hand, dozens of Palestinian journalists chose to convey to the world part of what was happening in a battle that could be called “Together we win for the truth,” and their equipment was covered with a thick layer of dust from the destruction, none of which touched the Israeli reporters’ cameras, which maintained their purity because they were out of service in the first place.
These Palestinian journalists paid for this with their lives, and the Israeli journalists should have bowed their heads to them in respect because they decided to keep “the coverage going,” even as they reported from the same pit of hell, in the words of journalist and writer Orly Now, and yet “these and these share the same profession.” “, nominally at least.