Despite the U.S. government’s continued claims that it is working toward a ceasefire, the genocide that has taken place in Gaza over the past year is the result of a joint U.S.-Israeli enterprise. . Israel would not be able to inflict the level of violence on the Palestinian people without American weapons, intelligence and political cover.
To pursue this policy, the U.S. government needed a critical mass of the American population to support or accept its policy of working with Israel to exterminate the Palestinians. To maintain it, President Joe Biden’s administration has adopted a decidedly pro-Israel narrative and sought to justify Israeli actions and its own by invoking Israel’s “right of self-defense.”
Influential voices in the American media also helped create the ideological conditions necessary for public acceptance of Israeli atrocities perpetrated by the United States. They are, with the Biden administration, partly responsible for the genocide in Gaza.
In 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) handed down the first-ever convictions for incitement to genocide, finding “genocidal harm caused by the programming of Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines” during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Incitement to genocide is “inchoate,” that is, a crime that encourages the commission of a crime while also constituting an offense in itself.
For the ICTR, demonstrating that a person has committed incitement to genocide does not necessarily require demonstrating that their speech directly led a person to commit genocidal acts. According to a specialist, for genocide to occur, a climate must be created allowing the commission of such crimes.
Comments in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal can be interpreted in these terms. The pundits at these newspapers engaged in a form of incitement to genocide, although distinct, because Americans do not need to go to Palestine and kill people to contribute to genocide; they just need to accept their government’s participation.
Gregory S Gordon’s Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition offers thought-provoking approaches to incitement to genocide and other forms of hate speech. Applying his arguments to US media coverage of Palestine and Israel after October 7, 2023 suggests that much of it amounts to incitement to genocide. Gordon, an international lawyer and former ICTR prosecutor, says demonization is a form of incitement. This practice, he writes, focuses on “devils, evildoers and other nefarious characters.”
An article published in the New York Times last October took precisely this direction. “If Gaza is the open-air prison as so many of Israel’s critics claim, it is not because Israelis are capriciously cruel, but because too many of its residents pose a mortal risk,” says the article. Here, large numbers of Palestinians in Gaza are presented as deadly criminals deserving of collective punishment. Along the same lines, an October 7 Wall Street Journal editorial told us that Israel is in a “rough neighborhood.”
A Washington Post editorial published days later claimed that Israel was part of a “battle against barbarism.” In another article, a columnist wondered whether “it would be futile to apply political logic to the horrors perpetrated by the millenarian religious fanatics of ISIS or Hamas.” They are motivated by a religious imperative: to massacre “infidels” and “apostates”, whatever the consequences. »
An article published in the New York Times in November offered similar wording, describing Hamas as a “terrorist death cult.” Characterizing Hamas in this misleading and overly simplistic way – let alone vilifying the Palestinians altogether – as atavistic savages sends the message that they are irrational barbarians and must be crushed, whatever the cost.
According to Gordon, attempting to persuade an audience that ongoing atrocities are morally justified is another form of incitement, prevalent in media coverage of Gaza. The direction Israeli policy was taking was easy to identify as early as October 13 last year when Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, wrote that Israel had undertaken a “genocidal attack on Gaza ( which) is completely explicit, open, and unashamed.
However, three weeks after the start of the Israeli offensive, an article published in the Washington Post rejected calls for a ceasefire and even the idea that Israel should “limit its response to precision airstrikes and commando raids to eliminate high-ranking Hamas members and free hostages.” . He argued that if Israel agreed to a ceasefire at this point, it would “reward aggression and invite more in the future.”
The subtext is that Israel’s actions are ethically defensible, even though the United States and Israel killed nearly 3,800 Palestinians in the first 13 days of the assault on Gaza, wiping out entire families. At the time, Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard described Israel’s actions as “a street after street pulverization of residential buildings, killing civilians on a large scale and destroying essential infrastructure”, while further limiting what could enter Gaza so that the Gaza Strip is protected. was “out of water, medicine, fuel and electricity”.
The November New York Times editorial mentioned above put forward a rather novel view that the Palestinians would ultimately benefit from a massacre. He magnanimously conceded that “in the short term, of course: Palestinian lives would be saved if Israel held its fire.” But the article asserted that if the US-Israeli assault ended with Hamas still in power in Gaza, that result would mean “a virtual guarantee of future mass casualty attacks on Israel, ever-increasing Israeli retaliation and d ‘deeper misery for the people’. from Gaza. »
By this logic, it is virtuous for the United States and Israel to help the Palestinians by pursuing policies that have turned Gaza into “a graveyard for thousands of children” and “a hell for everyone else.”
Attempts to legitimize the mass deaths inflicted by the United States and Israel did not disappear after the first weeks of the massacre in Gaza. In January, an article in the Washington Post said that the death and destruction in Gaza was a tragedy for its people, but that “the main responsibility must lie with Hamas, because it launched an unprovoked attack on Israel.”
Suggesting that the US-Israeli campaign is in response to an “unprovoked” Palestinian attack implies that the campaign is justifiable. This position does not stand up to scrutiny: in the days, weeks and months leading up to October 7, Israel repeatedly bombed Gaza and fired on Palestinians against the fence surrounding the territory while subjecting them to a brutal and illegal siege , not to mention the more than 75 years of dispossession to this day.
Because Israel was carrying out acts of war against Palestinians in Gaza before October 7, Israel’s actions since then cannot be understood as a form of self-defense. Yet US-Israeli apologists in the US media have declared that “Israel has the right and duty to defend itself”, presenting the US-Israeli crusade as just and therefore worthy of support. Never mind that Israel’s “defense” has resulted in a “relentless war” on Gaza’s health system and airstrikes on hospitals and health workers, as well as killings of Palestinians at the deadliest rate of all the conflicts of this century.
In late February, a Wall Street Journal editorial criticized Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib and others on the grounds that “the ceasefire they want would leave (Hamas) fighters alive and well.” free to rebuild their terrorist state. The suffering in Gaza is terrible, but the main cause is Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields.”
By that time, Israel had killed at least 7,729 children. For the Journal, it seems that this horror would be justified if Hamas were defeated; the tens of thousands of dead Palestinian civilians could be explained by dubiously and selectively employing the concept of human shields.
In March, another New York Times column repeated the same familiar canards in an attempt to persuade readers that U.S.-Israeli conduct in Gaza was right, claiming that “Hamas started the war” and that “Israel is leading a harsh war against Gaza. an evil enemy who puts his own civilians in danger. The Biden administration, the article advises, should “help Israel win the war decisively so that Israelis and Palestinians can one day win peace.”
Two weeks earlier, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, denounced the famine imposed on Palestinians in Gaza by Israel and declared that “we are now in a situation of genocide”. For some American opinion makers, it is morally right for the United States to continue to participate.
The media that published these articles could have given more space to sober reflections on how to generate peace, justice and liberation in historic Palestine. Instead, they gave platforms to those who helped incite the carnage wrought by America and Israel. When the history of this macabre period is written, it will be necessary to devote a chapter to the media which contributed to triggering a genocide and maintaining it.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.