This month, the world saw South Africa launch hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) into genocidal acts committed by Israel in Gaza. During a two-day hearing on January 11 and 12, the court heard the extensive evidence that the South African legal team had gathered to support their case against Israel, as well as the Israeli team’s rebuttal.
The hearings were historic for two reasons. First, it was the first time that Israel’s decades-long aggression against the Palestinians was exposed in detail for the world to see, without passing through the distorting prism of Western media or politicians. Second, it was the first time that Israel was truly held accountable in public under international law, without being shielded from such accountability by its Western donors, as has been the case cases over the last century.
The unprecedented nature of the hearings attracted international attention. Media around the world covered the proceedings extensively, often with live broadcasts of both presentations. But in the West, once again, an anti-Palestinian media bias has become apparent.
Channels like the BBC have been accused of not showing the South African presentation entirely, while showing more of the Israeli presentation. American, Canadian and British newspapers were reprimanded for not reporting the ICJ case.
The bias was most evident in the glaring parallels between the main points of Israel’s presentations to the court – which reflected long-standing main themes of Israeli propaganda – and mainstream Western media reporting, with few exceptions. Indeed, Western coverage of the war has been biased since day one.
The progressive American publication The Intercept conducted its own analysis of three major American newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times – and found that their reporting “strongly favored Israel”. He said they “disproportionately focused on Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered unbalanced coverage of anti-Semitic acts in the United States, while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7.
According to the Intercept’s analysis, the word “massacre” was used in reference to Israeli deaths compared to Palestinian deaths by a ratio of 125 to 2; the word “massacre” at a ratio of 60 to 1. Anti-Semitism was mentioned 549 times, while Islamophobia was mentioned only 79 times.
This anti-Palestinian bias in print media “follows a similar investigation of US cable news that the authors conducted last month that revealed an even greater disparity,” it concludes.
Many more such studies and examples of Western media bias against Israel are now available.
Tweeting the Intercept report, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, asked a pertinent question: “After months of Western media misrepresenting or failing to report the ongoing genocide in Gaza and all kinds of violations of international law against the Palestinians: I have a question. Don’t journalists have codes of conduct and professional ethics to respect and to which they must be accountable?
To answer his question: they do, in principle. But in practice, journalists and their media directors and owners operate in the context where most Western media play a central role in the enduring legacy of Israeli-Western settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide against Palestinians.
Therefore, the majority of citizens and politicians are convinced that they must support Israeli policies, even if they include colonial brutality and apartheid.
It is not surprising that American public opinion, and most other Western public opinion, over the past half century, has sided strongly with Israel over the Palestinians – because citizens have mostly heard the Israeli perspectives that dominated the media and the statements and policies of their governments.
However, over the past three months, the war in Gaza has revealed the extent to which Israeli state propaganda shapes American policy and the dominant narrative of events in the media. As Norman Solomon, media critic and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, explains in a January 18 Common Dreams article:
“What is most important about the war in Gaza – what is actually happening to the people who are terrorized, massacred, maimed and traumatized – has remained almost invisible to the American public… With enormous help from the media and power structures American Policies, the Ongoing War Mass killings – by any other name – have become normalized, mostly reduced to buzzwords, farcical diplomatic language and euphemistic rhetoric about the war in Gaza. This is exactly what the top leaders of the Israeli government want.”
This dual legacy of distorted reporting and dysfunctional US state policies is no longer as powerful as it once was, as global public reactions to the ICJ genocide hearing showed .
The global protests in solidarity with Palestine have revealed that Israel and its Western patrons and media parrots, who repeat widely discredited Israeli propaganda arguments, can no longer convince the global public to the same extent as they did in the past. This is due to Israel’s brutal actions, but also to the evolution of the global information system.
The world is now witnessing Israel’s genocidal actions and apartheid policies daily on social media and in some alternative media. ICJ presentations and thousands of articles, commentaries, webinars, public lectures and other associated events around the world have exposed these Israeli-Palestinian realities.
The altered news feeds have raised serious concerns in Washington, as well as in Tel Aviv, as honest, justice-loving citizens reject fervent U.S. support for Israeli military brutality — and many say they will reject probably the vote for “Genocide Joe” Biden in the general elections. presidential election next November. This is what happens when ordinary citizens learn the full story of events in Palestine – for the first time in modern history.
A new US opinion poll confirms that likely voters are more likely to vote for candidates who support a ceasefire in Gaza, by a margin of 2 to 1 (51-23%). Among young, non-white voters, who play a crucial role in a Democratic victory, between 56 and 60 percent said they would support ceasefire supporters.
But the growing awareness of what is happening in Israel-Palestine has had an impact far beyond American policy. As South African journalist Tony Karon noted in an article published in The Nation on January 11: “Israel is therefore waging a classic colonial war of pacification of an indigenous population that resists colonization – at a time when a large part of the citizens of the world produce the recipes of several centuries. of Western violence and slavery, demanding justice and a reorganization of global power relations. Defending Palestine has become shorthand for this global struggle to change the way the world is governed. »
Indeed, the intense global support for Palestine, which peaked at the ICJ hearing, represents the global South’s challenge to the political and economic hegemony of the North. People around the world say they support justice and will continue to resist Western colonial forces that have ravaged many societies for half a millennium.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.