The media’s support for the Ukrainian nationalists is confusing to me. I am on the nationalists’ side, because the bombings of cities and the refugees’ plight passes a simple eye test for me — here is a great and brutal injustice. I was in the streets protesting the Iraq war, and its murderous “shock and awe.”
What confuses me is that the media have lost all pretense of objectivity, and are outright cheerleaders for the Ukrainians. But I lost my mainstream media career when I abandoned my objectivity over Palestine. My former colleagues told me I was too passionate to differentiate facts from what was in my head, and I stopped getting assignments. Or I was hired to write about anything but the thing I cared about, Israel and its lobby.
Good friends said I’d gone “into the tank” for Palestine. You’re an activist, not a reporter… you’re lacking in the logical faculty… you’ve got all that mishigos about your Jewish family, you’re antisemitic… Your views are “overdetermined,” as a journalism professor friend said to me. Those questions held me back; and I regret the doubts now– in the light of the naked advocacy by our media in Ukraine.
I reflect that on the very first day of the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2008 it killed over 225 Gazans, 100 of them at a police graduation ceremony, including scores of cadets. It was wholesale slaughter, but our media said the situation was too complicated to reach an easy conclusion.
The media accepted the Israeli propaganda (as no American mainstream media today reflect the Russian side). They said that Palestinians are terrorists and rejectionists who have brought this on themselves by not giving up their grievances from being thrown out of their houses– They need to move on, Hillary Clinton once lectured them. And they said that talking about the Israel lobby is an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. Again and again people threw stones under the wheels of journalists who were merely reporting what they thought was true.
I remember, proudly now, how I went into the tank. In the spring of 2006 the New York Theatre Workship canceled the Rachel Corrie play, and I was stunned by the censorship and then by reading Rachel Corrie’s letters. Israel had killed this young American idealist for trying to stop house demolitions! Rachel was a martyr at 23– a witness, someone of great moral insight and courage, and my heart filled for her. I didn’t understand why she didn’t get more attention.
That summer I finally went to Israel and Palestine, at 50, and was shocked to see how awful life was for Palestinians. This wasn’t complicated. I was in a Hebron man’s house surrounded by barbed wire to keep the settlers from stealing it and he showed our little delegation a video of Jewish settlers pelting Palestinian schoolgirls with rocks as they tried to go to school. An Israeli on the tour said he felt like he had to run out of the apartment and vomit.
I couldn’t unsee any of it. When I got back I told my editor and Jared Kushner, who had lately bought the newspaper I worked for, that it was apartheid. A few months later I got fired. My editor, a dear friend, told me I had a weak mind and I was giving aid and comfort to evil people.
And now so many things journalists are declaring about the Ukrainians are things that we felt about the Palestinians and weren’t allowed to say. They were just too unnuanced…
“Nothing short of collective punishment,” Richard Engel said on NBC of the siege of Kyiv. But that has been true in Gaza forever.
“Indiscriminate attacks,” Stephanie Sy says on PBS of the Russian bombing. “We have been witnessing for weeks, and certainly just in the last 24 hours, atrocities of unimaginable proportion,” Kamala Harris says.
“Like the Nuremburg Trials,” Brooke Gladstone says on NPR today about the possibility of war crimes trials for the Russians.
“They were already heroes, now they are heroes even moreso,” Judy Woodruff on PBS said movingly about Ukrainian soldiers who been singing at the front lines.
“You will get home!” Tom Llamas said on NBC, comforting a 25-year-old refugee in Lviv. The young woman echoed him: “I believe 100 percent we will get home.”
And of course the thrilling videos of the schools and basements where Ukrainian civilians make Molotov cocktails. And Facebook’s revised policy of allowing posts endorsing violence against occupiers.
We were never allowed to say that Palestinians who fight Israeli occupation were heroes. We were punished for doing so. Edward Said was condemned for throwing a rock merely in the direction of Israeli tanks in Lebanon. I remember disapproving of the rock-throwing in occupied Bil’in. What an idiot I was. But I was trying to observe the official rules.
Now I realize what a joke the rules were.
Consider the endless arguments that were had over whether Israel was or wasn’t targeting civilians in Gaza. Richard Goldstone said so in 2009– then basically recanted his huge U.N. human rights report by taking that line back. Because Israel could justify any civilian deaths due to the fact that Hamas had rocket launchers in civilian areas. Of that police graduation, they said that all those cadets were going to serve in a wing of Hamas, which governs Gaza.
What bullshit these arguments were. And the bullshit is revealed by the fact that No one has any trouble today saying that Russia is targeting civilians, as it pounds neighborhoods from which its forces have been attacked. Or that it has bombed hospitals.
When Israel did that in Gaza, the D.C. political establishment didn’t blink, it said, Israel distinguishes between civilians and military targets. And good liberals Samantha Power and Suzanne Nossel and John Kerry and Barack Obama carried the water for Israel against Richard Goldstone and Jimmy Carter. And then Benny Gantz runs for prime minister in Israel by bragging that as chief of staff he bombed Gaza back to the stone age, and now he is a hero to the Democratic Party!
“Please recognize this country [Russia] as a terrorist state,” President Vlodomir Zelenskyy pleaded to Boris Johnson and the British parliament on March 8.
We have been trying to give Israel that appellation for years. And an honest compassionate writer, Tom Suarez, who dares to look at the struggle from the Palestinian perspective, has been repeatedly maligned as an antisemite for writing the book, “State of Terror.”
I think back on a video during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza– when Israel killed more than 500 children in a few weeks and again Barack Obama and Samantha Power and Hakeem Jeffries stood up for Israel. There was a protest in the West Bank and an old Palestinian man rushed at the Israeli soldiers holding up a green cardboard rocket on his arm. It was very brave of him. He was saying that Hamas was his heroes for attacking the Israeli soldiers, who have stolen his land and killed children and taken Palestinian homes and villages and cities.
What a noble man! And what a pity it took Ukraine to see that.
P.S. Of course the question arises, Why is there such a double standard? Some of it has to do with official media culture. There is an information establishment in the U.S. as in any other country, and shrewd journalists align themselves with the powers that be. Just look at the coverage of the Iraq war. I will never forget a dear editor friend, who kept me employed for years, telling me, “But Hillary Clinton had to support the Iraq war.” So he justified war crimes.
When it comes to Israel, I must address the power of the lobby: the importance of Zionist Jews in American politics. Mike Pence is now in occupied territories on Miriam Adelson’s dime; and no one can say what is plain as the nose on your face; he is running in the Adelson primary to be president and needs Miriam Adelson’s money to outflank rivals– including Donald Trump, who lately benefited from 100s of millions in Republican political contributions from the Adelsons and turned U.S. Israel policy worse than ever. It really is about who pays the bills.
AIPAC and the Democratic Majority for Israel are all over the Democratic Party– 41 Congresspeople just toured Israel on AIPAC’s dime– and these organizations support everything the Israeli government does. J Street is sometimes critical of the Israeli government, and now has a broad footprint in the Democratic Party, including the “progressive” wing; and J Street opposes the boycott campaign that would reduce military funding to Israel as antisemitic. The same campaign being waged against Russia, and taken up by every politician.
At times like this, I am reminded of CNN’s Jim Clancy who had the nerve to make a stand, publicly call a spade a spade and dare to challenge the propaganda of the aggressor and occupier.
He was baited, pilloried, tarred, feathered, and shown the door, and used as a very public example to all journalists of “you will be next”, simply because it was Israel. Needless to say the message was received loud and clear, as can be seen in the media since.
Had his tweets been about Russia in 2022, he would be labeled a wise brave hero and borne on the shoulders of liberals and conservatives alike. He might have even been in line for a Pulitzer.
Apparently “the truth will set you free”, but “the truth about Israel” is the opposite. You either remain in the eternal prison of lies and denial, or accept that the only true freedom is career-suicide.
Thank you for your bravery, Phil! You lost your career at NYO for daring to challenge the powers that be, but you are now truly free and we thank you for your work on the frontlines of this issue.
Not only does the media accept Israeli propaganda, it simply refuses to report what Israelis who are important state actors say and think. Here’s an interview with Efraim Halevi , who ran Mossad –
https://www.thejc.com/news/features/efraim-halevy-they-were-digging-graves-in-parks-but-i-was-not-so-gloomy-1.439584
“Israel sent messages to the Arab nations that it wanted peace, but not to the Palestinians.Very few Israelis then understood what that would mean. Yeshayahu Leibowitz was one of them. He warned then that the Palestinians would one day rise up and what the occupation would do to Israeli society.”
I am soooo tired of people saying that the Palestine/Israel situation is complicated. It is not. It is simple. It is difficult, but that is different from being complicated.
Thankyou Philip Weiss for your excellent article!
You declare that you lost your ‘mainstream media career’ when you abandoned your ‘objectivity over Palestine.’ You also state that your ‘former colleagues told me I was too passionate to differentiate facts from what was in my head, and I stopped getting assignments.’
I’m sure that the majority of informed people around the world admire your humanity and wisdom. Your Jewish heritage and the horrors of the European Holocaust must have played a major role in your admirable and passionate support for the brutally occupied and dispossessed indigenous Palestinians who have increasingly suffered under the boot of Zionism for over 75 years.
However, I wish the media would occasionally remind us of what was in fact the worst and most horrendous mass slaughter of a specific group of humans in modern history. I am referring to the systematic murder of 10-12 million Congolese by “Christian” Belgian colonists during the latter part of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century when King Leopold II ruled Belgium. He was the founder and owner of what was then known as the Congo Free State. One of the first people of note to refer to this holocaust was Samuel Clemens, aka, Mark Twain.
As well as mass murder, the unspeakable horrors Belgium inflicted on the natives of the Congo, including amputations of arms below the elbow and beheadings, were prompted by pure greed and chronic racism, i.e., to force them to work like slaves in order to harvest natural rubber on rubber tree plantations, which prior to the invention of the synthetic version, was in huge demand in Europe and America to manufacture tires for the burgeoning automobile industry.
Written by Adam Hochschild and published in 1998, “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa,” provides an excellent source to learn about King Leopold II and his monstrous crimes against humanity.