Weekly Briefing: U.S. mainstream media are all on board for Israel’s war

I urge all our readers to visit our site and see the wide range of coverage we are offering from Palestine. This includes our daily coverage of the Israeli onslaught. And Tareq Hajjaj’s harrowing personal accounts of his family’s flight inside Gaza, reliving the Nakba:

“During the very brief hours of the day when I manage to gain internet access, scrolling through social media feels like scrolling through a graveyard. Everyone is writing obituaries, everyone has a loved one who has been martyred. I saw a young man write that his mother, his wife, his four children, and his sister and her own children, were all killed in an airstrike that he alone survived.”

Our coverage includes important idea pieces. Such as Abdaljawad Omar’s essay pointing out that Biden’s rhetoric is reigniting the question of Palestine. Or Faris Giacaman’s piece that Israel suffered its worst military humiliation because of “racial and cultural perceptions of Arab inferiority and Jewish supremacism.” Haidar Eid’s view that the attack on Gaza is a boon to the BDS campaign. And my own take on the divisions in the American left over nonviolence, and where I stand.

Back in the U.S., what is becoming dismally clear on Day 9 of this crisis is that liberal American media have put aside any ambivalence about Israel and are aligning themselves with the Jewish state. We’d thought that the presence of reporters who understand the Palestinian cause would slow that process, but MSNBC has by some accounts clamped down on expressions of sympathy for Palestinians living under apartheid. And CNN calls its broadcast, “Israel at War.”

Jen Psaki, Andrea Mitchell and Wolf Blitzer have been giving a platform to Israeli war propagandists, from Michael Oren to Avi Mayer to Peter Lerner; and the networks’ failure to put correspondents inside the Strip, even as they dispatch anchors and correspondents all over Israel, reflects a racism they don’t feel embarrassed about.

The media are reflecting the White House narrative that this is Israel’s 9/11. Joe Biden has affirmed that Israel can do anything it wants “to defend” itself — just please bomb nicely. Chuck Schumer was in Tel Aviv today assuring Israelis that there are no political divisions inside the U.S. over Israel. So flake off, Squad and the progressive base of the party. You don’t count.

Everyone knows that Israel is committing war crimes by collectively punishing 2.3 million people in Gaza for Hamas’s crimes, but while BBC reporters Andrew Peach and Jeremy Bowen have stated this truth, there are plenty of flaks in the U.S. media denying as much. This feels a lot like the propaganda wave before the Iraq war in 2003, when antiwar voices were canceled. I thought we’d made progress.

This graphic from CNN today suggests that we have indeed made progress, and the discourse in the U.S. will fracture ultimately.

But for now the establishment is still rigidly behind Israel. The Onion is way more reliable on Israeli apartheid than the New York Times. Netanyahu is a heroic figure on the cable stations. And Palestinian children are simply faceless.

Abdaljawad Omar’s essay on the reopening of the Palestine question offers the only light I can see today. Americans are wondering why there is violence yet again in Palestine, so this is a teachable moment. The western idea of building a Jewish state on Palestinian lands has time and again proved unacceptable to Palestinians– despite 100 years of promotion and political acceptance in the west. Our own State Department warned in 1948 there would be endless unrest if a Jewish state was established, and there has been endless unrest.

In this week’s horrific violence, the questions of Jewish safety, and Palestinian safety, have been reopened for all Americans to consider. They must understand that Zionism is not the answer.

Thanks for reading,

Phil Weiss