Every incident, every military operation brings with it a torrent of media bias. We’ve grown accustomed to it over the years as crises have come and gone. But what happens when seasonal floods turn into tsunamis, inundating the landscape as far as the eye can see?
As we look back two years on from the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, it’s impossible not to conclude that while anti-Israel media bias has existed for decades, something in the media is now so damaged when it comes to coverage of Israel that it may be permanently broken.
So what have we learned?
Media sympathy is fleeting
The horrific events of October 7, 2023, were of a magnitude beyond anything Israelis had experienced even during the worst excesses of the Second Intifada two decades prior. As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict settled into a pattern of simmering tensions punctuated by short, sharp eruptions of violence, the world had started to lose interest. Financially stretched media outlets downsized, and war junkie journalists looked to Ukraine for their conflict reporting fixes.
By October 8, thousands of international journalists descended on Israel to report on the bloody aftermath of the Hamas attack. Confronted with scenes of horror and the stench of death as they toured the devastated kibbutzes and the site of the Nova festival, journalists couldn’t avoid eliciting emotion in their reporting. Interviews with survivors even prompted genuine tears from correspondents during live broadcasts.
Finally, were the media starting to understand what Israelis were experiencing? And even showing empathy and compassion?
It didn’t last long.
Only days after, that sympathy started to drain away, replaced by attempts to “understand” and, by extension, justify why the poor downtrodden Palestinians had broken out of their “open air concentration camp” that the media believed was constantly under siege by malevolent Israelis.
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Turning Israelis into monsters
Emotive statements from Israeli leaders, themselves as shocked and traumatized as the rest of the country, were twisted to turn Israelis into vengeance-driven monsters as opposed to the actual monsters who had murdered, raped, and kidnapped their way across southern Israel. Where politicians referred specifically to the terrorist perpetrators, their words were reinterpreted to be directed at the Palestinian population in general. And where marginal figures looking to boost their domestic profiles did express outrageous sentiments that mainstream Israelis condemned, it was these that made the headlines. It was only a short step from there to Exhibit A at the International Court of Justice.
And in the confusion, genuine errors were made by emergency responders and the military as they attempted to piece together an enormous crime scene. Appallingly, Israelis were accused, particularly on social media, of deliberately creating propaganda tales to exaggerate Hamas brutality. So, while Hamas indeed butchered babies and burned their homes while they slept in their cots, rumors and hearsay concerning the precise causes of death were thrown back and weaponized. If it later transpired that a murdered baby hadn’t been beheaded by a Hamas terrorist with an axe, it no longer mattered to some that the same baby had died a gruesome death by some other horrific method. Here was the “evidence” that hostile forces needed to “prove” that October 7 had been exaggerated or embellished by Israel for its own PR needs.
Tragically, as the few IDF units, police forces, and local security volunteers fought against thousands of heavily armed terrorists, a small number of innocent Israeli civilians were killed in the crossfire. Despite only one or two isolated incidents of this kind, the same malicious forces that questioned whether there had even been a massacre claimed that the majority of Israeli victims were killed by Israeli forces and not by Palestinians.
It wouldn’t be fair to tarnish mainstream media with the same conspiracy theories circulating on social media and in fringe extremist publications. But it’s also undeniable that this poison has entered the bloodstream, manifesting in the knee-jerk reaction of most of the media to dismiss Israeli statements as, at best, inaccurate, and, at worst, outright lies.
A PR implosion
The Israeli government and the IDF actually did a relatively impressive job of communicating to the world in the first few weeks and months of the war. For those of us who have experienced numerous events over the years that escalated due to poor crisis PR management, Israel passed the first test when an explosion at the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza was initially blamed on the IDF. It has taken too many years to internalize that lies will always fill an information vacuum. The IDF reacted quickly to gather the evidence that, contrary to the claims of the BBC, New York Times, and many others, it was a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket that had landed not on the hospital, but in its car park, killing not the hundreds claimed by Hamas but a few dozen.
Israel has always favored short military campaigns. The sheer length and scale of this war have rendered it almost impossible to verify everything that has happened on the ground. That has made it far too easy for Hamas to hurl nearly any claim against Israel, safe in the knowledge that a complicit media will republish. And so we have reached the point where IDF statements are simply dismissed, and nothing Israel says is treated with the credibility that a Western liberal democracy should be when confronting a terrorist organization.
This leads to the question of whether the situation would be different if Israel had given foreign journalists free access to report from Gaza. In a complex warzone where, thanks to the terrorist infrastructure embedded within the civilian population, it is inevitable that international media workers would have been killed in the fighting. One can only imagine the international opprobrium aimed at Israel under those circumstances.
However, by removing this potentiality from the equation, Israel handed over the media battlefield on the ground to Gazan journalists and, by association, Hamas. After eighteen years of Hamas rule, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to find that Gaza’s media has been absorbed into what has effectively operated as a terror statelet. That media workers could be moonlighting as terrorists still appears to be beyond the imaginations of the Western media outlets that have paid freelancers for stories or images. And even if Gazan journalists weren’t directly affiliated with Hamas, the absence of press freedom in the territory, allied to Hamas intimidation or sympathy for their terrorist ideology, has rendered objective reporting from Gaza a virtual impossibility.
Instead, the narrative has been controlled by Al Jazeera, sponsored by Hamas, and disseminated by global media. The results have been catastrophic. So, two years later, we have arrived at an unprecedented situation. Israel has arguably never been in such a powerful position vis-à-vis the rest of the countries of the Middle East. Yet, it’s hard to remember a time when its diplomatic relations and image have ever been at a lower point. And so much of this is a result of the battleground that should have been treated as a vital part of the war effort — the media front.
In a world where Jews are considered “privileged” and Palestinians are perennial victims shorn of agency, maybe Hamas knew that murdered Jews would quickly be forgotten in the inevitable Israeli response to October 7. Maybe the terrorist leaders and their sponsors knew, from reading The New York Times and watching the BBC, that the more Israel defended itself, the more its legitimacy would be attacked.
Because at the end of the day, even if Hamas is truly defeated, and even if the hostages languishing inside Gaza are brought home, it will be a pyrrhic victory if Israel is left as a friendless pariah and Jews around the world can no longer live openly in safety and security.
It’s too early to say what the new “normal” may look like. But it’s clear that when the smoke clears from the physical battlefield, it is going to linger elsewhere, obscuring the truth in mainstream media and online.
Israel has fought to ensure that Hamas can never claim October 7 to be a victory. We cannot allow the subsequent delegitimization of Israel’s place among the nations, in what feels like the greatest stitch-up in history, to be the terrorist organization’s crowning achievement. And that’s why HonestReporting will be needed more than ever before.
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