Israeli Cease Fire Violations and Media Propaganda

The Israeli conquest of Palestine has always been a difficult issue for Western mainstream media to cover. The difficulty lies not in the task of reporting the facts on the ground and transmitting an accurate depiction of them to the public, but in refraining from doing so.

Matt Peppe

The journalistic mission, to provide citizens with factual information that enables them to be informed participants in democratic decision making, conflicts with the corporate mission, to maximize profits and influence.

The role of U.S. mass media — and Western media in general — as a tool for disseminating propaganda was first argued by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their landmark 1988 bookManufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Their analysis reveals a media propaganda system based not on “formal censorship” but rather “by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without significant overt coercion.”

Although it does not consciously and overtly do so, Western corporate media serve the critical function of protecting the financial and business interests of institutional power.

“A propaganda model suggests that the ‘societal purpose’ of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state,” the authors write. “The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises.”

More than 25 years later, the New York Times, Washington Post, and the BBC keep churning out work that continues to validate Herman and Chomsky’s argument in Manufacturing Consent. In no foreign policy story is this more apparent than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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HELP SUPPORT WINDOW INTO PALESTINE - EVERY DOLLAR HELPS US TO MAKE OUR COMMUNITY BETTER!

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American media faking a series of ragegasms for Israel to prove their love is real

By TBogg

Normally you have to turn to Fox News if you want your daily dose of outrage delivered hot and fresh to your door with a side-order of egregious bias. Nothing quite sells a story like watching a credulous Fox mouth-hole reciting a list of talking points like it was The Road Not Taken. But this summer’s blockbuster, Gaza!: Shit Blowing Up Everywhere, has convinced all the other media outlets that “the water is fine, everyone into the propaganda pool!”

MSNBC kicked things off by giving correspondent Rula Jebreal the Walt/Mearsheimer treatment, marginalizing her as “Palestinian Journalist,” and, Jeebus knows, you can’t trustthose people. She was then shuffled off to the sidelines because she was harshing everyone’s Bibi buzz.

Israel was kind enough to use one of their blood-letting war overly-caffeinated conflict resolution time-outs so that bestest pal Wolf Blitzer from CNN could come over for a playdate; going on a ride-along with the IDF through the Hamas Tunnels O’ Terror, where Wolf put on his serious face and touched the concrete walls like they were the face of God (see below). We’ll give Wolf the benefit of the doubt and say that the IDF tricked him, saying they had found the missing airliner which, for Wolf,  is like telling a kid to hop in your van and you’ll take him to see some puppies.

Over at MSNBC, soon-to-be-out-the-door-but-not-soon-enough David Gregory displayed the fine art of being a really fucking horrible journalist by sandbagging a guest. Gregory told UN Relief & Works Agency spokesperson Chris Gunness that he had a film of rockets being launched out of UN schools and asked him to comment on it:

“The Israeli government has released videotape within the past hour, it was posted on YouTube, NBC News hasn’t independently verified,” Gregory explained to Gunness. “The Israelis say — and I realize that you cannot see this video, our audience can, and I’m going to describe it to you — that purports to show rockets being fired from a UN school.”

The video, it turns out, was complete bullshit, a fact relayed by Gregory at the end of the same episode, noting that the UN had “confirmed that the video does not show rockets being fired from a UN-administrated school in Gaza.”

And, here comes the apology: “So this is a back and forth that we are not able to settle at this point.”

That’s not even a “Whoopsie-doodle! My bad. Sorry, dude. But it’s really your fault because you trusted me so, actually, you’re the one who fucked up. Aren’t you embarrassed? You totally should be.”

To his credit, Gregory didn’t ask Gunness when he stopped luring kids into his van to go see puppies. Because Gregory has journalistic ethics. Or something.

Not to be left out, Senior Editor at the Atlantic, David Frum, — most notable for getting shit-canned by the Bush administration after his nitwit wife bragged to her gal pals that her husband helped start a fake war by penning “axis of evil”  — Twitter-accused the New York Times, Reuters, and AP of publishing  pictures of bloodied Palestinians  that he thought were fake. Sample tweet:

Time-lapse photography is the new kerning.

Having gotten fakery ‘out there,’ as they say in Cokierobertsland, Frum then backtracked:

On review, I agree that Shaw is right and that I was wrong. These images do appear authentic, and I should not have cast doubt on them. I apologize especially to Sergey Ponomarev of The New York Times, whose work I impugned.

Wait for it…..

Yet I also think it important to explain my skepticism when presented with such images.

No. No no no no no. You either fucked up or you did it on purpose. You’re supposed to be a professional  journalist which means it’s your job to get it right the first time and not come back a few days later and go, “Eh, I had my reasons. Whaddya gonna do?” That makes you only slightly better than Jim Hoft, the stupidest man on the Internet.

The simple fact of that matter is that the American media is largely in the tank for Israel and people are afraid to point out that America is Israel’s best and only friend for a reason, and when Israel wants to barf up bombs all over the Palestinians, America will be standing there ready to hold Israel’s hair back so that it doesn’t get any on itself.

And no one is immune to the lovesong of Israel, with Congress — which has failed to do much on anything for Americans this past year — shoving though a $225 million aid package  before they head off on a five-week vacation.

That just goes to show you, those vacation trips allowing legislators to wet their willies in the Red Sea can result in some pretty sweet payoffs.

Watch Wolf tumble down the Hamas hole below:

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Questions you won’t hear asked of the parade of Israeli officials crossing U.S & Canadian television screens during the current crisis in Gaza

The Media's Pro-Israel Bias: Why Does TV News Look Like a Netanyahu Ad?

No one is asking the Israeli officials parading across the screen the hard questions.

 by Chris McGreal

Here are a few questions you won’t hear asked of the parade of Israeli officials crossing US television screens during the current crisis in Gaza:

• What would you do if a foreign country was occupying your land?
• What does it mean that Israeli cabinet ministers deny Palestine’s right to exist?
• What should we make of a prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who as opposition leader in the 1990s was found addressing rallies under a banner reading “Death to Arabs”?

These are contentious questions, to be sure, and with complicated answers. But they are relevant to understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. They also parallel the issues routinely raised by American journalists with Palestinian officials, pressing to consider how the US would react if it were under rocket fire from Mexico, to explain why Hamas won’t recognise Israel and to repudiate Palestinian anti-Semitism.

But it’s a feature of much mainstream journalism in the US, not just an issue of coverage during the last three weeks of the Gaza crisis, that while one set of questions gets asked all the time, the other is heard hardly at all.

In years of reporting from and about Israel, I’ve followed the frequently robust debate in its press about whether Netanyahu really wants a peace deal, about the growing power of right-wing members inside the Israeli cabinet opposed to a Palestinian state, about the creeping air of permanence to the occupation. 

So it has been all the more striking to discover a far narrower discourse in Washington and the notoriously pro-Israel mainstream media in the US at a time when difficult questions are more important than ever. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and a crop of foreign leaders have ratcheted up warnings that the door for the two-state solution is closing, in no small part because of Israel’s actions. But still the difficult questions go unasked.

Take Netanyahu’s appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. The host, Bob Schieffer, permitted the Israeli leader to make a lengthy case for the his military’s ground attack, guiding him along with one sympathetic question after another. Finally, after describing Netanyahu’s position as “very understandable”, Schieffer asked about dead Palestinian civilians – but only to wonder if they presented a public relations problem in “the battle for world opinion”.

As if Schieffer’s position wasn’t already blindingly clear, he went on to quote former prime minister Golda Meir’s line that Israelis can never forgive Arabs “for forcing us to kill their children”.

As way of balance, CBS followed with a short clip of an interview by Charlie Rose with the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, who was pressed on his willingness to recognise Israel.

There has been fine reporting from on the ground in Gaza by courageous American journalists who have laid bare the price being paid by ordinary Palestinians. That, in turn, has prompted some stiff questioning in American TV studios of Israeli officials about the scale of civilian deaths and shelling of schools and hospitals. Some pro-Israel American pundits admit to have becoming “less pro-Israel”.

But the broader framework of how the conflict is presented in the US is more troubling.

Former MSNBC contributor Rula Jebreal drew widespread attention to the media divide when she condemned NBC News on air, on MSNBC, for pulling its only Arab-American correspondent, Ayman Mohyeldin, out of Gaza, only to reinstate him because of the backlash. “We are disgustingly biased on this issue,” she said.

She has a point.

An analysis by Punditfact of CNN coverage during the first two weeks of the latest Gaza crisis showed that appearances by Israeli officials outnumbered Palestinian officials by more than four-to-one. There were substantially more interviews with what Punditfact called Palestinian “laymen”, but they included the relatives of a Palestinian-American beaten by Israeli soldiers that offered little insight into the bigger picture.

All appearances by Palestinian officials were outnumbered by interviews with a single man: Israel’s former ambassador to the US, Michael Oren,whom CNN hired as a Middle East analyst earlier this year. The network presents Oren as a kind of neutral interpreter, when just a few months ago he was vigorously defending Israel on behalf of Netanyahu’s government. His limited value as an analyst was swiftly exposed by his assertion that Hamas was trying to get Israel to kill as many Palestinian children as possible as part of a media strategy.

The number of guests booked or sources quoted has never been balanced on this issue in the mainstream American press, but more important is the nature of interviews and the broader coverage when Israel and Palestine are not thrust into the news by a fresh surge in violence.

At one extreme is Fox News, where last week Sean Hannity shouted down a Palestinian guest, Yousef Munayyer, because he would not condemn Hamas as a terrorist organisation, then proceeded to terminate the interview.

Munayyer, director of the Jerusalem Fund in Washington, has appeared repeatedly on CNN where he is treated more respectfully. But he told me he is frequently brought on to answer accusations from the Israeli side, rather than explain the Palestinian perspective in the way that Israeli officials and commentators are allowed to lay out their case.

“Most of the time I go on it is to be put on the defensive, in response to a conversation that’s framed around Israel’s security concerns first and foremost,” Munayyer said.

Palestinians should face difficult questions about recognition of Israel, about Hamas’s policies and actions, about how peace would work in practice.

But on the other side, I’ve rarely seen a major channel match that kind of routine close questioning of Israeli officials about the position of a government packed with ministers hostile to a Palestinian state, who advocate annexation of much of the occupied territories and who propose second-class citizenship for Arabs.

Israel’s preferred representatives in the US media – Oren, plus the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, and Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev – all project the country as a liberal democracy, an unwilling occupier that is thirsting for peace.

But that does not fit with the views of leading politicians back in Israel. Naftali Bennett, the economy minister and leader of the most powerful political party on the right, has said: “I will do everything in my power to make sure [the Palestinians] never get a state.”

Danny Danon, the increasingly powerful chairman of the central committee of Netanyahu’s Likud party, openly opposes a Palestinian state and has said the prime minister doesn’t believe in it either. “I want the majority of the land with the minimum amount of Palestinians,” Danon, whom Netanyahu just fired as deputy defense minister for being critical of opposition to a ceasefire, told me last year.

And Israel’s ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, wants a good chunk of Israel’s Arab population stripped of citizenship.

Perhaps none of these men will get what they want. But they hold important levers of power, and good journalism would seem to demand that probing questions get asked about where Israel is headed under such leadership.

That kind of piercing American journalism can be found, mostly in foreign-policy journals and long magazine articles, such as David Remnick’s insightful report in the New Yorker last year on the rising political power of Jewish settlers. But much of the press demonstrates a frightening lack of inquiry, and if the mainstream media won’t do it, others are increasingly willing to do it for them.

It’s no secret that younger Americans do not rely on the nightly news, cable networks or printed newspapers for information in the way many older people do. The internet has opened access to foreign news media, which often has a different take in Israel, and has opened up a stream of links to to first-hand accounts as well as writing by analysts and activists who offer insights and information wilfully ignored by the Bob Schieffers and Sean Hannitys of the world.

There is evidence of a shift in public opinion, mostly generational: a Pew poll this month showed falling support for Israel among younger Americans. Over 65s backed the Jewish state by 60% to just 9% support for the Palestinians. Among young adults, aged 18-29, just 44% were behind Israel with backing for the Palestinians rising to 22%.

As opinion shifts, it will be harder to go on presenting just one side of the story.

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THE MURDER OF JOURNALIST RAMY RYAN BY ISRAELI/US MISSILES

GILAD ATZMON

A graphic video showing the killing of journalist Ramy 

Ryan in Gaza and an attack on an ambulance and 

rescue workers, by Israeli air strikes has surfaced 

online.

Warning: This 6-minute video is very graphic, viewer 

discretion is advised.

The video uploaded onto YouTube by Abu 

Shaar and featured at the information clearing house 

shows two ambulances arriving urgently on the 

scene where Ramy Ryan is seen covering the situation. 

About 15 seconds into the video, the first missile 

strikes the ambulance. Fourteen seconds later, the 

second missile strikes.

For several seconds, all we see is smoke with residents 

yelling for help, “Ya Allah” (Oh God) followed by 

“Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) and La Ilaha Illa Allah” 

both common cries of desperation.

At 0:40 seconds, the third strike. 0:55, the fourth 

strike. 1:09, the fifth. The cameraman stands up and 

we see a dozen men lying on the ground, all 

seemingly injured and trying to escape towards the 

walls to take refuge. 1:20, the sixth strike. 1:32, the 

seventh. 1:47, the eighth. 1:57, the ninth. At 2:00 the 

cameraman moves again and crawls towards the 

injured men on his left. 2:07, the tenth strike. 2:20, the 

cameraman moves toward another injured man who's 

yelling “Ya Allah, Ya Mohammad”. At 2:40, he captures 

another man unconscious or dead. At 2:50, he takes 

cover with a group of injured men. The old man at 

3:00 is saying “I can't. I can't.” while limping. A 3:27, 

we hear another missile.

At 3:50, we see Ramy Ryan on the floor, lying over a 

pool of blood. He's dead. A man is telling us “Look, 

look. A Journalist. Look.” while showing us Ramy 

Ryan's “Press” insignia. The man then tells us angrily, 

“show the United Nations! Show the world! Show the 

Red Cross! Show the Arab traitors! They are all 

traitors!”.

The missiles have stopped and panic breaks. We hear 

people mourning their dead. From 4:20 onwards, the 

cameraman shoots the aftermaths of the Israeli strikes.

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They say don't shoot the messenger, so far Israel has murdered 8

Palestinian journalist dies of injuries suffered in Israeli airstrike

GAZA, (PIC)-- The Palestinian journalist Mohamed Dahir, who works for al-Risalah media institution, died on Thursday of injuries he sustained in in the first Shujaiya massacre a few days ago.

On July 20, Israeli warplanes targeted Dahir’s home in Shujaiya neighborhood. His father, two brothers and infant were killed during the attack, while his wife was seriously injured.

The victims’ bodies were pulled from the rubble after five days of the airstrike due to the heavy shelling.

Dahir’s martyrdom raises the number of journalists killed since the start of Israeli aggression on Gaza to Eight, while 13 others were injured.

13 journalists’ homes were demolished, while 14 media institutions headquarters were targeted since the start of Israeli aggression on Gaza on July 7.

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Don't be fooled: 'media watchdogs' are Israeli propaganda tools

Alastair Sloan 

Consider yourself very lucky if you have never heard of "Comment is Free Watch" (CiF Watch), "BBC Watch", "HonestReporting" and "Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America" (CAMERA).

Statistics collected by the Institute for Internet Nonsense suggest that these four blogs account for "ninety per cent of web-based pedantry" and have been awarded "Most Boring Analysis" in the I Don't Care This Isn't Journalism awards, sponsored by Valium.

These blogs claim to be all about ensuring balance in the media. As such, they think, and tell their legion of pro-Israel supporters, that Western liberal editors are anti-Semitic and that criticising Israel online means that you hate Jews. They also scare-monger on their own websites that Western journalists are conspiring to paint Israel in a bad light. They impose this nonsense on the world through writing pedantic blog posts, sending mass emails to editors and celebrating every time they get one word changed in an "errant" newspaper article.

Unless a journalist has a Star of David tattooed on his or her forehead and has declared undying love for Zionism, she or he can become a target. However, all of these watchdogs are riddled with hypocrisy, deliberate falsehood, bullying and shoddy journalism. In fact, they're not about maintaining "balance" at all; they are propaganda tools, part of Israel's incredibly well-funded "hasbara" programme.

HonestReporting.com once boasted that it brought down CNN's email servers by sending six thousand emails per day to executives. In October 2004, the group co-ordinated around a thousand emails being sent to the British Medical Journal, which had published a critical piece about the Israeli army based on an academic study.

An analysis of the emails received by the BMJ showed that about a third of them issued blanket denials, without offering any contrary evidence; twenty-two per cent showed direct evidence of being derived from the HonestReporting.com website; and roughly half could not be published by the BMJ because they failed to meet the webmasters' criteria for public comments left underneath academic studies (which outlaw personal attacks and racial abuse).

Adam Levick, the managing editor and mastermind of these bullying strategies, has no professional background in journalism. He has spent his career working for various pro-Israeli think tanks, including NGO Monitor, a group that criticises charities which dare to speak out about Israel's human rights abuses.

A favourite moan of Levick and his friends concerns readers' comments beneath onlineGuardian articles, especially those which take an anti-Israel stance. They have a legitimate gripe as there are some genuinely nasty comments left on the Guardian's website, but HonestReporting [sic] always pushes for anti-Israel comments to be removed by site moderators.

Under my own published articles, I've been called a "well known crypto lefto fascist" (a title I'm secretly quite proud of), told that I have "blood on my hands" and that "judgement day is coming," (a bit more ominous). And finally that I'm "retarded". Did I ask for these comments to be removed from the website in question? No; I'm not nine years old and I can tell the difference between a lunatic with a keyboard and a lunatic with a gun.

Preachy CiF Watch mixes factual analysis and opinion on its own website, a practice known as "editorialising" and something which professional journalists frown upon. For example, its writers often use the term "radical" or "pro-terrorist" without any explanation; they are simply euphemisms to be deployed against any group or individual who is pro-Palestinian.

When they talk about award-winning journalist Robert Fisk, a figure who raises their digital hackles more than most, the bloggers use inverted commas around "award-winning" as if his awards for journalism are alleged or made up. The truth is that Fisk has won awards, but because CiF Watch resents this (and it hasn't won any), it sneaks in some snide punctuation.

CAMERA is the American parent organisation of CiF Watch (as well as the similar BBC Watch), but it focuses on the US media, something that it has done since the eighties. Fox News is an interesting case study regarding CAMERA's view of media "accuracy". Instead of having dirt thrown at them, Fox producers have been singled out for praise from the "watchdogs".

In fact, Fox is so good at producing balanced coverage, according to CAMERA, that they've never had to correct any of its content, something that cannot be claimed by almost every other major news outlet in America. That seems strange given that there have been at least seven academic studies looking at Fox News output and concluding that its audience is themost misinformed in America, presumably because of the fact-free reporting rather than them being stupid viewers.

At the time of writing, Fox is the subject of CAMERA's latest fawning post, being credited for inviting comments from two "refreshingly honest guests". Ex-mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg was one of them. In his interview with Fox, Bloomberg called for a disproportionate response to Hamas rockets and endorsed the high levels of civilian casualties. He also proclaimed that, "As Israel goes so will America."

"This is the only democracy in this part of the world," claimed Bloomberg. "This is an ally; we need them and they need us."

Bugling after him was Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters, reportedly one of the best qualifiedand most admired strategic thinkers at the Pentagon. "The global media... Let's be honest about this," he said. "The socially acceptable form of anti-Semitism, of old fashioned, fourteenth century Jew-hatred, is to be anti-Israel, to criticise Israel. That's safe."

Yes, CAMERA targets, you naughty journalists are all "Jew haters". Such extreme views were reviewed positively on the CAMERA website: "remarkable", it purred.

CAMERA is disputing the veracity of the massacre at Al-Shifa Hospital, arguing that it was a Hamas stronghold so over sixty civilian casualties were justified. Its only source for this is an IDF spokesperson.

Five editors from CAMERA have already been sanctioned formally by Wikipedia for putting biased entries secretly onto the public website. An investigation into their dishonesty waspublished by Electronic Intifada in 2008 and was followed by an exposé in Harpers Magazinelater that year. The reports led to an investigation by Wikipedia's management. Commenting on the incident, Gershom Gorenberg, of The American Prospect, stated: "CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media. And like others engaged in the narrative wars, it does not understand the difference between advocacy and accuracy." His piece was called "The Middle East Editing Wars."

Co-ordinators at CAMERA had even advised their members not to edit articles about Israel for a set period to evade suspicious site administrators, then bombard the site with pro-Israel edits. Even the Daily Telegraph in London, which is broadly pro-Israel in its editorial stance, covered the embarrassing incident.

In a YouTube interview with the blog "Elders of Ziyon" last year, the Chief Executive Officer of HonestReporting.com, British-born Boston resident Joe Hyams, tells viewers that he is trying to "raise journalistic standards." That's an interesting piece of condescending prattle, because Hyams has no professional background in journalism. He came from advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, where he was a "strategic planner".

According to the official website of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, which maintains a profile page for Mr Hyams and sends him frequently on speaking engagements, he "trains Israel supporters in the planning of campaign strategy and evaluation." The managing editor of HonestReporting.com is Simon Plosker; he has spent time working in the Israel Defence Force's Spokesperson Unit, and continues as a reservist, presumably in the same role.

Why would ex-advertising executives and reservists in the IDF's Spokesperson Unit be appropriate guardians of media balance? Simple; this isn't about balance, it's about a "media war", as Hyams himself puts it, which explains HonestReporting.com's close alliance with the Israeli government. These watchdogs are simply another cog in the Israeli war machine.

In November 2012, during the eight-day Israeli offensive against the people of the Gaza Strip, CNN anchors interviewed forty-five Israeli officials, more than twice the number of Palestinian officials. Between 30th June and 9th July this year, CNNinterviewed seventeen Israeli officials and just one Palestinian.

In a study published by academic Mohammed El Masry in 2009, he found that the New York Times and Chicago Tribune coverage of the second Palestinian intifada was highly skewed in Israel's favour. Similarly, a 2003 study by academic Matt Viser published in the International Journal of Press/Politics found that the New York Times personalised Israeli deaths, largely ignored Palestinian deaths and relied heavily on Israeli sources. A 2001 study by academic Seth Ackerman showed that National Public Radio covered 89 per cent of Israeli child deaths and only 20 per cent of Palestinian child deaths.

Far from defending Israel valiantly from anti-Semitic attacks or anti-Israel editorial bias, which these groups like to pretend is widespread, HonestReporting, CAMERA and their ilk are aggressors on the media scene, determined to push a skewed version of events taking place in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories to the audience and readership in America and Britain. The poor record of CNN and other media outlets is quite possibly a successful result of their efforts.

General awareness of these groups, and their activities to influence media coverage, is relatively low other than amongst the super-engaged minority who focus on Israel-Palestine issues. Although there's some cynical amusement to be gained from picking apart their pedantry, ultimately their role mirrors that of the Israeli military in pretending that Israelis are in mortal danger as a pretext for attacks on civilians, while spinning propaganda that distorts reality and supports Israel's war crimes.

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"Finally, Israel is alienating the US mainstream media,"

Article of interest on, in the opinion of Philip Weiss, the shift in American main stream news coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza. Good information and quotes and links to other good articles in the main stream American press.
  Ed Corrigan

Bernard Avishai terms the Israeli attack a “war crime” in the New Yorker

It’s happening: we are at last seeing significant American mainstream dissent from the Israeli line during this conflict. There is growing space to voice criticism of our closest friend in the Middle East because of what is widely perceived to be a “disaster” unfolding in Gaza (to quote Ali Abunimah).

Friends and commenters call me optimistic/naive (as Michael Ratner does on Law and Disorder radio today) but in my list below is everything from John Kerry’s hot-mic moment expressing anger at the Israeli brutality– a moment Kerry has survived– to The New Yorker accusing Israel of a “war crime,” to TV reporters Richard Engel and Karl Penhaul describing the inhumane conditions in Gaza, to Anne Barnard of the New York Times explaining to Americans that Gaza is an open-air prison, to Lawrence Weschler’s outburst, that Israel has “rabies” and Gaza is “a concentration camp.”

I am saying that this brutal and pointless onslaught is operating on the US mainstream the way that the massacres of Cast Lead operated on the left five years ago: People are saying Enough! They see that Israel has no plan at all besides wrecking Palestinian lives. “The monstrosity that is Israel is naked, for all the world to see,” Scott Roth writes. 

And look at this great tweet from James Fallows, accompanying a famous foto of US atrocities in Vietnam: 

It is just a matter of time before some liberal Zionists (who are merely the most amenable voices inside a reactionary American support community) begin to jump off the Zionist tank. Today Haaretz reported the following, according to Americans for Peace Now:

J-Street pulls sponsorship from pro-Israel rally in Boston – The left-wing organization complained there was ‘no voice for our concerns about the loss of human life on both sides, or the acknowledgement of the conflict’s complexity.’ (Haaretz+)

So even J Street (actually a center-right organization; it supports endless military aide to support apartheid) senses a change in the US climate, and feels safe taking a baby step.

More on the shifting climate.

In Gaza, NBC’s Richard Engel retweeted this very sensible message from Jon Snow, a British TV announcer:

If you strangle a people, deny them supply, for years, extreme reaction is inevitable. the one begets the other.

Bernard Avishai had a piece at the New Yorker last week called “Watching Gaza” that said Israel is guilty of war crimes, killing civilians in an effort to discredit Hamas. And the endgame, Avishai says, is rightwing consolidation of greater Israel, and the Palestinians going to the international criminal court.

bombing these homes every few years—“mowing the lawn,” as one commander put it before earlier Gaza operations—demonstrates that Israel will not shrink from inflicting hundreds of random civilian casualties, through which it hopes to discredit Hamas. If you don’t think this is a war crime, talk to your Palestinian friends…

Israel’s problem is no longer just Ban Ki-moon and CNN. Since 2012, the streets of the West Bank have grown more volatile; a new generation, as distrustful of the two-state peace process as Israeli rightists, has come of age. Jerusalem is witnessing mob violence on both sides of its divide. Israel cannot bomb civilians and expect that students in Hebron and Ramallah will only vent their fury on Facebook. Bassem Khoury, a Palestinian entrepreneur and former economics minister, wrote to me this morning that the pressure on Abbas to sign the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, pushing Israeli leaders toward facing the sanctions of international law, has become irresistible. Wherever Abbas goes, Khoury writes, “cries of ‘either sign or leave’ are being heard amongst the disgruntled, particularly the youth.”

…In the absence of a credible peace process, which Netanyahu has preëmpted, the consequence of this war will be, in effect, the consolidation of a Jewish state in which the Arab minority will stop imagining a place for itself. And how long will Hezbollah stay out of the fray?

That consolidation of a racist state is why Andrew Sullivan now says the two-state solution is dead; so let’s move on to a struggle for equal rights within one country.

Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group had an excellent piece on the New York Times op-ed page on the “road to war,” saying that Israel chose this war as a means of blocking the unity deal between Hamas and Fatah.

the most immediate cause of this latest war has been ignored: Israel and much of the international community placed a prohibitive set of obstacles in the way of the Palestinian “national consensus” government that was formed in early June….

Thrall says in so many words that the siege of Gaza is immoral and has to be lifted.

For many Gazans, and not just Hamas supporters, it’s worth risking more bombardment and now the ground incursion, for a chance to change that unacceptable status quo. A cease-fire that fails to resolve the salary crisis and open Gaza’s border with Egypt will not last. It is unsustainable for Gaza to remain cut off from the world and administered by employees working without pay.

Many writers are citing J.J. Goldberg’s piece at the Forward, “How Politics and Lies Triggered an Unintended War in Gaza,” which says that Israel manipulated the teen killings in the West Bank to have a war with Hamas, and now Israel is going off a “cliff.” Goldberg is essentially conveying a portrait of an intolerant political culture that Max Blumenthal gave us in his 2013 book, Goliath, a place whipped by war fever and fear of Arabs.

Anne Barnard at the Times has a remarkably straightforward rendition of Palestinian conditions in Gaza.

Perhaps most important, the vast majority of Gazans cannot leave Gaza. They live under restrictions that make this narrow coastal strip, which the United Nations considers occupied by Israel, unlike anywhere else.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain in 2010 called Gaza “an open-air prison,” drawing criticism from Israel. But in reality, the vast majority of Gazans are effectively trapped, unable to seek refugee status across an international border. (Most are already refugees, those who fled from what is now Israel and their descendants.)

So the people of Gaza are refugees–it’s about time that is brought home to Americans. Barnard’s report is similar to Karl Penhaul’s excellent report on CNN last night, about people running for their lives in Gaza. Penhaul quoted moving calm statements by Sameh Grega, who had to abandon his mother when he fled Shuha’iyeh, and at the end of the report, by a young man describing the killing of his mother and brother.

And Pat Lang agrees with me, that things are shifting. He adds a realist gloss to it:

As sad as it is to say, the main effects of this round of fighting in Gaza will be found; 1- in the worldwide political damage done to Israel for the callous massacre of civilians and 2- the impact on Israeli and more importantly American popular opinion of a high Israeli military body count. Throughout previous Israeli operations intended to “mow the grass,” in Gaza, the IDF has operated with impunity, able to continue from day to day without major fear of the likelihood of its own casualties in dead and wounded. If these present reports are correct, that has changed. The American people have many admirable characteristics but their inability to see virtue in “losers” is not one of them. An ability on the part of the Hamas/IJ fighters to inflict casualties on the IDF would raise the public image of the Palestinians in America. According to the Israel FB page, Hamas now says that it will equip large numbers of Gazan youth with grenades and send them against IDF forces in suicide attacks. The Israelis do not seem to understand how potent a weapon that would be.

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A Debate on Gaza: Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada vs. J.J. Goldberg of The Jewish Daily Forward

We host a debate on U.S. media’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict and the roots of the crisis with two guests: Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the website Electronic Intifada and author of the new book, "The Battle for Justice in Palestine"; and J.J. Goldberg, editor-at-large and columnist at the newspaper, The Jewish Daily Forward. Abunimah and Goldberg discuss news headlines that ignore the massive Palestinian toll, whether the ceasefire should address the Gaza blockade, and the history of the conflict.

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Give it up for Rula Jebreal MSNBC’s Sole Palestinian Voice & Takes on Pro-Israeli Gov’t Bias at Network & in US Media

A week after public outrage helped force NBC’s reversal of a decision to pull veteran reporter Ayman Mohyeldin out of Gaza, the sole Palestinian contributor to sister network MSNBC has publicly criticized its coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. "We are disgustingly biased when it comes to this issue," Rula Jebreal said Monday on MSNBC’s Ronan Farrow Daily, citing a disproportionate amount of Palestinian voices and a preponderance of Israeli government officials and supporters. Jebreal joins us to discuss her decision to speak out againstMSNBC and her broader criticism of the corporate media’s Israel-Palestine coverage. An author and political analyst who worked for many years as a broadcast journalist in Italy, Jebreal also shares her personal story as a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship who is married to a Jewish man and has a Jewish sister.

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