A Reckoning: the genocide in Gaza, the criminal complicity of the western press and a collective amnesia
Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war. He campaigned for president, at least partly on principled issues of legality and human rights. He famously questioned the legitimacy of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and committed to closing it down if elected. During the era of the Bush/Cheney regime, we saw the boundary of legality stretched beyond its elastic limit. Torture euphemistically became ‘enhanced interrogation’, kidnapping and delivery to vicious regimes became ‘extraordinary rendition’. These and other actions insidiously chipped away at legal boundaries on impunity. With Obama’s election, the page was turned on the United States war on terror, providing a clean slate upon which the US could rewrite the way it would conduct its international and domestic affairs. Or perhaps not? Obama appointed ol the hawkish Hilary Clinton as his secretary of state which was an early sign, one that I missed the significance of.
Obama decided that there would be no reckoning for past deeds. The country had, in his words, to ‘look forward and not backward’. The political leadership changed but, for those who lied, sanctioned and undermined illegality, there was to be no accounting. They simply slid into comfortable retirement jobs retaining the customary honour accorded former government officials. No legal, professional or social analysis of what they had done. The message to the lower level implementers of torture was that there would be little or no price to pay for issuing or indeed following illegal orders. Legality itself was determined at the whim of whoever was in power at the time. In fact the only incident of any consequence that comes to mind, was the infamous Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse revelations, for which only one or two very junior, very young soldiers had to answer for their actions. It is also important to remember that some principled professionals did speak up others even resigned from government during the excesses of the Bush regime, but there was never any acknowledgement or validation of their courage and adherence to principle when the new administration took over. I suspect that it would have been much more difficult for Congress to shirk their responsibility to the Hatch Act, and continue slavishly supplying lethal weapons to Israel, if they had been held to account for their abdication of responsibility over the WMD charade in Iraq. The illustrious Colin Powell, Secretary of State for the United States during the Bush-Cheney years, incinerated his stellar international reputation on a pyre of lies he told at the United Nations about Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD. His bosses dismissed the eventual discovery that there were no WMDs with a scornful “Get over it”.
Even worse to my mind, is the disgraceful role in all this of the press. In the build up to the Iraq war they were by and large cheerleaders for the Bush/Cheney buccaneers, and they did not have to answer in any meaningful way for their lack of investigative rigour and subjective reporting, even after their cheerleading had been exposed.
This time, in the face of wholesale murder in Palestine, the western press have been even more egregious in their behaviour. Fellow journalists have been killed at an unprecedented rate for over two years and for most of that time the major western media were quiet about it. There was no major media response to the deliberate targeting of journalists. The universally recognised PRESS jacket, once the offer of some measure of protection in conflict zones, became the bullseye for Israeli snipers and quadcopter drone pilots. In the absence of reporting on this, the mantra from media houses was for ‘western journalists’ to be allowed into Palestine because ‘no journalists had been allowed in’. But this served to further delegitimise the journalists who were working and being killed in the region every day. The murder of journalists without consequence in Palestine was epitomised in 2022 with the killing in the Jenin refugee camp of Shireen Abu Akleh. She was an American/Palestinian journalist shot by an elite IDF sniper. Recently the US military investigator who had been assigned to the case revealed that though his report concluded that she had been deliberately targeted by the IDF, it was suppressed by authorities of the Biden administration.
Apart from the betrayal of their colleagues in Gaza, the western press actively abetted the Israeli propaganda machine, both by commission and omission in their coverage. There was essentially no coverage of cases brought by South Africa against Israel at the world’s highest court or of Israel ignoring court directives; and the US government threatening court officials was reported as normal behaviour, when mentioned at all. There was barely any mention of the targeted killing of medical workers and aid workers or UN officials. During the hellish days of unbridled killing, a group of World Central Kitchen volunteers were targeted and killed by the IDF. As they were foreign nationals, there was about a two-week period of reporting and indignation in the media before the atrocity receded into the media amnesia of crimes against humanity perpetuated in Palestine. Even today, the incessant violations of the so-called ceasefire by Israel go unreported.
By December of 2023, the overwhelming majority of the member countries of the United Nations were pressing for a cease-fire in Gaza, the United States stuck by Israel and misused their veto in the Security Council to block the resolution. The media, when they mentioned it at all, provided no analysis of why the US chose to veto and what the implications of the veto were. For the last two years when so-called international law, which was set up to provide a legal backstop to an unregulated ‘might is right’ world order, is violated, the worlds editorial pages have been silent. When they did speak, they articulated a convoluted bothsidesism designed to leave readers confused about how complicated the issue is. Notably, a few voices in the western media have consistently spoken out as vociferously as they can, but the weight of the silence of the majority has effectively kept Israeli barbarism under the radar.
Thankfully a meticulous tally is being kept of what happened by the committed efforts of a variety of individuals and organisations; the Hind Rajab Foundation, the work of Francesca Albanese for the UN, the media company ZETEO, Chris Hedges, the surviving Gaza Health Workers and many, many others who we must support in the difficult work ahead of combating the inevitable project that will try to sanitise the last two years. This is the arduous task of making sure that ‘never again’ applies to everyone and not just to those on one side. For that we must be aware of what is going in in the world. The media has gone quiet on the goings on in Gaza and the West Bank of Palestine, but what has not gone quiet are the killings and deprivations in Gaza and the West Bank, or any media analysis of the stealthy moves at the UN to put a stamp of legitimacy on the Trump/Netanyahu plan for Palestine. The talk of the establishment of a Board of Peace administered by Tony Blair, under the chairmanship of Donald Trump, is a shameless continuation of the awful colonial Zionist project under a different name. It is so blatant that there is not even a pretence at having Palestinian input to plans for their future. It is also an arrangement that is a de facto guarantee that there will be no reckoning for the perpetrators of this catastrophe. The talk of a proposed return of Mr Blair is appalling. This is the man whose record of influence in the region is overdue for its own reckoning.
P.S.
While indeed Obama was right that the world needs to look forward to make progress, structures like the press, the rule of law and concepts like shame provide the platform from which that progress can be made. Netanyahu may yet get his comeuppance from his people but it is way too early to know how this phase in the death throes of the global struggle against apartheid will play out. However it is certain that without a wider accounting for the slaughter that Israel and its enablers have inflicted on the Palestinians, Lebanese and Yemenis, the descent into global impunity and barbarism will only be accelerated in Congo, Sudan, Ukraine, Somalia, …
