Racist dehumanisation of Palestinians continues
While the grieving of Israelis has been a media spectacle over the past two years—revisited again and again each time Israeli hostages’ remains have returned to their families—the trauma of Palestinians now returning to their destroyed homes receives relatively little attention.
UNICEF estimates that over the past two years of Israel’s genocide, 28 children have been killed by the Israeli occupation forces every day on average. Let that sink in: a classroom of kids murdered each day.
You won’t hear much about the tens of thousands of grieving Palestinian families in the corporate media. Yet you will hear, again and again, about Israeli trauma, even as Palestinians continued to be killed in their dozens.
US President Donald Trump, addressing the Israeli Knesset on 13 October, claimed that the ceasefire deal he brokered will open a new “golden age” for the Middle East and end some 3,000 years of conflict. It was laughable.
Yet a largely uncritical Western media seriously pondered whether the Trump administration—which, like the Biden administration before it, provided the finance and weaponry to Israel as it carried out genocide—really was some great peacemaker.
The reality for Palestinians, however, is that the war is far from over.
Israel continues to occupy 53 percent of Gaza, after withdrawing behind an invisible “yellow line”, and continues to prevent vital aid and recovery equipment from entering Gaza. In the first week of the so-called ceasefire, the Israeli army committed 80 violations, killing 97 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Imagine if it had been 97 Israelis killed. There would be no handwringing about the ceasefire holding. It would be wall-to-wall condemnations of Hamas and justifications for Israel to continue the genocide. In the Western media, Palestinian lives don’t matter.
Israel has returned the remains of 1,718 living and 150 deceased Palestinians from Gaza, along with 250 Palestinian political prisoners. However, 154 of these political prisoners were immediately deported to Egypt by Israel, according to Hamas, denying them reunification with their families.
According to the director of Gaza’s Health Ministry, Dr Munir al-Bursh, documents that accompanied 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians returned to Gaza reveal that they were held in the notorious Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert. According to photos and testimonies published in the Guardian last year, Palestinian detainees at Sde Teiman were held in cages, blindfolded and handcuffed, shackled to hospital beds and forced to wear nappies.
On 20 October, the Guardian reported that several of the recently returned victims were blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs. In one photo, a rope is fastened around a man’s neck. No identification accompanied the victims’ bodies, adding to their families’ grief and trauma.
Imagine for a moment the media reporting if Israeli hostages had been returned like this. The images should have provoked the kind of outrage generated by the revelations of torture by US troops of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2004. Yet these crimes received little reporting.
The reunification of 1,718 Palestinian detainees with their families in Gaza was news for a day. Many told their families of brutal treatment in Israeli prisons, including beatings and torture. But those are the “lucky” ones. Some 9,000 West Bank Palestinians remain in Israeli custody, having been kidnapped and transferred to Israel in breach of international law. More than 3,500 are “administrative detainees”, who have never been charged with any crime, while 2,763 are deemed “unlawful combatants” by the Israeli military, according to Israel Prison Service data.
Their families’ separation from loved ones—in many cases for years—and their encirclement and harassment by an increasingly aggressive and violent settler movement, is not considered worthy of the media attention given to Israeli families whose loved ones were taken hostage on 7 October.
American journalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times, is the latest to fall foul of the conservative media establishment. After being scheduled to address Australia’s National Press Club on 20 October, Hedges was informed that the event was cancelled. Everyone knows why: Hedges reports the truth, and the truth is embarrassing to Israel, Australia, and the corporate media.
In a Late Night Live interview, the ABC’s David Marr took Hedges to task for accepting an invitation from the Australian Friends of Palestine Association to deliver the annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture, “Requiem for Gaza”. He claimed Hedges had compromised his credibility as a journalist by accepting such an invitation.
This isn’t just a disgraceful slur against Hedges, but a racist attack on the Palestinians. If reporting the truth about what they face under the boot of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide is a mark against any reporter, the insinuation is that Palestinian oppression itself is some lie. In the Said Memorial Lecture, Hedges hit back:
“October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalisation and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.
“The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state.”
The obfuscation and lies of Western politicians and their media mouthpieces have enabled and emboldened Israel, Hedges argued:
“The funding and arming of Israel by the US and European nations, as it carries out genocide, has imploded the post-World War Two international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilisation.”
This loss of credibility—the exposure of the hypocrisy of the capitalists and their institutions—is perhaps the greatest achievement of our solidarity movement over the past two years. It should give us the strength to continue the fight for Palestine.
Nick Everett is the secretary of Friends of Palestine WA.
