Swimming against the mainstream on Palestine
If your news is coming from the Murdoch stable, you’d be forgiven for believing that university campuses across Australia and around the world are in absolute turmoil with students establishing “no go” zones and scaring off Jewish students with endless rounds of pro-Hamas slogans. In fact, the opposite is true. Peaceful protest camps have been attacked by violent Zionist mobs, only some of them in police uniforms.
If you see the Murdoch papers in your city or town, or you watch Sky News, then you’d know that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese thinks the call “from the river to the sea” is violent antisemitic speech. But you probably wouldn’t know that for the past two weeks, the Israeli military has been bombing Rafah, the last safe haven in Gaza, killing dozens more civilians to add to the staggering numbers of dead bodies piling up outside the bombed-out hospitals, schools and mosques.
If you read the ruling-class opinion pieces in Newsweek, your head might actually explode. Here’s a headline from a column by Josh Levs published on 7 May, seven months after the start of what looks like an endless bloodbath—you might say “genocide”—that has killed more than 40,000 Gazans: “The mainstream media is biased against Israel. I know I was part of it”. It is staggering that a semi-celebrity American columnist could believe such a thing in 2024, but here we are. You won’t be surprised to know that Josh Levs is a Zionist propagandist.
Now, I don’t know what media Josh is consuming, but everywhere I look across the mainstream media, all I see is pro-Israel apologetics, inflammatory articles that call anti-genocide campaigners antisemites and editorials demanding the police throw students off campus for standing up against Zionist aggression.
The world’s biggest media brands—the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, Bild and Die Welt in Germany, alongside Fox News, CNN and even the BBC—have amplified every lie uttered by the Zionists: “Oh we didn’t bomb the hospital, it was a Hamas rocket”, “Hamas beheaded 40 babies”, “tunnels, tunnels, tunnels”, “Hamas is using human shields”, “it was an accident that we bombed that aid convoy/ preschool/doctor/journalist”, on and on and on it goes.
The Australian media, and that includes the Age, the Guardian, the Saturday Paper and the ABC, is no better. There have been massive protest marches in Melbourne and Sydney every weekend for seven months, but they’re apparently not newsworthy anymore. Protest action has been constant and widespread—perhaps the most significant mobilisations against war and oppression since the Vietnam Moratorium protests some 50 years ago. Unfortunately, the wise editors at Australia’s major media outlets can’t see past the latest press release from the Zionist Federation of Australia. They don’t seem to notice they’re missing the story of the decade.
There’s plenty of war-porn on offer—casualty figures and carefully designed graphics showing where the Gazan population has been pushed to in recent days—but this is not designed to explain what’s actually happening. For the last eight months, the Israeli massacre in Gaza has been framed in the media as an act of self-defence. Sure, journalists are obliged to report the occasional guilty utterance from Penny Wong or Joe Biden that Israel should “be careful” where it drops its 2,000 pound bombs and try to “minimise” civilian casualties, but there’s so much that journalists are obliged not to report on.
From day one of its military operation in Gaza the Israeli military has been committing war crimes of unspeakable horror: murdering journalists, doctors, aid workers and over 15,000 children. In recent weeks, we found out that hundreds of people—medical staff, civilian adults, and children—had been handcuffed and shot at point-blank range in the back of the head before being buried in hastily dug ditches. In the Western media at least, news of this tends to be buried along with the corpses.
It is war reporting reduced to spectacle and sanitised for Western audiences. Far from being anti-Israel, the mainstream media is complicit—through its actions or its silence—in one of the most horrendous acts of barbarism since the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August 1945.
Anyone with eyes to see has witnessed the horror. We’ve seen the broken limbs, the bloody faces and the lifeless toddlers covered in cement dust. We’ve seen the women and children being pulled from the collapsed apartment blocks. We’ve seen the rotting flesh and protruding bones of the innocents murdered and dumped in the mud by bloodthirsty, murdering cowards. We’ve seen the rows and rows of body bags, the grieving fathers, the lists of the dead, the maimed and the starving. We see all this every day in our social media feeds.
The mainstream media tends to shy away from the harsh truth of the horrors in Gaza. Journalists and editors like to think that they sit above it all. Aloof and able to decide, like Solomon of the Biblical fable, who gets to see and hear which bits of information.
But it’s not like that at all. The mainstream news media is, above all, a business. Journalism is just another line on the balance sheet for media companies. For all the noble talk of a fearless Fourth Estate that holds the powerful to account, journalism is complicit in power. This has consequences too for the politics of the coverage that we see, not just of this war but of all wars and any conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has the blessing of governments in the West, from Washington to London, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa and Canberra. What ties these governments together—from conservative to liberal or social democratic—is their material interest in the system of imperialism. Media companies benefit from imperialism too, and they ensure that the journalists they hire will conform to similar ideological beliefs. This is why the horror is sanitised and the political explanation reduced to propaganda.
Reporters and editors who step out of line don’t last long; they get blacklisted and sacked. Zionist groups campaign against them to ensure they’re silenced. This is happening all over the world right now. Reporters, artists, prominent academics and anybody who dares to speak up against Israeli aggression is labelled an antisemite and hounded from public life.
Of course, in the upside-down world in which Josh Levs thinks the mainstream media is to blame for Israel’s bad publicity, silencing anti-Zionists is righteous and moral. It could even be considered a defence of free speech. This is the exact argument being put out by the Murdoch media about campus protests here in Australia and around the world. It might seem bizarre, but Murdoch columnists are actually attempting to convince us that the students’ Gaza solidarity encampments are an attack on free speech.
Governments have seen the power of the student protests that were set off a few weeks ago in New York, and they are doing everything in their power to crush this new anti-war movement before it overwhelms their lies.
A similar line of reasoning is being put forward about social media and, in particular, TikTok. The US Congress is demanding that TikTok be banned in America because, supposedly, it presents a threat to national security. It’s an absurd argument about how much data TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, collects and allegedly passes to the Chinese government (the hypocrisy here is mindboggling—all the US-owned social media companies regularly share data with the National Security Agency).
In Australia, the heads of ASIO and the Federal Police have also come out against social media, describing it as a cesspit of hate speech and terrorist indoctrination. What these officials in Washington and Canberra are really worried about is that TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp are platforms where young people can talk to each other and share ideas outside of the control of teachers, preachers, parents, politicians and mainstream editors.
Politicians, bureaucrats and Murdoch editors hate the fact that the majority sentiment on TikTok and some other social media platforms is on the side of the Palestinians and making a mockery of the official pro-Israel propaganda.
As Josh Levs himself acknowledges, the growing awareness of young people about Israel and Palestine is dangerous for the imperialist status quo. Levs supports imperialism, so his solution is for governments to crack down on the sources of dissent, what Levs calls “dangerous, violent radicalisation” on university campuses.
Our solution is the exact opposite. We celebrate the campus protests as a festival of the oppressed. We learn to read between the lines of the mainstream media and to recognise their constant lies and propaganda. We share the TikToks and the videos that make it out of Gaza so that we know, so that we understand, and so that we can act to end the barbarism of imperialism, once and for all.
