Are 'Zionists' targeting journalists? (Read)

Gaza, the ABC and the war on truth: Part 1

Photo: Credit:Tamer Soliman. iStock.

This is a (slightly edited) transcript of Part One of a two-part audio essay. The audio is for paid subscribers only.

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I’m tackling, again, the Israel-Hamas war and journalism. And even if you can’t bear to think about the war, which I’d perfectly understand, I reckon you’ll find this essay interesting for what it shows about the crisis in journalism and in democracy more generally.

And I think a good place to start is close to home, at my former newspaper, The Age. Where, outside its Melbourne headquarters, five days before Christmas, a protest group called No More Bodies in Gaza conducted a silent “die-in”. About 60 people turned up wearing flak jackets marked “Press” and helmets. They lay motionless on the ground, blocking the entrance to the building; eventually police moved them on. In a recent piece in Quadrant, the journalist Tony Thomas reveals the die-in was a huge story for Tasmin, Iran’s news service. You can also watch the demo on TikTok; the video; to borrow Thomas’s description, comes with “bonus musical moaning.”

The protestors were pretending to be reporters killed in Gaza.

This has emerged as a major story in the Israel-Hamas war — it has featured in the world’s august publications, Time magazine, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and so on. The story is: Israel is killing journalists. As opposed to killing brick-layers, chefs or town-planners. I’m not being callous: the toll in Gaza is high even if we don’t take as sacrosanct Hamas’s estimate of more than 24,000 dead. Many thousands have been killed, no doubt. For its part, Israel claims it has killed roughly 9000 Hamas militants.

According to the most reputable organisation that’s keeping a tally on dead journalists in Gaza, 76 reporters have been killed in Israel’s onslaught. (That was the figure on January 23.) Sometimes this story is reported simply as a human and civic tragedy, silent on the obvious question of why journalists in particular are dying in such large numbers. The silence invites the conclusion Israel killed these journalists deliberately. At other times, the accusation is explicit.

“Israel is murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza,” read the headline on a column in The Guardian earlier this month. “Where is the outrage?”

Well, there was certainly outrage outside The Age building and on the same day, five days before Christmas, Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC, was also targeted. About 40 portraits of Palestinian journalists killed during the Israel-Hamas war were plastered on its Southbank offices.

Two days later the ABC office had red paint splashed on its doors, presumably to resemble blood, and a warning daubed across the windows: “tell the truth about the war in Palestine.”

In that same week the Australian chapter of Amnesty International —- you know, Amnesty, the non-government organisation famous for advocating for prisoners of conscience in repressive, totalitarian regimes — well, Amnesty expressed “grave concerns” about “the increasing intimidation of journalists by Australian media companies” that will “intensify a chilling effect on fair, accurate reporting of the conflict in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel.”

A casual observer might look at all this — the protests outside press offices, the warning from Amnesty about a “chilling effect” on reporting the conflict — and wonder: since when has Australia become the sort of country that stifles media freedom? A place where even the public broadcaster won’t tell you “the truth” about the war in Gaza, a war in which Israel is murdering journalists, no less? Murdering the truth, we could say.

This is the theme I’ll be interrogating here: Israel’s alleged war on truth. And the proxy wars being fought in newsrooms across the free world. I’ll be taking the long route, with detours along the way.

Strap in.

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Let’s go back to that Amnesty International statement expressing concern about the “increasing intimidation of Australian journalists by media companies” and its chilling effect on accurate reporting. The statement explains that in recent months some media companies, in their role as publishers, have sought to “discipline” and sometimes even terminate journalists who have “expressed criticism of the actions of the Israeli government.”

Amnesty was referring to the sacking of ABC journalist Antoinette Lattouf for her pro-Palestinian activism — more on that in a minute — and to the response from media executives to an open letter signed by Australian journalists, similar to others signed by journalists across the Anglosphere. The letter calls for Israel to be treated with as much scepticism as Hamas. For journalists to let go of “both sideism” reporting of the Gaza war in favour of “the truth.”

The truth, according to the signatories, is that the war “did not start on October 7,” and October 7 should always be placed in its “historical context,” which includes “the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their native lands in 1948 to make way for the state of Israel,” and “the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel since 1967, including that the UN deemed Gaza an Israeli-occupied territory even after Israel’s withdrawal from the enclave in 2005.”

Got it? Everything’s Israel’s fault. Expunged from the letter’s “historical context” is the Jewish people’s continuous presence in the land since before recorded history, the succession of Palestinian leaders from before Israel’s creation to the present day who rejected peace deals and refused to come up with counter offers, the waves of terror from Palestinian militants, in particular the second intifada in the early years of this century, which caused the Israeli public to become disillusioned with the peace process and lean towards hardline right-wing governments inclined to entrench the occupation.

The letter states: “It is our duty as journalists to hold the powerful to account, to deliver truth and full context to our audiences, and to do so courageously without fear of political intimidation.”

That word again: “intimidation.”

This is the first Orwellian inversion of the truth; there’s more to come. Let’s get real: the open letter’s signatories claim the status of free speech martyrs even though they’re the ones trying to suppress speech they don’t like. They’re not simply asking that the Palestinian perspective on the war be better represented in media reporting; they’re demanding the Israeli perspective be sidelined and shouted down. It’s an attempt to stitch up the debate, just like the Sydney Theatre Company actors donning the keffiyeh at curtain call and the teachers proselytising on Palestine in the classroom — all want to push their views without the risk of others pushing back.

And the open letter begins with a narrative from which everything else follows: Israel is killing journalists.

To date more than 300 journalists from the ABC, The Guardian, Schwartz Media, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have signed the letter, alongside the national committee of the journalists’ union, and the union committee at the taxpayer-funded ABC.

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It’s no surprise that most of the letter’s signatories hail from the progressive or left-leaning media. Journalists from these outlets are usually themselves progressives, and these days ardently pro-Palestinian sentiment is overwhelmingly associated with the political left. Also: cultural manifestos tend to be issued in workplaces where managers are likely to respond with, say, promises to convene “listening sessions with culturally diverse staff.” (There’s a reason we don’t see mass insurrection in the Murdoch media: most reporters aren’t really into martyrdom.)

But on this occasion the petitioning journalists miscalculated somewhat. The old guard — veteran journalists who insist reporters cannot be activists — pushed back. Editorial management at The Age and the Herald announced that any of their reporters who signed the letter would be banned from reporting on the Israel-Hamas war. Even senior editors at the lefty Guardian, where the committee of the journalists’ union likewise endorsed the letter, clarified their code of conduct to explicitly prohibit reporters from signing open letters and petitions because such actions risk undermining The Guardian’s journalism.

And in that same week leading up to Christmas journalist Antoinette Lattouf was sacked from the ABC three days into a short term radio job. That she was hired in the first place was in my view a mistake. She had signed the open letter, and the ABC’s head of news had also warned journalists that doing so risked their professionalism being called into question. And Lattouf had also frequently posted febrile anti-Israel material on social media. In one post she described the Israeli military as “driven by blood-thirsty, extremist men who want to justify the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.” The station’s content director had told her to stop posting content likely to be controversial because the broadcaster was fielding complaints about her appointment. Lattouf claims she had sought clarification on what this meant.

“What if another journalist dies, can I post that?” she asked.

She subsequently posted a Human Rights Watch report, which the ABC itself had reported, that accused the Israeli government of using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war in Gaza. The post was the last straw. She was sacked; also a mistake, in my view. The broadcaster looked ridiculous as it frantically sought to defuse a controversy of its own making.

She has sued the broadcaster over the sacking, and recently amended her claim to allege racial discrimination played a role in the dismissal (Lattouf is of Lebanese background.) The ABC said the allegation was “abhorrent.” Her lawyer told the media that since “October 7 and the ensuing conflict in the Middle East, it has become notorious in the media industry that Arab and Muslim journalists are being intimidated, censored and sacked”.

As if on cue, another ABC reporter, Nour Haydar, resigned in protest over the broadcaster’s Gaza coverage and what she claimed was its poor treatment of non-white staff.

“Commitment to diversity in the media cannot be skin deep,” she told The Age and Herald.

And then — lo’ and behold, last week The Age and Herald published a story on what it described as a “co-ordinated back-channel” letter-writing campaign by a group of pro-Israel lawyers to get Lattouf sacked. The story featured leaked messages from a private WhatsApp group, Lawyers for Israel; the members strategise, talk tactics. One of them suggests trying to spook the ABC over Lattouf’s employment with legal threats of a spurious nature — which is actually a contradiction in terms because if the legal threats are of a spurious nature, the ABC’s lawyers can’t possibly be spooked.

Well, here was actual proof that powerful and shadowy forces were indeed trying to intimidate and censor pro-Palestinian journalists. By writing strongly-worded letters to the ABC. That’s “intimidation”, apparently. Lattouf explained the story’s significance in an interview with BBC World, yes, the controversy is now global. She says she has “no beef or issue with those who wish to lobby,” but the concern here is the lobby group “seems to have a direct channel, [and] access to, very senior people, in this case, the chair of the board at the ABC, and can influence an outcome so rapidly.”

On Sunday, at the pro-Palestine protest that’s become a weekly ritual in Melbourne since October 7, Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni referenced Lattouf’s plight, and the Lawyers for Israel campaign that was making the ABC an “unsafe place” for brown reporters.

I wonder how Jewish journalists are feeling at the ABC these days. If we must trade in this currency of fragility. Are they feeling the ABC is an “unsafe place” for them?

On Monday, back at ABC headquarters, the journalists were in open revolt, or at least, err, the 125 who voted no-confidence in the ABC’s managing director for failing to protect staff from outside interference. Three journalists voted against. The refusenik troika.

At the same meeting, global affairs editor John Lyons, reportedly said the ABC “faced one of its darkest days,” the day the story broke about the Lawyers for Israel campaign.

“I was embarrassed that a group of 156 lawyers could laugh at how easy it was to manipulate the ABC,” said Lyons. He’s a former Middle East correspondent for The Australian (I had always found his reporting compelling); his book, Balcony over Jerusalem, recounts his battles with Australia’s so-called Israel lobby over his journalism.

Lyons told staff at the meeting that the ABC had bowed to “a group of lawyers lobbying for a foreign power”.

You used to have to read between the lines to detect the age-old trope of a global Jewish conspiracy to control the media. A trope closely allied to the trope of disloyalty; the Jews cast as a nation within a nation, not to be trusted. It’s a trope that preceded the state of Israel, and (the ironies!) also the one that sparked the Zionist movement, when, in the late 1800s, a Jewish journalist (the ironies!) called Theodor Herzl reported on the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, wrongly convicted of high treason. Herzl, known as the father of modern Zionism, concluded from “the Dreyfus affair” that only a Jewish homeland could free Jews from anti-Semitism.

Now, in the disinhibited climate of post October 7, you can say anti-Jewish tropes aloud, as did Lyons in this accusation that Australian Jewish lawyers were doing the bidding of a foreign power, as if they’re remote-controlled by the Israeli foreign ministry. And yet, Lyons seems relaxed about the pro-Palestine journalists at ABC, and elsewhere, likewise lobbying for censorship to advance foreign interests. They’re also, if you like, trying to control the media, and from inside the media, no less.

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If you’re even vaguely familiar with debates about media reporting on Israel, the allegation the ABC is failing to report “the truth” of Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza is .. novel.

For decades now, Jewish and Zionist groups, Murdoch press columnists and culture warriors within the conservative Coalition have been accusing the ABC of systemic anti-Israel bias; a Liberal senator has even described the broadcaster as “institutionally anti-Semitic.” (The BBC is accused of the same thing by, among others, its former director of television.)

In fact the same week that Amnesty alluded to pro Zionist intimidation in the Australian media, the ABC posted on TikTok a video on the anti-Israel “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” movement. It was basically a breezy ad for BDS, at a time when pro-Palestine protestors are targeting Jewish and Israeli businesses in ways reminiscent of the Nazi anti-Jewish boycotts of the 1930s. After a backlash, the TikTok video was taken down, edited and re-posted.

Complaints about the video were referred to the ABC’s internal watchdog, the Ombudsman, which then ruled the problem had been resolved because the edited video had added context and criticism of BDS. It is a lousy decision. As Herald Sun columnist James Campbell pointed out, the original video was at least honest about the nature of BDS whereas the new version asserted the boycott movement is only targeting Israeli businesses in the occupied territories, and only wants Israel evicted from lands it conquered in 1967 and not from all the land “from the river to the sea,” as the chant goes. Which is all bullshit.

Still— say the agitators; the ABC is soft on Israel.

When the signatories to the open letter were warned by senior editors at the various outlets that signing petitions exposed them to accusations of bias in their reporting they responded with an accusation of hypocrisy: had not some of these same editors accepted paid trips to Israel that would likewise undermine their reporting? If you’re scratching your head at this non-sequitur, it’s okay, so am I. How can you compare journalists signing a political manifesto with journalists attending a paid trip where they’re vulnerable to influence from the trip’s funders, certainly, but ultimately free to make up their own minds about what they’re shown?

One of the open letter’s demands is that reporters be forced to disclose if they have been on paid trips — “junkets” — to Israel organised by pro-Israeli groups. Now, a reporter filing stories that originate from a junket should disclose this fact. But the disclosure obligation surely doesn’t endure for years; unless you believe that, as with the Mafia, accept a freebie from Zionists and they’ll own you forever.

The signatories also urge “all Australian journalists from hereon to reject offers of paid trips to the Middle East.” Does the reference to “the Middle East” include Palestine or should journalists be free to accept junkets to the Palestinian territories given they come, as the news site Crikey saw fit to point out, “without the five-star experience of Israeli trips?” Weirdly, Crikey has compiled a list of journalists and politicians who have taken part in organised tours to the Middle East on the dime of lobby groups or governments, “or at their own expense”— it seems that touring Israel even at a reporter’s own expense carries a risk of long-term intellectual contamination.

Why are the signatories so worried about these junkets? — apart from the obvious danger their colleagues might actually learn something. Such trips typically introduce reporters (or politicians or students) to Israeli political activists from across the spectrum, from the settler movement to its trenchant critics, and usually to spokespeople from the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank who offer up blistering critiques of Israel’s policies. I’ve always found this set-up — in which pro-Israel tour operators co-ordinate with the Palestinian Authority so guests can hear blistering, first-hand anti-Israel critiques — perversely heartening; a glimmer of hope that one day Israel and an independent Palestine can live side-by-side in mutual loathing but grudging acceptance of the other.

What’s the likely takeaway from an Israel junket? That the Jewish state ought, on balance, be allowed to exist? Is that what the petitioning journalists fear? I think most visitors to Israel discover it’s a vibrant, besieged, raucous democracy; a clash of cultures, a mass of contradictions. And maybe that’s the signatories’ problem: the Jewish state takes shape as a real place supplanting the one-dimensional malign actor of the left’s imagination.

Or maybe that’s just one half of their problem. I’ll explain what I mean.

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Let’s consider another non-sequitur in this argument. The open letter urges reporters to “adhere to truth over ‘both-sideism,’” in reporting on Gaza, because, they say, “both-sideism is not balanced or impartial reporting; rather, it acts as a constraint on truth by shrouding the enormous scale of the human suffering currently being perpetrated by Israeli forces.”

I’ve been mulling over this, struggling to grasp why both-sideism “shrouds” the “enormous scale” of human suffering Israel has inflicted on Gaza. The enormous scale of human suffering is in fact so vividly reported it’s increased public unease about the war, led 153 countries, including Australia, to vote for a humanitarian cease-fire, prompted the Biden administration to pressure Israel to reduce civilian casualties and led South Africa to petition to the International Court of Justice to find Israel guilty of what’s said to be the crime of all crimes, genocide. At the risk of now sounding glib, for people who supposedly control the media, the Jews are doing a crappy job of it. But the signatories to the open letter claim the media is “shrouding” the suffering in Gaza.

I’ve come to think it’s they who want to do the “shrouding” in this miserable story. They want to “shroud” the role of Hamas. They want the mainstream media to bend to the hypnotic norms of social media where what the letter calls “events on the ground,” are presented seemingly raw and unmediated, the terror organisation all but invisible. It’s already pretty hard to “see” Hamas; when their fighters aren’t taking cover in the vast underground network of tunnels they built through diverting aid money intended for impoverished Gazans, they’re blending in with the impoverished Gazans, shooting from behind them, training fighters, the Israelis claim, from within densely populated refugee camps. Hamas fighters allegedly double as doctors, as teachers, as ambulance drivers, maybe even as journalists — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’ll get to the dead journalists. I’ll get to them in forensic detail.

The signatories to the open letter don’t want us looking too hard at jihadist Hamas, or at the geopolitical structure the terror group inhabits: Hezbollah, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Qatar and Iran. They want to downplay the threat the jihadist axis poses to Israel. As much as they don’t want Israel taking shape as a real place of complexity and contradiction, they’re even more determined that Gaza not take shape as a real place. Because that would involve reporters investigating Gaza’s leaders and conceding they too have power and agency. Because that would mean the Palestinians take shape as actors and not just as victims.

Recently I listened to a podcast interview between writer Dan Senor and Matt Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Levitt, together with Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari, has written a paper on Hamas’s internal dynamic since October 7. The discussion with Senor explored the tensions within the Hamas leadership on tactics, the rift between Yahya al-Sinwar, Gaza’s undisputed leader, and the group’s leaders living the good life overseas in Qatar, Lebanon and Turkey. Sinwar is hopeful Hamas can absorb Israel’s assault without being completely destroyed; he could then declare “divine victory,” as did Hezbollah in 2006. Hamas’s overseas leaders, on the other hand, are more nervous about Israel’s military campaign and are looking ahead to the day after the war, trying to carve out a space for the group in whatever political structure emerges in Gaza. The discussion also touched on the tension between the pro-Sunni and pro-Shiite tendencies within Hamas and on a lot more.

My point here: the podcast made me realise how much I don’t know about Hamas, about how it works, about the personalities who make it tick. I realised I knew very little about Sinwar, the leader who dragged the people of Gaza into this war and who keeps it alive, day after day. Sinwar who built his power base in Hamas during the two decades he spent in Israeli prison for abducting and murdering two Israeli soldiers, time he also spent teaching himself Hebrew, devouring Israeli media — he wouldn’t have knocked back a study tour on the Zionist dime. His deep knowledge about Israeli society helped fashion a long term strategy culminating in the October 7 attack.

I know very little about Hamas because the international press is as incurious about Hamas as it is obsessed with the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and the best analysis you’ll ever read on the media’s Israel fixation and failure, is an essay published originally in Tablet magazine in the aftermath of the 2014 Israel-Hamas war. The essay is by Canadian-Israeli Matti Friedman. From 2006 to 2011 Friedman worked as a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s two biggest news providers; the experience gave him an insider’s perspective on, as he puts it, “why reporters get Israel so wrong and why it matters.”

Friedman discussed the media’s obsession with Israel; how the AP during his time — and this was typical of most news agencies— had 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories, significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. Higher than the total number of reporters in all the countries where the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” eventually erupted. To the international media, Friedman suggests, Israel is “the most important story on earth, or very close.” And while every flaw in Israeli society, every act of Israeli aggression is aggressively reported, Palestine is not taken seriously as a story in its own right.

Even after Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in 2007, the AP, Friedman wrote, was not interested in reporting on the group’s founding charter. A word about that charter, which has never been repealed. By now people might know that it calls for the elimination of Israel — no big deal, that’s a cause the kids at Harvard and Sydney uni can cheerfully get behind. Except the charter doesn’t so much talk of “Israelis” as it does of Jews, and not simply of what it sees as the Jewish interlopers in the land of Israel. But the Jews: everywhere.

“Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious,” the charter declares. It says the Jews were “behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests.”

(I guess this was back before the Jews could sabotage society via “secret” WhatsApp groups.)

Hamas thinks the Jews set up the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions to sabotage societies — interesting, no? Not interesting for the AP, apparently.

Not interesting that Hamas’s founding charter doesn’t read anything like the petitions and screeds proliferating in the aftermath of October 7 with their rote references to settler-colonialism and free Palestine. Instead the charter calls for the killing of Jews:

“The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”

Friedman, in his 2014 piece, conceded there are practical obstacles to reporting freely on Gaza, chief among them Hamas’s intimidation and threats against reporters.

He writes: “During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza.”

What does the public know about the nature of Hamas’s intimidation of journalists? Almost nothing. Less than the public knows about Sinwar, I’d suggest. In 2016 a Human Rights Watch report on press freedom in Palestine found three cases — just three — of Hamas authorities detaining and intimidating journalists: one journalist had criticised the government for failing to protect a man with a mental disability, another had posted a photograph of a woman looking for food in a garbage bin and the third had alleged medical malpractice at a public hospital after a newborn baby died.

If Hamas harasses journalists for reporting on inadequate disability services or medical malpractice, what might happen to journalists who try to report on allegations Hamas is preventing civilians from following Israel’s advice to evacuate parts of the strip ahead of bombardment, or using mosques as part of their military infrastructure or hijacking aid convoys? In October, staff from UN relief agency, UNRWA tweeted that fuel and medical equipment had been stolen by “a group of people with trucks purporting to be from the Ministry of Health of the de facto authorities in #Gaza”, meaning Hamas. Within hours the tweet was deleted and a correction posted saying no looting had occurred. Well that’s a relief.

But, as Friedman explained in his 2014 essay, Hamas’s iron-fisted control of the news isn’t the main problem. Journalists have always found ways to report on repressive regimes; where there’s a will there’s a way — the truth is, there’s little will. The international press isn’t interested in running exposés on Hamas. Friedman recalls the AP’s Jerusalem news editor once filed a story on Hamas intimidation; his superiors shunted the piece into the “deep freeze” and it was never published.

For the international press, Friedman wrote, “Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians.”

And if you want a concrete example of why this incuriosity about Hamas matters, consider this line in Friedman’s 2014 essay:

“An observer might think Hamas’s decision in recent years to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict would be fought and the cost to innocent people.”

Just a bit prophetic?

In October The Washington Post pulled a cartoon that portrayed a Hamas leader using Palestinian civilians as human shields, after an outcry, including from other journalists in the newsroom, that the depiction of the terrorist featured racial stereotypes. Get that? Some staff were more concerned about the alleged racist depiction of Hamas than they were about Hamas’s cynical disregard for Palestinian lives that the cartoon sought to critique.

Several journalists at the Post have signed an open letter similar to the one in Australia.

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But it’s harder for journalists to blur the role of Hamas in this conflict than it was during the 2014 conflict with Israel, on which Friedman based his essay, or during the last flare up in 2021, when journalists in Australia, and elsewhere, first signed an open letter calling for an end to “both sideism” reporting on Israel-Palestine. That earlier petition, also signed by hundreds of journalists, some of them highly respected journalists, simply vanished Hamas, and its rocket attacks on Israeli towns, from a potted account of the war that preceded a list of editorial demands. In the potted account of the conflict the Netanyahu government had unleashed a brutal war against Palestinians without any provocation whatsoever. The letter was pure Pravda— only worse.

Such blatant lies are harder to peddle this time; according to the man-bites-dog measure of news worthiness, October 7 was simply too spectacular.

It’s why, for instance, Crikey’s Guy Rundle (I could write a thesis about Crikey’s resident Marxist Guy Rundle, and maybe I will— he’s pretty much written a thesis on me over the past 20 years) Guy Rundle, writing about the massacre at the Nova music festival, referred to “the canny decision” of “pro-Israel outlets” to “feature only murdered girls and young women from that absolutely unspeakable, unimaginable killing field.” Notice his obsessive, conspiratorial focus on the meta-narrative. It can’t just be as simple as — to invoke one of the hard-nosed maxims of our reporting trade — she bleeds, therefore she leads. She, being beautiful freedom-loving young women dancing for peace in the desert dawn before monsters rounded on them.

As an aside: Rundle at least expressed his horror about the massacre where so many of his media colleagues, including veteran ABC journalists, disgracefully did not, while in the same breath he warned that what would come next — Israel’s response — would be far worse, and he’s since written a torrent of pieces on Gaza, in which the state of Israel has shape-shifted from a plain old illegitimate settler-colonial regime, to a state with Nazi-like affectations, to a satanic state. For the “satanic state” bit he hides behind quotes from tiny ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects that believe a Jewish state should only exist once the Messiah comes.

Earlier this month, he wrote that if terrorists were to land a massive blow on Israel he’d be out on the streets, celebrating. Mate: we get it, okay?

He’s also referred to Zionist groups launching “a globally coordinated campaign about rape, mutilation and torture reports and allegations arising from the October 7 Hamas raid, asking why these had been rendered invisible by Western feminists and allies.” A “globally coordinated campaign:” the same language used about the Lawyers for Israel campaign against the ABC. Seems the “globally coordinated campaigns” of Zionists are the only ones worth noticing.

Because in the progressive press Hamas’s globally coordinated campaign is rarely spoken of; a campaign bolstered by state actors that have their own reasons for wanting to destabilise the West: China, with its TikTok algorithms amplifying cool, young jihad apologists, Russia, with its bot farms, and Qatar, with its gifting of more than $US 4 billion over 20 years to US colleges, including some of the Ivy League schools now notorious for their vigilance against campus micro-aggressions but their tolerance for calls for a genocide of Jews, colleges that export their “decolonisation” ideology to universities around the world where its lapped up like Coca Cola.

So no sooner had The New York Times published in December its two-month long investigation into Hamas weaponising sexual violence on October 7 than so-called feminist organisations set-about trying to debunk the story as Zionist propaganda in the service of genocide. This too was a “globally coordinated campaign.”

But still, but still: journalists can’t entirely ignore October 7. There are still hostages held in Gaza. They can hardly ignore their fate. They can’t do the equivalent of tearing down hostage posters. The human drama of hostage taking is, I’m sorry to put it like this, media gold.

So — the signatories to the open letter, cannot ignore October 7 and still call themselves journalists; instead they urge their colleagues to see the terror attack in its “historical context.”

And I agree: we must see the rape and execution of adolescent girls in their beds, a militant’s jubilant bragging on the phone to his parents —“I killed 10 Jews!”— the orgy of murder and mutilation carried out to an ecstatic soundtrack of “Allahu Akbar” — we must see all this in the historical context of the fanaticism, Islamic supremacy, misogyny and Jew hatred that seeded the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas and other jihadist movements are an offshoot, a movement created decades before the state of Israel was even born.

I’d argue we must also see October 7 in its future context; as Hamas official Ghazi Hamad reassured the world in November, his group would repeat the atrocities “again and again.”

It’s a shaky proposition, isn’t it, that we must see October 7 in its “historical context;” see jihadism as the awful but inevitable consequence of the Palestinians’ decades-long humiliation and dispossession at the hands of settler-colonial Israel? It’s shaky because on that day Hamas was so clearly the author of its own story, its militants proudly filming and uploading their bloody rampage across communities in southern Israel, and every detail of that story makes a mockery of Western narratives of Palestinian victimhood, makes a mockery of the West and its values full stop.

So the signatories of the open letters and the many other journalists who didn’t sign but are broadly on the same page need a trump card. The journalists need something else, something big, to nail their argument that there are no “two-sides” to the war; that Hamas must be edited out of this story lest we “shroud” the scale of the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza. Without something else, the argument that it was really Israel, and not Hamas, which started this war, falters. What’s the trump card?

Israel is killing journalists.

**

Could there be any more potent accusation to rally the world’s journalists and intellectuals than a supposedly democratic state assassinating journalists? Murdering them in cold blood to stop them from telling the world “the truth” about the carnage in Gaza? Actually, there is a worse, even more shocking allegation: the Western media is colluding with Israel’s lethal war on the truth. Worse still: the Western media is colluding with Israel’s lethal war on the truth because “the Zionists” are variously manipulating and intimidating them into doing so.

Once we accept that Israel is killing journalists to suppress the truth about Gaza, every other allegation about Israeli depravity in executing this war, including the ultimate allegation of genocide, becomes more than plausible because, as a matter of logic, Israel wouldn’t take such dramatic steps to muzzle the press unless it had something spectacular to hide. No coincidence, then, that South Africa made specific mention of Israel’s killing of Gazan journalists in accusing Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice.

And the first line of the journalists’ open letter reads: “Israel’s devastating bombing campaign and media blockade in Gaza threatens newsgathering and press freedom in an unprecedented fashion.” It goes on to cite statistics on journalist deaths in Gaza, and declares:

“We join hundreds of our colleagues in the US, Reporters Without Borders, the International Federation of Journalists and others in calling for an end to attacks on journalists and journalism itself.”

In this framing, the journalists’ demands are emergency measures against a mortal threat to “journalism itself.” That’s clever. Because in ordinary circumstances it would be a huge call for journalists to declare, by way of manifesto, that the media should take sides in a foreign conflict to reflect an “historical context” rendered in dot points as “the truth.” But if Israel is killing journalists there’s no two sides about it, surely? Then the long-standing norm of journalistic “balance” must indeed fall away. Because then we really can’t believe anything Israel says.

And remember, the letter also calls on reporters to “apply as much professional scepticism when prioritising or relying on uncorroborated Israeli government and military sources to shape coverage as is applied to Hamas.” This is also huge. The demand is not that reporters treat unverified information from the Israeli authorities with scepticism, or with more scepticism than they do at present — that would fair enough. Unverified information from government officials should be treated with scepticism always and especially during wartime. Democratic states lie — they mostly lie carefully, with an eye to plausible deniability, but they lie. Israel lies.

No, the open letter’s signatories are not simply demanding journalists be sceptical of unverified claims from Israel, they want “as much” professional scepticism applied to the claims of Israeli authorities as is applied to Hamas.

They’re not even saying: treat the two sides the same, because they’re morally equivalent. They’re saying something, in my view, even more mind-bending than that. They’re saying: here is a war between two sides; one is an illegitimate genocidal entity that murders reporters in cold blood lest they reveal the truth; the other is a proscribed terrorist organisation.

Boom, boom.

They’re saying that Israel is worse than Hamas. That its democracy is skin deep, just like the ABC’s commitment to diversity. They’re saying Israel is like Vladimir Putin’s Russia — only worse. Vastly worse because since Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999 around 25 journalists have been murdered in Russia — many sprayed with bullets in their apartment blocks in direct retaliation for their work — whereas Israel has already knocked off three times that number of journalists in just three months in Gaza alone, while insisting it’s a democracy.

I suspect many of the open letter’s signatories believe democracy is a con anyway, a cover for racist imperialism. But Israel’s democracy is surely the biggest con job of all because it’s a shield behind which the state assassinates journalists.

How else would Israel succeed in getting newsrooms around the world to shroud “the truth” about the conflict, as the open letter puts it, if not by eliminating the journalists who bear witness to what the letter describes as the “immense and disproportionate human suffering” inflicted on civilians in Gaza. (And if you spend your time on Twitter, latterly known as “X,” you’ll learn that Israel has its moles in the Western media. You’ll learn that the death of a Gazan writer and his family in a “surgical” Israeli strike on the apartment block in which he was staying was payback for his online confrontation with a Jewish American journalist. Now there’s what The Age might call a “back-channel campaign” to take out a scribe.)

On the open letter’s reckoning, Israel is worse than Hamas. That’s Hamas with its founding charter stating Jews established Rotary Clubs for the purpose of sabotaging societies; Hamas, whose spokesman Basem Naim denied that its militants raped women and girls on October 7 because Islam, he said, “considers any sexual relationship or activity outside of marriage to be completely haram,” meaning forbidden. In fact, according to The Guardian, Israeli authorities believe the Hamas fighters that attacked Israel were beforehand given a text that implied traditional Islamic military law allowed the abduction and abuse of captives as “the spoils of war.”

The open letter doesn’t mention Hamas killing journalists, so compared to Israel the terror group is a champion of press freedom. Here’s the crucial point: the letter doesn’t merely cut Israel down to the status of Hamas; it elevates Hamas to the status of Israel, conferring on the terror organisation legitimacy and credibility equal to that of a democratic state.

But, and I’ve taken the long route to get here: is it true? Is it true Israel is killing journalists? And here I should fess up; I’ve been misquoting the guts of the allegation about Israel deliberately targeting journalists in Gaza to suppress “the truth.”

The precise wording in the open letter and in the reports from key NGOs refers to the “apparent” targeting of journalists by the Israeli government and its military. The letter says: “we are appalled at the slaughter of our colleagues and their families and the apparent targeting of journalists by the Israeli government, which constitutes a violation of the Geneva Conventions.” Guy Rundle (who hasn’t signed the open letter) wrote: “There is almost no serious doubt that the Israel Defence Forces deliberately target war correspondents and media workers for killing.” Frankly, I’d expect nothing less from a satanic state. But, again, note his wording: “There is almost no serious doubt” that Israel targets journalists.

Which means there’s “serious doubt” that it does.

“Almost.” “Apparent.”

The eye tends to glide over such words, but they do strenuous work. They give perfect cover to the accusation the Jewish state is murdering truth itself.

Is there any truth to the accusation?

I’ll explore that question in part two of this podcast.

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An earlier version of this story stated The Guardian’s editorial management had “flagged a new code of conduct” prohibiting staff from signing petitions or open letters because such actions risk undermining The Guardian’s journalism. In fact, the rule was added as clarification to an existing code of conduct for Guardian staff.