Are 'Zionists' targeting journalists? (Part 2: Read)

Sorting fact from fiction in Gaza and beyond

Israeli soldiers guarding a barrier. Photo: Joel Carillet. iStock

This is a slightly edited transcript of Part 2 of a two-part podcast on the Israel-Hamas war and the media. You can look at Part 1 here. It is long because it’s a transcript — not a feature article. If you become a paid subscriber you can listen to the full audio essay here and here.

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Let’s go straight to Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza, where, on January 7th, three journalists were travelling in a car: Al Jazeera cameraman Hamza al-Dahdouh, freelance videographer Mustafa Thuraya and freelance journalist Hazem Rajab. According to the Al Jazeera network, the journalists were covering the aftermath of an Israeli air raid. There are conflicting reports about whether they were en-route to the air raid site or returning from it. It is also unclear if their car was marked “Press.” What is clear is that the Israeli Defence Forces struck the car with a missile. Al-Dahdouh and Thuraya were killed. Rajab was injured.  

Israeli military officials responded with a series of inconsistent and confusing explanations — as they often do in such cases. That’s either because in the chaos of war the real facts only come to light later — that’s the generous interpretation — or because they have a standard playbook of obfuscation and denial — that’s the ungenerous interpretation. Maybe there’s truth in both interpretations.

So here, the IDF at first said a “terrorist” had been operating a drone from the car that posed a danger to Israeli troops— that’s why they struck. To which Al Jazeera responded that while one of the journalists used drones for reporting, he wasn’t flying a drone at the time of the air strike. An IDF spokesperson then said the death of any journalist is regrettable, but if journalists use drones in a war zone they’re going to look like terrorists, which seemed to imply the whole thing was a terrible mistake. They vowed to investigate the incident. The IDF then came back and said someone had been operating a “hostile drone near Rafah” and more than that both the deceased were members of Gaza-based terrorist organisations actively involved in attacks against IDF forces.

The military even produced — conveniently after the fact — a document it claimed proved al-Dahdouh was an operative from the electronic engineering unit of terror organisation Islamic Jihad. The BBC then consulted experts who cast doubt on the authenticity of the document… 

And there’s more.

Al-Dahdouh was the son of Wael Al Dahdouh, the Gaza bureau chief for Al Jazeera Arabic. Wael had already lost four members of his immediate family, including young children, in an Israeli bombardment. After now burying his journalist son, he made a dignified and moving video address and immediately resumed his reporting of the war. He cuts a courageous figure. 

What to make of this bloody mess? Well, Al Jazeera is no doubt of what to make of it. The network accuses the Israeli military of “systematically” — that’s their word — targeting Wael Al Dahdouh, the bureau chief, and his family to discourage him from bearing witness in Gaza.

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It’s this accusation more broadly that I’m interrogating here. Is the Israel military deliberately targeting journalists, assassinating them, to stop them from telling the truth about the war in Gaza? As I explained in Part 1, the people making this claim are not fringe activists. Nor is Al Jazeera the only media network making this accusation. It’s been aired in the world’s most prestigious media. NGOs are pushing it hard.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York based independent, non-profit organisation which, as its name suggests, defends the right of journalists to report the news “safely and without fear of reprisal,” describes “an apparent pattern of (Israel) targeting.. journalists and their families.”

On Thursday, a group of what the media described as “independent experts” appointed by the UN’s Human Rights Council expressed alarm at the “killings, injury and detention” of reporters in Gaza and elsewhere, warning of “a deliberate strategy by Israeli forces to obstruct the media and silence critical reporting".

The same accusation kicks off an open letter signed by more than 300 Australian journalists, and influential committees of the journalists’ union, calling for an end to “both sideism” reporting on the Israel-Hamas war and for journalists to treat with equal scepticism unverified information from the terror group Hamas and from the state of Israel. 

As I explained in Part 1, this accusation does a lot of work, even on a subliminal level. Because if we accept that Israel is murdering journalists in Gaza then I’d suggest many other accusations against Israel become presumptively true.

So, as with any murder charge, we need to probe the state of mind of the Israeli state to find evidence of what could be construed as murderous intent towards journalists. 

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Journalists under fire in Gaza are hailed as heroes, and rightly so.  

Unlike the situation in Israel’s previous, more limited, campaigns in Gaza, this time very few foreign journalists are on the ground covering the conflict. A small number are embedded in the Israeli military, with their reports subject to military censorship. Otherwise, Egypt won’t let reporters in through its Rafah crossing with Gaza, and Israel won’t let them in through its Erez crossing, which has been closed since October 7. 

International media organisations petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to be allowed entry into Gaza; the appeal was rejected in a ruling last month. The court said the restrictions were justified on security grounds as the presence of journalists could endanger Israeli soldiers battling Hamas, give away troop locations and so on. Meanwhile in November, 67 foreign media correspondents wrote to the Egyptian authorities requesting the opening of the Rafah crossing — they never got a reply. 

But even if Israel and Egypt were to grant journalists access to Gaza, in reality few international media would send staff because the risk of injury and death is too high. Journalists have the same protection as other civilians under international law; Israel insists it does not target journalists, but the IDF consistently warns it can’t guarantee reporters’ safety in combat zones. 

The upshot in Gaza is the international media has to rely on Palestinian journalists, civilians, aid workers and so on for information, and their information can be hard to verify. On social media many Gazans are chronicling their daily lives in a war zone. Some are citizen journalists, others professionals. Their reporting is poignant. Many have huge social media followings.

Let me clear: nothing, nothing of what I say next should be taken as minimising the immense suffering and carnage in Gaza. I’m not going to be playing God, judging who did or did not deserve to die. I’m simply interrogating the viral claim that Israel is targeting journalists to suppress the truth.

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The first interesting thing here is that the tally of Palestinian journalists being slaughtered in Gaza started running almost simultaneously with the Israeli military response to the October 7 massacre. By October 16 — when the war was less than 10 days old — The Guardian was reporting a 12th Palestinian journalist had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Hold this thought. I’ll come back to it later. 

The most reputable source on the dead journalists in Gaza is the Committee to Protect Journalists, which I mentioned earlier. I’m going to refer to this body as “the Committee.” 

According to the Committee, the Gaza war is the deadliest conflict for journalists since the organisation began tracking deaths in 1992. As at February 2, its tally of dead journalists in Gaza was 78. (Another three were killed in Lebanon and four Israeli journalists were killed on October 7th.) The Committee claimed more journalists were killed in Gaza in the first 10 weeks of the war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year. A pretty big claim. By way of comparison, the Committee says, 17 journalists and media workers have been killed in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

Former NBC Middle East correspondent Martin Fletcher reflected in The Times of Israel (and he was writing in late November) that in the Vietnam War 63 journalists were killed over two decades, and 69 in all the years of World War II. That figure of 69 is contested but that’s not material here: the death toll of journalists in Gaza, at 78, now exceeds the official toll in both these wars. Which suggests Vietnam and WWII weren’t that lethal for journalists after all, Fletcher writes. With a large dose of irony.

So let’s dissect the figures. The first thing to note is the Committee’s list of slain journalists includes 10 media workers, which includes drivers, finance administrators in media companies and an organisational development consultant. I’m going to discount these names. The IDF would be unlikely to go after organisational development consultants in their homes. 

And that’s the next crucial observation: more than half the journalists were reportedly killed at home under Israeli bombardment. Most weren’t on the job at the time they were killed, although the Committee says it’s still investigating the circumstances of their deaths. When I scrolled through the Committee’s list, which includes a profile of each journalist and the circumstances of their death, I found — the numbers aren’t sacrosanct, I’m very bad at counting — I found only 12 or so cases where it’s crystal clear the journalists were killed while actually reporting in Gaza. That’s including Al Jazeera’s Hamza al-Dahdouh and freelancer Mustafa Thuraya; the two I mentioned earlier, whose car was struck by an Israeli missile. 

So what of the majority of journalists killed at home with their families? Were they killed impersonally — just part of the overall toll of Gazan civilians killed as collateral damage, to use that miserable phrase? Or were they killed because the IDF deliberately targeted them through precision bombing? And if the IDF deliberately targeted them, did it do so to silence them as journalists? To bury the truth, so to speak? Or were they targeted for reasons that likely had nothing to do with their journalism?

Well, there’s something else that leapt out when I scrolled down the Committee’s list of journalist fatalities. Of the 78 journalists killed in Gaza, I counted 26 — so, a third — who worked for media owned by, or affiliated with, Hamas or Islamic Jihad; that’s the proscribed terror groups that carried out October 7, and that between them still hold more than 130 civilians hostage. And that figure of a third is probably conservative. 

Turns out I’m not the only one whose been holed up in a dark room grappling with this story. David Collier, a UK-based researcher into anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, has written a 150 page report entitled: The “Journalists” of Gaza — he puts the word journalists in quotation marks. The subtitle reads: “a modern day anti-Semitic conspiracy theory promoted by the mainstream media.” His findings have thus far not been challenged. 

Collier has gone through the Committee’s list of slain journalists, cross-referencing the names with their existing social media accounts and other publicly available material, including Arabic-language material he’s run through Google translate. 

He found many more journalists that the Committee did not list as having worked for Hamas or Islamic Jihad channels who nonetheless were; overall 35 journalists on the list — half the total, which stood at 70 at the time of his investigations — were working for the public face of these terror organisations. One of these outlets is the Hamas-affiliated Arabic-language Al-Aqsa TV channel. In October, France’s broadcasting watchdog ordered a satellite provider to take the channel off air for allegedly violating rules on incitement. 

Some of the profiles of the fallen journalists on the Committee’s list make a jarring contrast with the information Collier has unearthed. For instance, Salam Mema is described as “the head of the Women Journalists Committee at the Palestinian Media Assembly, an organisation committed to advancing media work for Palestinian journalists.” She sounds like a comrade, except, as Collier explained to me, the news site Palestine Today plainly describes “The Palestinian Media Assembly” (or “Gathering” as Google Translate would have it) as “the union press framework of the Islamic Jihad Movement.”

And around 70 per cent of the dead, Collier found, had repeatedly on social media celebrated attacks against Israeli civilians that would have exposed them in many countries to the threat of arrest for supporting terrorism. (Well, maybe not in Australia: in Sydney, Muslim clerics can preach for Jews to be “drowned” or killed “one-by-one” and the law apparently has little to say about it.) 

Freelance photojournalist, Hassuna Salim, one of the deceased journalists on the Committee’s list, posted on his Telegram channel on the morning of October 7 a call from Islamic Jihad for everyone to rise up, grab a weapon and fight; hundreds of Gazan civilians joined in the bloody rampage in Israel. Duaa Sharaf, one of about half a dozen women on the list (Mema is another) worked for Hamas-affiliated Radio Al-Aqsa and was killed, tragically with her child, in a strike on her home. When on April 7, 2022 a terrorist slaughtered three Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv, Sharaf had posted on social media: 

“Kill them, may Allah punish with your hands, and humiliate them..” I won’t finish the quote; you get the picture. 

I’m not sure the Western media should be automatically expressing solidarity with such journalists. But I guess one person’s propagandist is another person’s journalist. 

And, to be clear: being propagandists still doesn’t make these people legitimate targets under international law, as a military law expert at Texas Tech University, Geoffrey Corn, explained to me via email. He says enemy propagandists only forfeit their right to protection as civilians “for such time” they’re assessed as taking a direct part in hostilities. In other words they can lose their right to civilian protection — but only temporarily. Corn tells me that in military law lingo this idea of an enemy propagandist taking a direct part in hostilities even has its own verb; it’s called “DPH’ing.” A journalist would be “DPH’ing,” he explains, if, say, they were supplying Hamas with intelligence for their combat operations against Israel.

I put some questions arising from Collier’s research to the Committee. It responded by email:

“ ..We do not include journalists (on the list) if there is evidence that they were actively inciting violence, acting on behalf of militant groups, or serving in a military capacity at the time of their deaths. We continuously update our database and if we discover new information showing that a journalist is/was involved in such activities we would remove them from our list.” 

The Committee’s website says that of the dead journalists on its list, “multiple sources” have found no evidence “to date” that they’ve engaged in military activity. I’m not doubting the veracity of these “multiple sources.” I am, however, prepared to entertain the possibility that if Israel indeed deliberately targeted some or most of these people it wasn’t for their journalism — it was for their apparent links to jihadism. Again, whether that targeting was lawful is another question and I don’t have the information or expertise to make a judgment either way. 

Given most of the journalists were killed at home with their families it’s also worth pointing out that Collier found several images of the journalists’ close family members posting pictures of themselves with weapons and sharing Hamas material. In one case, Ahmed Shehab, an employee of an Islamic Jihad channel, was reportedly killed in the house of his father, Abd Shehab, a high-ranking commander of Islamic Jihad — I found an October 20 press release in which the IDF boasted of having killed the commander. Again, if that household was indeed targeted, it was likely targeted for reasons other than Ahmed Shehab’s journalism.

I noticed something else in The Committee’s reporting. It documents Israeli “threats” against journalists in Gaza, which, again, lends credence to the allegation reporters are being targeted for their truth-telling. Only, the case studies on which the Committee bases the allegation don’t support that conclusion, and in some instances appear to directly contradict it. 

For instance, one case of Israeli authorities allegedly threatening journalists, arises from a November report published by HonestReporting, a group monitoring what it describes as “ideological prejudice” in media coverage on Israel. The report raised questions about what it claimed was the fortuitous presence of six Gaza-based photojournalists when Hamas breached the border fence to enter Israel on October 7. It alleged the reporters may have had prior knowledge of the operation or even been embedded with Hamas forces. Some of these photographers, all of them engaged by The Associated Press and Reuters, went on to document atrocities against civilians.

More recently an instagram video surfaced of two of the photographers boasting on October 7 about their scoops. One admires his colleague’s footage of the desecrated body of an Israeli soldier. The other recounts with feverish excitement that he was on the scene from “the beginning” of the day; that he was also present when Hamas broke into an Israeli home, kidnapped “three settlers”; but left their dog; how he saw maybe “50 female settlers” being carried away — that’s a reference to the abduction of Israeli women. He urges anyone who has the chance to go on the cross-border adventure to Israel to grab this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And so on. It’s a chilling clip.

Anyway, in response to HonestReporting’s allegations, Israeli officials warned any journalists with prior knowledge of the attack would be hunted down together with the terrorists. 

Five days later eight family members of journalist Yasser Qudih were killed in an attack on their home in southern Gaza. Qudih, who survived the attack, was one of the six journalists mentioned by HonestReporting; his October 7 photograph of an Israeli tank burning on the Israeli side of the border was published by Reuters. (He wasn’t one of the journalists in the boys own adventure video I just told you about.) Reuters later stressed it had no “prior relationship” with Qudih, or with another freelancer whose photos it bought on the day. The agency also noted the photographs were taken “two hours after Hamas fired rockets across southern Israel and more than 45 minutes after Israel said gunmen had crossed the border.”

The point here is that if Qudih was the target of Israel’s strike, it’s because, as Benjamin Netanyahu’s office foreshadowed, the October 7 photographers might come to be seen as “accomplices” in crimes against humanity. Again, to be clear: I’m not suggesting Qudih, let alone his family, deserved to be targeted. I’m merely saying that if he was targeted it likely wasn’t on account of his tenacity in speaking truth to power.

Another of the Committee’s examples of Israel’s “apparent” targeting of journalists arguably proves the exact opposite. On November 22, Anas Al-Sharif, a reporter and videographer for Al-Jazeera Arabic in northern Gaza, reportedly told his employers he’d received multiple telephone threats from the Israeli military, ordering him to stop reporting and leave northern Gaza. He said he’d also received voice notes in WhatsApp disclosing his location.

The following month an Israeli airstrike hit Al-Sharif’s family home in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing the journalist’s 90-year-old father. The Middle East Program Coordinator for the Committee —- again, that’s the Committee to Protect Journalists — Sherif Mansour, expressed alarm at “the pattern of journalists in Gaza reporting receiving threats, and subsequently, their family members being killed.” 

But this interpretation of events is just series of assumptions. It assumes the Al-Sharifs’ family home in the Jabalia refugee camp was the explicit target of the Israeli airstrike, as opposed to collateral damage, and that the only possible motivation for the strike was payback for Al-Sharif’s journalism. Critically, this narrative fails to consider a less sinister explanation for events: that rather than threatening Al-Sharif to stop reporting or else, the IDF was actually warning him to evacuate an area that would be coming under heavy bombardment as it subsequently did. 

To give an even starker example: in late October, Al Jazeera’s Gaza reporter, Youmna El-Sayed, told of her husband receiving a phone call. El-Sayed said the caller addressed her husband with his full name and told him, “‘This is the Israeli army, we are telling you to evacuate south because in the coming hours it is going to be very dangerous in the area where you are at.’” She said that of the seven families living in her block, hers was the only one contacted. She said: “None of the other six families got a warning call from the Israeli military, like we did, so this was a direct threat just to us, to our family.”

She goes on to say her family decided it was too risky to evacuate while the area was under bombardment. I can understand why El-Sayed felt the phone call was threatening, as in: “stop reporting or else…” But was the intention of the IDF to threaten? Or was it in fact to warn, as El-Sayed’s own version of the phone call suggests? Yet the Committee unproblematically files this incident under Israeli “threats” against journalists — Al Jazeera in a statement described the incident as a “vile” threat, stating, “Israel’s actions continue with impunity as they attempt to silence the messenger.”

We saw the same uncharitable interpretation of Israel’s evacuation warnings during the 2021 Israel-Hamas war, when the IDF bombed a tower in Gaza that housed the offices of 13 media organisations and NGOs. The military had claimed the building also housed Hamas intelligence — although it did not provide proof of this assertion saying this would compromise their intelligence efforts. Refused to reveal their sources, we might say.

In any event, the IDF called the journalists ahead of the bombing and gave them an hour to evacuate, which they did. No-one was hurt. Still, the international press was outraged, accusing the military of trying to censor coverage of Israel’s offensive. I would have assumed that if silencing the press was the goal, the army would not have warned about the impending bombardment the press loudly denounced.

So to recap — I’m not expecting you to memorise as we go. Of the 78 journalists the Committee lists as killed in Gaza, 10 weren’t journalists at all so could be hardly be targeted as journalists. Only around 12, give or take, were confirmed working at the time they were killed, of which two were clearly targeted for reasons that aren’t clear. Most were killed at home with their families. Roughly a third to a half worked for jihadist outlets suggesting they may have been targeted for their association with the enemy rather than their reporting/propagandising on the war. And nor is there any real evidence of Israel threatening journalists to stop reporting “or else” — in fact there’s compelling evidence of Israel trying to protect journalists.

And as it happens, the Committee itself has not found any of the journalist deaths in Gaza to have been intentional killings, or “murders.” It’s classified most of the Gazan journalists as having been killed while on “dangerous assignment,” which is also a bit of a stretch when most were killed at home with their families. 

The Committee has classified only one — one — death in the current war as a “murder”; that of Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah, killed on October 13 in southern Lebanon while reporting on clashes between Israel and Hezbollah. Various media and NGOs allege Abdallah and his crew were well removed from ongoing hostilities, within clear sight of Israeli aircraft and their clothes and vehicle were clearly marked as “Press” when an Israeli tank fired at them in quick succession. 

The Israeli military said it was sorry for the journalist’s death — another journalist was seriously wounded — but couldn’t explain how it happened. It’s unclear whether the IDF is investigating the circumstances; international law doesn’t require armies to investigate themselves every time they cause civilian deaths. 

The incident is horrific. 

But I wonder: does it comfortably fit the definition of a murder? And not just murder in the abstract but the calculated muzzling of a journalist? The Committee variously defines murder as, “the targeted killing of a journalist, whether premeditated or spontaneous, in direct reprisal for the journalist’s work,” or a killing where “a journalist was singled out in direct retaliation for their published reporting or to head off a sensitive story on which they were working.” That last one instantly conjures Putin’s Russia, and those contract killings of journalists in their apartment blocks. 

If the killing of Abdallah in Lebanon was targeted then presumably it was spontaneous not premeditated. Did the soldiers in the Israeli tank spontaneously decide to fire at a contingent of the international press as reprisal for their reporting on the border clashes, and perhaps as a warning to other reporters to keep away? Not impossible, I guess. Or was it one of those tragic screw-ups, akin to the all-too-frequent incidence of armies killing their own with “friendly fire”?

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You need to understand this: while the accusation that Israel targets journalists went mainstream in this war it did not start in this war. Remember, I mentioned earlier that the tally of dead journalists started running almost from the moment the war began? I think that’s because the theme of Israel killing journalists was already well-established, the category was pulled off the shelf, if you like. 

And the critics making the accusation often rely on a report from the Committee published in May — so, before the current war — entitled: “Deadly Pattern: 20 journalists died by Israeli military fire in 22 years. No one has been held accountable.”

The 22 years in question encompass several bloody and tumultuous episodes, including the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings within Israel during the second intifada, a period the open letter airbrushes out of the “historical context” they say journalists must reprise when reporting on October 7, (I discussed this issue in Part 1, you might remember). The time frame also includes Israeli reprisals during the second intifada, three wars and several major military campaigns in Gaza.

Most of the journalist fatalities, 18 out of the 20, were Palestinian. But again, overwhelmingly, the killings are classified as either crossfire deaths — so, reporters killed while covering live clashes — or killed while on a dangerous assignment, such as covering a demonstration that unexpectedly turned violent. 

And while the report is entitled “Deadly Pattern,” this only refers to the pattern of Israel’s response to the deaths, and not the deaths themselves. Because the deaths don’t form any pattern; the circumstances leading to each fatality vary widely.

In several cases the Committee plainly acknowledges the journalist was not the target: in one, the journalist was killed during a strike on a building; he’d been interviewing a Hamas leader who was the target. Three of the deaths arise from a single incident during the 2014 Israel-Hamas war in which the IDF said it fucked up (my words) and hadn’t detected the presence of civilians. One journalist was killed in an airstrike on his apartment block and it’s not clear his death had anything to do with his work.

Again, here’s the important bit: Only three of these 20 cases are classified as “murders” — although in one other case, that of cameraman James Miller shot in Gaza in 2003, a jury in a coronial inquest held in Britain unanimously returned a finding of murder. The jury’s forewoman had said: “This was an unlawful shooting with the intention of killing Mr James Miller. Therefore we can come to no other conclusion than that Mr Miller was indeed murdered.” (The IDF paid compensation to the Miller family: the soldier in question was charged with improper use of weapons and acquitted.)

Of the three cases the Committee classifies as murders two, photojournalists Yasser Murtaja and Ahmed Abu Hussein, were killed in April 2018 while covering what the Committee describes as protest movements “during which Palestinians demonstrated to end the Israeli siege on Gaza and return to historic homelands inside Israel.” Which reads like a fairytale, and is highly misleading. The 2018 Great March of Return, as Hamas coined it, were a series of violent riots with live fire, explosives, grenades, molotov cocktails, and attempts to breach Israel’s border — and knowing what we know now we can probably surmise the intention was more sinister than that of peacefully returning to “historic homelands.” 

More than 200 Palestinians were killed over months of protests. The Israeli military had warned civilians to stay away from the strife. I suspect the Israeli military assumed the photographers were in the business of incitement. Again: that doesn’t mean the killings were lawful. It simply casts doubt on the allegation that the Israeli military recognised these men as bona fide journalists and shot them to suppress their reporting on the clashes. 

All the alleged murders, over these 22 years, appear to fall into the spontaneous category. And probably the most disturbing incident, the one that’s usually brought up in support of the accusation that Israel assassinates journalists, is that of the veteran Al Jazeera reporter, Shireen Abu Akleh, gunned down in the West Bank in May 2022. She was a journalist 20 years on the beat. On that fatal day she was covering an Israeli army raid in Jenin. Just an ordinary day on the West Bank, on one view of it. There was gunfire and clashes in the vicinity. Abu Akleh was walking down a street that was reportedly “relatively quiet,” wearing her “Press” flak jacket and helmet, when she was shot in the back of the head and killed instantly.  

An IDF probe, which came after the habitual obfuscation and misinformation from Israeli authorities, conceded there was a “high possibility” she was shot by an Israeli soldier. Shot accidentally. No charges would be brought over the incident. And in a first, Israel formally apologised for the killing. 

So what can we say about all this? 

I think Israel has a serious case to answer on how its system of military justice responds or, more accurately, fails to respond to civilian deaths caused by its soldiers negligently, or recklessly, opening fire. The Committee’s report notes the military consistently says its troops feared for their safety or came under attack and declines to revisit its rules of engagement.

And there are many other problems the report identifies: the IDF’s tendency to only open probes under international pressure, the slow and secret nature of the probes, the fact soldiers are rarely charged with offences and when they are, as in James Miller’s case, it’s usually with lesser offences such as weapons violations when, the Committee argues, it would be open to authorities to bring criminal proceedings for, say, manslaughter, where you don’t need to prove the killing was intentional. 

The Committee says that Israel’s failure to hold soldiers or their superiors accountable for the deaths of journalists creates a culture of impunity in which soldiers feel they can open fire without consequences and this in turn creates a dangerous environment for journalists.

I think there’s heft to these arguments, although the matter is complex, as the report itself concedes; the Israeli authorities are mindful that tightening the rules of engagement might make soldiers overly fearful of being prosecuted for accidental civilian deaths, and this might cause them to hesitate on the battlefield, risking their lives and lives of others. 

The safety of soldiers is a highly sensitive issue in Israel, a country with a conscript army. For parents to willingly send their kids to the army they need absolute confidence the military will do everything in its power to protect its soldiers — all this is well ventilated in the Committee’s report, which I’d describe as tough but fair and above all, completely irrelevant. Completely irrelevant for present purposes. 

Because whether there is a culture of impunity around the accidental deaths of journalists reporting on Israel-Palestine is not the charge I’m interrogating here. I’m not interrogating the extent of moral decay within the IDF after more than 50 years of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, for moral decay there is.

No, the charge, again, is that the IDF deliberately — “apparently” — targets journalists because they’re journalists. That it murders them in cold blood to deter them or stop them from revealing the truth about Israel’s crimes. 

And only about half a dozen cases over the past 20 years are even relevant to that charge: the three cases out of 20 that the Committee categorises as “murders,” four if we include James Miller, and in the present war, the death of Reuter’s journalist Issam Abdallah in Lebanon and we should also include Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Al Dahdouh and his colleague Mustafa Thuraya killed in the airstrike on their car in southern Gaza. That’s half a dozen cases too many. But is it an outrageous number, when we consider the near daily clashes between the IDF and Palestinians, the frequent wars and outbreaks of violence in Lebanon, and Gaza, and the large contingent of journalists bearing witness, as Matti Friedman puts it, to “the most important story on earth”? (I discussed Friedman’s work on the media’s Israel obsession in Part 1.)

Purely for the purpose of this exercise I’m going to put the worst possible construction on these murders. Let’s assume that in each of these cases the IDF soldiers took the opportunity, under cover of live conflict, to assassinate the journalists in “direct retaliation for their published reporting or to head off a sensitive story.” Let’s assume the IDF chiefs are tacitly encouraging soldiers to take out journalists when feasible. On the sly. In circumstances that afford plausible deniability.  

Then answer this: what does Israel stand to gain from this picking off of journalists? What does it stand to gain in the PR stakes? Whose interests are served by the accusation that Israel is murdering journalists? Shouldn’t journalists be asking this question, as a matter of routine: who stands to win or lose from any given narrative? It’s what makes the journos’ open letter so laughable: it claims to want “clear-eyed” reporting on Israel-Palestine, but really, it’s demanding reporters be credulous and naive and in the business of peddling fairytales. 

The tragic killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, for instance, sparked riots in the West Bank, a tsunami of condemnation from the international community, a redoubling of efforts to isolate Israel through boycotts, excoriating columns in Al Jazeera about Israel murdering another “beloved daughter” of Palestine.

For good and obvious reasons, the killing of journalists attracts the attention of .. journalists, not least the withering attention of Israel’s own journalists. Remember Guy Rundle’s almost daily dissertations on satanic Israel?— I discussed Rundle’s columns in Crikey in Part 1. An Israel so satanic there is “almost no serious doubt” its military assassinates journalists? Well, these dissertations from Rundle rely heavily on Israeli media sources, such as the left-wing Haaretz, a dogged critic of the Netanyahu government, and +972 Magazine, an independent Palestinian-Israeli publication. 

Interesting how the satanic Israeli state never does a Putin and murders its own journalists. Yet if I was the Netanyahu government I’d be worried about stories such as one that ran in November in +972 headlined, “‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza.” The piece drew on military sources to allege the IDF had been authorised to strike at non-military targets, at Hamas’s political infrastructure, and with the help of artificial intelligence was able to predict civilian casualties with devastating accuracy. 

“Nothing happens by accident,” said a quoted source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target..”

It is a confronting piece — although it would more confronting if Israel were bombing Gaza indiscriminately without factoring in civilian casualties, the crime of which it’s usually accused. Except when the dead are journalists— then, the killing is suddenly construed as deliberate. 

As I said, if I was the Netanyahu government and in the business of assassinating journalists I’d be wanting to take out the journalists at Haaretz or +972, or at least shut them down. Still. I guess Israel has to maintain a veneer of democracy at home so it can keep murdering journalists in Gaza so that they don’t report the truth about Israel’s “genocide”, which genocide Israel also carefully disguises with warnings to civilians to evacuate areas slated for bombing. These Jews are smart, right?

To be fair, there has been a crackdown on journalists in the Palestinian West Bank post October 7, with some arrested and media outlets closed down. The Israeli authorities say the measures are necessary on national security grounds to counter incitement and so on — so, again, it’s hard to disentangle what might appear an undermining of press freedom from the overall Israel-Palestine conflict. 

One of the outlets beyond the West Bank that’s been shut down under national emergency laws, and even then only temporarily, is the Hezbollah-affiliated satellite news channel, Al Mayadeen. That’s Hezbollah; by way of reminder, like Hamas, Hezbollah is a proscribed terrorist organisation. It’s a terror group that has even murdered Jews outside of Israel.

And here’s an interesting fact: the signatories of the journalists’ open letter cite Israel’s shutting down of this Hezbollah mouthpiece as evidence the Jewish state is attacking — quote —  “journalism itself.” Did you get that? More than 300 Australian journalists and the union committee at the ABC and the national committee of the journalists’ union, see a jihadist propaganda rag as emblematic of “journalism itself.” 

Maybe the profession needs to urgently confront the moral and intellectual decay in its own ranks.

To sum up my findings: the allegation that the state of Israel is targeting journalists, actually or even apparently, is highly contestable. To put it anaemically. And to put it anaemically: I have reasonable doubt the allegation is being made in good faith.

Like I’ve said before, the signatories to the open letter needn’t have bothered penning their list of demands. Much of the media has already ditched “both sideism” reporting on the Israel-Hamas war in favour of “the truth,” the truth according to Hamas and its cheerleaders. And this story of Israel assassinating journalists is a classic of the genre. The numbers of dead are inflated, the context in which the deaths occurred studiously ignored, Israel is presumed a murderous rogue state, while Hamas is yet again erased from view, despite its fingerprints all over this story.

This truth according to Hamas aims to undermine Israel’s legitimacy, intensify pressure for a lopsided ceasefire and maintain the terror group’s bloody grip on power. 

So when activists, such as the signatories to the open letter, try to re-write the institutional rules of engagement so that their views prevail without any prospect of dissent, they’ll encounter pushback; not because the Murdoch press is whipping up outrage, not because Jews, oops “Zionists,” are once again evil puppet-masters, pulling strings behind the scenes, not because the mainstream media, let alone Australia’s public broadcaster, is “racist” but because every inch of this scorched territory of the Israel-Palestine conflict is contested and will remain contested no matter how many protesters play dead reporters outside media headquarters. 

Because the truth doesn’t die that easily. 

***

Correction: An earlier version of Part 1 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, by way of clarification, to an existing code of conduct for Guardian staff.