All They Do is Lie?

Anyone paying attention to Israel’s current onslaught in Gaza will doubtlessly be having a hard time keeping up with all the lies and falsehoods emanating from Tel Aviv, issued in increasingly desperate attempt to justify its murderous – and, arguably, genocidal – atrocities.

One of the most prominent and regularly espoused (not just in this most recent conflict but in all previous instances of Israel “mowing the lawn”) is the claim that the IDF is left with no choice but to target schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings on account of the very regrettable fact that Hamas stations its forces in them, thus rendering all residents of said schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings “human shields”. Despite the confidence and indignation with which these contentions are made, the evidence that Hamas actually engages in this practice is nowhere near as overwhelming as Israel and its supporters would have us believe.

In its forensic report of Israel’s 2008/9 Operation Cast Lead, for example, Amnesty International reported:

“contrary to repeated allegations by Israeli officials of the use of “human shields”, Amnesty International found no evidence that Hamas or other Palestinian fighters directed the movement of civilians to shield military objectives from attacks. It found no evidence that Hamas or other armed groups forced residents to stay in or around buildings used by fighters, nor that fighters prevented residents from leaving buildings or areas which had been commandeered by militants”

In any event, even if it were the case that Hamas uses human shields in the exact manner Israel alleges, this in no way affords carte blanche licence to target civilian infrastructure. Tel Aviv still has an obligation to abide by the principles of international humanitarian law, as Amnesty explained in a further report on Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge:

“The fact that Palestinian fighters in Gaza may be located within civilian areas does not in any way negate Israel’s obligations with respect to civilians, including the principle of distinction, the prohibition on indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks, and the precautions in attack”.

Nevertheless, this reality has not precluded Israel from repeating the human shield charge ad nauseam since October 7. In no small part down to almost all hospitals in Gaza ceasing to function thanks to the IDF’s systematic targeting of them, Tel Aviv has been left in desperate need to find a veil of legitimacy for operations that would otherwise be unequivocal war crimes.

The most notorious of these claims is that al-Shifa – Gaza’s main hospital – serves as the “command and control centre” of Hamas. To help service this claim, Israel produced an “intelligence-based illustration video” detailing exactly what they believed Hamas’ hidden layer looked like:

This was the pretext for last week’s IDF raid of al-Shifa. “The most moral army in the world” was going to, once and for all, find unimpeachable proof of Hamas recklessly endangering the lives of its people by headquartering itself underneath the Strip’s biggest hospital. And it appeared Israel had actually done it. Although not quite like the cartoonish villain's secret hideout we were expecting from its intelligence illustration, Israel did produce video footage of what clearly looked like a bunker underneath al-Shifa.

There was, however, one quite crucial omission. The bunker Tel Aviv showed to the world last week was not constructed by Hamas, but Israel itself. In a 2014 article, Tablet Magazine wrote:

“Back in 1983, when Israel still ruled Gaza, they built a secure underground operating room and tunnel network beneath Shifa hospital”

So, in other words, what Israel claims to have “discovered” last week was a bunker and tunnel network they themselves built. Hardly the devastating proof required to retrospectively justify Israel’s industrial bombardment of medical infrastructure - especially given that evidence Hamas actually used these Israeli-built bunkers remains elusive.

Given the significance of this revelation and how effectively it dismantles a crucial Israeli narrative, the story very quickly dominated social media feeds. It even made its way to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who conceded that Israel did, in fact, build the bunkers in a recent interview with CNN.

This admission appeared to absolutely bewilder CNN’s international affairs “expert” Christiane Amanpour, who had quite clearly never heard this before. In fact, she was so surprised to hear it, she actually questioned whether Barak had said this in error:

“When you say it was built by Israeli engineers, did you misspeak?”

Barak reassured Amanpour that he did not misspeak and it was, indeed, Israel who was responsible for the bunkers under al-Shifa. Given how prominent this story has been on the political corner of Twitter and other social media platforms, it is rather unbecoming of Amanpour to be completely incognisant of this. As journalist Jonathan Cook points out, it is entirely representative of the bubble corporate media lives in:

I myself made a similar observation on my modest account and got into cordial exchanges with users who disagreed that this was genuine ignorance on Amanpour’s part. In their estimation, Amanpour was merely feigning incredulity, a necessary prerequisite in her capacity as a Western propagandist when confronted with inconvenient facts. As one user put it to me, Amanpour has been in the business a long time, so there is no way she could have not known this. In my view, this misses the fundamental point.

What makes Western mainstream journalists such effective propagandists is not, necessarily, that they are unwilling to criticise their own governments; rather, they often simply don’t know how. Orwell has a very interesting quote to this effect:

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them”

The exact same principle applies to journalism. Journalists do not need to lie or censor themselves to act as effective propaganda agents; they have been put in their positions precisely because of the ignorance Amanpour demonstrated in the earlier interview. In a notorious exchange with the BBC’s Andrew Marr, Noam Chomsky explained this perfectly.

As you can see in the video above, Marr objected to what he perceived as Chomsky’s insinuation that mainstream journalists self-censor. In response, Chomsky succinctly replied:

“I’m not saying you’re self-censoring, I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting”

Interestingly, in the full exchange, it was revealed Marr had never heard of the U.S. counter-intelligence program COINTELPRO, an initiative that aimed to undermine the entirety of the American political left and even resulted in assassinations. So, in essence, Marr demonstrated the point that ignorance of major Western crimes is the surest way of ensuring continued employment in mainstream media.

Moreover, it is such ignorance that allows journalists to readily repeat talking points vital to Israel’s narrative throughout this war. Journalists trumpet the Israeli argument that we can’t possibly have a ceasefire with a group like Hamas as they will never honour it, totally unaware of the fact the group has honoured previous ceasefire agreements and it is Israel, almost invariably, who breaches them.

Similarly, it is axiomatically accepted as fact that Israel very magnanimously offered Palestinians the opportunity of their own state, repeatedly, throughout the years only to have this offer of altruistic pragmatism rejected by the intransigent Palestinian side. The actual, far more nuanced history of the Oslo Accords and Camp David agreement – and other similar Israeli offers – has no platform on mainstream media, primarily because its journalists are completely unaware of the fact that Israel’s olive branches were not quite as generous as they like to proclaim, and the Palestinians had quite reasonable grounds to reject these offers.

Or consider how a number of journalists have tried to argue with what appears to be genuine sincerity that Israel – unlike Hamas – has not threatened genocide, despite the endless stream of near-daily genocidal statements casually issued by acting Israeli officials.

This is all just something to consider next time you come across a journalist asserting something completely contrary to what you know to be the genuine reality. Journalists are not necessarily lying, being deliberately deceitful, or responding to pressure from higher-ups; they do not need to be to serve their true function. As Michael Parenti so infamously said to journalists, “you say what you like because they like what you say”.