Inside the Media's Secret Playbook to Undermine Israel
The international news media talk in codes that allow them to defame Israel while pretending to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fairly. They have fooled many. It is time to crack the code.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Mainstream news media have developed an impressive linguistic arsenal to help them hide their anti-Israel bias when covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It allows them to feign impartiality while defaming Israel. The deceit begins right from their naming of the dispute.
If you found my reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a bit jarring, that is the point. Calling it the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a successful linguistic device designed to serve the Palestinians’ fictional narrative.
The 1948, 1956, and 1967 wars between Israel and its neighbors are called the first, second, and third Arab-Israeli wars. They were part of the wider Arab-Israeli conflict. This naming seems fair. The Arabs started these wars.
Turning “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” into the standard nomenclature makes Israel sound like the aggressor, makes Palestinians sound like a nation, and makes the conflict sound different from just another round of the Arab-Israeli conflict. All three are lies. The mainstream media is complicit in spreading them. They have developed a glossary of deceitful terms and phrases to demonize Israel while pretending to be unbiased.
For example, last June’s news coverage of Israel’s rescue of four hostages — held prisoner for eight months — was a case study in the media’s anti-Israel code. Consider this piece from the BBC, one of the world’s most antisemitic organizations, headlined: “Palestinians describe chaos and carnage in hostage rescue operation.” It wrote, “… the rescue operation also saw scores of Palestinians killed in and around a refugee camp, including women and children, the Hamas-run health ministry said.”
The two italicized terms are codes that feature in my list of the media’s top 15 anti-Israel phrases.
1) Refugee Camps
These are Palestinian housing blocks and settlements. Some were tent cities or camps many decades ago but are now just urban areas, some of them modern. They are hotbeds of terror, which is why the four rescued Israeli hostages were being held there.
Most of those who live there have the logically impossible status of being refugees by descent. They lack citizenship of any state because Egypt and Jordan refused to grant it to them after losing the war they started against Israel, and rather than building a state, the Palestinians spent the next 75 years terrorizing Israel.
If there was a two-state solution, or some other political settlement tomorrow, these “camps” would just be suburban blocks or villages. Journalists like to call them camps not because they once were, but because it summons up the dishonest image of someone behind a barbed-wire fence and makes Israel look bad.
2) ‘Our Reporters’ in Gaza
This would include the likes of Al Jazeera “photojournalist” Abdallah Aljamal, from whose house one of the four Israeli hostages was rescued. Many of these stringers and photographers are Hamas fighters, members, or sympathizers.
No credible news organization or journalist would take their reporting seriously, let alone pay them for their lies. Even those who are not compromised cannot report freely from Gaza under Hamas’ iron-fist, so nothing they report can be trusted.
3) Cycle of Violence
Nature has cycles, such as seasons or the precipitation cycle; wars do not.
Wars have actors who make choices. Every war Israel has fought has been defensive. Arab states or terrorists attack Israel, and Israel defends itself.
That is not a cycle.
That is a pattern of repeated aggression. Journalists call this a cycle to pretend there is some equivalence between the actions of each side. There is not.
4) The West Bank
Israel’s biblical heartland is called Judea and Samaria and has been for more than three millennia. In calling it the West Bank, the media has adopted a Jordanian view of the world.
Jordan is an odd place to use as a reference point, as though it is the geographical equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time. They do this to make the region sound less biblical and less Jewish, feeding the lie that Judea and Samaria is historically Arab land.
5) The Occupied West Bank
Israel thinks it has a sovereign right to Judea and Samaria. The Palestinians say that Israel is occupying it. That makes it a dispute, and the territory disputed, not occupied.
That was simple.
6) Illegal Settlements
This refers to Jewish settlements in disputed Judea and Samaria. In calling them illegal, reporters are setting themselves up as judges of international law and pretending their opinions are facts.
Most countries hold the political position that some of these settlements are illegal, but political opinions do not determine legal facts. Crucial distinctions are never made between settlements on Israeli territory, settlements on disputed territory (often just down the road), or outposts on privately owned Palestinian land, which are illegal under Israeli law.
It is not even clear that most of these settlements would be illegal even if the region was occupied.
7) Settler Violence
This is loaded language designed to link violence in Judea and Samaria exclusively to Jewish settlers, as if Jihadists have no role in it. It does not distinguish between Jewish attacks on Arabs or Arab attacks on Jews, despite there being plenty of blame to go around.
The media uses this as code to blame all the violence on the Jews. This phrase is also designed to demonize Jewish settlers as violent when most of them are not.
8) The 1967 Borders (The ‘Green Line’)
This is the demarcation line of the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948. Arabs had these borders before 1967 but refused to accept them, started a war, lost, and now want them again.
Between 1948 and 1967, Jordan illegally occupied Judea and Samaria, as well as East Jerusalem, and ethnically cleansed them of indigenous Jews. There was no clamor for a Palestinian state then, because there never was such a nation. Jordanians and Palestinians were just Arabs trying to destroy Israel.
The media’s ignoring of 1967 borders being nothing but an armistice line, and not some natural or just territorial boundary, is a deliberate attempt to overwrite Jewish history and Jews’ inalienable right to their ancestral homeland.
9) Hamas’ Political Wing
Hamas is an Islamist terror organization that wants to destroy Israel, murder all Jews, and build a global Caliphate. The idea that Jihadists in suits constitute a “political wing” and are anything but plain terrorists is nonsense.
The media indulges this fantasy, so it looks like Israel is not in an existential and civilizational war with Islamist zealots, but in a territorial dispute that Israel could resolve politically.
10) The Hamas-Run Gaza Health Ministry
Terrorists with stethoscopes are still terrorists. The media’s insistence on reporting and repeating their proven lies as data and facts, especially with regard to casualty rates, has been disgraceful.
Sometimes reporters write that the Hamas casualty numbers cannot be verified. It used to be that good-quality media titles did not publish things that they could not verify. That feels like a long time ago now.
What’s more, the media’s reverence for medical doctors as credible is deeply misplaced. For unclear reasons, doctors have always been over-represented among antisemites. More than half of Germany’s doctors voluntarily joined the Nazi party, compared with 7 to 10 percent of the overall German population. Scandals of antisemitism among doctors is an issue globally, and are a pernicious problem in the United Kingdom.
11) The Palestinian Authority
The body that the murderous Palestinian Liberation Organization created to govern Palestinian territories after the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993. It is a terrorist organization that the international community funds despite knowing that it pays Palestinians to kill Jews.
The media never mentions this because many of them do not like Jews either. Or they are just unbelievably bad journalists.
Most often, it is both.
12) Palestinian Prisoners
These are terrorists that Israel has arrested for attacking and killing Jews, or planning to do so. The media pretends they are somehow political prisoners, or equivalent to the Israeli civilian hostages, including babies, that Hamas has abducted.
They are not.
13) ‘Pro-Palestine’ Supporters
This means “anti-Israel” demonstrator. There is no such thing as a “pro-Palestine” position.
Does it mean being Jihadists like Hamas? Or wanting a two-state solution? Or wanting to wipe out Israel? Or wanting a democratic Palestinian state?
These are mutually incompatible things.
14) Hamas Fighters
These are terrorists.
Terror is a tactic, not an ideology, and it is indisputable that Hamas uses terror as a tactic, so they are terrorists. This is a fact whether one agrees with their ideology or not.
Much of the international media’s refusal to label them as such betrays their anti-Israel bias, a disregard for facts, and a disrespect for language. Not coincidentally, a lack of bias, a reverence for facts, and great care in the use of language are what makes good journalism.
15) Israel bombed civilians.
This means Israel bombed terrorists who were hiding behind civilians and/or were embedded in civilian infrastructure — in violation of international law and all moral decency.
The media refuses to acknowledge this, since it would make the Hamas look like the villains, and not the Jews.
This phrase also obscures the Hamas terrorist tactic of dressing in civilian clothes and then pretending they were civilians when Israel kills them. How does the media know they were civilians? Hamas and the terror-infested United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian “Refugees” have told them so.
It is that bad.
Assuming the Jihadists do not win, which is no certainty, the news media’s complicity in this outrage is going to be studied for decades. Future generations will look back and wonder how it could have happened, much as we wonder about Nazism and the Holocaust.
The conclusions they reach will be just as unsettling.
The Israel-hating mainstream media is so unbelievably biased, but often in even more subtle ways. They go out of their way to report the "wildly unpopular" Netanyahu "regime", the often omit "Hamas terrorist organization controlled" when describing the health ministry.
I'll never forget when I cancelled my LA Times subscription, back in the 1980s. There was a horrible, totally unprovoked attack on Israel by islamists. The headline on the front page of the Times read something like "Arabs Prepare for Israeli Attack". There was also a photo next to the article showing sweet looking bedouins packing up their belongings. You had to get to the beck page if the section to see language that even mentioned the original attack that Israel "claimed" had happened.
I literally cannot recall one single story about Israel, on 60 Minutes, that ever portrayed the country in a positive light. "Think All Israelis Want to Make Peace with Their Neighbors? Well, tonight on 60 Minutes, we'll introduce you to an Israeli group that's worse then the Nazis. All this and Andy Rooney..."
Since when, during WAR, do countries apologize and rationalize for the civilians of the enemy killed?