The Top 10 (False) Premises Driving Israeli-Palestinian News Coverage
Journalistic laziness and cowardice are behind the poor and biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Here is where the reporting goes wrong — and why.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Mainstream news media’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, and the politics around it, has been abysmal — especially since most outlets have built their reporting on a series of accepted, but false, premises and lies.
The poor reporting is a cocktail of laziness, ignorance, willful misrepresentation, and racism. Historical knowledge is important not because it matters who was right or wrong 75 years ago, but because it allows us to spot the false premises and lies that much reporting is built on.
It takes courage for a journalist to think and report differently than their peers. Every reporter wants to provide their own take, but without straying too far from the consensus narrative, in case they look silly.
Furthermore, newsroom culture rewards reporters who get scoops, or get the story that everybody is chasing, first. There is no equivalent kudos attached to the quality and accuracy of reporting. Indeed, fact-based reporting requires more work.
Even the few remaining mastheads that follow the endangered journalistic norms of non-biased reporting have been publishing nonsense. And governments even concoct their foreign policies on these fictions.
Here are the common false premises, how they fail basic logic tests, and their impact on accurate reporting.
1) Palestinians are fighting for a state.
The Palestinians have been rejecting offers of a state beside Israel since 1937 because that is not what they want. The idea that they are is, at best, half-true. Those Palestinians who want a state, want it to replace Israel, not coexist with it. That is quite a distinction.
Not reporting this is deceitful and distorting. The Palestinian Authority is the political arm of the murderous, kleptocratic Palestine Liberation Organization, which was set up in 1964, before there was any “occupation,” to destroy Israel.
Hamas has clearly stated that its aim is to annihilate the Jewish state. Far from wanting a state, it is an Islamist group with a theocratic and theoretical foundation that opposes states in monarchical and republican form. Its aims will be unchanged whether there is a Palestinian state or not.
Impact: This changes the significance of reported events. For example, when Israel okays new West Bank settlements, it is often written that they will make a future Palestinian state less viable. That may be true, but it also irrelevant if a state is not what the Palestinians want.
2) There is a cycle of violence.
This is the laziest, most unimaginative, and inaccurate thing anyone can say or write about the conflict. Every war that Israel has fought since the civil war between Arabs and Jews in British Mandatory Palestine in 1947 through 1949 has been a defensive war.
The Palestinians attack Israel, then Israel defends itself and fights back. That is not a cycle of violence; it is a pattern of repeated aggression. This is easily looked up contemporaneous news reports.
Impact: It apportions blame for violence somewhat equally, which journalists casually equate with “balance.” Facts have no respect for balance.
3) The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a land dispute.
No, it is a religious dispute. They are fighting over this piece of land because it has religious significance. It is a fight over sacred spaces.
More fundamentally, the Palestinian side is mostly Islamist, a vile religious political ideology that wants to overthrow national governments and replace them with a Caliphate, including in the West.
The conflict is a sick genocidal ideology trying to destroy Israel and Jews as part of a larger conquest. Those who know the Palestinians best, the Muslim states of Egypt and Jordan, want nothing to do with the Palestinians because of their violent radicalism. Egypt blockades Gaza, and Jordan does not grant Palestinians citizenship, accordingly.
Hamas cuts to the heart of the matter when it boasts it will win because, “We love death more than you love life.” This conflict is a civilizational clash. Islamism is a death cult, while Judaism is among the world’s few religions that posits that life now is more important than the afterlife.
Impact: The premise that it is a land dispute misrepresents the conflict, ignoring the real obstacle to peace, which is Palestinians’ unwillingness to live alongside Jews.
4) The West Bank is illegally occupied.
At issue is how it gets written as fact. Sometimes the media even sets itself up as the arbiter. Consider this line from a recent CNN report: “The West Bank is illegally occupied, though Israel disputes this.” Does Israel disputing it not make it disputed?
It would be fair to write that most countries for political reasons consider the West Bank to be illegally occupied, but Israel disputes this. That is a factual statement about competing opinions. Tribal votes do not establish if something is factual or true.
Impact: This sets up unbalanced reporting because it frames the dispute as between occupier and occupied. This is to squeeze the conflict into the “oppressor-oppressed” narrative that some of the Left wrongly thinks explains the world.
5) Gaza is or was an open-air prison.
Sometimes this assumption extends so far as to say Israel’s blockade of Gaza (but somehow not that of Egypt) was tantamount to an occupation. If a blockade is an occupation, then we might as well throw away our dictionaries and thesauruses because words have lost all meaning.
One would need to be on hallucinogens to think a prison has 36 hospitals (more than many countries), the ability to move in giant earth-moving equipment to dig 360 kilometers of tunnels, the resources to arm a 30,000-man militia, and an arsenal of about 20,000-plus rockets.
Even more than a false premise, it is an article of faith. Foreign journalists have not been reporting from Gaza from before the October 7th attacks, or since Israel retaliated and invaded. Very few journalists know what Gaza was like before October 7th, or what it is like now.
Most are dishonest with their readers and viewers about their lack of access. They take reports and pictures from Hamas propagandists, many of whom are terrorists yet still on the payroll of major international news outlets. This is not what credible, verifiable news reporting looks like.
Impact: It establishes a justification for Hamas’ October 7th massacre, and allows reporters to write amoral nonsense, such as while nothing justifies murdering civilians, the attack must be “seen in context.”
6) The UN is a credible body.
The media reports on what the United Nations says and does as though it is a credible body with moral authority. It is not. The UN is a grubby representative body that authoritarian regimes, Islamic states, and far-Left extremists have hijacked.
The half a trillion dollars spent on it since its inception must be the greatest waste of money since fiat currencies were invented. No serious person should care what it says or does. Journalists who do so are complicit in a grand fiction.
If the corrupt UN — which elected a Nazi as its leader multiple times, refuses to condemn the October 7th massacre, or condemn Hamas’ sexual violence, has appointed Iran as chair of its disarmament conference, and whose peacekeepers do nothing while Hezbollah fires hundreds of missiles at Israeli civilians — is a credible institution, then we are now in a moral abyss.
Impact: It uses a political body as a proof point. Political consensus does not change facts or truth.
7) A two-state solution is the obvious solution.
There is a great arrogance when leading writers claim to know the solutions to other countries’ problems.
After 75 years of conflict, it is obviously not obvious that two states are the solution. Most Palestinians and Israelis do not support it. It is not what the conflict is about. There are compelling reasons against it, and for considering the world’s obsession with it a delusion.
It is only one of several possible resolutions. It could be one state, two states, or a confederation, and each those could take many forms.
Impact: It is patronizing to the protagonists and does readers a disservice to tell them that the solution to an intractable conflict with roots going back millennia is obvious.
8) The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is independent.
United Nations members appoint ICJ jurists so that they can secure legal rulings that support their political positions. Large numbers of ICJ judges come from authoritarian regimes which do not have independent judiciaries that can rule against their government.
Only someone unfamiliar with how dictatorships work could imagine that many of these judges can make anything other than political rulings.
Impact: As with treating the UN credibly, this uses a political body as a proof point. Political consensus does not change facts.
9) The rallies are a “pro-Palestinian position.”
Stories describing protests in Western countries as “pro-Palestinian” assume there is such a thing as a “pro-Palestinian position.” It is a meaningless thing to say. Is supporting Hamas pro- or anti-Palestinian? Is wanting a confederation pro-Palestinian? It would depend on who you asked. Regardless, these protests are anti-Israel.
Impact: It dumbs down coverage by conveying no information about what the protestors think (if they think at all).
10) The International Criminal Court (ICC) is independent and competent.
The ICC is the world’s least effective judicial institution. In the 22 years since its establishment, the ICC has burned through a billion U.S. dollars, made only 44 indictments, and secured just nine convictions.
The United States, which was one of 40 countries that did not join it, identified the problems. It rightly feared the court would be used for political purposes and erode sovereignty by allowing a foreign court to rule on crimes in other countries. Only a nation with no self-regard would join it.
Impact: This uses a political body that is inept as a proof point. Political consensus does not change facts.
The mainstream news media has earned the public’s lack of trust in it. Fake news abounds because they abandoned truth. Disrobing lies, myths, and propaganda used to be the news media’s job.
Now we are on our own.
This is everything I support and write about because it is so blatantly obvious that these Hamastanians spread propaganda and celebrate Hamas terrorism. So much evidence (of Iran’s terrorist proxies and trail of murder) exists that support the innocence of Israel. Plus, the Bible itself is vetted Jewish history with all the excavation evidence across Israel that everyone visits so it doesn’t belong to “Palestine.” Moreover, you have these young college students about to graduate … what did they learn except that they do not understand how to research, and that they were sleeping during the history lesson on propaganda and the holocaust? Finally, you have adults who have five PHDs, but cave as their prestigious institution allows this foreign propaganda to reduce the value of their American alumni’s degrees. An education is supposed to make your brain stronger. Embarrassing.
Excellent article. You have outlined the problem in a clear and thorough manner.
Only one comment: classic Torah Judaism cares as much about the afterlife as it does about this life. Everything we do in this life has an affect on the afterlife. This means it is very present in our consciousness. Of course we live fully, appreciating every moment of the here and now. But always with an inner eye to the afterlife.