At an AEJ lunch on June 13, two experts examined the rival national narratives, political messaging, and information controls which shape public understanding of the Israeli-Gaza war.
The meeting included two presentations and a discussion on the information and propaganda war between Israel and Hamas, as well as the wider political messaging shaping perceptions of the ongoing conflict.
The speakers, Julie Norman and Chris Paterson, provided insights into the historical background, motivations, and decision-making processes of Israel and Hamas, as well as the challenges faced by journalists in reporting on the conflict due to restrictions and threats from both sides.
On 7 October 2023 Hamas fighters killed about 1200 people and took more than 250 hostages in an attack on Israel. In Gaza since, the Israeli military has killed more than 35,000 people including more than a hundred journalists.
Dr Julie Norman of University College London is an expert on the political history of Israel-Palestine, including Gaza and an investigator into issues of rights and resistance in protracted conflicts. She addressed the political and ideological development of Hamas, the framing of the current war by Hamas and Israel, and the political and diplomatic challenges between the Israeli and Palestinian sides in reaching a lasting settlement.
Chris Paterson’s ground-breaking book War Reporters Under Threat: The United States and Media Freedom (2014) investigated the violence experienced by war reporters during military actions by the United States government and some of its close allies, including Israel. He has written widely on journalists’ safety and legal protection, international news production, and journalism in Africa.
AEJ UK panel on Gaza 13 June 2024
Transcript of the AEJ Israel- Gaza Panel Meeting on 13 June 2024
William Horsley
Good afternoon and welcome everybody to this AEJ session. I’m William Horsley, the AEJ UK Chairman. Thanks as always, to Regent’s University whose generous cooperation makes it possible for us to host meetings at this fine venue.
Our topic today is the information and propaganda war between Israel and the leadership and people of Gaza under Hamas.
And the wider political messaging by both sides that shapes people’s very different perceptions and understanding of the current conflict and indeed of the path to a long term political settlement. So to shed light on these highly contentious issues are two very well qualified speakers
Julie Norman of UCL is an expert in the political history of Israel and Palestine. She will tell us about the roots and ideological development of Hamas and interpret for us the motivations and decision making by Hamas leaders up to today — including, of course, the murderous attack across the border on October 7th.
And now, as you know, yet another formula for a ceasefire with the prospect of an eventual settlement is being urgently discussed, while Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza and its people continues. Julie is now researching a book on the history of Gaza.
And Chris Paterson, who’s come all the way from Leeds University to be with us, will examine an issue which many see as lying at the core of the enormous international failure of the international community down the years to engineer an agreement between the warring sides — namely the failure both by the government’s, and by the international media who are accused of not properly accepting and respecting the inherent rights of the Palestinians, and in particular, the duty of every journalist to report the conflict and challenge the narratives of both sides without fear or favour.
Chris is the author of War Reporters Under Threat, the US and Media Freedom, which was published in 2014, and examined the evidence that large numbers of journalists were killed in earlier conflicts by the actions of American military forces with almost complete impunity.
And I think he sees parallels between that and what’s today going on, the conduct of the IDF and Israeli authorities using extremely tight, even aggressive, information control, as well as its political capital as a close ally of the United States.
We’ll hear from each of them for about 15 minutes. There will be slides, which together with the audio recording will be up on the AEJ UK website very soon afterwards. I’ll hand over first to Julie, and Chris and I will be with you later.
Julie Norman
Thank you so much, William. Thank you all for being here. It’s really a delight to be able to speak with journalists in particular. All of us who work on this, whether as practitioners, academics, are we relying so much on your work, and the work of your colleagues right now, to tell the stories, to get the stories out.
So it’s a real privilege to be in this room with all of you. I’ll try and just walk through as briefly as possible in 15 minutes, the background of Hamas, how they kind of came to be in control of the Gaza Strip, their motivations for carrying out the October 7th attack, and where things are now, and a little bit on how Hamas and Israel are framing what’s happening now, before handing over to Chris.
I’ll just start with a bit of a background. I think now, since October 7th, really even for the last almost two decades, Gaza and Hamas have been almost synonymous. Hamas has been in control of the Strip since about 2007, and I think we associate them very much with that piece of land.
In reality, Hamas is a pretty new group, and they weren’t always and still aren’t just confined to Gaza. Hamas emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, a much wider group that originated in Egypt back in 1928.
This is a group that takes different forms in different countries, different chapters. have a sort of different take, but are much more focused on essentially establishing an Islamic society, a society that’s based very much in Muslim values, Islamic law.
And so initially, throughout the West Bank, Gaza, all of what we now consider the Palestinian territories, there was this Muslim Brotherhood presence, pre ‘48, between 48 and 67, after 67, et cetera. I mean, I would say this Muslim Brotherhood group was intentionally non-political. They chose not to get involved with the PLO. They were not part of the hijackings, the resistance that was taking place in the 60s and 70s.
And they focused a lot more on that idea of building this Islamic society, mosques, schools, hospitals, clinics, really leaning into the more charitable aspects of that work. So I would say, as I kind of go through, it’s interesting to think about Hamas’s progression, because people ask, are they a social movement? Are they a terrorist group? Are they a political party?
I’ll make the case that they have been and even this day are all of them. So they started in that way. All that changed in 1987 when the first Intifada began, the first Intifada being the first really homegrown Palestinian uprising, a very widespread grassroots movement, people from all facets of life taking part.
And at this point, the Brotherhood saw we can’t sit this one out anymore. We can’t just sit on our hands and pretend that politics doesn’t matter. We need to actually be involved in the resistance activities or we’ll lose all credibility with our society.
So a group spun off of the Muslim Brotherhood called the Islamic Resistance Movement. And its acronym is Hamas. It means zeal or enthusiasm in Arabic. And they emerged as a pretty small group in the Intifada and participated in a lot of the resistance activities, both nonviolent and then increasingly a bit more armed as the Intifada went on.
Hamas’s charter, when it was founded, is pretty explicit. It calls on all Muslims to resist Zionism, to resist the state of Israel through jihad, to liberate all Palestinians, and then considers all of Israel and Palestine, Palestinian land and Muslim holy land.
I just note they revised their charter a bit in 2017 and moderated some of the language of it. But they’re pretty clear in what they’re striving for. So they emerged as a pretty small group then and had a role.
But I would say not a super massive one in the first Intifada. Things changed in the 1990s. So many people here, I assume, remember the Oslo Accords, the famous handshake on the White House lawn between then PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
This was obviously the start of the so-called peace process that would ostensibly lead towards some kind of key state solution, at least from some interpretations of it. So Hamas was not in favour of this agreement.
They opposed this idea of normalizing relations with Israel, of recognizing Israel, of renouncing violence, and of even moving towards a two-state solution. Again, they were committed to all of historic Palestine being a state, not one on 67 borders. So they began a campaign to essentially be a spoiler for that process. I would say this didn’t happen in a vacuum. There were extremist attacks by extremist Israelis against Palestinians during this time as well.
But Hamas really took on this idea of being a spoiler to the peace process. And they did this by raising the ante of their armed attacks. The type of attack that they embraced in the 1990s was suicide bombing.
This had been a tactic that really had not been used in the Middle East prior. Hamas ended up carrying out about two dozen suicide attacks. during the 1990s, and that would escalate even more during the Second Intifada.
So I’d say in this part, you see this real shift from Muslim Brotherhood days to the Hamas 1990s and Second Intifada days, where they really were known for, from their perspective, armed resistance, from much of the international community’s perspective, terrorism, definitely as a militant group.
They became the dominant force of armed resistance through the Second Intifada. At that time, during the Second Intifada, they carried about 150 suicide attacks, resulting in over 500 Israeli deaths.
Again, this was in coordination with some other groups as well, but they were definitely the main group doing this. And I would say this type of action, this type of terrorism was very different for Israel than previous tactics, and really did just have the very literal sense of terrorizing the population. Buses, markets, public places, everywhere that people went always felt like it was under threat from the suicide attacks. So it was very much how Hamas was defined and essentially almost defined themselves.
So this takes us up through the Second Intifada, kind of to 2005, 2006, when Hamas goes through yet a third change, and they make a somewhat unexpected move by deciding to get into politics and running in the parliamentary elections for the Palestinian Authority.
To everyone’s surprise, including their own, I would argue, they were massively successful in this election. They ran on a platform called Change and Reform, and it was really a pushback to the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which many saw as inept, as corrupt, and again, really just seizing on this idea of we are the party who will still resist for you and will still resist for Palestine.
One of their posters had the slogan “Israel says no, the U.S. says no, what will you say?” And that was pretty much it. much the rallying sort of message from Hamas is, look, the whole world is against us.
Israel doesn’t want us. Are you still going to be part of this fight for Palestine? And that turned out to be extremely effective. Obviously, this was not what many people expected. This was when the UK, when the US, when many countries were in their big heyday of promoting democracy in the Middle East. These were free and fair elections by all accounts, Carter Center, everyone else. And then your result is a group that was considered terrorist group for the last 10 plus years by most of the international community.
So the US, the UK, most internationals, Israel said, if Hamas is going to be part of this government, we need to do three things. One, it needs to recognize the state of Israel. Two, it needs to renounce violence.
And three, it needs to accept the international agreements that we have to date. I say those because they are probably the same ones that we are going to circle back to sometime in the next year or two if we ever get to a day after point with any kind of criteria for Hamas to be in government.
Hamas refused those criteria. They were not going to change their stance on those points. And so with that, there was, I would say, almost a civil war between the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority and this group of Hamas.
The PA trying to wrest control from Hamas and essentially their security forces in a sort of civil war. And Hamas’s security forces were superior in Gaza. So Hamas maintained control of that territory.
The Palestinian Authority’s security forces took control or maintained control in the West Bank. So that’s why since 2007, we’ve had almost a split Palestinian governance between the West Bank and Gaza and between a Fatah-led PA and a Hamas-led Gaza.
So I would say throughout those 20 years, we saw a shift from Hamas again, going from religious social movement to an armed resistance movement to a political party. And now I would say trying to be all of those things at the same time.
That makes Hamas very difficult to get one’s head around. I won’t be giving a test on the organization, but just to say there are a lot of different leaders doing many different things within Hamas. The top, there is Ismail Haniyeh, who is kind of the political head.
He is based in Doha, Qatar. So he is the one that is often speaking for Hamas to negotiators around the ceasefires, these kinds of things. In reality though, he doesn’t really call the shots for what’s happening on the ground.
That is much more based by the leadership within Gaza, led by Yahya Sinwar, who’s very much wanted by Israel at the moment. As well as by the armed unit itself. the Al-Qassam Brigades led by Mohammad Deif, who’s also very much wanted by Israel right now.
Still within that you have a lot of technocrats, you have a whole slew of ministries like you have in the UK, you have you still there’s charity groups like the the social services working. So Hamas is all these things at once and it makes it very difficult for I would say a state like Israel to completely wipe out Hamas because of these different layers and different levels of them and it also makes it very hard for us to know who is really speaking for Hamas and I’m sure many of you know this better than I do as journalists because you’ll get what are I think often quite sincere quotes from some individuals in Beirut or Doha but it’s very different from what Hamas in Gaza is thinking or organizing.
So I want to turn to just how Hamas governed and then kind of how they, why they end up doing what they did. I do want to say when they took control of Gaza, it wasn’t complete control. Israel had withdrawn their military presence from the Gaza Strip as well as their settlements prior to Hamas’s taking over.
But Israel still maintained control of Gaza’s airspace, its sea space, and most crucially its borders. So Israel controlled the people who went in and out of Gaza for the most part and also the goods, what goods could come in and out of Gaza.
So the economy ended up being very dependent on how willing Israel was to open the borders to either workers, to people going in and out. And that, I would say, somewhat constrained any group’s governance there. And that was intentional by Israel to try and pressure, put pressure on this Hamas-led government in the Strip. So how did Hamas end up doing over this period? I would say not great. Again, they came in pretty unprepared, pretty much as a group that had been doing very different types of activities before trying to lead a government.
And they, like the Palestinian Authority, ended up having to rely on various means to make any kind of economy work. They built up a big tunnel economy with smuggling goods into Gaza to get around these restrictions on the borders.
And increasingly came to be seen as increasingly corrupt themselves. So this was a poll that was taken right before October 7th by one of the main Arab polling organizations. And you can see that over 70 per cent of Gazans considered Hamas as highly or at least somewhat corrupt by that point and really not a lot of trust in that government.
As the time of their governance went on, again increasing economic or worsening economic conditions during that time. And also punctuated by what I think we now look back as many wars. At the time they seemed pretty major.
2008, 2009, 2012, 2014, which would be these about one month long back and forth between Israel and Gaza, usually resulting in around a thousand deaths and a bit more of casualties. It was in these times that Hamas usually got the biggest bump, again coming back to their touchstone of resistance. So I would just say this happened again this last time around. They had been pretty much declining in popularity in polls up through October 7th and then right after October 7th, a massive bump in popularity.
Interestingly so, more in the West Bank than in Gaza because I would say Gaza is obviously bearing the brunt of the response to Hamas’s actions, whereas those in the West Bank have been kind of able to see this as again this resurgence of resistance and kind of rallying around that.
I do think these numbers will go down. There’s usually a surge right after kind of a war situation, and then it comes down a little bit later. So I mentioned the attack. I would like to turn to why Hamas engaged in October 7 and why they launched this.
I would say the main reason is simply to put the issue of Palestine back in the forefront of everyone’s attention. Israel’s, the region’s, the world’s. Hamas felt like this was being forgotten, not least of all, by Arab states in the region that were starting to normalize ties with Israel.
And even internally, I think they wanted to, again, prove that they were the leaders of resistance. They could carry out something like this. Hamas does get support from Iran in terms of weapons and training.
But this, I would, from everything I have heard and read, this was not an Iran-coordinated attack. This was something that Hamas was going to do and essentially told Iran they were doing it when it was kind of too late to stop it. And so this was more of an internally developed attack, and again, one that Hamas was, again, trying to force this back to the issue. And if you saw the news this week, the Wall Street Journal had some really interesting reporting with all these messages that they were able to get from Yahyan Sidwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, to leadership outside, pretty much saying, yeah, this is essentially what we wanted.
We wanted this big response. We wanted this world attention. We wanted the world turning away from Israel, et cetera. I would say, again, there was a lot of popular support for the attack, and that was from across the territories, West Bank and Gaza.
So I’ll turn now to how Hamas is framing the attack, and then I’ll hand over to Chris shortly after that. I mean, I would say Hamas is framing the war as very much a justified, or I would say they’re justifying October 7 as a justified armed response to Israel, to the occupation, to what they see as 60-plus years of occupation and what they see as an illegal Zionist presence. I would say that they liken themselves to other resistance movements like the FLN in Algeria, like the ANC in South Africa, and they see themselves as part of this resistance, so to speak, to imperialism, to colonialism, to kind of these bigger trends as well.
That’s very much the framing that they’ve used and one that has been very much taken on board by many solidarity groups as well, and they are of course framing Israel’s response and actions in the strip as genocide, as ethnic cleansing, and as an attack against the Palestinian people.
I would just say Hamas does exploit urban warfare, again they use an extensive tunnel network for all kinds of things but that does, it runs for miles back and forth underneath the strip and is very well fortified.
They do, and this is not just really propaganda, they do place weapons in mosques and schools and apartment buildings and places where civilians are, and they have been known to seize and loot some of the aid coming in.
Right now they’re really pushing for the permanent ceasefire and for a role in governance in any kind of day after and of course for a massive release of Palestinian prisoners. For Israel and again I think Chris will say more about the framing but this is absolutely the inverse.
Israel obviously is viewing and framing the war as a justified response to not only terrorists but terrorists who they also see as that wanting to commit genocide as trying to wipe out the state of Israel, wipe out the Jewish people and posing an extreme existential threat to Israel and I can’t say like overemphasize how deeply and viscerally this has been felt in Israeli society and the war is seen across almost all political, across the political spectrum whatever people are saying about Netanyahu, the war is seen as extremely justified and the coverage of the war I’d say is very different than it is here.
Israel’s aims in this are to eradicate Hamas’s military capabilities, governance capabilities and also infrastructure. So one of the pictures there are some of the tunnels which that’s one of the reasons Israel is trying to hold on to the border between Gaza and Egypt, the Philadelphia corridor to try and really try and destroy the smuggling and the tunnel infrastructure that is there.
Israel is very willing to go it alone I think they’ve made that clear in the wake of ICC and ICJ rulings and they too I would say are exploiting some of the challenges of urban warfare. I do think they are, I know this is not believed by all, I do think they are trying to target Hamas but they are definitely showing gross negligence to the protection of civilians in terms of distinction of targets.
As someone who follows different types of conflict, I would say the proportionality ratio is one that is definitely questionable. There’s no, when we look at proportionality, it’s the proportion of civilian casualties to the military objective.
There’s no formula in international law to say what that is. This gets a bit crude to say, but I would say from the US, say in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, for high level targets, it was about an 8 to 10 civilian casualties permitted for a high level target.
For Israel, what I’ve read and heard is it’s up to 20 civilian casualties for a low level target and up to 90 or 100 civilian casualties for a high level target. So very different levels of permissibility than we’ve seen in recent previous wars.
And again, this is one that, you know, I would say that this is where some of the grades of international law come in because we just don’t have set metrics for these things. But Israel right now is trying to, again, deplete Hamas’s capabilities, obviously release the hostages and maintain security control over Gaza.
So I’ll just end with what I think are pretty obvious challenges towards a resolution, which I could see in three ways. One is just the ceasefire, which we’re seeing the non-negotiations, I guess, play out this week.
Hamas wants the ceasefire to be permanent. They want a timetable written down and they want Israeli forces to withdraw immediately and completely. Israel wants to maintain a security presence. They want to be able to finish the job.
And so you have, even with this carefully worded proposal from the U.S. that tries to get all these things in one basket, the details don’t line up. And both sides, I think, know that. Likewise, with the day after, Israel does not want any presence for Hamas after and any kind of post-war governance.
And most Palestinians, Hamas supporters, are not, believe that Hamas should at least have the right to participate in a government and would not be seen as a legitimate government without some sort of Hamas representation, at least in a non, even in a non-militant point.
And then just finally, for the broader conflict, I would say we’re kind of at this weird point where most of the world and even most of the region, most Arab states, are now for the first time ever, like firmly in support for a two-state solution.
But the actors on the ground aren’t there. Israeli support even before October 7th was down to about a third supporting a two-state solution. Now it’s much lower and the numbers are about the same in the West Bank and Gaza.
And obviously for Hamas, that’s something they’re not going for either. So I would say we’re at this, I think, really… difficult inflection point where things are at a real low right now. I don’t think things will change in the short term, but there is a renewed attention to the conflict right now and this is a moment I think that can and should be seized upon to start thinking in the more long term about how this can be the leverage for some kind of change, but I don’t think it’ll be immediate.
William Horsley
Thank you very much indeed, Julie, for that extremely authoritative and dispassionate account to help us counter misinformation and get the story straight. Chris will now take over to look more closely at the Israeli army’s behaviour — and particularly the issue of controlling the media, and the killing of more than 100 journalists since October last year.
Chris Paterson
Thank you, Julia, and thank you, William, for the kind invitation. As William said, I do write about international news and have particularly done a large study of news agencies as well as the study you see there.
But I realize I am an academic telling very experienced journalists about their work. And I know how much you all enjoy that – so please don’t throw things! Julie’s conclusion with the differential framing of this story, I think, is a very helpful introduction to what I have to say.
While the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict with its 50-year history is an example of asymmetrical war, this is not a term that routinely appears in contemporary media accounts. The term war, of course, is commonly used, which unfortunately implies to audiences a conflict between equals, erasing the reality of asymmetrical conflict.
So I would suggest that, for the purposes of this talk, that this military asymmetry is paralleled by a longstanding informational asymmetry. But while William asked me for analysis of media coverage of the current conflict, I won’t provide that because simply no research has yet been published.
It’s just too soon. I should mention that the Center for Media Monitoring has published a scathing report on some of the coverage and I’ll give you a quick example of some of the critique that is ongoing now before I move on.
Many UK media scholars who are colleagues of mine have been doing all they can to highlight uneven news coverage and particularly the unequal value in the news of Israeli and Palestinian lives. So in January, just for one example, one of my colleagues noted that headlines all over the world loudly proclaimed January 22nd “the deadliest day for Israel”. On that day, 22 Israeli soldiers were killed in the invasion of Gaza. On the same day, the IDF killed almost 200 Palestinians in Gaza. There was almost no mention in most outlets. Just one example.
In an article about media coverage of Gaza focused on the 2014 Israeli invasion, two former PhD students of mine, that’s them at the bottom [of the slide], identified five factors that are key to maintaining an asymmetrical advantage in the world’s media coverage.
First, media organizations must face high degrees of scrutiny for their reporting. Secondly, censorship and restrictions can be imposed on journalists. Thirdly, access to important sources of information can be granted and rescinded.
Fourthly, broadcasting facilities and journalists may be targeted by armed forces of the belligerents involved. And fifthly, measures may be put in place to collaborate with media organizations. And it is reasonable to say that both parties in this conflict attempt to practice all of these strategies.
I won’t go into a lot of detail, but it is quite clear that part of Israel’s asymmetrical advantage is an extremely large and professional apparatus in terms of managing information. I have met some of these people. One of them, indeed, got a PhD from my school in the 1990s. and he’s one of those people managing the image of Israel globally.
I’ll primarily address the first and second point. The first point about the level of scrutiny means that journalists face more comment about their reporting of this story than almost any other and most of that comment – of course many of you will know this – is hostile no matter how carefully they try to cling to a neutral position.
This is what theorists Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman described as the “flak filter” in their influential critical model of international affairs journalism known as “the propaganda model”. Of course neutrality in reporting is itself a problem.
In journalism studies we have a theory that describes this. It is called the journalism of detachment, and it was made famous when the BBC journalist Martin Bell refused orders from his editors to spend more time on the Serbian side of the story when he was reporting from Sarajevo as Serbian shells and bullets killed civilians who had no means of fighting back.
He argued there should not be an attempt at neutral balanced reporting when warfare is asymmetrical. But you all know that this is problematic for most media, in part because of “flak” — organized pressure campaigns by people who object to coverage.
Staying conspicuously neutral is the safest position for most media, even when neutrality favours the position of the strongest party. I say most media because there are prominent examples of major media organizations which do make their sympathies clear, such as Al Jazeera.
As I said, there is a history of research into media coverage of conflict. One of the largest studies was by the Glasgow Media Group, which is quite famous in British media studies and quite infamous amongst journalists of a certain generation.
The study was called Bad News from Israel, from 2005. The authors conducted a very large content study of BBC and ITV coverage and the privileging of Israeli narratives. They blame much of this on the structural bias of broadcast news against explanation and context.
So British television news viewers never heard the historical context. These researchers did extensive audience research as well. One finding was that British audience members often interpreted the term “occupied territories” to mean Palestinians occupy these territories.
The audience is left with the impression of a symmetrical struggle over bits of barren land. Finally these authors made the point that in the absence of historical context the status quo is made to appear legitimate and neutral and those resisting are seen as the cause of violence.
But this and many other studies have also shown a consistent quantitative imbalance. Israelis speak on camera on UK television much more than Palestinians. The study found an almost exactly inverse relationship between the nationality of victim and airtime.
When Palestinian casualties outnumbered Israeli casualties three to one coverage of Palestinian deaths got a third of the airtime. It would be interesting to test this formula in the current conflict.
I’m not aware that anyone has done this yet. The study showed that British journalists tended to reproduce terminology introduced by Israeli sources, and reject terminology introduced by Palestinian sources.
Both the Palestinian governments and the Israeli government have a long history of trying to tightly control media access. Israel has some of the lowest levels of media freedom of any democracy, currently ranking 101 out of 180 nations by Reporters Without Borders, RSF.
In my book, I’ve written in some detail about the extreme lengths that Israeli government communications specialists go to monitor the reporting of foreign correspondents. They have been known to eject them from the country or remove their credentials when they don’t like their reporting.
What does other research tell us about the reporting of Gaza during these attacks by the Israeli state over the decades? As I mentioned, research has documented that it’s typical for Israeli official sources to be much more prominent in news coverage than Palestinian sources.
This pattern over time legitimizes an Israeli government perspective in the minds of the Western public and delegitimizes the Palestinian voice. Another study explored the challenge of this kind of reporting.
It noted journalists must trust their sources in order to ensure their physical security, yet they are professionally required to suspect the information delivered by these same sources. And of course, this is a contradiction every journalist working in areas of Israeli control must negotiate.
Some research has focused on the communication strategies Israel has used over the years. These include consistently projecting itself as highly vulnerable and framing any military action as self-defense.
Importantly, Israel consistently seeks to align itself with Western democratic standards, and you will hear its spokespeople always make this point when they are interviewed. Attention to Israel’s human rights violations can perhaps be effective in disrupting this degree of control over the narrative.
In their research, my former students pointed out the asymmetry in reporting language as it pertains to numbers. By way of example, they show typical UK reports about the 2014 Gaza invasion typically refer to specific weapons when addressing a military strike from Gaza, and don’t talk about weapons when talking about an Israeli strike on Gaza, all while using similar numbers.
So they quote from reports on an Israeli attack on Gaza, writing, with a journalist in this case writing, ‘most attacks have so far been from the air, hitting some 1200 targets in the territory’. But when reporting military action by Hamas, a typical report says, ‘more than 200 rockets have been launched at Israel from the Gaza Strip, the military said’.
Using similar numbers to describe very different things makes them seem equivalent to the reader, so not an asymmetrical war. And using words like targets legitimizes the attack and obscures the human cost.
These researchers ask journalists why their reports look like this. The main reason they give is that Hamas officials disappear when they are targets of the IDF, so there is no Hamas source to talk to.
So Israel gets to tell the story. Another way to control the narrative is to prevent access to conflict and threaten the few who have access. Possibly never in the history of conflict have the media been so completely banned from getting close to the story.
But I would argue they’re not avoiding reporting from Gaza just for legal reasons. They are avoiding it because they know the IDF will shoot at them. A CNN reporter did race into Gaza a month or so ago, record one report and race back out.
Al Jazeera reports regularly from Gaza because they were the only major outlet to have a large team there already. I said I would return to the issue of targeting of journalists, so let me finish with that.
I wrote an article in The Conversation on this last month to coincide with World Press Freedom Day. I proposed that article because the deaths of aid workers in Gaza killed by Israeli drones and missiles reminded me of the deaths of journalists I wrote about at the hands of the US military.
In so many of those cases, and there were nearly 50 of them, the US government had been informed where journalists were so they would be safe, and then those journalists were killed. Two decades ago, BBC journalist Nik Gowing went to Washington in an attempt to secure protection for media workers.
He wrote, ‘there’s a growing fear that some governments, especially the most militarily sophisticated, like the US and Israel, are sanctioning the act of targeting of journalists in war zones’. Deconfliction, the term you may be familiar with, is an arrangement by which non -combatants, including aid workers and journalists, try to ensure their safety by informing the warring parties of their movements to prevent themselves being targets.
It was instituted by the UN in 2018 to keep humanitarian workers in Yemen safe from attack by Saudi forces. The motivation for this was the destruction of hospitals over recent decades. You may be aware that there’s quite a track record now of hospital destruction by the US, some people don’t know this, in Serbia and then in Afghanistan, by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, certainly by Israel in Gaza. And, of course, by Syria and by Russia and by other militaries.
Before this year, there was already plenty of evidence that for journalists, at least, deconfliction offers little or no protection. When the U.S. moved into Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, media organizations routinely used this approach. It often didn’t work.
In November 2001, journalists were injured as U.S. missiles hit BBC and Al Jazeera bureaus in Kabul. After interviewing a CIA official at the highest levels, U.S. investigative journalist Ron Suskind told me, “My sources are clear that this was done on purpose, precisely to send a message to Al There was great anger at Al Jazeera.”
As you can imagine, it was very difficult for me in writing this book to find anyone getting anywhere close to going on the record saying that the missiles were intended as a message to the media. This is about as close as we get, but Suskind has a pretty good reputation, and I believed him enough to put him in the book.
As U.S. forces entered Baghdad in 2003, Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Ayyoub was killed by a U.S. missile as he started a live broadcast from the roof of his bureau. The company had sent the Pentagon its coordinates months earlier and had been assured the night before by the State Department that the bureau was safe and would not be targeted.
At the time, Washington denied it had a responsibility to protect journalists. And it warned news organizations that did not embed with the U.S. military that they would be at risk. My book about American attacks on the media traces the start of the US willingness to use violence against reporters to the targeting of Yugoslav communications infrastructure in 1997. This was seen as a means to control what was called the information space. In 1999, the infrastructure target was Serbia’s public broadcaster and NATO casually dismissed the deaths of 16 media personnel.
I note in my book a pattern of similarity between US attacks on media and those of Israel. I observed there was a clear line from industry concern about journalist safety in the first Gulf War to many initiatives to work more closely with the military so they would better understand the media, to the embedding of military personnel in media operations, and then to missiles hitting media operations at the exact point required to shut down location reporting for an extended period.
Well before the Gaza invasion, press freedom groups documented hundreds of attacks on media by the Israeli military. The bureaus of several media organizations in Gaza had been bombed by the IDF. Since the 1990s, there had been reports of hundreds of journalists killed or injured by the IDF. Press freedom groups like Reporters Without Borders have detailed records of every case.
Even though foreign media had been kept out of Gaza by Israel, many residents there, of course, worked for the media or report to global audiences directly online.
The IFJ has estimated that since the hostilities began, the death toll of civilians has included at least 109 journalists and media workers, and noted that this is a mortality rate of over 10%, dramatically higher than any other occupational group.
A month into the conflict, the leader of the Gaza Journalists Union made a video pleading for support from fellow journalists. He described how the family of the Al Jazeera correspondent were killed in a tent encampment while he was reporting on the air.
Another reporter was shot and died as an ambulance trying to save him came under attack. As the quote I gave earlier from the CIA shows, countries at war sometimes do target civilians to send messages about the cost of challenging their narrative.
One Gaza journalist, Sami Abu Salem, has explained in a YouTube video how persistent threats prevent reporting.
There are links in my article to these journalists talking about the dangers of working as a journalist in Gaza. They make the point that the threat of almost certain death prevents them from gathering facts and images in the places attacked by Israel, and that allows the story to be told on Israel’s terms.
As you may know, there are long-running campaigns to end the war, [and] the impunity of states who attack journalists. But of course the UN and humanitarian organizations need to be cautious to avoid antagonizing militaries they have to depend on.
So I’ll conclude by saying we must ask now: if civilian organizations seeking to work in conflict zones need better protection than ad hoc deconfliction agreements, perhaps in the form of automatic sanction of combatants who break international humanitarian law?
And that’s where I’ll conclude.
William Horsley
Thank you very much indeed, Chris. Two highly informative and thought-provoking presentations. The use of the word context, I think, is very important for both speakers. And one thing that strikes me is that this attempt, principally on the Israeli side, although of course Hamas is not tolerant of dissent either – by Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China and a dozen other examples around the world show states exerting their power through media control, absolute media control with reprisals, imprisonment and much worse.
And it is striking that this is now happening – though it happened, of course, with the accusations against America in earlier conflicts — but now it’s happening in the case of Israel with the protection of America in ways that are apparently changing the world’s geopolitics quite significantly, the global south being up in arms about so-called “double standards”.
I would also just mention for context, that apart from Israel denying access — and as you mentioned the threat to life — Al Jazeera, which was the sole external source, very critical but extremely effective in getting information across to Israeli audiences, has also been banned in Israel to make that information control more complete.
We have with us some seasoned international journalists, indeed those of many who’ve had experience in the Middle East and Israel and Palestine. So we very much hope to hear from comments as you please.
But we have big issues and the one that we really put on the order paper was the one which was… highlighted, I think, by both sides, the asymmetry, what I termed myself, inequality of arms and whether actually this is so severe in terms of the understanding of the outside world that it is an impediment to peace.
So that’s one thought I hope we’ll explore. We have a bit of time, so please raise your hands It’s often difficult to listen to the facts or the interpretations on this issue, and we’ll keep this discussion civil.
The question and answer session is available on the audio recording above.
Julie Norman slides – online
Julie Norman slides – Powerpoint presentation downloadable
Chris Paterson slides online
Chris Paterson slides – Powerpoint presentation downloadable
Journalists safety in Gaza – Chris Paterson in The Conversation
