Moustafa Bayoumi, an American professor of Egyptian descent and an author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem, wrote in 2018, "It is the peculiar fate of oppressed people everywhere that when they are killed, they are killed twice: first by bullet or bomb, and next by the language used to describe their deaths." This phrase suggests a double tragedy for oppressed individuals when they face violence. The first instance of killing is simply a physical act―being shot by a bullet or bombed, whereas the second form of killing is more metaphorical and relates to the language used to describe their deaths. Put otherwise, the narrative, discourse, or portrayal of the events adds another layer of harm. This could involve the way media, governments, or other influential voices frame and describe the deaths of the oppressed. It implies that the language employed often contributes to the further dehumanization, distortion of facts or justification of the violence.
The prevalent pro-Israel narrative in much of the British and American press coverage of Israel's ongoing war with Gaza, emphasizing Israeli suffering, threat perceptions, and geopolitical goals above everything else, was not something unexpected for those closely following the country's news landscape. A glaring flaw in the world's so-called renowned newspapers covering the ongoing war is the seemingly unanimous effort or initiative to portray it as a conflict that only ignited on the morning of October 7, relegating all the events or scenarios leading up to the war to oblivion. Such an initiative flattens 75 years of settler colonialism, dispossession, violence, suppression, and surveillance of inexplicable proportion into a very simplistic understanding. The Israeli history of land grabs that is shaping Palestinian and broader Arab perception coupled with years of Israeli oppression and military occupation have been given scant mention.
Most of the Western media consistently present reports framing the Israel-Palestine war as the one that began only on that morning, emphasizing the attack by Hamas fighters on that day. The years of barbarity by Israeli soldiers preceding this date are often marginalized or relegated to the periphery in this narrative. Since the Hamas attack on October 7, much of the British media has unquestioningly accepted information from Israeli authorities. From the claims of 40 beheaded babies to assertions of Hamas command centers under hospitals with displaced civilians, British media organizations have repeated even the most inflammatory Israeli claims without thorough verification.
BBC News CEO Deborah Turness, in a recent interview, acknowledged that the BBC had created an impression of prioritizing certain deaths over others by using "died" for Gaza and "were killed" for Israel in a tweet. She noted that journalists will exercise greater caution or think more carefully when talking about civilian deaths in the future. Turness accepted that the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine war has faced criticism from “both sides” but emphasized that the BBC cannot simply assume it is correct if criticized by both sides. She committed to attributing information to appropriate sources. This is a glaring example of how semantics can subtly play a role in shaping or driving home a message based on one's choices or preferences.
In the last eight weeks, over two million Palestinians, two- thirds of them being women and children, in Gaza have endured indiscriminate bombing, starvation, and thousands of deaths, supported by video and photo evidence. However, on British television, we find individuals with ties to the Israeli government simply dismissing Palestinian casualties as untrustworthy without facing challenges from experienced journalists. The Arabic news outlet, Aljazeera, says that on October 22, the BBC presented its report on an Israeli strike on a mosque within the West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp with the caption “Israel strikes Jenin Mosque targeting Hamas cell.” The claim that the targeted mosque was a “Hamas cell” was not attributed to anyone or placed in quote marks, creating the impression that the BBC itself has somehow verified the existence of this cell in a place of worship. This shows a level of intentionality to encourage further atrocities.
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We may also recall that a couple of decades ago, the Iraq war, ignited by the suspicion of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), unfolded in 2003 with a coalition led by the United States and the United Kingdom. The claim that Saddam Hussein's regime harbored such weapons was embraced by the Anglo-American media, including the BBC, and fervently portrayed it as indisputable truth. Tragically, this unfounded narrative led to an illicit war, years of upheaval, boundless human suffering, and the tragic loss of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. And, Iraq is still grappling with the enduring consequences.
The United Nations, leading NGOs, and Palestinian authorities affirm the accuracy of the casualty numbers in Gaza, exceeding 16,000. Despite the evidence including photos, videos, and mass graves, the Israeli government disputes the figures, backed by the US president and some UK journalists, enabling continued bombing without media scrutiny. However, individuals linked to the Israeli government, labeled as "guests" and "experts," continue to assert on British television, without any challenge from seasoned journalists, that Palestinian casualty figures are unreliable.
Since the beginning of this Israel-Palestine conflict, Pro-Israeli voices have become entrenched on British television. During an interview with Sky News, a British free-to-air channel, on October 25, 2023, Israel's former ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, responding to a question says, "I am very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is showing for the Palestinian people and is actually showing for these horrible, inhuman animals who have done the worst atrocities that this century has seen and the worst atrocities the Jews have suffered since the Holocaust.” How come such an anti-Palestine hate speech is unabashedly repeatedly allowed on British television with little pushback from the journalist interviewing him? Media organizations bear the responsibility of refraining from broadcasting or publishing views and statements that constitute hateful incitement against any group based on their national identity, religion, or any other intrinsic characteristic. Regrettably, this responsibility is often disregarded.
The leaders and perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide portrayed it as a self-defence measure against Tutsis depicting them as outsiders and interlopers: "If we don't do it to them, they will do it us." Just as Tutsis were debased as "cockroaches", political, military and religious leaders of Israel often decry and dehumanize Palestinians as "a cancer", "vermin" and called for their "annihilation". Palestinians are often portrayed as backward and considered a burden on the country. A prominent Israeli journalist and radio presenter, David Mizrahy Verthaim, writing on X, has called for wholesale bloodletting and turning the Gaza Strip into a slaughterhouse. Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted lumping all pro-Palestinians as pro-Hamas.
Claire Lauterbach and Namir Shabibi, writing for Declassified UK, an investigative journalism and media organization founded in 2019, have analyzed the front-page coverage of Israel's war in Gaza by five major US and UK news media ― the Washington Post, the New York Times, TheGuardian, TheTimes, and the BBC between 7-26 October, 2023. Their analysis shows how they reduce Palestinians to numbers and cover Israel in ways reflecting their governments’ priorities. They have found UK-US media clinical and routine in prioritizing coverage of Israeli suffering, while Palestinians are routinely depicted as faceless victims; they are simply irrelevant. The Times, for the first time, reported the death of Palestinians 11 days after Hamas’ attack: “Strike kills up to 500 in Gaza.” It had by then featured several front page pieces about specific, named Israeli victims.
In the UK-US mainstream media, Israelis are often portrayed as active victims, being killed or murdered by Hamas or following a surprise Palestinian attack. Sometimes, "The Palestinians" is used interchangeably with "Hamas" as seen in The Guardian on October 8. Palestinian civilians, by contrast, die passively – and yet it is they who have done most of the dying since 7 October. On 9 October, the BBC ran with “700 people have been killed on the Israeli side with more than 400 also dead in Gaza”, presumably succumbing to shock or an act of God, the analysis states.
Israel is assigned no responsibility for killing protesters. On the contrary, Palestinians appear, simply and almost mysteriously "dead". This is how the language dehumanizes the oppressed.
The analysis has found―in none of the three weeks’ of front-page headlines and lead paragraphs for the five UK-US media analyzed for the article are Israel’s serial violations of international law mentioned. The media describes child victims from both sides differently, paralleling how Palestinians' deaths are often portrayed passively, with little mention of Israeli actions, while Israelis' deaths are depicted actively, directly attributed to Hamas or "Palestinian" actions. Once a people is completely dehumanized, it becomes logical, and even necessary to apply a wholly different standard of (in)decency toward them, says the analysis, adding UK-US media often depict Palestinian deaths in a passive manner, as if they occurred naturally or through uncontrollable forces. The analysis quotes the November eighth issue of the Times of London as stating: "Israelis marked a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died."
Likewise, as reported by The Guardian on Nov 3, 2023, a WhatsApp feature that generates images in response to users' searches produces a picture of a gun or a boy with a gun when prompted with the terms “Palestinian”, “Palestine” or “Muslim boy Palestinian.” The Guardian verified these search results through screenshots and its own tests. Specifically, stickers depicting guns consistently appeared for these three search terms. In contrast, prompts (searches) for “Israeli boy” yielded cartoons of children engaging in activities like playing soccer and reading. Notably, a search for “Israel army” resulted in the AI generating drawings of soldiers smiling and praying, without any depiction of guns. Even when using explicitly militarized prompts (searches) such as "Israel army" or "Israeli defense forces," the generated images did not include depictions of guns. Instead, the cartoon illustrations portrayed individuals in uniforms engaged in various poses, mostly smiling. One illustration even showed a man in uniform in a prayer pose. This is a clear example of how language can be manipulated to dehumanize an entire community in a very subtle and nuanced way that can easily fall through the cracks.
Haaretz, a daily Israeli newspaper, cross-checked some of the allegations, such as forty babies being beheaded, babies being burnt, babies and children being hung on a clothesline, Palestinians binding children together, a baby being burnt in an oven, 20 teenagers being burnt, and pregnant women being shot dead, provided by Israeli soldiers and officials, and found that they did not add up. The newspaper notes:"This is a form of total dehumanization — Palestinians die without names, families, or stories, whereas the Israelis killed have names, stories, and families and are known. This dehumanization is what allows the implementation of an extermination policy, as we witness every hour in Gaza."
Writing an essay titled "Politics and the English Language" in 1946, George Orwell said: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Palestinians are not "little snakes" to be slaughtered, as called by Ayelet Shaked, an ex-Zionist minister of Israel. They, like everyone else, deserve a more dignified narrative. We all deserve better; no one should endure the tragedy of dying more than once.
