Western journalists must be held to account for complicity in genocide

Palestinian journalists risked their lives to tell the world the truth about Israel's genocide - and were treated like dirt by their Western colleagues.

They will never be forgiven. By ‘they’, I mean the Western governments who have armed and facilitated Israel’s genocide, for 466 days, knowing full well the horrors being inflicted every single day.

By ‘they’ I mean the Western media outlets who have legitimised Israel’s war crimes, who have failed to frame their coverage around the explicitly and repeatedly stated genocidal intent of Israeli leaders, who have airbrushed atrocities, failed to hold their governments account for their criminal complicity - and failed to even show a modicum of solidarity for the Palestinian journalists who have suffered the biggest slaughter of media workers in the history of human civilisation as they risk their lives every single day to bring the world the depraved, hideous truth of what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people.

Which brings us to this devastating speech. It was delivered by the Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed, who is from Deir al-Balah. He is only 22 year old, and he has already done more important work than countless Western journalists combined will ever do in their whole lives, and he has done so whilst risking his life every day, every hour, every minute.

In his speech, he speaks of how Palestinian journalists have “reported tirelessly, extensively and thoroughly” on what he rightly describes as “the most well documented and first lived streamed genocide in history.” He says they reported this horror in “makeshift tented camps”, as they wept over “loved ones, colleagues, friends and family members”, while Gaza’s journalists have been “killed in every possible way”. In impossible circumstances, he says, “we never stopped - to tell you the truth” whilst trying to “move your dead consciences to help a population that has seen every sort of torture and tasted every type of death.”

As well as being let down by the “international community”, Abed specifically mentions the role of the international media. “We haven’t seen any sort of support, a single word of support,” he says, suggesting that if Palestinians had “blonde hair and blue eyes,” attitudes may have been different, “but because we are Palestinians, we have only one right, which is to die and be maimed.” Journalism, he concludes, “is not a crime. We are not a target.”

That is a speech which should trigger an overwhelming sense of shame amongst Western journalists. But it won’t, because the vast majority of them won’t even listen. For many of them, courage is defined by writing terrible things about marginalised minorities in the rags they work for, and then getting criticised about it by teenagers on social media: where they claim to be the victims who are suffering the horror of being scrutinised by members of the public for what they believe is the brave act of making life that little bit harder for people whose lives are already too hard.

These Western journalists like to think of themselves as noble truth tellers, speaking out without fear or favour. And some of them are: that there are courageous journalists in the West is without question. There are just too few, not least in positions of prominence and influence.

Well, Israel’s genocide has certainly exposed the ugly truth about the vast majority of the Western media. They knew from the beginning that Israeli leaders and officials repeatedly declared that civilians in Gaza were “human animals”, that they would illegally cut off all the essentials of life to them, that all civilians had collective guilt - that there was no such thing as civilians who were “not aware, not involved” as Israel’s President put it, as they bragged they would flatten Gaza, that as one Israeli minister put it after the first few weeks: “The North of the Gaza Strip, more beautiful than ever. Everything is blown up and flattened, simply a pleasure for the eyes.”

They know Israeli ministers boasted they were doing another Nakba, that is, a repeat of the murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel in 1948.

They may not have heard every statement, like Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declaring at the start variously that he had “lifted the restraints” and “every restriction” on Israeli soldiers - but my goodness did they hear enough.

They saw with their own eyes the ever more apocalyptic footage of Gaza as its buildings were so comprehensively destroyed that it now has a completely different colour and texture when looked at from space.

They may not have used a tape measure to work out how small Gaza is, which is no bigger than East London, but they knew it was a tiny territory, and they may not have known that several times the explosive power of Hiroshima was detonated there, but they knew it was a vast amount.

They knew that thousands upon thousands of civilians were being slaughtered, that included entire bloodlines wiped from the face of the earth over and over again, that so many of the slaughtered were children and babies, but they showed more outrage over the false claims of Israeli babies being beheaded on 7th October than they did about literally hundreds of Palestinian newborns being incinerated by explosives, crushed to death under destroyed buildings, and literally suffocated to death in besieged and attacked hospitals as they were taken off ventilators.

They may not know the name of practically any Palestinian child, but even they must have heard about Hind Rajab, a 5 year old little girl with a beautiful smile, whose family - her aunt, uncle and four other cousins - tried to flee their home for safety. Most of them were killed, leaving just her and 15 year old cousin Layan alive, Layan desperately ringing the Palestine Red Crescent pleading for help, before you hear here slaughtered on air by a tank. An ambulance sent to save little Hind, now on the phone, terrified, in a car full of the bloodied corpses of her family, begging for help, scared of the dark. The paramedics sent to save her who coordinated their journey with the Israeli defence forces, who were then blown up by the Israeli army, barely anything remaining of their corpses, and then days later, the decomposing bodies of Hind and her family were discovered.

Western journalists may not have known that every aid agency, as well as two US government departments, concluded over and over again that Israel was deliberately starving the Palestinian people - but they knew enough.

They may have tried to avoid hearing the endless stories of Israeli soldiers torturing and raping Palestinians, including to death - but even some of them must have heard about a riot in support of the right to rape Palestinian detainees on the streets of Tel Aviv attended by Israeli ministers.

Did they really think there was some legitimate moral or military end which justified unleashing this level of death and destruction, killing so many more times the number of Israelis killed on 7th October, day after day after day for 466 days?

They knew enough. They knew enough and yet many of them carried on justifying this barbarism. They knew enough and yet many of them refused to speak out, apart from empty handwriting and platitudes.

Let’s be generous. Maybe some were scared. I know for a fact that some are scared. Maybe they feared being smeared as racists or terrorist supporters because they happen to object to the mass slaughter of innocent people. Maybe they feared their careers would be menaced, that they’d be deplatformed. None of these are irrational fears. But none of these fears are worth even a thousandth or a millionth of the fears of Palestinian journalists spending every day fearing that this may not only be their last day, but the last day of everyone they love.

They knew. They knew enough. And they helped drown the Palestinian people in blood, because if the Western media actually did its job, and made clear the gravity of this crime, then it would all have been stopped a long, long time go.

Well remember this. It wasn’t just the politicians and executioners of the Rwandan Genocide who ended up in the dock, it was journalists, too.

We must not let them get away with this. No crime in history was so confessed to so publicly, so proudly, so repeatedly. No crime in history was documented as it actually happened. There are no excuses. There is nowhere to hide. And everyone who has their fingerprints over the crime scene must be held to account.

And yet with noble exceptions, as the Palestinian journalists who actually did their work, knowing that any moment they could be exterminated alongside their entire families, these same Western journalists couldn’t even bring themselves to type or mutter a word of solidarity.

They do not think Palestinians are humans. That’s not hyperbole, it’s a statement of the obvious, because nobody - nobody who really think Palestinians are of equal worth would ever tolerate what has been inflicted on them in this genocide. Even if you thought Palestinians were worth a fraction of the worth of people you considered your own, you wouldn’t tolerate this.

We owe it to journalists like Abubaker Abed to speak out, and we owe to them to hold to account the media outlets and politicians who enabled a genocide in plain sight.

And that accountability might take years, it might even take decades. But we must never ever give up on holding all of the guilty to account.

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