For over a year, the US and UK media have refused to identify Israel’s war as a genocide. Mainstream outlets are only willing to regurgitate their governments’ soft criticisms of Israel, which serve to mask the West’s complicity in the slaughter.
by Justin Schlosberg
Part 3 - Hiding Complicity
But these double standards pale into insignificance compared to the media’s blind spot over not just the active complicity of the West but its continual sponsoring of what even the International Court of Justice has ruled a potential genocide on the Palestinian people. The problem is not just the obscene use of taxpayer money to fuel a war that public opinion is overwhelmingly against. Arms manufacturers are also massively profiteering from Gaza, as they did from Ukraine, and as NATO military spending escalates at an unprecedented rate.
After uncovering that the CEO of BAE Systems had personally pocketed almost £1 million cash from the Gaza genocide, arms trade investigators told me that a number of broadcasters expressed interest in covering the story, before promptly dropping it prior to airing. Making a personal killing from mass killing was not, it seems, sufficiently newsworthy.
The depth of US and UK military and intelligence involvement is often obscured or, more often, completely ignored by mainstream media. Declassified UK has reported on the use of the UK military base in Cyprus to deploy US special forces to Israel, as well as on hundreds of cargo shipments and frequent spy plane flights over Gaza and Lebanon. Yet consumers of mainstream media would have no idea that such hands-on involvement exists.
What’s more, in conjunction with the massive imbalances over language, this blind spot presents a trap for some pro-Palestine critics of the media who are given to perceive Israeli propaganda as uniquely and universally powerful. There’s certainly good reason to believe that the pro-Israel lobby in the United Kingdom, United States, and elsewhere operates through a shadowy and extensive network of political influence. But the trap lies in mistaking this influence as some kind of autonomous power leverage that Israel wields over the West, with the effect that US/UK/EU governments are reluctantly or unwittingly forced into complicity by the sheer extent and agency of the pro-Israel lobby.
And it is the product of an age-old truth: that real power tends to erase itself. In the end, the pro-Israel lobby only exerts the influence that it does because it is enabled by powerful, vested interests within the countries in which it operates.
Any wider and honest look at how Israeli apartheid evolved historically can’t ignore this enabling, from the Balfour Declaration to the Camp David Accords, when US power effectively underwrote Israel’s determination never to allow a contiguous and genuinely independent Palestinian state.
Any wider and honest look at how Israeli apartheid evolved historically can’t ignore this enabling, from the Balfour Declaration to the Camp David Accords, when US power effectively underwrote Israel’s determination never to allow a contiguous and genuinely independent Palestinian state.
A true balanced depiction of the horrors that have taken place over the last year calls not for equal treatment between the oppressor and oppressed, or between the victims of a heinous terror attack over two days and the victims of industrialized mass slaughter over twelve months. Rather, we should question where the balance is struck between attention to the atrocities and war crimes carried out by Israel and critical scrutiny of its paymasters — between the hit man and the crime boss who is supplying the guns and calling the shots.
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