Yves here. We can make the headline into a general category: the media normalizes Israel’s ethnic cleansing. Where were they during the Nakba? During the creation of bantustans in Israel and the ongoing settler takeover of the West Bank? And the only intermittent coverage of the genocide in Gaza?
By Belén Fernández, the author of The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas and Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Center, among other titles. She is an opinion columnist at Al Jazeera. Originally published at Common Dreams
In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.
Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. It was, as Habib Battah and Christina Cavalcanti note in an investigation for the Public Source (8/27/25), an “awkward hybrid between a traditional embed and the kind of all-expense-paid publicity trip that journalists refer to as junkets, freebies and dog-and-pony shows.”
Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? As Battah and Cavalcanti emphasize, these media professionals were also embedding themselves “within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence,” hosted by an “extrajudicial occupying military power—a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.”
The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. New York TimesJerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner, an old pro at conducting preemptive journalistic strikes on Lebanon, did not disappoint with her dispatch (10/13/24), “Just Over the Border From Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines.”
And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy.
‘Urgent Evacuation Warnings’
While the October 2024 embed was one of the more preposterous embodiments of Western corporate media’s special relationship with Israel, outlets continue to do a fine job of sanitizing Israeli brutality even when their reporters are not physically viewing the region from inside an Israeli armored vehicle. Since March of this year, Israel has killed at least 3,613 people in Lebanon and displaced 1.2 million, obliterating entire villages and otherwise expanding the ecocidal policy honed in the Gaza Strip.
There has been no remotely comparable destruction on the Israeli side, and a recent Reuters article (5/31/26) that had attempted to suggest some symmetry now comes with the preface: “This May 31 story has been corrected to remove a reference to tens of thousands of Israelis being displaced by Hezbollah fire, in paragraph 3.”
Like in Gaza, where genocide proceeds apace in spite of a declared ceasefire (FAIR.org, 10/21/25), the media tend to report “ceasefires” in Lebanon without caring to highlight the fact that it’s not a ceasefire when Israel is still pummelingthe country and massacring people, all the while setting the stage for a massive land grab with its creeping so-called “evacuation orders.” These “evacuations” have been focused on the Shiite demographic, with Israel warning Christian and Druze communities not to allow Shiite neighbors to take refuge in their towns (New York Times, 4/1/26).
Lebanese journalist Habib Battah, co-author of the aforementioned Public Source investigation, suggested to me that such orders might be more accurately termed “ethnic cleansing directives.” But that, of course, would be way too much for corporate media outlets to handle—and so it is that we learn about Israel’s “urgent evacuation warnings” and “large-scale evacuation orders,” as though it’s some sort of public service announcement, fire drill or other fundamentally legitimate Israeli undertaking, rather than entirely illegal in addition to downright psychopathic. From a legal and moral perspective, after all, you can’t just go around ordering people in other countries out of their homes, oftentimes only to bomb them when they comply.
Then there’s the matter of the “Yellow Line” or “security zone”—more terminology borrowed from Gaza (FAIR.org, 5/19/26)—which denotes the portion of south Lebanon that Israel is currently illegally occupying. But Israel has never been very good at staying within the lines, and its latest “evacuation orders” spanned no less than one-fifth of the entire country, far beyond its own unilaterally appointed Yellow Line.
As Battah remarked to me, the media’s acceptance and deployment of such arbitrary vocabulary creates “artificial structures” and a sense of orderliness, when in reality “there’s no yellow lines, there’s no yellow, there’s no colors—these are just illegal invasions.” And because media are committed to sanitizing Israel’s behavior rather than questioning it, “colonization becomes normalized.”
‘A Warning to Residents’
The eagerness of journalists to do Israel’s bidding is all the more confounding given that Israel is currently the No. 1 killer of journalists in the world. A recent Associated Press article (5/29/26), for example, reduced the pulverization of Lebanon to simply “ongoing fighting in southern Lebanon between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters.”
A June 4 Reuters writeup blamed Hezbollah for having “rejected” the latest US-mediated “ceasefire” plan—which, mind you, would basically have given Israel the green light to seize south Lebanon outright. Reuters refrained from referencing the thousands of Lebanese casualties since March, but did allow Israel the usual space to defend its depredations: “The Israeli military, in a warning to residents of the south, said it was continuing to target Hezbollah facilities.”
This is not to say that corporate media do not report on the destruction, displacement and killing in Lebanon; they do—and sometimes even sympathetically. But the refusal to paint a consistent and properly contextualized picture of what is actually going on in the country means that they mostly just end up legitimizing Israel’s war crimes.
Imagine for a moment that Hezbollah had just killed thousands of Israelis in three months and occupied northern Israel. In doing so, it laid waste to 5,000-year-old cities, and bombed the fuck out of everything from homes to ambulances to World Heritage sites to university students to environmental activists who protect sea turtles. Suffice it to say we’d be hearing a lot more about the utter barbarity of it all—and that Hezbollah wouldn’t be allowed to claim ad nauseam that it was targeting “military facilities.”
Almost three years into a genocide that has officially killed nearly 73,000 Palestinians and given Israel every opportunity to blind the world with its true colors, it is no short of an abomination that Israeli officials are still permitted to insist—with little to no media pushback—that they only target “terrorists” and “terrorist infrastructure.” If Israeli officials were to claim that two plus two equals eight, or that Elvis Presley was living in a cave in Madagascar, would the corporate media also report such information with a straight face?
By taking Israel’s word for it, journalists wind up essentially validating mass killing and occupation—as in the corrected May 31 Reuters piece that straight up makes the case for Israel’s seizure of a 900-year-old castle that lies nowhere near the imaginary colored line:
The advance into Beaufort Castle has granted Israeli troops a vantage point over much of southern Lebanon and northern Israel, from which attacks have been launched towards Israeli residential areas.
‘Iranian Proxy on Its Borders’
Of course, willful media decontextualization and omission of relevant history facilitates the conversion of Israeli propaganda into “news.” One handy trick is to always, always, always remind audiences that Hezbollah is a “powerful Shia group supported by Iran,” as the BBC (5/28/26) puts it.
On March 13, CNN ran an analysis datelined Tel Aviv that bore the headline: “The War That Never Ended: Israel Seizes Moment to Finish Fight Against Hezbollah, Iran’s Proxy in Lebanon.” The analyst proceeded to justify Israel’s belief that “it needs to establish a strong military defense to protect civilians from the Iranian proxy on its borders.”
But while invoking Hezbollah’s support by Iran is practically a requirement for Western media reports, it is never deemed necessary to qualify Israel’s own orientation in any way—like, I dunno, “The war that never ended: Genocidal psychostate backed to the hilt by global superpower seizes moment to finish fight against Hezbollah.”
As for why this fight started in the first place, the media can somehow never summon the energy to explain that Hezbollah owes its very existence to Israel’s apocalyptic 1982 invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, prompting the group’s formation. Indeed, Israel’s lengthy history of invading Lebanon—not to mention its 22-year occupation of the south of the country, which ended in its ignominious eviction by the Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance—would seem to be pretty crucial context in terms of understanding the current war. But those journalists who do bother to provide a bit of background do so in as ambiguous and cursory a fashion as possible, as in the New York Times’ explanation (6/3/26) that “Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia group, has been in conflict with Israel, on and off, for decades.”
A May 13 NBC News intervention headlined “Amid Ceasefire, Israeli Forces Ramp Up Destruction of Homes in Southern Lebanon” offers a roundabout summary of Hezbollah’s origins: “The group, formed in the early 1980s as a civil war consumed Lebanon, was created with support from Iran and sought to expel Israeli forces from Lebanese territory.” The piece went on to discuss some details of the present destruction in south Lebanon, including footage from a video posted to X on April 24 in which
two excavators can be seen destroying solar panels in the Christian border town of Debel, where a photo last month showed a soldier taking what appeared to be an axe to a statue of Jesus.
In a statement to NBC News that can be safely filed under the can’t-make-this-shit-up category, the Israeli army “said…that the damage to the solar panels was not in line with its values, and that disciplinary measures had been taken.” Here’s praying that corporate journalists might someday have the balls to take Israel to task on more existential matters.
It may be giving “journalists” too much credit to think that they are capable of making moral judgments in their stories. They are there to record the action. And while romantic movies like Under Fire treat their reporter protagonists as heroes who side with the underdogs in their war reporting, the recent film Civil War gives a more realistic picture. There the two photographers are out for the scoop and to make a name for themselves. They are also adrenaline junkies for whom the danger itself is a high.
Meanwhile it’s the editors back at headquarters who are manufacturing consent and shaping narratives. Phil Weiss once estimated that roughly fifty percent of his NYC reporter colleagues and editors were Jewish. As long as Israel was not too overtly acting like South Africa then this outsized presence could comfortably make the Muslims the villains since it’s a safe bet that very few of them are reporters in New York or DC.
All of which is to say that when it comes to manufacturing consent you need a consent factory. The NY Times once owned swaths of timber land in Canada and a pulp mill to turn out the rolls of paper they needed every day. Pixels are cheaper but the MSM bigfoot legacy lingers on. That may not last though.
It’s naive in the extreme to assume that reporters have much say — or even any say — in what ultimately goes out, as NC’s Conor Gallagher will tell you.
US media enterprises employ — or, anyway, ’employed’ in the historical sense since the MSM continues to decline — rooms full of copy editors to continually rewrite pieces which reporters turn in so as to, firstly, comply with the ‘norms’ which their employer wants to promote (e.g. the NYT’s continual ‘Here’s What You Need To Know About XYZ’ heds, a perfect illustration of Sheldon Wolin’s ‘Inverted Totalitarianism’ thesis in action) and, secondly, to dumb the pieces down.
As regards the second, as an experiment I once wrote an 800-1000 word piece in which I purposefully included as many politically non-controversial but counterintuitive — contrary to widely-assumed popular belief — facts. The copy desk promptly ‘corrected’ everyone of those facts to the false conventional wisdom.
If you then argue with a copy desk — and by implication with editors, PCM types who conceptualize their own standing in terms of how many lower-ranked employees, like copy editors, they have under their supervision — more than once or twice, you are risking your continued employment as a journalist.
This isn’t to say it’s any different nowadays from how it was in the days of Hearst and Luce. ‘Freedom of the press is only guaranteed to those who own one’ has always been the case.
Sooner or later, if you’re someone with any concern for the truth and you’re reporting for the MSM, you will –as Chris Hedges did with the NYT, for whom he used to write — have to show yourself to the door and leave.
If someone is writing articles that are then turned into propaganda and published by their bosses with the original someone’s name on the byline, they aren’t a journalist in the first place.
They are just another cog in the propaganda mill.
How?
Because markets? ( the news outlets are for sale. / ;)
From JImmy Dore.
Ultra Zionist Bari Weiss Put In Charge Of CNN! ! w/ Garland Nixon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVGM_lQmrlM
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the
EarthMICIMATT? 😹The birth of Full Spectrum Dominance? Mono-militarism?
Doesn’t the term “ethnic cleansing” itself obscure what’s really happening? As far as I can tell, the term was invented by the perpetrators (Serbs in Yugoslavia) to describe their horrific acts and, for some reason, adopted by the NYT and other outlets, not to mention the UN Security Council.
No, it has a meaning in international law. That is why it was used in Serbia. as part of the war crimes cases.
It might be worth noting that foreign press (including BBC) said it would be illegal for them to accept an invitation to send reporters to cover the Ukrainian drone attack that killed students at the teacher’s college in the Donbas, so the incident went unreported in the West. It is apparently not BBC policy to act lawfully when they are breaking into Lebanon. (Also those students were murdered by Palantir. Alex Karp admitted that he provided targeting to the Ukrainians).
The BBC is in an “information war”. Of course they won’t do anything that might help confirm a “Russian narrative.”
Here is a memorable (and entertaining) example of this imperative in action:
BBC Reporter Discourages Syria Questions Due To “Information War” With Russia
The video is here:
Admiral Lord West Casts Doubt on Syria Attack Intelligence
The whole short segment (6:46) is worth watching; the key admission comes at 4:04:
Whoa. Wait a minute, did that just happen? Did a BBC reporter just suggest that it could possibly be “inadvisable” for a retired naval officer to make public statements questioning what we’re being told to believe about Syria? That the conversation shouldn’t even be had? That the questions shouldn’t even be asked? Because we’re trying to win an “information war”? Did McVeigh really suggest that the intelligence of the same war machine which led us into Iraq on false pretenses should not be questioned at the risk of “muddying the waters”? –Caitlin Johnstone
Jonathan Cook chimed-in on this a few days ago in a post:
How Israel planned the Gaza genocide decades ago
As the US cosmologist Carl Sagan famously observed: “You have to know the past to understand the present.”
Which is precisely why western politicians and media have been so careful to strip out the past, excising the context and background, such as Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing campaigns of 1948 and 1967, that explain Israel’s behaviour in the present – in Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon.
Western audiences, deprived of the region’s history, have been more easily manipulated into believing that Israeli atrocities are a response – and a supposedly “proportionate” one, at that – to Hamas’ one-day attack on Israel in late 2023.
It should be obvious to all by now that there is little daylight between Chosen People and Nazis: a fascist is a fascist.
The 80s and 90s were the beginning of the hollowing out of the American little democracy. It started with Reagan and went to Bill NAFTA Clinton! Hey, but who’s paying attention to history!? What’s stunning is how many people think Trump is the beginning of fascism. He’s the result of many, many years of corporate plunder and spineless Democrats and greedy, racist Republicans. The concentration of wealth, the monopolized media, basically a march toward a fractured Republic. We are broken!— Eddie Pepitone
As many of us here realize, in the USA, in 1992 and shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bulwark against fascism crumbled when the democrat party abandoned its traditional base to fully embrace the corporatocracy, just as the republicans had done years earlier. A majority of Americans are against fascism, against genocide and ethnic cleansing, but in this “2-party system” that’s now entirely managed and controlled by fascists, they have no voice or representation in government, let alone in the corporate-owned legacy media, and no chance of effecting change within the current system.
The government of the USA has financed and facilitated the genocide: ending the genocide begins here. It begins by ending the safe ground of ignorance and by exposing and condemning the complicity of those who enable our present system of governance to continue. We must end fascism and return to democracy, or else share the Palestinian fate.
Yes!
I agree with Carl Sagan’s remark. A piece of the past unmentioned so far is the Cold War and it’s hard to overestimate the damage anti-Communist ideology did to American culture and education.
Post WW2, oil was crucial to the West and the ME was vital to American interests. In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser, a revolutionary, rose to power in Egypt, the largest Arab country. Nasser was a Socialist and he introduced socialist policies. He nationalized the Suez Canal. His popularity in the Arab world skyrocketed but the worst thing was he worked closely with the Soviet Union. Syria was also cozy with the Soviets but Nasser was different because he wanted to create a united pan-Arab world across the ME. Commies controlling the ME was unacceptable.
Is this atmosphere, Israel also made some choices–Nasser was anti-Zionist–and after its 1967 war, but especially the 1973 Yom Kippur war it showed itself as a potential force in support of US policy.
Now, of course, Israel has gone way off the road and has become a criminal enterprise and a danger to US interests, as well as its neighbors.
A good definition of what ” authority exercised abusively ” looks like is found in “A Resistance History of the United States” by Tad Stoermer…. I have not read through it all yet but, I recommend it’s reading highly….
“Using governmental power to serve those holding it rather than those they were supposed to represent”
My first impression: A must read. A clarifying and fundamentally important work.
I rarely come across something like this.
But who will push back against this normalisation of Israeli expansion? A recent article in NC explained that this is simply a justified creation of buffer zones for state security – and the comments were mostly about this as a serious proposition, not that the whole thesis was Zionist bullshit.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Bertrand Russell’s last letter, dated January 31, 1970 discussed Israel’s expansion.
It still is relevant after 56 years.
Russell wrote:
“After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and suggested “negotiations”.”
https://abdelmoumenchouichi.medium.com/bertrand-russells-last-message-israel-palestine-war-694eb7a7a99e
Part of it is also those who formerly were appalled by apartheid and ethnic cleansing, who previously opposed South African apartheid or supported the intervention in Rwanda or Bosnia-Herzgovina, upon having taken public positions against Russia for intervening in Ukraine on the same humanitarian grounds, and supporting Israeli atrocities regardless of anything, have now logically contradicted themselves on the topic.
Likewise, having been anti-war, now having become pro-war against Russia, and contradicted themselves on that too.
And having contradicted themselves, no longer able, without loss of face or absurdity to oppose genocide or ethnic cleansing or war, they are now unlikely to speak out, have effectively silenced themselves, unless they admit to being wrong on something.
Which most are too prideful to do. Better someone else die than admit to being wrong.
How to get the entire left to abandon its principles overnight.
You have to wonder how those so-called ‘journalists’ manage to sleep at night.
Has Western journalism sunk to such a low point where only the totally amoral take such jobs?