How the German media protect Israeli Apartheid

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Renowned journalist and pro-Palestine activist Gideon Levy once said that the Israeli media was "the biggest collaborator with the Israeli occupation." This indictment was made in 2019 at London’s Palestine Expo, the largest pro-Palestinian solidarity event in Europe, long before Amnesty International branded "Israel" as an Apartheid state and an ultranationalist right-wing regime came to power in a political entity that has had no shortage of them since "Israel's" bloody inception on ethnically cleansed land three quarters of a century ago.

Today, with otherwise passive Israeli liberals taking to the streets in record numbers to protest the demons of their own making (albeit for their own selfish reasons of safeguarding an ill-gotten settler colonial status quo and not out of solidarity with the ever-worsening situation for Palestinians under occupation) and the de-facto annexation of a West Bank already riddled beyond recognition by the malignant tumours that are illegal Israeli settlements, there seems to be a tentative shift in the attitudes of the liberal Israeli media, which Levy in that 2019 speech in London directly blamed for Israeli society’s wilful denial about what is going on in Palestine.

Following the transfer of governmental powers over the Occupied West Bank to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who proudly describes himself as “a fascist homophobe”, leading Israeli daily Haaretz ran an editorial titled “Israel's Cabinet Just Advanced Full-fledged Apartheid in the West Bank”, which was celebrated by Palestinian commentators as a long overdue admission.

In fact, Haaretz, the newspaper of choice for Israelis who identify as left-leaning, has for some time now been using the A-word in the context of "Israel", from Levy himself in his impactful op-eds all the way up to the newspaper’s publisher, an unapologetic Zionist who once responded to criticism by a Mizrahi woman on Twitter with the following sexist and racist comment: “Insolent woman. My family led the Zionist movement when you were still swinging from trees.”

Whether the liberal Israeli media’s cautious step from collaboration towards counter-narration is indicative of a broader and lasting change in attitudes within liberal-left Israeli society remains to be seen (Palestinians understandably remain sceptical).

But what is painstakingly clear already is that the media in far away Germany, whose genocide of the European Jew constituted the climax of centuries of anti-Semitic persecution on the continent and remains to this day the de-facto get-out-of-jail-free card that shields "Israel’s" repression in Palestine against any attempt at accountability, are not backing down from their pro-Apartheid truth-faking anytime soon (unlike Haaretz, liberal-left German media still refuse to acknowledge that "Israel" is an Apartheid state).

After the Nablus massacre, the German media’s pro-Zionist machinery went into full damage control overdrive, employing all tricks of the trade, tendentious reporting, suggestive wording, lying by omission, you name it, in a desperate attempt to salvage the unsalvageable: namely the reputation of a violent and racist entity with which Germany boasts a special relationship, characterised by what it calls “unbridled solidarity”, no matter how many Palestinians "Israel" murders in the Occupied West Bank or bombs in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Take the tagesschau news website for example, an offshoot of state-funded ARD television channel’s eponymous nightly news broadcast, which according to a Statista market research report from 2022 was Germany’s most trusted news source. In response to "Israel’s" brutal invasion of Nablus, during which the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) murdered over 10 Palestinians, among them two children and an elderly woman, tagesschau posted this misleading headline and subtitle on its homepage (I have translated all following tagesschau quotes from the original German):

“Multiple dead during Israeli military operation”, followed by the subtitle “In an anti-terrorism operation in Nablus in the West Bank, the Israeli military has killed more than ten people, according to Palestinian sources. More than 100 are said to be wounded. The city is known as a hotbed for militant Palestinians.”

This is a perfect example of how truth is all too often not told, but manufactured, by way of some simple rhetorical tweaks that result in a more desirable outcome for the agenda-abiding “journalist” who is tasked with pulling the wool over their readers’ eyes. Just the word “during” is ingenious in its propagandistic power as it masterfully obliterates any correlation between the “dead” and the “military operation.”

If the virulent anti-Palestinian racism that guides German news reporting would not exist, Nablus would not be described as “a hotbed of militant Palestinians”, but as an incubator of valiant Palestinian resistance against a violent occupying force (not a day goes by without “objective” Western media glorifying the heroism of Ukrainian fighters, by the way). Murdered Palestinians would not be downgraded to dead Palestinians, as if they suddenly dropped dead from a mysterious illness and not from premeditated Israeli bullets fired by trigger-happy soldiers who hate Palestinians with a fiery passion.

As if the content of this particular headline and accompanying subtitle wasn’t bad enough, the fact that one had to scroll past six other news items to reach this one, meaning that tagesschau deliberately demoted a story that was headline news across all justice-centred media, traditional and social, made it so much worse.

But "Israel’s" anti-Palestinian repression did not stop there, and neither did the German media’s dirty work of sanitising the Apartheid state’s image after the fact: as Jewish settlers, aided by the IOF, were executing their night-time pogrom in Huwara and social media was ablaze with horrific videos of burning Palestinian houses and gleeful settlers dancing in celebration of their own cruelty (all this just days after the Nablus massacre and on the same day emissaries from the Palestinian Authority were in Jordan engaging with their Israeli oppressors in what Ghassan Kanafani once famously described as a “conversation between the sword and the neck”), tagesschau did at first glance not even mention what was unfolding in Huwara, much less treat the events as the breaking news they deserved to be.

Instead, they decided to run a piece titled: “Israel wants the death penalty for terrorists”, with the last sentence of a long subtitle being, “The attack [on two Israeli settlers] overshadowed a meeting in Jordan and in the evening led to riots.”

Not only did tagesschau once again intentionally de-prioritise a Palestine-related news item (I had to scroll past seven headlines to stumble across this one), they deliberately ran a comparatively low-intensity story designed to divert attention away from the pogrom unfolding in Huwara in order to create an image of calm and business as usual, while Israelis were in reality unleashing hellfire on a defenceless civilian population whose land they illegally occupy.

And why would the pro-Israel propagandists at tagesschau refer to the events in the past tense, which implies that an action has ended, when the pogrom was still ongoing at the moment of publication? For the same reason they downgraded a pogrom to a “riot” in the hope of deflecting from the unambiguous culpability of the clear-cut offender by redistributing blame to the victim.

Ambiguous wording could also be found the next morning on the tagesschau website: Unable to further hide what was going on in Huwara, they begrudgingly ran a piece with the generic and lazy copy-paste headline used so often by Western media in the context of Palestine: “Escalation of violence in the West Bank” (again failing to mention who was responsible for the violence), subtitle: “Only hours after a Palestinian attack on two Israelis in the West Bank, alleged revenge actions by Jewish settlers have occurred.”

Notice the strategic use of the word “alleged”, intended to sow the seeds of doubt within the reader by craftily manufacturing a possibility that the accusations might be unfounded, even though the violence and who caused it was well-documented and therefore factual to a fault.

The day after that, Huwara had already slipped into media oblivion in Germany, with the only mention of Palestine on tagesschau being of "Israel: Judicial reform a danger for the economy?" the headline asked, while traumatised Palestinians were still in shock and reeling from the recent horrors. A day after that, there wasn’t even a mention of "Israel" anymore; clearly, Operation Protect Apartheid had been deemed a success in the eyes of the fake news factory workers at tagesschau.

For the German media, held hostage by a legitimate historic guilt through which they wrongly justify their pro-Zionist reporting, the Huwara pogrom provided an easy escape route to get on the right side of history for once when it comes to Palestine. 

But decades in captivity have resulted in a Stockholm syndrome that has clouded their judgment, which is why they failed to take advantage of that wide open window of opportunity, choosing instead to remain a prisoner of their destructive guilt (destructive because it continues to view the ongoing Nakba through the lens of the Holocaust and is therefore devoid of true responsibility) and to continue doing everything in their power to shield a genocidal Israel from accountability.

If Nablus and Huwara, two incidents of unvarnished barbarism where the delineation between hero and villain, oppressed and oppressor, couldn’t be anymore clearer, have revealed anything about the moral nature and true mandate of German media outlets such as tagesschau, it is that they are like the character “The Wolf” from Quentin Tarantino’s movie Pulp Fiction: nothing more than a mobster clean-up crew at a murder scene.