At least 43 Palestinians, including 9 minors, have been killed so far this year by Israeli fire and whilst the death toll of Israeli settlers and soldiers is officially more than four times less, the Western media continue to refrain from properly covering the killings of Palestinians. So what does this tell us about how the conflict is covered and why do Zionist lives matter more to the West?

Israeli occupation forces have killed more than one Palestinian for each day of the year so far and this is without any war or major military escalation as of yet. Last year represented the deadliest year for West Bank Palestinians since 2005, according to the UN, with this year's death toll indicating that 2023 may well be much more violent. Despite the Zionist public having voted in an openly fascistic coalition to run the occupying entity, one that espouses rhetoric about violating not only international law but also US foreign policy, Western media is still in a love affair with the Apartheid regime.

There is barely any coverage when Palestinians are killed, even when there is clear video evidence of civilians being murdered that goes viral on social media. When the Western media does decide to cover stories about Palestinians being murdered, they are quick to oversimplify, use sanitized language and rob the context from the ongoing situation on the ground; guilty of this are outlets all the way from the Associated Press and Reuters to Fox News and MSNBC. 

However, when a Palestinian man in his twenties walked into the illegal settlement of Neve Yaakov, late last month, shooting dead 7 Israeli settlers, the attack was wrongfully detailed and the context of the incident was entirely misrepresented. What was most telling was that most media outlets, including the BBC, described the location of the shooting to have been a “neighborhood in Jerusalem” and refused to call it an illegal settlement, which de-facto served as recognition by the biased Western media that the settlements are legitimate and part of “Israel”. This position is not even held by any Western government, with even the US opposing settlements at least on a surface level in rhetoric. It was additionally notable that the incident received wall-to-wall coverage and was portrayed as an anti-Semitic terrorist attack, comparable to the coverage expected if the incident had occurred in London or Paris. 

Just one day prior, however, Israeli occupation forces had committed a massacre in the Jenin refugee camp, killing a total of 10 and injuring many others. "Israel’s" rampage inside the densely populated camp included the blocking of ambulances, firing tear gas into a nearby hospital, shooting an old woman in the throat twice and then in the chest. It also included using a military jeep to crush the skull of a Palestinian man they had already shot and was laying on the road. The death toll of the incident in Jenin refugee camp was much higher than the revenge attack, carried out by Khairi Alkam, against illegal Israeli settlers, yet the settlers received more attention than the Palestinian refugees. The fact that the illegal settlement of Neve Yaakov is a war crime, and that the settlers killed participated in that war crime, did not matter to the Western media and they simply decided to build a mythical narrative about a “synagogue shooting” in a peaceful “Jewish neighborhood”, when there was no attack inside or on the grounds of the synagogue nearby and the area is literally a Palestinian free zone by way of force.

Related News

Germany: Sacrificing academic freedom for the sake of 'Israel'

Israeli manpower shortages offer a firm reckoning of Gaza genocide

All of the above is expected when it comes to the way Western media cover the conflict, this is because to the racist Western media and the racist governments of the West, "Israel" is part of the “garden” and their soldiers are “gardeners”, to borrow the terminology from the European Union’s foreign minister Joseph Borrell. The Israelis are tantamount to an outpost for Western civilization in the eyes of the West, they are representatives of “liberal democracy” and separate the “garden” from the “jungle” as Mr. Borrell puts it. This is why US President Joe Biden claimed that the settlement revenge shooting was “an attack against the civilized world”, the same “civilized world” that assassinated Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh last year and then wrote contradictory reports to white-wash the murder of a veteran journalist who was even a US citizen. Simply put, Palestinians lives don't matter to the Western world, whilst Jewish-Israeli lives are sacred, even if those Israelis are illegal settlers brandishing firearms. 

So when Palestinians are massacred, nothing is done and the most that will happen is a call for “both sides” to refrain from escalating the situation. When Israelis are killed on a much smaller scale, however, the West and its complicit media are there on scene to lie for "Israel", to aid them, and to provide funding, weapons and expertise in order to kill Palestinians as revenge. Palestinians, no matter how badly they suffer, are always preached to - even by some pro-Palestinian Westerners - to react with purely peaceful means and told that they should never result to force, whilst Israelis are armed and funded to the teeth so that they can “protect themselves”.

What happens when Palestinians take the advice, the West gives them and they turn to non-violent struggle, quoting international law and peacefully asking for their rights? Take the example of the Great Return March in the Gaza Strip, which began on the 30th of March, 2018. Palestinians in their hundreds of thousands showed up to the separation barrier between Gaza and Israeli-occupied historic Palestine, they didn’t kill a single Israeli in over a year of protests. What happened? Over 300 Palestinian civilians were shot dead by Israeli snipers sitting hundreds of meters away, tens of thousands of others were also wounded, many of them suffering life-changing injuries and many of those were denied medical treatment by “Israel”.

Live on camera, week after week, unarmed men, women, children, disabled people, journalists, medical workers and the elderly were all shot dead by Israeli soldiers who even filmed themselves laughing whilst doing it. What was the reaction from the West to this mass non-violent protest movement? The Western government ignored it almost completely and the Western media spun the following fake narrative to protect "Israel": “Israel was defending its border against Hamas-organized riots for fear of its safety and may have occasionally used excessive force”. The reality you may ask? There is no border between Gaza and “Israel”, it doesn’t exist anywhere in law or on paper, the protests were not riots and Hamas was not the principal organizer, nor was any force necessary. When the UN and internationally respected human rights organizations inspected "Israel’s" claims, they found that the Western narrative was completely false, however, the shameless Western media continued to report on it in the same way they had been doing, if they even bothered to report on the demonstrations at all.

When do the Palestinian people receive proper attention in the media you may ask? It is when the Palestinian resistance are shooting dead soldiers, killing settlers or firing rockets. When "Israel" is threatened and Israeli lives are being taken, the Western media are all over it and the Western governments all show up to offer their diplomatic, financial, and military support to the Zionist entity. The game is clear, the Western corporate media is racist against Palestinians and does not value their lives, so when they are killed, it is as if they are somehow responsible for their own deaths. Whether it be the AP, BBC, Reuters all the way to party-partisan US media like MSNBC and Fox News, they all fall in line to dehumanize Palestinians in one way or another, never treating them as equals and never giving them the legitimacy as a people to rise up and fight for their dignity. The Israelis, according to the Western narrative, are permitted to use violence to uphold their hierarchy of racial and religious supremacy, to “mow the lawn” so that the “jungle” will not overcome the “garden”, so when the guardian of the “garden” suffers losses, the world pays attention.

Palestinians at this point have no other option but to turn to armed struggle, non-violent struggle alone cannot work and the neighboring countries have either normalized with the Zionist entity or have been so weakened by war that they are not capable of intervening in any significant way. The only way that the world will listen, is if Israelis are killed, because unfortunately nobody cares when Palestinians are. The only ones to blame for this scenario are the Apartheid regime itself and its Western enablers, who ripped the hope out of the Palestinians and forced them to live a hellish life without land, dignity, or representation.