Carrying water for Israel. The Guardian’s racist framing of Palestinians.

.

The Guardian is once again amplifying Israeli propaganda this morning by deploying the following tricks:

(a) Israeli hostages have smiling pictures and names (above). The 9,700 Palestinian hostages are just faceless numbers in The Guardian and are called ‘prisoners’ if they are mentioned at all.

(b) Deploying the phrase ‘Netanyahu says’ or ‘Israel says’ allows The Guardian to parrot Israeli propaganda free of moral reproach as if it were news. Relaying the lies of Israel without comment or challenge is an editorial CHOICE – not an act of journalism. A choice it makes on a daily basis.

(c) It is Netanyahu that does not want a peace deal and this Israeli PR gambit is all part of a banal attempt to disguise that fact.

(d) There is no mention in this headline of how these hostages died, just the implied insinuation that Hamas killed them. It is FAR MORE LIKELY that they died from the mass indiscriminate Israeli bombing campaign of Gaza.

(e) The Guardian never mentions how spectacularly unsuccessful Israeli attempts to recover the hostages have been – with just EIGHT recovered alive in ten months of mass slaughter in Gaza. An actual journalist might wonder just how committed Israel really is to getting its hostages back, easily surmising that Israel has no real interest in the timely rescue of the hostages, for they are way more use to Netanyahu as unrescued excuses for genocide.

(f) A real journalist would have noted that Israel has never had any interest in a ceasefire in Gaza and has never negotiated in good faith, constantly moving the goalposts and refusing to offer the very thing the talks were supposed to be about – a permanent cease fire.

(g) Buried underneath the big headlines about Israel’s hostages is sotto voce coverage of Israel’s horrific ongoing assaults on the West Bank. The Guardian’s choice to parrot Israeli lies prominently while offering whisper quiet ‘coverage’ (buried deep in their Live Blog) about ethnic cleansing and crypto-fascist pogroms going on in the illegally occupied West Bank is a typically racist framing of Western settler colonialism on the rampage.

(h) Through the Guardian’s lens, Palestinians are thousands of times less important than Israeli lives. This is not news coverage but social conditioning – you are being invited to casually accept that some people’s lives matter way more than others and that Israel can ignore all legal and moral standards so long as the targets are Palestinians.

(i) Israel’s endless juxtaposition of all Palestinians with Hamas and then Hamas with terrorism is carefully calculated racism, designed to offer a fig leaf of morality to Israel and their western backers. The Guardian is happy to repeat these juxtapositions as though the job of a journalist is simply to copy and paste the propaganda of the powerful.

By contrast, The Guardian will never repeat the simple fact that Hamas is resisting an illegal invasion of Palestine and that Israel has no legal case whatsoever to call military resistance on occupied land ‘terrorism’. Note the double standard with Ukraine.

(j) Although nothing can justify Hamas targeting of civilians on October 7th, The Guardian rarely notes that Israel chose to murder many of its own civilians that day and has gone on to kill 186,000+ civilians in Gaza. Who are the most powerful terrorists here? The Guardian chooses not to ask such questions for it knows the answer perfectly well.

Hiding its pro establishment biases in the long grass of a faux ‘journalistic balance’ is the product that The Guardian sells on behalf of the powerful, it is what makes The Guardian Media Group such an insidious and dangerous tool of propaganda.

To give Israel’s press releases and the plight of Israel’s hostages, bombastic and sympathetic prominence after ten months of the relentless mass slaughter of Palestinians is a choice, indeed to call out Israel’s genocide for what it is – a contemporary holocaust – would be grounds for getting your account banned as a commenter and instant dismissal as an employed hack.

The Guardian is not a newspaper, it is not journalism – it is an business that packages the propaganda gambits of western imperialism for western audiences, always for sale to whoever it perceives to be the winning team. Institutionally racist – it gaslights the world that it holds the powerful to account – nothing could be further from the truth.