In early October 2024, Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University gave an interview to the online news site Electronic Intifada. In it he explained that there is a “huge gap” between the academic (evidence-based) understanding of aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (such as the Jewish supremacist nature of Israeli society and its resulting apartheid policies) and the mainstream media assumptions about (a “democratic” and “progressive”) Israel. The latter define the popular and official reporting about that country and its Zionist ideology. 

Massad’s observation describes a problem that distorts more than just views of Israel. The United States has a popular and official perception, again promoted by mainstream media, of itself and the world encapsulated by catch words such as freedom, capitalism, progress, individualism, morality etc. Other countries develop their own fanciful self-images. However, in the case of the U.S. and Israel, the two images have merged in the storyline delivered to U.S. citizens by the mass media for at least the last hundred years.*

So strong is this merger that, in the case of President Joe Biden and his government, this shared identity necessitates an unquestioning support of Israel’s “right of self-defense” even when “defense” covers up offense and offense amounts to the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of the Palestinians. The end product of this remarkable act of collective self-deception is the U.S. government’s complicity in an ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza enclave, and U.S. domestic approval of the suppression of pro-Palestine protests—in violation of America’s own standards of free speech.

Israel’s Media-Shaped World

There is nonetheless a growing, but still small, segment of U.S. citizens willing to look beyond the mainstream media. For those who do so, the discrepancy between popular perceptions and evidentiary reality is relatively easy to spot. This is because there are alternative sources of information on the peripheries (not all of it reliable, of course) and, combined with a modicum of critical thinking skills, one can learn to judge the evidence. 

This is much harder for Israeli Jews. In the Zionist state not only have the national media, with only rare exceptions, been co-opted to promote a popular mythology but all the schools, colleges and universities as well. Most information related to the conflict with the Palestinians is censored and the resulting closed information environment has been getting more and more restrictive. Indeed, over the past twenty years (picking up a lot of steam since October 2023), views opposing official ones are considered seditious. And this in turn has paved the way for today’s popular Zionist approval of barbarism. Here is how the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy (one of the last critical media voices in the country) describes the present Israeli state of mind:

“Over the past year, Israel has united around several assumptions: firstly, that the massacre of 7 October had no context whatever, occurring solely because of the innate bloodthirstiness of Palestinians in Gaza. Secondly, all Palestinians bear the burden of guilt for Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians. Thirdly, after this terrible massacre, Israel is allowed to do anything. No one anywhere has the right to try to stop it. [For instance] wreak destruction indiscriminately across the [Gaza] territory; and kill more than 40,000 people, including many women and children. Barbarism has become legitimized in both Israeli discourse and the army’s behavior. Humanity was removed from the public conversation.”

Facts supporting Levy’s judgments are readily available in English on worldwide web sites such as Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, among others. But these are not mainstream broadcasters and so the majority of Americans, and almost no Israeli Jews, ever see full and accurate reports on what is really going on in the Occupied Territories, south Lebanon and other regional areas subject to Israeli attack. Ignorance is not bliss in this regard, it is the equivalent of living a lie.

From an Evidentiary Point of View 

Let’s take a look at an example of how this internal propaganda creates a delusional state of mind first in Israel and then the U.S. In mid-November 2023, the UK’s Sky News posted an interview with a 29 year old Israeli pilot who flies F-15 jets against Gaza targets. The pilot, who comes across as a personable fellow, told the interviewer that “Every civilian casualty is tragic whether it is in Gaza or in Israel.” However, he added that “the Israeli air force aborts attacks if civilians are identified on the ground.” The pilot insists that “every operation that is undertaken, both in the air and on ground, is 1. Hamas related and 2. Cleared in order to avoid civilian casualties.” Under the circumstances this pilot follows every order with a clear conscience. And, why wouldn’t he? He lives in a world where he is part of the “most moral army in the world,” where “all military operations are legitimate and proportionate and all civilian casualties are unintended.”

There is little doubt that the pilot believes what he is saying. Indeed, he sounds much less callous than the Israelis described by Gideon Levy. Of course, pilots fly fast and high enough to never clearly see the slaughter they cause. For the Israeli infantry things are different. On the ground, the demoralizing force of continuous combat will likely lead to an increasing morale problem. To date this trend has been largely countered by the fact that these soldiers have been raised and educated in a media-shaped world (only now clashing with an evidentiary one). However, cracks are forming and there are reports of refusals to return, over and again, to the multiplying number of Israeli front lines.

Seen through the window of the real evidentiary world, the pilot and his fellow citizen soldiers are now replicating the behavior of the past oppressors of the Jews. In doing so they are helping to destroy international law and the standards of human rights. In fact, they are all doing their part in a nationwide display of barbarism.

Let us take another look through the window into the evidentiary world. This time we will compare reality to the performance of Mathew Miller, who has served as spokesperson for the United States Department of State since 2023. His job is to explain U.S. actions in a rationalizing way and his speciality is half-truths. He has a harder job than the pilot because many of those he is speaking to, primarily the Washington press corp, have access to information (sometimes first hand information) that contradicts the worldview Miller promotes. However the reporters can’t do much about it except to tut-tut and roll their eyes. Most of their editors are under enormous cultural and political pressure to stay the course supporting the pro-Israeli line — and countervailing  evidence be damned.

Here is an example of the kind of misleading half-truths that Miller and his bosses spin. On 19 September 2024, Miller was asked to respond to criticism that “the US calling for calm [in Gaza] while continuing to arm Israel was not a successful strategy for reducing tensions in the Middle East.” The contradiction presented was an obvious one, so how did Miller finesse it? He replied, “We are mandated – we are required by statute to guarantee that … Israel has a qualitative military edge over rivals in the region. It’s not a discretionary question.” What Miller leaves out here is that, by law, this mandate is conditional. There are at least three U.S. laws that make it so: 

+ The Leahy Law, which prohibits the U.S. Government from using funds for assistance to foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating them in the commission of gross violations of human rights.

+ The Genocide Convention Implementation Act, provides for criminal penalties for individuals who commit or incite others to commit genocide.

+ The Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids the provision of assistance to a government which “engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” This Act also bars military assistance to states impeding U.S. humanitarian aid. 

In September, 2024, according to UN sources, 90% of all humanitarian aid for the Palestinians, including American aid, was delayed or denied by the Israelis. Israel’s violation of all of these U.S. laws has been testified to by every credible human rights organization on the planet. The Biden administration and Congress have ignored the evidence and the humanitarian laws.

Ironically, this overall situation has generated anti-Zionist sentiment worldwide that the Israel labels antisemitism, which they then use to garner support for their barbarism.

Another Example of Our Media-Shaped World

Though U.S. attitudes toward the present situation in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, specifically the genocide in Gaza, are the most notable examples of Americans living in a mostly media-shaped world, it is not the only ongoing case. The devastating war in Ukraine has also been distorted—again by not presenting a full story. 

The full story about the Russian invasion of Ukraine would have informed the public that, against the advice of American diplomats expert in relations with Russia, U.S. politicians pushed the eastward expansion of NATO after the December 1991collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time it was easy to do so because the new Russian Republic was in political and economic disarray. Today, the disarray has passed and the Russians have repeatedly expressed the fact that they feel threatened by “an encroaching NATO.” By the way, they did try to negotiate the issue as Ukraine turned toward the West and sought to join both the European Union and NATO. Western rejection of Russia’s efforts to negotiate helped  triggered the Russian invasion.

Conclusion

Mainstream media in the U.S. has been co-opted to the point that, at least on issues of foreign policy, it is little more than a vehicle for government agitprop. As Jonathan Cook puts it, “They are not journalists. They are propagandists for their governments.”

Can most of us tell the difference between biased reporting and what is really going on? If that reporting conforms to a standing cultural worldview, the answer may well be no. The problem becomes worse when most of our friends, neighbors and family members actively treat the media reports as true. 

By now it should be obvious just how dangerous this situation can be. American wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine (and this is just the short list) have garnered popular support through selectively biased reporting and government deception. The willingness of Israeli Jews to turn themselves into an approximation of the past oppressors of their European forefathers, with the full support of numerous American administrations, is likewise based on an incomplete and biased history, reported over and over, to the point that, until recently, it appeared as prima facie true.

One might have hoped that a good liberal education would have inculcated most citizens with the ability to recognize and resist this flaw in media and political chatter, but this was not to be. The job of education has always included turning out loyal citizens and not independent thinkers. And now, even what liberal education does take place, is dying out.

There is no easy answer. We are victims of our cultures, the manipulative power of our media-allied leaders, as well as our genetic roots that urge us in the direction of tribalism. Those who resist all this may be saner for the effort, but they are also seen as “social mistakes.”

*See Lawrence Davidson, America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood, (2001).

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