This article was first published by Karyn Taylor-Moore on her substack, you can find the original here

Way back in early April of this year we had a rally for Palestine here in Christchurch which had as its theme the phrase ‘Unmute Gaza’.

There were three speakers that day and each of them – in their own different way - spoke of how Palestinians, and the Palestinian cause, have been silenced for over 100 years and how lethal that silencing has been for the Palestinian people.

The first speaker talked about the roots of the current conflict and how they went much deeper than 1948. She talked about how they stretched, in fact, all the way back to 1897 and the official establishment of Zionism and how, through all the long years between then and now, the voices of Palestinians have been shut out and shut down.

And because of the geopolitical importance of Israel – a Western beachhead in the resource-rich Middle East – that story, in the telling and the re-telling. was allowed to blossom into a foundational myth that most people in the world believe to be the truth. Told and re-told by powerful politicians and massive media organisations the Israeli story ended up being the only story most of us ever heard. A story about a persecuted people– fleeing pogroms & hatred and the ultimate horror and evil of the Nazi Holocaust – a people without a land who arrived in a land without people and who made the desert bloom.

The dominance of that story – that foundational myth – meant that the Palestinian story - a story of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, Israeli brutality and loss - was buried, repressed, hidden, muted, covered up and eventually rendered invisible. Over time the Palestinian story was turned into something it was forbidden to mention in polite circles – indeed for many years Israelis and many of their American supporters denied that the original ethnic cleansing of Palestine, what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (the catastrophe), even occurred. And in Western countries – particularly the United States – anyone attempting to give voice to the Palestinian perspective on the conflict would often end up being accused of anti-semitism, or of wanting to destroy Israel, and the fear of such accusations, and their possible repercussions for people’s careers and lives, resulted in a cone of silence descending over the entire subject.

The second speaker at our rally that day talked about the silence of the New Zealand media. Addressing New Zealand journalists she’d come to know since the 2019 massacre here in Christchurch where 51 people were gunned down while worshipping at the Al Noir Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre she demanded of them:

when you looked me in the eye and you promised you would do better to hold yourself to higher standards when it comes to reporting on minorities and marginalised communities – where are you now?

She pointed out that hundreds of these journalists’ Palestinian colleagues have sacrificed their lives to provide documented evidence of the Israeli genocide so Western media can amplify their voices to the world and pressure governments to act but that despite “war crime after war crime after war crime – still our media won’t take responsibility for the fact that their silence is complicity and the blood of Palestinians is on their hands”. She closed by asking New Zealand journalists to stop for a minute and reflect on why they chose their profession. What were their hopes and dreams, what morals and values did they wish to uphold? And then she asked them to reflect back on the past 6 months to see if their journalism represented their personal journalistic integrity.

It was a powerful speech and it deserved to be heard by many, many more people than the few hundred-strong crowd gathered under leaden skies by the Bridge of Remembrance in Christchurch that day. It deserved, in fact it needed, to be heard by the very journalists she was addressing but sadly our rallies rarely make the news for the reasons our speakers had so eloquently outlined so there were no journalists there to hear it, or to report on it.

Our third speaker was live on the phone from Gaza, his voice amplified via a microphone so everyone could hear him - a 49-year-old man whose life had been destroyed by the horror unleashed by Israel. He was from Northern Gaza and when his family was first ordered to evacuate he and his wife were reluctant to leave their home. Imagine being asked – by an invading army that had regularly conducted bombing raids over your city for the last 18 years– to leave your home. To take whatever belongings you could carry and just leave. Would you want to leave? Would you?

They stuck it out for a while but the bombing of a nearby house frightened the man so badly he decided he and his family had to go. His wife still didn’t want to. She loved her home and was worried if they left they’d never return. He, frightened that if they stayed all their lives would be at risk, had to drag her out. He literally had to drag his wife out of the house, crying and begging him to let her stay, all the while knowing full well that if they left they would probably never come back but that if they didn’t leave they could all die. Imagine being faced with that choice.

I stood there and listened to that man – his voice cracking with emotion, fully aware of how impossible it was for him to fully convey the horror of what he was going through, the constant moving (he’d moved at least four, maybe five times), the smell of death and destruction, the sound of drones and planes and bombs, the hunger, the relentless fear – and I cried. I was fully aware my tears were of absolutely no use to him or to anyone else in Gaza but I was unable to stop them falling. He thanked those of us in that small crowd for standing up for the people of Gaza and he exhorted us to keep going, to keep talking about Israel’s war against the Palestinian people, to keep pushing against the relentless efforts to silence Palestinian voices.

I check into our various media sites here in New Zealand relatively regularly and often, day after day after day, there’ll be nothing at all about the horrors unfolding in Gaza. And if events there are reported the story will often be buried deep in the World section way down the bottom after far more “important” news about the woes of some celebrity, the latest peccadilloes of Donald J. Trump, some unfortunate person who has been eaten by a crocodile or a shark, or beaten up by a lunatic in a carpark in some small American town, or the trials and tribulations of the UK royal family. And because our major media outlets tend to regurgitate material from Reuters and Associated Press¹ the majority of the reportage that does exist so thoroughly sanitises and decontextualises the conflict that it sounds, to the casual observer, as if it’s ‘just a war over there’ between ‘those people who are always fighting’ and that Palestinian suffering is a ‘humanitarian crisis’ with no real source.

Here are a few typical headlines - and remember, the majority of people only read the headlines, just to illustrate this point:

Note the passive voice, the fact the huge toll estimated by the letter to The Lancet that is the subject of this report wasn’t mentioned in the headline or the lead paragraph, the phrasing of Israel’s assault on Gaza as ‘the conflict between Israel and Hamas’, the implication that the ‘fighting’ is between 2 equal foes.

*WHY are Palestinians ‘still struggling’ to access food and clean water??*

As Tameem, a Palestinian New Zealander I follow on Twitter/X notes, the phrase ‘West Bank Violence’ implies that the violence in question is being perpetrated by the Palestinians when it is, in fact, being perpetrated by Israeli settlers.

*Who is conducting the strikes? Why are these strikes aimed at a mosque? Was anyone killed or injured in these ‘strikes’?*

This last headline is one of the most egregious of them all - so egregious in fact that there was enough of an outcry about it from activists and independent journalists that the BBC was forced to change it to reflect the fact that IDF soldiers had set dogs on this man and then left him to die alone from his injuries.

It's now early August – over three months since the ‘Unmute Gaza’ rally here in Christchurch – and nothing has changed. The genocide goes on relentlessly. The horrors mount up relentlessly. And the media continues to ignore or obfuscate those horrors relentlessly.

And not only have our media been ignoring and obfuscating throughout the last nearly 10 months (and indeed throughout the many years before October 7, 2023) they have also consistently platformed Israeli spokespeople and officials while giving very little airtime to Palestinians. One of the worst examples of this here in New Zealand was our major public broadcaster, TVNZ (6 months into the ongoing genocide) giving the Israeli Ambassador to New Zealand, a man who should have been expelled from the country as soon as it became obvious what Israel was actually doing in Gaza, a platform to air his genocidal and profoundly racist views on one of its premier current events shows.

I have written about my puny efforts to hold TVNZ to account for this here and here.

TVNZ² then compounded its sins by conducting an interview with the Head of the New Zealand Delegation to Palestine two weeks later and using it as an opportunity to grill him – relentlessly – about the crimes of Hamas and provide yet another apologia for the Israeli genocide in Gaza which I write about, at length, here. TVNZ then claimed that this interview provided ‘balance’ to their interview with the Israeli Ambassador.

New Zealand media is not alone of course – this sort of journalistic malpractice is rampant across the Anglophone West. The reporting of the Palestinian Genocide by other Western media outlets – particularly in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia has been similarly shameful.

Two particularly egregious examples of Western media’s efforts to hide Israeli crimes have occurred just in the last few weeks - one being the failure of many outlets to report the revelation that Israel enacted its notorious ‘Hannibal Directive’ on October 7 - a story first reported by liberal Israeli outlet Haaretz - and the second being the extremely muted reporting of the arrest – for sexual abuse of a Palestinian detainee – of nine guards at the notorious Sde Teimen Detention Camp.

On 10 July, James North of Mondoweiss noted

Three days ago, Israel’s leading newspaper, Haaretz, published the results of its thorough, comprehensive investigation into what actually happened when Hamas attacked on October 7. So far, the U.S. mainstream media has not said a word about the shocking results of that investigation.

The next day, 11 July, an article in The Cradle pointed out the same thing, noting that

Despite a major Israeli daily confirming that the army killed many of its own soldiers and civilians on 7 October, corporate news outlets have chosen to stay silent”. Further noting that “a search of reports on the Israeli investigation in outlets like CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, BBC, Reuters, AP, the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, and others yielded no results.

The only major English-language outlets that had reported on the news at the time The Cradle article was published were The Guardian and The Independent. The Cradle noted that both attempted to downplay the revelations with headlines saying that the IDF “may have risked civilian lives” by invoking its “controversial” procedure known as the Hannibal Directive.

I did my own search 10 days later and as of 21 July there was, at least as far as I could see, still no sign of any reporting by the majority of Western legacy media on the results of the Israeli army’s investigation – although I did find one paywalled article from the Washington Post which did mention the Hannibal Directive. There was, however, nothing from Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC, CNN or the New York Times. Likewise here in little old New Zealand – crickets. Nothing from Radio New Zealand, TVNZ’s 1News, The New Zealand Herald, Newsroom or from Stuff.co.

I did another search on July 31 and found that The New Zealand Herald had, helpfully, published the Washington Post article so I could now read it. This report turned out to be about on the results of the Israeli army’s investigations into what happened at Kibbutz Be’eri, rather than about the Haaretz revelations regarding the use of the Hannibal Directive and only mentioned the Directive in passing as follows:

The report did not specify whether Israel’s notorious Hannibal directive was in effect at the time. The directive instructs troops to do anything in their power to prevent Israelis from being kidnapped, even if that puts their lives at risk.

As of 4 August still nothing from Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, CNN, or the New York Times. I also checked ABC (Australian Broadcasting ), and CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) – crickets. And here in New Zealand – still silence from Newsroom, Stuff.co, the New Zealand Herald, TVNZ’s 1News or Radio New Zealand.

Bear in mind that Hamas’ October 7 attack continues to be one of the single-most important news stories in Western media. A Google search of the phrase ‘October 7 attacks’ yields thousands of articles, many of which are very recent – i.e., within the last couple of weeks.

Given the intense media interest in the events of October 7 you would think that the Israeli military’s findings that Israel enacted the Hannibal Directive that day - and thus must certainly bear the blame for a not insignificant number of the deaths attributed to Hamas – would have been all over the front pages of every media outlet in the West. This, however, does not appear to be the case.

Then along came the revelations that a Palestinian detainee at Sde Tieman Detention was subjected to a gang rape which was so violent it ended up hospitalising him. These revelations provided a severe challenge to the standard shroud of silence policy taken by legacy media outlets towards allegations of the sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. This silence stands in stark relief against the obsessive interest in allegations – as yet unsubstantiated – of the use of rape and sexual abuse as a weapon of war by Hamas on October 7. Note the foregrounding of the words ‘rape’ and ‘sexual violence’ in the following headlines about allegations of Hamas using rape as a weapon of war, and then compare them to the headlines about the allegations of rape and sexual violence at Sde Teiman discussed below.

The nine guards accused of the rape - or should I say gang-rape - were arrested and riots broke out to free them. These riots were ultimately successful and the guards were released from custody. Obviously this was a story that had to be covered – but how to cover it?

Most major Western media outlets opted for the tried and true method of hiding news they’d rather not report by burying it deep in the body of the article, often in the last couple of paragraphs. This was a tactic employed by AP, Reuters, the New York Times, the BBC and the Washington Post. Given that journalists and sub-editors are fully aware of the fact that the vast majority of people don’t read past the headlines this tactic means, of course, that very few people will find out what those who are pulling the media’s strings don’t want them to find out. Note the lack of the words ‘sexual violence’, ‘sexual abuse’ and ‘rape’ in these headlines.

The New York Times even opted, in one article, to frame the story as a ‘battle for Israel’s soul’. Notice that there is no mention in either the headline or the lead paragraph of the fact that the soldiers were detained for sexual abuse - gang rape to be specific. There was also no indication of the viciously violent nature of this abuse - so violent in fact that the man was hospitalised with extremely severe, indeed life-threatening, injuries.

Compare this to the New York Times’ own hysterical coverage of the since debunked ‘Hamas mass rape’ story in their notorious article ‘Screams Without Words’ - an article which was syndicated in scores of other mainstream outlets around the world. Note the fore fronting of the phrase ‘sexual violence’ in the headline and the emotive words in the lead paragraph - ‘rape’, ‘mutilation’, and ‘extreme brutality’. All of these words could have been, and indeed should have been, used in describing what happened to the Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman but they were not.

Other legacy media – including, for some reason, most of the outlets here in New Zealand (TVNZ’s 1News, Newsroom, Stuff and the New Zealand Herald) made the editorial decision not to report on the story at all. As far as I can tell Radio New Zealand seem to be the only mainstream New Zealand outlet to have covered this story – re-publishing the above-mentioned report by the BBC in which any mention of the fact that the abuse the Palestinian detainees was subjected to was sexual was buried paragraphs deep.

And, adding grave insult to severe injury, there has also been silence in most mainstream Western media about the number of Palestinian journalists that have been killed - conservative estimates suggest at least 113 with other estimates suggesting over 160 - over the last 10 months in Gaza. No other world conflict has killed this many journalists in living memory.

As Mohamad Elmasry points out in an Opinion piece for Al Jazeera,

Israel has a long history of violently targeting journalists, so their Gaza kill total is not necessarily surprising.
In fact, a 2023 Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) report documented a “decades-long pattern” of Israel targeting and killing Palestinian journalists.

Elmasry further notes

Given this broader context, Israel’s targeting of journalists during the current genocide is genuinely not surprising, or out of the ordinary.
However, what is truly surprising, and even shocking, is the relative silence of Western journalists.

Elmasry suggests that Western news outlets may claim they have “simply been maintaining their devotion to stated Western reporting principles of detachment and neutrality”, but, as he goes on to point out that,

in other situations [such as the 2015 killing of 12 Charlie Hebdo journalists] Western journalists have shown that they are indeed capable of making quite a fuss, and also of demonstrating solidarity.
Following that attack, a genuine media spectacle ensued, with seemingly the entire institution of Western journalism united to focus on the event.
Thousands of reports were generated within weeks, a solidarity hashtag (“Je suis Charlie,” or “I am Charlie”) went viral, and statements and sentiments of solidarity poured in from Western journalists, news outlets and organisations dedicated to principles of free speech.

When juxtaposed against the massive outpouring of grief - and solidarity - following the Charlie Hebdo killings the lack of compassion and solidarity from Western journalists for their colleagues in Gaza is all the more shocking and it is hard not to view it as indicative of a very deep rot not only within Western journalism but within Western society in its entirety.

It is important to stress here that Western media’s long-standing malfeasance over the Israel-Palestine conflict is not just a matter of academic concern, it has had very severe real-world consequences - consequences which are reaching their crescendo right now in the Gaza genocide. Media framing of Israel as the perpetual victim of violent Palestinian terrorism, the “only democracy in the Middle East” with the “most moral army in the world” constantly defending itself against a tide of Arab barbarism threatening to engulf it, has resulted in ignorance, confusion and often outright hostility towards the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause. This, of course, is entirely intended because the less the public knows about the matter the less they’ll care, and the less they care the less public pressure there will be on Israel, and its chief benefactor the US, to end the occupation, oppression and injustice perpetrated against the Palestinians for the last 76 years.

A lot of people I’ve spoken to lately know vanishingly little about what has happened in Gaza since October 7 and absolutely nothing about anything that happened before that date. Indeed, a good friend of mine, an intelligent woman who keeps an eye on the news and likes to stay informed, didn’t even know who was bombing who. Was it Hamas or the Israelis who were accused of committing genocide? She didn’t know. She actually didn’t know.

This lack of knowledge is reflected in the findings of a March 21 poll by the Pew Research Centre in the United States that showed half of Americans didn’t know which side had a higher death toll – the Israelis or the Palestinians – despite the fact that at the time of the poll 32,000 Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis had been killed since October 7 – a casualty ratio of roughly 26 to 1.

Furthermore, 58% of Americans thought Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are valid but when asked about Hamas’ reasons for fighting Israel only 22% describe them as valid. This is not the slightest bit surprising given the framing of the Israel-Palestine situation as a ‘complicated’ conflict over land between ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ and a group of Islamic fundamentalist ‘terrorists’ who want to ‘destroy Israel’ and who ‘never wanted peace’.

This ignorance on the part of Western populations has been lethal for the Palestinians. It has provided cover for Israel to place Gaza under a brutal blockade since 2007 and to engage in periodic bombing raids resulting in the death & maiming of thousands of people. It has allowed Israel to steadily increase its illegal settlements in the West Bank, thus scuttling any possibility of the now mythical ‘two-state solution’. It has allowed Israel to subject the Palestinian people to a brutal and profoundly unjust apartheid system whereby they are treated as second-class citizens in their own land – forced to go through countless checkpoints to get to work or school, subjected to a multitude of humiliations and degradations dished out to them by Israeli soldiers and police and subjected to the perpetual threat of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment without charge. According to B’Tselem at the end of March 2024, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) was holding 8,611 Palestinians in detention or in prison on what it defined “security” grounds, including 1,141 from the Gaza Strip. At that time, the IPS was also holding 1,556 Palestinians, 7 of them from the Gaza Strip, for being in Israel illegally.

As for what is going on in Gaza right now, it is beyond horrific. Over a million people have been bombed and told to 'evacuate' over and over again. Each time they were told to go to a 'safe place' - but on their way to those 'safe places' they were bombed and sniped - and then when they got to the safe spaces they were bombed and sniped again. Many of those who defied evacuation orders and stayed behind were rounded up and tortured and sometimes even executed, most of them civilians - doctors, accountants, lawyers, mechanics - fathers, sons, brothers and sometimes even daughters and mothers and sisters. This pattern has been repeated - over and over - for over nearly 10 months now. Entire family lines have been wiped off the face of the earth - thousands of people are known to be dead, thousands more lie under rubble, thousands more are injured, starving and suffering from diseases caused by the breakdown of public services and sanitation and Israel’s refusal to let in life-saving medical supplies.

A recent report by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor³, covered by AL24 News, reveals that “approximately 10% of the Gaza Strip’s population has been either killed, injured, or gone missing over the span of 293 days of the ongoing genocidal war”.

According to the report, around 50,000 Palestinians have either been killed or remain buried under rubble, with their bodies still lying in streets, border areas, or zones completely destroyed, making retrieval impossible.
Additionally, nearly 100,000 Palestinians have been wounded, the majority of whom are civilians, including children and women. Approximately 3,000 Palestinians have gone missing after being detained in Gaza, with their whereabouts currently unknown.
Estimates from the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor indicate that at least 51,000 deaths have occurred since the onset of the war due to factors such as the blockade, lack of medical care, collapse of the healthcare sector, severe shortages of essential medicines, travel restrictions for treatment abroad, outbreaks of epidemics and infectious diseases, and widespread famine.

People are being operated on without anaesthetic, women and children are being shot in the streets by snipers. Western doctors have returned from Gaza with stories of children - children!! - with bullet holes in their heads. Israeli soldiers have actually, in cold blood, taken aim at a child - put that child’s head in their gun-sights and pulled the trigger. I want to scream as I write this but what good is my screaming? It's an apocalyptic nightmare and to make it all even more horrifying there is no escape. There is nowhere for the people there to go. Within the last couple of months Israel has been bombing displaced people in tents. In fact just within the last 12 hours Israel bombed people sleeping in tents outside the al-Aqsa hospital - burning many of them alive. Gaza has - in the past - been called by many people a concentration camp. It is now - and this is not hyperbole - a literal death camp.

*Image Source: Screenshot - Twitter/X - @resist_05*

For over 75 years the silencing of Palestinian voices by powerful political interests and their media lackeys has given Israel and, perhaps even more importantly, its backer the United States free rein to give the middle finger to international law and to run roughshod over the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. The result of that deliberate silencing has been decades of dispossession, oppression and injustice for the Palestinians which has now metastasised into a full blown campaign of extermination and ethnic cleansing into, in other words, a genocide.

As Abby Martin pointed out in an interview with Briahna Joy Gray way back in December of last year:

The New York Times, WaPo, all of these beltway media publications and so called ‘papers of record’ - they are all accomplices to genocide. All those who are running the editorial line in these publications should be brought up to the Hague for complicity - for engineering & manufacturing consent among the American public. If these headlines were written differently, if the leads weren’t buried in paragraph 8 - public opinion would have been changed decades ago - we know how this works.

In other words, the silencing of Palestinian perspectives - the muting of Palestinian voices - has led directly to where we are today. It has led directly to the complete impunity with which Israel - ably assisted by its benefactor the United States, is able to carry out its genocidal policies. It has led to nightmarish suffering for the Palestinian people in Gaza and in the rest of the Occupied Territories. It has led to the total impunity with which Israel can rattle its sabre at Lebanon, Syria and even Iran. It has led to the entire United States Congress clapping like seals as a genocidal maniac spouted blatant lies and demanded more bombs to ‘finish the job’. And it has, ultimately, led all of us here in the West to the edge of a moral abyss from which there may be no coming back. It is well past time, and indeed it may well be imperative for the long-term fate of the entire world, to unmute Gaza.

¹ Just FYI, the head of the Jerusalem Bureau at Associated Press, Melanie Ridman, is, according to trusted sources, a ‘fanatical Zionist’.

² Just last week I wrote a 20 page response to TVNZ’s response to my complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) and am now awaiting a possible counter-response from TVNZ. I took mercy on my Substack readers and didn’t publish that screed on this platform due to the excruciating detail into which I went to rebut each of TVNZ’s points, but I’ll let you know the ultimate outcome. I’m not feeling all that optimistic to be honest. Attempting to prove lack of balance within the context of a media landscape that is biased to the bone about the Israel-Palestine issue is a virtually impossible feat.

³ It perhaps goes without saying that this report has not been covered by the BBC, the ABC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TVNZ’s 1News, Radio New Zealand, the New Zealand Herald, AP or Reuters.

Karyn Taylor-Moore is a recovering academic psychologist & a long-time leftist anti-imperialist from Ōtautahi