By Karim Bouris, updated and adapted from a talk given to Amnesty International Local Group #610 (Bend) in October 2024

At the time of this writing, the federal government is following Project Esther’s blueprint and using pro-Palestine advocacy as an excuse for attacking free speech; all the while, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is called out by every credible NGO as a PR front used to placate the growing opposition to Israel’s man-made starvation of Palestinians.

I’m sharing the stories that follow for the same reason I keep going back to the same poems by Refaat Alareer, Naomi Shihab Nye and June Jordan — because I want to find ways to feel whole after the last 20+ months of relentless news and devastation from Gaza, even if I’m just one other Palestinian voice screaming into the wind. I hold on to the obscene pipe dream that our collective Palestinian voices, our figurative and literal voices hoarse from falling on deaf ears as we ask for some measure of relief and hope for justice, are carried together and find a way to reach more folks who are feeling this same way.

Since you’re reading this, you know that Mixte is a national public relations and digital marketing agency whose only goal is justice, health and freedom for all people. 

What you may not be as familiar with is that our field of work was pioneered by an Austrian-American man called Edward Bernays, who is referred to in his obituary as “the father of public relations.” Edward Bernays’s first book was titled “Propaganda”, which tells you all you need to know about what we do for a living (even if we think it’s all for good): simply put, we practice the scientific technique of manipulating public opinion. Or, as Edward famously dubbed it: we dabble in “the engineering of consent.” 

I always get frustrated by misinformation & disinformation, in general. But I get particularly worked up when it comes to this topic: because what I see going on in media stories every day amounts to journalism malpractice.

I’ll start with sharing a little more about me, seeing as my bio doesn’t really tell you who I am even though I’m straddling both ongoing wars against the people and places I’m from: Palestine and Lebanon. 

When I was 8-9 years old, my twin sister and I were hanging out during a school holiday with our five closest cousins. At the time, some of us lived in France, others in England and others in Greece. I don’t know how we stumbled onto the topic of how we’re each experiencing racism in school — along the lines of “when kids ask you where you’re from, what do you tell them?” My sister and I said “Lebanon” — which got looks of absolute disdain by all the others. “What do you say…..?” we asked timidly. 

Walaw, we say we’re PALESTINIAN! 

I realized much later in life that our answer was a legacy from my Palestinian father who was taught to “fit in” after his family was forced to move to Lebanon in 1948. To be ashamed of being Palestinian. And I realize that I’ve been repeating that same behavior as a parent. So I’m now on a lifelong mission to undo this with my own adult children.

My father was born and raised in Jaffa until the Nakba of 1948. After my grandfather’s family was expelled from their home, they emigrated to Lebanon. That’s where my father met my mother, who’s from the mountain town of Zahlé. 

As for me, I was born in Beirut in 1975. 40 days after that beautiful day, a civil war started that lasted about 15 years and ripped my homeland apart. My family was one of the lucky ones who had the ability to escape; it’s how I got to then live in Greece, Nigeria, England, France and the US. 

Another important fact about the civil war in Lebanon, which I think is pertinent to this topic: Israel occupied Lebanon for 13 years, from 1982 to 1995. Which was one of six different times Israel has occupied Lebanon in the past 50 years.

Since a) I’m not a geopolitical or foreign policy expert, and b) nobody gets moved by facts, I’m going to share here three stories about my family’s personal experience and connect each story to a key concept that shapes our understanding of “the situation” in Palestine. (And still, for those keen on fact-checking what’s in this piece, everything mentioned in it is sourced & available at the end.) I will then apply the fine-tuned professional public relations credentials I boasted about earlier to explain how that same concept gets intentionally misrepresented in U.S. media, in clear contradiction with the very code of ethics most of those legacy outlets claim to uphold. 

One last note before diving in, a couple of thoughts on what I’m hoping you get out of reading the rest of this article. First, I hope you get a moment of realization that the stories you’ve been told about Palestine, Gaza; about who’s good & who’s not; I hope that these stories feel intentionally loaded and contradictory. More importantly, I hope that you’ll be a little bit less confused about some critical concepts, so that any time you read or listen to a story in U.S. media about Gaza, the West Bank, Palestine, Lebanon or even the Middle East in general, you put that story through another filter.

The last thing I hope you’ll get from reading this is feeling more compassion about what this dark chapter means for me, people like me and any fellow Palestinians in your personal or professional circles. It’s a little selfish, yes, but it matters.

Understanding “hasbara”

“Hasbara” is the Hebrew word for “explanation.” It’s a public diplomacy technique that melds information warfare with the official strategic objectives of the Israeli state. AOC summarized it best when she referred to “the invoking of uncertainty” in an interview with Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo in April 2024. 

In other words, “hasbara” is another word for propaganda. You know, the art and science of Mixte’s field of practice.

At a time when the budget for this state-sanctioned propaganda is increasing, it logically follows that when it comes to the coverage of Gaza in U.S. legacy and mainstream media, we need to critically ask how outlets source their stories.

In the last year, investigations by The New Republic and The Intercept revealed that reporters from CNN, ABC and NBC are embedded with the Israeli military. And that these networks run their coverage of what’s going on in Gaza through a Jerusalem team. That Jerusalem team operates under the umbrella of the Israeli military censor.

The point here is that the Israeli military, the IDF, controls the stories that all major U.S. outlets can cover — which is the direct definition of propaganda.

Yet, at the same time, U.S. media outlets delegitimize foreign media sources. 

Most readers don’t question the NYT or WaPo’s journalistic integrity standards. Those of us who do this for a living however, do, so I’m going to pick on them pretty ferociously in what follows. This isn’t facetiousness either: I’m questioning their integrity because Mondoweiss and The Intercept shared a leaked editorial memo from the NYT brass on how their journalists are required to cover the issue. I’ll get to the specifics of that memo further down.

Before, though, I want to come back to the problem with the quality control of CNN, WaPo and NYT stories. As I mentioned earlier, they run almost all of their stories through the IDF, the Israeli military. Since it began its war in Gaza, we know that Israel has prevented all foreign media outlets from physically accessing the Gaza Strip. So who are CNN and others’ sources if they can’t be there on the ground themselves? 

I find this particularly important to raise, since in 2023 Israel was one of the 10 worst countries for imprisoning journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, level-pegging it with Iran. In the last 20 months, over 180 journalists were killed in Gaza. So, again, who’s reporting the stories we’re reading?

Even if we grant major U.S. media outlets the benefit of doubt for not having their own direct people on the ground, there are still a plethora of media companies covering the news and doing research whose editorial fact-checking isn’t any less rigorous, such as the IMEU, Al Jazeera, Middle East Monitor and Middle East Eye to name a few.

In any good investigative journalism process, it’s important to expand the net of trustworthy sources. That tenet is clearly laid out in the Society of Professional Journalists’ aforementioned code of ethics. In our world of social justice, we specifically try to work with journalists who have lived experiences related to brown and Black communities, because they generally provide less biased and more nuanced news coverage. That same logic unfortunately doesn’t apply to covering the current war on Gaza.

Let’s play a game. Read the names of the following list of reputable outlets, and sit with the intrinsic feeling that bubbles up inside when you let them in: Ain Media, Fourth Authority, Al-Khamisa, Khabar News, Al Quds Radio, Al Aqsa TV, Palestine TV, Al-Shabab radio, Al Resalah, Mithaq Media Network, Rawasi, Al Sahel, Al-Jamahir, WAFA, Namaa Radio, Al Qehara News.

Do you feel a certain level of discomfort? Do you question their credibility? Whatever you’re feeling may be true to you; and what is also true is that each and every one of these outlets had one of their journalists or staff killed in Gaza because they were indigenous reporters that weren’t going through the Israeli military censor.

I’m not ultimately looking for a unilateral answer or epiphany. I’m just curious if we can start with admitting to ourselves that it’s not that far-fetched to think we have a knee-jerk bias against cultures and areas we don’t know. And, by extension, the media outlets from those same places.

I thought of playing this little game after Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the point in his latest book, “The Message,” that no U.S. media outlet has a bureau chief in Tel Aviv who is a respected Palestinian voice. That is bound to shape the “side” we take on an issue when that voice is simply never represented. As he’s said repeatedly in interviews during his book tour, Palestinians have been pushed out of the frame; they don’t exist as narrators of their own story.

The specific “tells” of the role of “hasbara” in U.S. media are many:

• When you read stories, you’ll notice that “war crime” and “genocide” are taboo words. 
• Israeli bombings in Gaza are reported as “blasts” attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. 
• Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.

This influence of hasbara shows up in the use of language that doesn’t hold Israel accountable to what it’s doing in Palestine, even when its own soldiers proudly post their crimes on social media. Remember that leaked NYT memo? The folks at The New York War Crimes provide excerpts from articles published by the NYT, with their suggested edits of what those could/should sound like if they were objective:

• On January 28th, 2024, the NYT wrote: 
  • “Amid warnings of famine, the collapse of the health system and the massive displacement of the Palestinian population, UNRWA’s work is considered more important than ever.”
  • Replace this with “Due to Israel’s blockade, bombardment and invasion of Gaza, widespread famine has broken out in the strip, health services can no longer provide essential services, and large swaths of the population are now refugees, making UNRWA’s work more important than ever.”
• On March 9th, 2024 the NYT wrote: 
  • “Five months into Israel’s campaign against Hamas and its siege of Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are close to starvation, United Nations officials say.”
  • Replace this with “Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war — a war crime — has brought hundreds of thousands of Palestinians close to starvation, United Nations officials say.”

The language used by the NYT dehumanizes the Palestinian people. It robs them of what makes them relatable. It reinforces the trope of “the Arab masses” on whom a random tragedy befell — as if by a natural disaster. Which, incidentally, is the same approach we saw in the U.S. when major media outlets were covering police violence in the Summer of George Floyd, or when they cover race and gender-based violence issues.

Finally, if you want a direct line to how U.S. media enable Israeli “hasbara,” I love asking folks to read Benjamin Netanyahu’s speeches in English, curated for the western world, and read translations of the same topics when he speaks about them in Hebrew for his domestic audience. They are wonderful, real-time examples of this relationship — his language shifts from one of power and dominance in Hebrew to one of victimhood in English. It doesn’t take more than a click of a button to do this, yet almost every U.S.-based media outlet publishes the first without checking the second. 

If this doesn’t start sounding like journalistic malpractice, then keep reading.

All roads lead to Zionism

I haven’t had many moments of light since Israel began its campaign in Gaza. One of those, though, is my father opening up and finally, at the age of 83, sharing a little more about his life and experiences as a child of the Nakba and being Palestinian. 

He was born in 1940 and remembers periodic episodes of having to leave their home for a couple of days at a time. By the early ‘40s, confrontations between different groups that had started in the ‘20s were short-lived but becoming more frequent. Those skirmishes were generally between the Palestinians rising up against the colonizer British army, or between the Zionist settlers or the Zionist Haganah & Irgun brigades and that same British army or local villagers.  Every time, my family would leave their home for a couple of days, stay with a relative away from the tensions and return home.

By now you’ve read the word “Zionist” a few times in this piece. I have to start here because Zionism is foundational to everything about Israel. By foundational, I mean that it is the literal foundation of the state, so it’s important to understand a little more about Zionism as an ideology to see how it shapes hasbara as a matter of state policy.

Malcolm X, writing on “Zionist Logic” in the September 17, 1964 edition of Egyptian Gazette, acknowledged that Zionism in & of itself is a problem, not because he took issue with cultural Zionism; not because he had issues with Jewish religion or with the Israeli diaspora at large; but because political Zionism is an ethno-national settler colonial movement that is dependent upon the expulsion, erasure, dispossession of the Palestinian people.

That movement began in 1897, when Theodor Herzl, the spiritual father of the Jewish State, summoned the First Zionist Congress. At this special convening, the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country was proclaimed. The Brits, who were controlling that area since the end of World War I, then recognized this right in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. They then re-affirmed it again in the Mandate of the League of Nations which gave their blessing to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.

There’s another important figure to mention here. After Theodor Herzl’s death in 1904, Ze’ev Jabotinsky became the leader of the right-wing Zionists, the “revisionists.” He’s famous for developing the “Iron Wall” concept. In that 1923 essay, he argued that a Jewish state could only be created from a position of overwhelming military strength, by proving to the Palestinians and the Arab states through military might, that Zionism could not be defeated. Marc Lamont Hill & Mitchell Plitnick provide examples of some of Jabotinsky’s writing in their book “Except for Palestine”:

• Defeating Zionism should feel “hopeless”
• “Colonization” and “colonists” aren’t taboo words
• Arabs are referred to as the “native population, civilized or uncivilized”
• Colonization is considered “just & moral.”

It doesn’t take much, after reading those foundational pieces, to see how Zionist ideology was inherently and unequivocally ethnocentric and expansionist in its conception.

It’s important to begin with an accurate historical context of Zionism because “hasbara” wants us to conflate Zionism with an instinctive response: that any criticism of Zionist ideology is anti-Semitic. That’s how, today, we’ve been able to reach a point where the U.S. Congress attempted to pass bills like the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” commonly referred to as the “Nonprofit Killer” bill.

The problem is that this cry of anti-Semitism isn’t about protecting Jewish people (despite what the Anti-Defamation League wants you to believe): it’s about protecting the government of Israel against its own stated ethnocentric and expansionist mission by criminalizing any criticism of those policies. This is especially acute today despite Israel’s escalation of war beyond Gaza and the West Bank, into Lebanon, Syria, Iran & Yemen.

Decades of illegal occupation

I harbor to this day a really big regret: that I never got to meet my grandfather, my Jedo. He died before I was born. I have one little moment of peace today — when I look at his picture, I see his spitting image in my own dad. My father and his brothers started and ran a successful international shipping company in the ‘60s. I used to joke that they did what most immigrants learn to do when they’re not welcome by their host country. But I was wrong: they got that bug from their own father, my Jedo.

I’m on a quest to find an iconic photo floating somewhere around the world in one of my relatives’ homes. It’s a photo of Jedo with his brother, my Great Uncle, in front of their first business: Palestine’s first bike shop in 1916. Jaffa was the trade center of Palestine because of its ports, so it was a bustling commercial center — that’s where the first railroads were built. So much so that my grandfather opened his next business, a generalist home goods store. Think of it as Jaffa’s Bed-Bath-Home-Depot-&-Beyond.

That dream story took a turn in 1948, when the state of Israel was declared. As you know now, that’s when the British army forcefully removed my grandfather and our family from their home. They were able to sneak back in later that day because they had nowhere to go, risking their lives for two weeks by living under cover of darkness, keeping all doors and windows shut, not using electricity, just living by candlelight. Every day was a risk because their home was going to be given to Israeli settlers at any moment.

My father describes these days as “very quiet.” He talks about my grandfather’s attempts to smuggle them out of Jaffa. He talks about being woken up once, sometimes twice, to rush out as quietly as possible to the beachfront. This went on night after night over those two weeks; only to sneak back into their home, not getting “made,” waiting to repeat the same thing the next night. 

And then it happened: my grandfather found a fisherman who accepted to sneak them up the coast into Lebanon, where they had a chance to start over.

If you read any Israeli speeches or writing from those days, you’d read a description of this occupation, and the forced expulsion of Palestinians, as a “just & moral colonization.” I don’t have much to say about what colonization and occupation are. All I know is that “justice” and “morality” can’t be claimed when two organized armies, British and Zionist, join forces against an army-less people and bend them against their will. That is a pretty cut-and-dry setup.

State-sanctioned “hasbara” continues using to this day the same “just and moral” arguments to justify this decades-long occupation, and ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people.  

The most common reason given is the “empty land” concept: Israel’s religio-nationalist ideology justified taking over a land because it was being wasted by inferior, threatening and expendable people.

That’s one take. I guess, if I had been able to ask my Jedo, Jaffa’s preeminent bicycle and home goods purveyor, he’d have a thing or two to say about this. I think he’d feel that his livelihood, his businesses in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, are pretty strongly connected to the land of Palestine. Those were clear cities with neighborhoods. Not exactly a “land without people.” 

This was simply based on the notion that Palestinians, while perhaps indigenous to this land, had no connection WORTHY of recognition. Yet, despite clear evidence of occupation of the land and expulsion of its people, any response has been met with some kind of moral outrage by the “hasbara” machine, via U.S. media amplification. Palestinians have a long history of attempting nonviolent resistance, long before 1948, yet we’ve been treated like the enemy. Not because of our actions but because our mere presence and existence have always been a threat to the Zionist ideal. 

When Palestinians have attempted to respond to life under occupation with violence (intifadas), that was met with outrage. When Palestinians try responding with nonviolence (the movement to Boycott Divest and Sanction), it’s also met with outrage. Which leaves a simple question: what’s left to do?

Finally, if any reader believes that this was a fair fight by the underdog Zionist army forces against the Arab hordes, who believes “to the victor goes the spoils” here’s some food for thought: when the Zionist colony was settled In April 1948, the Palestinian population was defenseless. The British army had paved the way by decimating any Palestinian resistance when it quelled the push made for independence in the 1936-1939 Great Arab Revolt (for more on this, I recommend reading “Gaza Strip: The Lessons of History” by Salman Abu Sitta in the book “Gaza As Metaphor.”)

Apartheid

As you know, my dad’s family is from Jaffa, Palestine. My mother is from Zahlé in Lebanon. 

My paternal Jedo (again, grandfather) and great-grandparents were Greek Orthodox Christians, a religious minority in Palestine. Today, our old neighborhood of Ajami in Jaffa is a ghetto, a mixed Jewish and Arab town.

If my family had chosen to return and assimilate in the new state of Israel, we’d have had to agree to be designated as Arab Israelis — with the same set of rights as African Americans in the Jim Crow south. If you think this is an exaggeration, let me describe what life for my grandparents would have turned into if they’d chosen to stay. 

Under Israeli law, my grandparents’ home was considered absentee or abandoned and fell under ownership by the Israel Lands Authority. Practically speaking, my Jedo and Teta (my grandmother) would have been forced into a moneyed agreement with the state of Israel itself and not a private property or land owner. They would’ve gone from being homeowners into lessees. As Palestinian residents in Israel, they initially would have paid a massive amount of money to own 60 percent of their home while Israel kept control of the other 40 percent. 

They then would have become protected tenants and paid a significantly reduced monthly rent to a state-owned housing company for the duration of three generations. This sounds good in theory, so let’s dig into the fun math about this three-generation period: the Israeli state would have considered my Jedo the first generation tenant; his wife, my Teta, the second generation; and my father the third generation. 

Today, state authorities would be knocking on my now-84 year old father’s door, demanding he buy the unit or leave, seeing as housing prices in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area are skyrocketing, coastal suburbs being coveted by the wealthy and affluent. Without a doubt, the state today would be pushing out my Palestinian father to make room for wealthy Jews, whether domestic or from abroad, who are willing to pay the insanely high asking prices for seaside property.

This is acceptable today because my dad would belong to a problem group. A group that is responsible for Jewish residents leaving the city. That’s according to housing developers like the company B’Emuna, which develops Jewish-only housing. This company gladly explained to Israel National News, a settler website, that Jewish residents are leaving because of poverty and because of falling property values caused by the presence of an Arab population.

Does the logic of indigenous residents impacting the quality of life and housing prices sound familiar? If it does, then you understand that this story is really about apartheid.

Apartheid is a policy that is founded on the idea of separating people based on racial or ethnic criteria. It is an Afrikaans word literally translated to “separating, setting apart.” My family was part of the 120,000 Palestinians who lived in Jaffa before the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. Since the Nakba, less than 2.5% Palestinians remain (roughly 3,200). 

For a recent example of the type of laws that exist in an apartheid state, my favorite (please read the irony here) is the Jewish “Nation State” law of 2017. That law accomplished three big things:

• It stated that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.”
• It established Hebrew as Israel’s official language, and downgrades Arabic — a language widely spoken by Arab Israelis — to a “special status.”
• It established “Jewish settlement as a national value” and mandates that the state “will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.”

And its effect was immediate. This law led to a dramatic increase in settler violence since 2017, illegally forcing Palestinians out of their homes in the West Bank, because the nation as a whole legalized more ultranationalist positions and aggressive behavior against Palestinians.

That violence continued through 2023, which was the most violent year against Palestinians and the deadliest year for children in the West Bank… but not in Gaza, at least until October 8 of that year.

“Hasbara” definitely goes out of its way to distort our understanding of Israeli apartheid in the U.S. If you read any stories about the West Bank or about Israel’s treatment of Gazans, almost all of those stories include the line that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” and describes Palestinians as somehow having an equal share of responsibility in the situation. That Israel applies its laws equitably well for all its citizens.

If that’s the case, then let’s take a closer look at the lives of Palestinians inside “democratic” Israel, not in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank:

• Palestinians live shorter lives, are poorer and live in more violent neighborhoods
• 41 percent of all Israeli localities have “admission committees” operating in them that can bar from them anyone lacking “social suitability” or “compatibility with the social & cultural fabric” (can you guess who doesn’t meet these criteria?)

Put simply: Israel is a democracy but for the Jewish people only. When you have a set of rules for one people and another set of rules for another, you can’t call it “democracy.” Especially not in the U.S., where we made the Jim Crow laws of “separate and unequal” illegal. To this day, new laws are being introduced and approved by the Israeli Knesset that demonstrate an ongoing commitment to the “separate and unequal” treatment of Palestinians, such as allowing Palestinian children under 14 to be jailed.

Yet, to this day, in what I believe to be a testament to the incredible power of the Israeli hasbara’s effective, consistent messaging, “no one has successfully prosecuted allegations of Israeli apartheid in any jurisdiction.”

The bigger question becomes: how can it be morally acceptable for the U.S. — and our main media outlets by extension — to make an exception for Israel when that country’s government represses its own domestic media from calling out apartheid?

Accomplices in a U.S.-sanctioned genocide

In 1992, when I visited Lebanon for the first time at the age of 17, I had a three-hour lunch at the restaurant Berdawny in Zahlé, where my mother is from. Zahlé is in the mountains east of Beirut, closer to the Syrian border than to Beirut itself. And it was a worthwhile trek: to this day, I can’t forget the mezze followed by a parade of mashewe. And, just when my 17-year old endless pit of an appetite almost gave up, I finished up that three-hour lunch by going to the next table over, which was setup with the sweets, fresh fruit and ahweh (coffee). 

On September 23rd, 2024, I woke to the news that the Israeli army had bombed Zahlé, claiming to be rooting out Shia Muslims in this historically and decidedly Catholic town with nary a story in main U.S. outlets — an important nuance I’ve given up on them understanding.

This was “just another day,” another day of watching the story of the end of my people playing out on my damn screen. And all I can hear is my father telling me:

your people are being killed by your president and by your tax dollars.

If I step back with a mindset of compassion, I can understand the pain felt by a Jewish diaspora that has been persecuted, degraded and decimated for centuries in Europe (ethnically cleansed in Spain, Russia, the World War II Holocaust) — but I can also pause when I see where it led it to. Namely, Israel’s response to October 7th, which was to respond to a terrorist attack on its people with a 20-month genocide that has no clearly-laid, agreed-upon strategic victory plan. 

I am crystal clear about the term “genocide” being the only one applicable here. Regardless of how I may feel about one side’s motives or another, my justice lens doesn’t just disappear; I can still acknowledge that the human temptation to do wrong applies across the board and can be condemned in equal measure.

I’ll just say this when it comes to the criteria for genocide

• 153 countries (or 80 percent of all nation states in the world) ratified the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 
• Genocide is also defined very clearly in the United States Code and includes violent attacks with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group — whether committed in time of peace or time of war 
• It is genocide, according to the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University, ​​the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School, the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and the Lowenstein Human Rights Project at Yale Law School.

What I’ve described up until now is a flawed democratic state that doesn’t practice diplomacy, but that lives by the sword alone. It is supported in this policy in every way by the same colonial powers of the twentieth century who created it — most importantly, our own country, the United States. Israeli institutions practice racism and apartheid and its army commits war crimes. And the U.S. policy is to protect Israel from facing action under international law — a position the U.S. government has worked diligently on protecting in order to shield it from historical accountability.

As a professional communicator, I pay special attention to the power of imagery in language. Today’s Zionist “hasbara” has a long history of using language that deliberately dehumanizes Palestinians. It is intended to minimize the emotional response to the mass violence wrought by their military onto Palestinians. Here are some examples:

• Israel “mows the lawn” — the metaphor implies the Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, with their crude but effective homemade weapons, are like weeds that need to be cut back
• Prisoners in this war aren’t being “tortured” but “being investigated”
• “Buffer zone” instead of military occupation
• “Collective punishment” instead of genocide
• “Mapping exercises” to maintain direct surveillance
• The Hebrew word לסכל (lé-sekèl) “to thwart,” is frequently used by Israel to describe targeted killings and assassinations
• The dehumanizing language on Palestinians since October 7th. These are examples referenced and sourced by South Africa in its petition to the International Court of Justice against Israel
  • “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle”
  • “of civilization against barbarism”
  • “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
  • “When the entire world says we have gone insane and this is a humanitarian disaster — we will say, it’s not an end, it’s a means.”
  • “the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves”
  • “I tell you, in Gaza without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be exterminated, all of them killed. We will flatten Gaza, turn them to dust, and the army will cleanse the area. Then we will start building new areas, for us, above all, for our security.”

The Israeli historian, political scientist, and former politician Ilan Papé suggests that we need to start using new terminology. Especially western media:

• Instead of “occupation,” talk about “colonization”
• Instead of “peace process,” talk about “decolonization”
• Instead of “peace solution,” talk about “regime change”
• Instead of “two states solution,” talk about “one state solution”
• Instead of “Israeli democracy,” talk about “Israeli apartheid”
• Instead of “Israeli defense policy,” talk about “ethnic cleansing” — and genocide in the case of Gaza

I started this long piece by sharing that I’m hurting. When I’m asked whether I have hope for an eventual peace between Israel and the Palestinian people living under its occupation, my answer is “no.” But I always mention something that the Reverend Doctor Munther Isaac of Bethlehem said: that while I may not see a light at the end of this dark tunnel, every person who cares to learn and listen and speak is lighting a candle for me that helps me take one more step forward.

So while the genesis of this article was shame — a learned behavior that has my own father asking me to “stop living in the past and focus on the future” — I am left feeling like I’m giving myself a gift of hope. That perhaps a reader or two can give me, or any other Palestinians in their circles, a few more candles in this long tunnel we’re in.

I hope that readers can weigh the information in the media that they consume, which is filtered for the benefit of a singular government, against the expertise across so many disciplines — scientists, politicians, journalists, academics, authors, activists — and choose instead one new outlet to dive into and get their news from. A few are listed on the list that follows.

I also hope that, by making it this far, I’ll have helped readers shed any leftover uncertainty:  Israel’s occupation of Palestine, based on its Zionist foundational ideology, has created an apartheid state that led to the current genocide in Gaza.

Resources and references

Preparing to deliver “First they bombed Gaza, and I did not speak up” as a talk in October 2024 meant sifting through a seemingly endless trove of sources on Palestine and Israel; on the history and context of Gaza; and on each concept in more depth (Hasbara, Zionism, Occupation, Apartheid and Genocide). Each of those topics exists in its own context, as well as within the context provided through the filter of U.S. mainstream media.

Linked below is the comprehensive list of books, articles, videos and websites that rounded out my learning. If any resource isn’t directly cited in this talk-turned-essay, please know it was equally instrumental in shaping my broader understanding of how “hasbara” manages to keep progressive allies paralyzed, afraid or unsure as they witness Israel’s relentless campaign against Palestine.

– Karim Bouris

Download to continue learning