One Year Later, Israel Lost

Israel has lost in the court of public opinion, on the world’s political stage, and as a regional power

Oct 09, 2024

woman in brown jacket holding flag — Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash

If war were measured in casualties alone, arguing who the winners and losers are is easy. But it’s not. War isn’t decided by who kills the most people but by those who convince the world, both socially and politically, that their mission is just. Israel has failed to convince anyone of this due to its current efforts that perpetuate its brutal occupation of Palestine.

The actions of the ethnonationalist state have turned the world against it. Not against Jewish people, but against the state of Israel. There are two major reasons for this: ethnonationalism is largely frowned upon globally as is the apartheid state it became. Israel, although inadvertently, has become its own worst enemy as it shines its own spotlight on the oppression, subjugation, and mass murder of the Palestinians it has been violently colonizing for nearly a century.

Arguably, more people than at any other time in modern history are paying attention to and learning the history of Palestine and how we arrived at the current conflict. People worldwide know that October 7, 2023, didn't happen in a vacuum – that the current conflict didn’t start that day. Suggesting it was simply an act of terror made no more sense a year ago than it does now and is likely what drove people to find the history of the region to get a better understanding of it.

This also exposed – and continues to reveal – blatant media bias and highlights its not-so-hidden anti-Arab and Islamophobic positions. While we saw hints of it during the start of the war in Ukraine after many journalists spoke of Ukrainian children being more civilized and not from “some far-away place” like the Middle East, as Charlie D’Agata from CBS News put it, we’re also seeing it in a more overt sense in how the story of the conflict is being reported.

“Ukraine isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades,” Charlie D’Agata said live on the air in April 2022 on CBS News. “This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”

The current language and biases are similar to the one-sided racist coverage of the “war on terror” after 9/11. The difference is people aren’t buying it anymore. As many now know, Israel is a settler colonialist state funded by and forced on Palestinians by Western nations through the Christian-nationalist-like idea of Zionism. It should be noted that despite efforts to silence discussion on the issue and include criticism of the ethnonationalist concept of Zionism under the umbrella of antisemitism, people are still speaking up.

In the U.S., most know the history of genocide, displacement, and long-term oppression that has taken place and in many ways continues to occur in the United States. The similarities between what Israel is doing now and what the U.S. did then are being noted on a global scale. The lies about so-called “terrorists” using Palestinians as “human shields” are also coming to light as Israeli soldiers use civilians as human shields seemingly daily.

Myriad lies about what occurred on October 7 have also been exposed. However, despite their being debunked countless times, Western politicians and pundits alike continue to spread those same lies even today. Countless high-ranking government officials and lawmakers continue to use those lies to assert that they stand behind Israel’s “right to defend itself” as it slaughters tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

The faces of the U.S. government continue to claim to be pushing for a ceasefire and saying they “disagree” with some of what Israel has done (and is doing). Meanwhile, it is still sending billions of dollars of weapons to continue the indiscriminate slaughter. Trying to outwit the public with meaningless platitudes is a breeding ground for misinformation – not entirely unintentional.

The lies and the constant perpetration of them are but one major reason to highlight how Israel is losing what it calls a “war” but logical people refer to as genocide or ethnic cleansing – which are justified. But not fact-checking politicos and ignoring parts of the story such as those that point to Israeli soldiers killing a large portion of those who died on Oct. 7, exposes Western news media bias. When we hear of the public not trusting major news outlets, leaving out key details to drive largely false narratives is likely a major contributor to that distrust.

Looking at the impact the “reporting” non-corroborated stories of the 40 beheaded babies and mass rape had and are having speaks for itself. The effort to dehumanize nonwhite populations continues to rear its ugly head in our news cycles and it’s virtually nonstop and more prevalent than ever. Who needs dog whistles (coded language) to fire up bigots to demonize entire groups of people when you have the news media toeing the line?

While the U.S. government complains about misinformation, what’s becoming clearer is that the misinformation is coming from inside the house. Watching the news media intentionally leave out history, certain contexts and key details to frame narratives is terrifying. Meanwhile, even with the support of an imperialist partner on the corporate media side, the truth comes out faster than Israel or legacy media can handle it. Rather than correct their false narratives, they often move on to something else as if nothing happened. We might get a soft apology.

What we’re seeing in Western media isn’t any different than what this country has seen in the past. It’s based on the same colonized concepts of hundreds of years ago. It paints white people as saviors and the rest of society as savages. It follows in line with the government instead of holding truth to power. And it absolves itself as if it's the be-all, end-all of information in the same so-called “civil society” that ships weapons of war all over the world in its colonialist project.

As more people turn against the news media because of being caught trying to perpetuate lies time and again, it’s worth noting that we should be paying attention to journalists who aren’t afraid to call something what it is, aren’t afraid of the oligarchs in control of our news media, and aren’t afraid to report the truth no matter how unpopular it may be because one thing is clear: Israel lost its “war” on the world’s stage months ago.

There is little difference between Manifest Destiny and Zionism. Manifest Destiny claimed that Protestant Christians from Europe were ordained by God to take over North America. Zionism claims that Jewish people from Europe were ordained to colonize Western Africa. Both are built on the idea that certain people were chosen.

Hundreds of years ago the “chosen people” logic was applied to justify colonizing the West and slaughtering Indigenous people. Meanwhile, the “news” was being used to justify atrocity just as it is now.