by M. Reza Behnam | Sep 10, 2026
As Israel’s war on Gaza enters a grim third year, the prevailing narrative developed by mainstream Western media serves as a masterclass in institutional complicity; filtering genocide through a lens of manufactured neutrality.
Since October 2025, when the so-called ceasefire – which Israel has repeatedly violated – began, the tragedy in Gaza has been effectively erased from the news cycle. The incredible suffering of the Palestinian people has been treated as if it were unworthy of attention.
Because of this severe marginalization, it is more important than ever to look critically at the media’s role in constructing and perpetuating the ongoing genocide, and restore the crisis to the public prominence it requires.
By adopting Israel’s security-centered narrative without question, major news outlets continue to legitimize state violence. Cloaking its atrocities in the sanitized language of “self-defense” does more than just distort a humanitarian crisis; it creates an ideological shield that hides the true human cost from the public.
Institutional media coverage of the catastrophe, however, cannot simply be dismissed as negligence or professional oversight; it represents a systemic structure of complicity that began eight decades ago.
Well before 7 October 2023, the media laid the ideological and narrative foundation that facilitated Israel’s immediate massive military retaliation and ongoing atrocities in Gaza.
From the beginning of the Zionist enclave, editorial frameworks have been shaped around a singular imperative: safeguard and legitimize, at all cost, Israel’s survival and expansion. By trading critical journalism for propaganda, they systematically manufactured public consent for state-sponsored violence.
To fully grasp the situation in Gaza – a 140-square-mile concentration camp blockaded by air, land and sea – requires historical context that Western editors have actively scrubbed from copy and airwaves. Rarely, if ever, have they presented the current quagmire within the more than 80-year continuum of Israeli land theft, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and apartheid.
The institutional media almost never expose the public to the core ideology upon which the Zionist colony was built and on which it sustains its expansionist “logic.” To truly understand Israel, however, it is essential to know that it was founded on the supremacist belief in the expendability of the indigenous Palestinian population.
If journalists had simply examined the agenda and words of Israel’s Zionist founders and its strongest defenders – which abound – public perception would look radically different today:
- “We should there [Palestine] form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” (Theodor Herzl, Austro-Hungarian political founder of modern Zionism; from his political tract, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), 1896.
- “Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach… And we are…demanding that this outside Power should carry out this task vigorously and with determination.” (Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of modern Likud Party; from his The Iron Wall), 1923.
- “We must expel the Arabs and take their places… And, if we have to use force…then we have force at our disposal.” (David Ben-Gurion, Polish-born first Israeli prime minister; letter to his son), 1937.
- It [Israel] is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” (then-Senator Joe Biden, U.S. Senate), 1986.
- “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” (Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defense Minister; lecturing troops entering Gaza on 10 October), 2023.
- “This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 16 October address to Knesset following the attack),
Furthermore, the media have skewed the reality of Palestine by continuing to characterize the Arab-Israeli struggle as a “conflict.” This terminology hides a violent history of Zionist colonization that began in 1948, and perverts the asymmetrical Palestinian response to dispossession. A false equivalence is created that masks the fact that one party (the colonizer) holds absolute power over the lives of the colonized.
Isolating the daily brutality of the occupier from the foundational violence of the occupation warps public perception of the crisis. It falsely casts indigenous resistance as unprovoked aggression, while normalizing an inherently brutal system of subjugation.
The media has also largely neglected to scrutinize diplomatic initiatives like the Oslo Agreements (1993 and 1995) and Abraham Accords (2020). By overlooking their systemic faults, they essentially legitimized the occupation, and normalized the groundwork for ongoing Israeli military dominance and territorial expansion.
Consequently, over the years, Western outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, and NPR, have consistently served as public relations agents for the Pentagon and Israeli Occupation Forces.
One of the media’s most insidious tools has been language manipulation. From the start of the Gaza war, news outlets have employed a form of linguistic apartheid that dictates how human life and death are valued; essentially who is worthy of mourning.
Hence, the Israeli assault on Gaza has relied on rhetoric calculated and structured to strip Palestinians of their humanity; effectively masking acts of mass violence behind the language of routine administrative tasks.
Such linguistic sleight of hand is mirrored in official, clinical euphemisms designed to shield Israel’s military from accountability – recasting mass atrocities as “operations,” intentional starvation as “logistical challenges,” and the erasure of entire families as mere “collateral damage.” By design, this “functional framing” reduces human beings to mere casualty counts and transforms genocide into a sanitized tragedy.
The media has rendered Palestinian suffering an accidental byproduct, rather than the result of deliberate violence, through the use of the passive voice; in which verbs float free of actors, where lives “are lost,” hospitals “are destroyed,” and buildings “collapse.”
There have been a number of instances in which news outlets have issued directives explicitly instructing reporters to avoid using specific terms such as: occupied territory, refugee camps, ethnic cleansing, and particularly genocide and Palestine.
Journalists and media personalities have understood that straying from the approved Israeli narrative or foreign policy consensus meant career stagnation, professional blacklisting or outright termination.
This starvation of empathy has done more than misrepresent, it has constructed a permissive semantic structure, that covertly shields and absolves perpetrators of their crimes. It ensures that mass devastation is read not as a human catastrophe, but as an abstract, inevitable footnote of geopolitics.
The most damning indictment of the media’s failure is that the truth has survived not because of, but in spite of institutional journalism. The heavy burden of documenting the war has fallen on courageous Palestinian journalists, citizen chroniclers, and independent digital outlets reporting from inside the ruins, often at the cost of their lives. As of mid-2026, international organizations and press watchdogs report that more than 260 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza.
It is now widely recognized that in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, numerous media outlets rushed to publish unverified and sensationalized accounts of atrocities. Particularly egregious was the fake, often repeated narrative of “40 beheaded babies.” This fabrication, as well as the accusation of systematic mass rape—later debunked by independent journalists and international organizations – served a singular purpose: to generate the emotional and moral outrage necessary to justify Israel’s indiscriminate retaliation.
For decades, mainstream media has presented Palestinians as inherently menacing, less evolved and obstacles to U.S.-Israeli geopolitical ambitions. Consequently, they created the political conditions and domestic apathy that has allowed billions of dollars in weapons to flow unconditionally from Washington to Tel Aviv.
Following three years of unchecked Israeli devastation in Gaza and escalating violence in the occupied West Bank, some news organizations have finally begun to label Israel as the menace and core threat to regional peace.
Under the guise of objective neutrality, mainstream newsrooms have institutionalized a practice of “genocidal blindness” – the refusal to apply legal or historical definitions (as the International Court of Justice has) to the live-streamed destruction of a civilian population.
They have also prioritized official state denials over documented evidence gathered on the ground. By prioritizing political access and government-approved sourcing over accountability and truth, mainstream journalism has forfeited its ethical credibility.
True objectivity requires matching language to verified reality. Over time, however, the media have reduced an ancient-rooted society to a negligible footnote in a biblical or European romance.
The failure of the Fourth Estate to properly contextualize and to voice the outrage that the holocaust in Gaza deserves will be remembered as an historic betrayal of the public trust; a watershed moment signaling its eventual collapse.
© 2026, M. Reza Behnam, Ph.D.
Dr. Behnam is a political scientist who specializes in comparative politics with a focus on West Asia. His “Cultural Foundations of Iranian Politics,” published by University of Utah Press, and still in print, was recognized by Choice as Outstanding Academic Book for 1987–1988.
![Iranian military personnel take part in an exercise titled "Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz", launched by the Naval Forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is being carried out in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz on February 16, 2026. [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/AA-20260216-40574970-40574965-IRAN_LAUNCHES_MILITARY_EXERCISE_IN_THE_STRAIT_OF_HORMUZ_AGAINST_SECURITY_THREATS.jpg?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
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