Middle East Eye, March 31 2025
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Last Friday Jonathan Cook wrote with his customary lucidity on one particular event. That event being the murder on March 31 of fifteen Palestinian emergency workers, in medical uniform and driving clearly marked ambulances; a crime Israel sought to hide by burying the bodies – hand-cuffed and at least one of them decapitated – beneath the crushed and half interred vehicles in which they’d perished in a hail of bullets. When that didn’t play, they said the vehicles had been behaving in a suspicious manner; a lie refuted by independently captured amateur footage.
Sorry, I need to start again. What Jonathan actually wrote about on Friday was corporate media coverage of Israel’s crime; specifically, Guardian coverage. But before I get to his words, let me reiterate a few points I’ve made many times.
- The best of our media – or from a certain perspective the worst – may speak truthfully and insightfully about many things, not all of them trivial. But their ownership patterns and business models prevent them, for reasons given here and here and here, of doing the same on matters of core concern to those who, beneath a rapidly thinning veneer of democracy, rule the West.
On many matters our ‘quality’ media serve us passably well but this enables a greater lie. They must show themselves trustworthy even if it embarrasses high office. (Not only does long term capacity to manufacture consent depend on it. So too, on pain of losing market share, do their business models.) But the trust gained helps them mislead us, more by lies of omission than commission, on matters of critical concern to the power they ultimately serve.
- There are at any given time several such matters of core concern. Recent and/or ongoing examples include the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the war to dismember Syria and the growingly reckless efforts of the rulers of a West in economic and moral decline to sow fear and loathing of China. On all of these things Western media consumers are subjected to propaganda blitzes of great and prolonged intensity, featuring lies of both commission and omission.
- Palestine is another case in point. Some say media can’t speak truthfully on it because their upper echelons fear an undeniably powerful Israel Lobby. Plausible, because it has more than a grain of truth, but ultimately wrong. As Brian Berletic put it in October:
People tell me Israel controls the US. When I ask how, they tell me AIPAC. But the arms industry spends far more. So do the Banks, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture. A cartel of industries fund think tanks producing papers which become policies and bills that the media sell to the American people. That’s how it works and the Israel lobbyists are a tiny fraction of that. if Israel truly controlled the US, all its forces would be in the Middle East. But they’re also in Ukraine and South Asia because the US is waging proxy war in all three.
Rather, Western elites back Israel because it’s a beachhead in a geo-strategically vital region, and because Zionist expansionism – the only lens through which ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and wider goal of a Greater or Biblical Israel, make sense – aligns with US policy to control the Middle East.
- For our systemically corrupt media, however, there’s a snag. Such is the extent of Israel’s blatant slaughter – its leaders openly declaring criminal intent and now charged by the highest court on the planet of genocide, its soldiers boasting of their atrocities on social media – that truth inversions highly successful in the cases of Ukraine, Syria and China are proving less so with regard to Palestine. It’s true that many still do and say nothing …
… westerners act like an empire-backed military force dropping bombs on a giant concentration camp and systematically using rape as a weapon of torture and deliberately starving civilians is just way too compwicated for a dumb widdle baby wike me, goo goo ga ga. People act like they’re being humble about their own intellect and understanding, but really they’re just lying and psychologically compartmentalizing away from self-evident reality. It’s not humility, it’s just another kind of dishonesty … Caitlin Johnstone
… but that still leaves Western rulers in a state of alarm – as witch hunts in mainstream political parties, curtailment of freedom of speech and assembly, redefining antisemitism to include criticism of Israel, and harassment of the few truly independent journalists all attest – over the sheer numbers of people opposed to Israeli war crimes. Those like me who contest the official narratives on Ukraine, Syria and China are few in number. Those who protest what Israel is doing are not …
… which leaves The Guardian with a major headache. Its corporate boardroom is wedded to a corrupt status quo – see Monolithic control at the Guardian? and Dear Guardian Media Group and What’s the point of George Monbiot? – but a substantial slice of its readership has a worrying aversion to genocide, while its more liberal and even centrist columnists will now be experiencing high levels of cognitive dissonance. 1
Given these things, what’s a liberal newspaper to do? How to walk the treacherous line of calling out a genocide without, well, calling out a genocide? That’s where the insights of Mr Cook come in, given both his extensive Middle East knowledge and insider experience as the Guardian employee who quit after one too many spikings, and a few too many crass rewrites, of stories insufficiently Israel-apologetic.
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How is the media still getting the Gaza murdered paramedics story so wrong?
Israel’s execution of 15 emergency workers a month ago is incontrovertibly established. So why are the Guardian and other outlets still so ready to fudge the issue?
Here is yet another example of stunningly craven journalism from the Guardian, entirely illustrative of what is going on across the British establishment media in its coverage of Israeli war crimes in Gaza for the past 18 months.
We are now a month on from Israel executing 15 paramedics and hiding their bodies in a mass grave. Since then, video footage has surfaced of that atrocity, showing Israeli soldiers firing on a convoy of emergency vehicles that were clearly marked and with their warning lights on. We have had postmortems of the victims showing they were shot from close-range in the head and torso. And we’ve had eye-witness accounts of the killings.
All of that, of course, is on top of compelling circumstantial evidence. Israel sought to destroy the evidence of its war crime by crushing the emergency vehicles and then burying them, along with the bodies of the 15 crew members, presumably in the hope that they would decompose and make it hard to forensically determine exactly what had happened.
The latest evidence to emerge, reported by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper this week, shows that Israeli soldiers fired continuously for three and a half minutes on the convoy, despite the emergency vehicles being clearly marked.
According to details from an internal investigation by the Israeli military leaked to the paper, the soldiers fired from near-point-blank range and even while the emergency workers were trying to identify themselves. (Not surprisingly, the other parts of the investigation, those made public, have been a whitewash, suggesting only “professional failures” and “operational misunderstandings”.)
In other words, this new evidence confirms that Israeli soldiers intentionally murdered most of the occupants of the emergency vehicles with a prolonged hail of bullets. Those who survived, the postmortems suggest, were executed with shots to the head or torso. Then the evidence was hurriedly buried.
None of this is surprising. We have known for some time, as repeatedly reported by the Israeli media, that the Israeli military has created undeclared “kill zones”, where anything that moves is shot – even children, aid workers and emergency crews.
As has also been evident for most of the past 18 months, Israel is implementing a policy to destroy Gaza’s health sector, including its hospitals and ambulances, and killing or kidnapping medical staff – on top of wrecking the rest of the enclave’s infrastructure. The goal is to force the Palestinian population out of Gaza, driving them into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai.
Israel is carrying out a genocide to facilitate its ethnic cleansing plan.
The murder of the 15 paramedics entirely fits with this picture.
The video evidence has already proven that Israel’s original claim that the ambulances and fire engines were “advancing suspiciously” – whatever that is supposed to mean – was utterly untrue.
Israel’s other implausible claim, that several of the emergency crew were really Hamas fighters in disguise, has been thoroughly debunked too. The biographies of those murdered by Israel show they have long been emergency workers. Israel has been relying on this kneejerk excuse every time it gets caught lying about its latest atrocity.
So how on earth is the Guardian still writing a headline like this:
New details on killing of paramedics in Gaza appear to contradict IDF’s account
Or writing a first paragraph like this one:
New developments have come to light in the killing of 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers by Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip last month, with evidence reportedly contradicting the Israel Defense Forces’ claim that soldiers did not fire indiscriminately at the medical workers.
The “evidence” cited by the Guardian is a reference to the Haaretz report of Israeli soldiers firing for three and a half minutes on the convoy.
The Guardian’s wording falsely suggests two things. First, that the Israeli military’s account of the killings still has enough credibility that it needs contradicting. And second, that Haaretz’s latest evidence only “appears to contradict” an account that has already been so repeatedly contradicted that it cannot be entertained as true on any level whatsoever.
The Guardian’s phrasing is also utterly subservient to Israel. The Israeli military framed its internal investigation as if its aim was to determine whether soldiers fired “indiscriminately” or not – so that it can then claim to have concluded that they did not fire indiscriminately.
That presumably means the Israeli military wants us to believe its soldiers shot at the emergency vehicles with precision and intention – in this case, to kill those “Hamas fighters” invented retroactively by the Israeli military to justify its atrocity.
The Guardian buys into this framing, suggesting that the unpublished part of the investigation found that the three and a half minutes of live fire at the vehicles was actually “indiscriminate” rather than intentional.
The reality is far worse: it was both. Israeli soldiers fired indiscriminately at the vehicles with the intention of killing all of the emergency workers inside. The issue of “discrimination” is meant only to serve as a red herring.
Before Haaretz’s new disclosure it was already clear that the Israeli military’s account was a pack of lies. So why is the Guardian not doing its job? Why is it still pretending a month on that the Israeli military’s version has not already been thoroughly discredited?
Even a highly cautious headline from the Guardian ought to read like this:
New details on killing of paramedics in Gaza further discredit IDF’s account
And the text should read:
New developments have come to light in the killing of 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers by Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip last month, with an internal Israel Defense Forces’ investigation reportedly finding its soldiers fired a prolonged hail of bullets from close range at a clearly marked convoy of emergency vehicles.
Any rookie journalist knows the Guardian is reporting this all wrong. It keeps giving Israel the benefit of the doubt, even after the case against Israel has been proven. It keeps fudging the story. It keeps suggesting that Israel’s guilt is not already an incontrovertible, established fact.
If this isn’t clear to you, just imagine how this story would have been reported were the executed paramedics Ukrainian and the soldiers responsible Russian. Not like this, you can be sure.
Why are a whole team of highly experienced Guardian journalists still getting this story so wrong? It is not because they are incompetent. They get it wrong because it is their job to do so: they work for a corporate media outlet, one that exists within a corporate news system that serves a corporate financial system that is protected by corporate political structures.
Or for shorthand, these journalists – whether they understand it or not – work for the British establishment, advancing British foreign policy goals that are subservient to Washington’s imperial demands for global full-spectrum dominance.
The role of corporate advertising is clear. It is there to make us want to consume, to encourage us to feel that we need more to be complete, to cultivate an aspiration in us to a materially “better” way of life. People in the advertising industry don’t think of themselves as monsters. Nonetheless, the profession’s goal is to create an endless demand for resources on a finite planet. Ultimately, it is to will the suicide of our species.
The role of the corporate media is no different. It is there to create the illusion that we are the masters of our own thoughts. It is there to make us think we have reached an independent understanding of the world, even though that understanding has been carefully crafted for us from birth. It is there to cultivate a worldview in us that aligns precisely with the privileging of a tiny corporate elite whose wealth depends on the relentless pillaging of the planet for their benefit.
Journalists don’t think of themselves as monsters either. Nonetheless, they are part of a media machine whose goal is to lull us into passivity as our leaders actively collude in the perpetration of a genocide, as our corporations, militaries and intelligence services press ahead with endless wars for resource control, and as the tripwires of nuclear confrontation grow ever more numerous and entangled.
No one wants to think of themself as a monster. But we keep doing monstrous things.
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- Say what you like about Owen Jones, and I’ve said plenty in respect of his writings on Syria and Russia, on Palestine he’s been superb – albeit as the exception proving the rule.