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'Israeli violence is legitimized and Palestinian counter-violence is delegitimized' Janine Jackson ([link removed])


** CounterSpin interview with Gregory Shupak on Gaza assault
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Janine Jackson interviewed Gregory Shupak about the Gaza assault for the February 23, 2024, episode ([link removed]) of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.


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Janine Jackson: Seven national US unions, along with more than 200 locals, just formed a coalition calling for a ceasefire in Israel's genocidal war on Gaza. Postal workers, flight attendants, teachers, nurses, auto workers, painters: more than 9 million union workers have signed on to the National Labor Network for Ceasefire ([link removed]) , calling for an immediate end to violence and the restoration of basic human rights, the release of hostages and full access for humanitarian aid. “We can't stand by in the face of this suffering," said the head of United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers ([link removed]) . “We cannot bomb our way to peace.”

So this is on the heels of a ceasefire call by the AFL-CIO, who have a decidedly spotty history in taking the side of humanity in international conflicts in which the US is involved. It's reflective of a growing understanding of the non-marginality of protesting Israel's violent actions in Palestine, and dissenting from US financial and political support for them.

At some point, elite media are going to say, “This was wrong and everyone saw it,” but what are they saying now? If you only can call out horror when it's history, what is journalism good for?

Gregory Shupak ([link removed]) is a media critic, activist and teacher. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and he's author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media ([link removed]) from OR Books. He's joining us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Gregory Shupak.

Gregory Shupak: Hi, thanks for having me back.

JJ: Well, as of February 20, the US, for the third time, has used its veto on the security council to kill a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in what news outlets persist in calling ([link removed]) the "Israel-Hamas war." We're told the White House has put forward an alternative that asks for a halt in fighting “as soon as practicable.”

Well, we know that folks like to say journalism is the first draft of history, and unfortunately that can be true even when what you're seeing with your eyes doesn't match with what you're reading in the paper. I still think that a lot of folks are kind of waking up to media criticism right now, but I just want to ask you, in terms of journalism in coverage of this nightmare, what are you seeing that needs to be called out? What do you think needs to be paid particular attention to?

GS: One thing that comes to mind is that there are a lot of credible organizations based in Palestine, including in Gaza, that get very little in the way of a platform in US media or Canadian media, organizations like Palestine Center for Human Rights ([link removed]) (PCHR), Al-Haq ([link removed]) , and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights ([link removed]) . These organizations are very well connected on the ground in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine in some cases.

BBC,2/29/24 ([link removed])

So I find it, well, at best disappointing that these groups are virtually never mentioned or never cited, I should say, in the American or Canadian media. I think that they provide a lot of very detailed information as to what's happening, and it's one of the problems with the constant framing of what is called the “Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza ([link removed]) ,” framing what Palestinian health officials say that way is flawed, as we know, because it's used to cast doubt on what's being said because Hamas is a thoroughly demonized organization in this part of the world. So, therefore, attaching their name to information is going to make that information sound suspect to a large portion of the audience.

One other kind of facet of that is that it's not just the so-called Hamas-run health ministries giving us information about attacks on hospitals and medical workers and schools and refugee camps and so on and so forth. There are these groups that have a really long history of doing vital work and a very strong track record and internationally recognized track record, and they should be part of the media conversation, but these sources are just not admitted. It's just everything is presented as, “Well, Hamas said this versus Israel said that.”

One of the more frustrating motifs throughout the period since October 7 has been to wedge Palestine into the anti-wokeness

New York Times, 2/6/24 ([link removed])

culture war stuff. And we saw Bret Stephens a couple of weeks ago having a piece called “Settler Colonialism: A Guide for the Sincere,” ([link removed]) we've seen at least two ([link removed]) pieces ([link removed]) in the Atlantic quite stridently opposing the framing of Palestine as a conflict between colonizer and colonized. And, in some way most disappointingly, we've seen in the last few days, Lydia Polgreen writing in the New York Times “Restoring the Past Won't Liberate Palestine.” ([link removed])

And so all of these have in common, especially the Atlantic pieces and the Stephens piece, they rest on this idea of naive, fanatical college students who have these simplistic ideas about politics, and is really a way of eliding some very basic fundamental elements of how things have gotten to this point in Palestine.

So Polgreen mentioned, partially to her credit, I guess, that the vast majority of people who created Israel were not from there, and this is still, I think,

New York Times, 2/18/24 ([link removed])

treated as a minor point by her and it's really absent in the other pieces I'm mentioning. And what she says is that talking about Palestine as a conflict between an indigenous population and a colonial population is what she describes as part of a “larger trend on the left these days, emanating from important and complex theories in the academy but reflected in crude and reductive forms in the memes and slogans at Palestine protests, an increasingly rigid set of ideas about the interloping colonizer and the indigenous colonized.”

So I mean, it's hard to know what crude and reductive slogans Polgreen has in mind because she doesn't mention any, but the fact that Polgreen, and especially Stephens, the pieces in the Atlantic, they're all obscuring that at the time of the post-World War I British mandate in Palestine, the population of Palestine was 90% ([link removed] population of Palestine in,Palestine reached 225 thousand Jews.) Palestinians. And even when the UN issued its 1947 partition plan, Palestinians owned more than 94% ([link removed]) of the land between the river and the sea.

So Polgreen—and the other commentators I've mentioned—they're wrongly implying that the movement to stop the genocide in Gaza is at some basic level wrong about Israel being a colonial enterprise. And this is really significant because they present this idea of anti-colonial struggle in Palestine as some kind of a misguided romanticism that selectively wants to restore the past. Well, the issue isn’t whether the past should somehow be restored, but whether Zionism should continue to be the governing principle across all of historic Palestine.

And so these are all just one example of the ways that Israeli violence is legitimized and Palestinian counter-violence is delegitimized, as is the Palestine solidarity movement within the United States and Canada and so forth. Because if you obscure the fact that this is a colonial dynamic, then it's much easier to just present what has happened both in the longer term and since October 7 as, "Israel is just a country defending itself."

We know, or I assume many of your listeners know, that that is a wildly misguided characterization of it, and it goes back to those decades leading up to the creation of the Israeli state, that this violence that we've seen in recent months is all a product of seeking to maintain an ethnostate in Palestine, wherein Palestinians remain an oppressed minority within what is now called Israel, and stateless occupied people in the West Bank and Gaza and of course internationally.

So you can't understand the basic hinge point in this war, like the fact that most people in Gaza, 70% ([link removed]) of them or thereabouts, are refugees without understanding that they got to be refugees because creating a colonial state in Palestine required expelling 750,000 Palestinians ([link removed]) and also their descendants. So it's treated in the Times by Polgreen and Stephens as let's explore these trendy academic ideas. But this has really real implications for, of course, the people living in Palestine, but also for how the issue is presented and understood in even just factual reporting, where you get very little sense of the fact that there is a fundamental asymmetry here and that what we're talking about is a colonial war or perhaps a decolonial or anti-colonial war.

JJ: I think of Plato's shadows on the cave wall so much, that people interpret real events in terms of some sort of narrative and what it means for them. It just blows my mind. And I just want to ask you finally: journalism should be different, reporting should be different than telling us a story about the good guys and the bad guys. And I just wonder what you think responsible journalism would look like at this time?

GS: I think that responsible journalism would do more than just present what has unfolded as, at best, Israel says this on the one hand, Hamas said that on the other hand, when I think others have said before, we don't have to present debates, like, well, somebody says the sky is blue and somebody says it's purple. We have a lot of sources that can independently make clear what is happening, and those should be relied on more, including the sources I mentioned earlier today, but not only those—that what we're seeing here is a brutal and, in the words of the ICJ, plausibly genocidal undertaking ([link removed]) by Israel to kill what is now, if you include the estimated number of people under the rubble in Gaza, at least something in the ballpark of 35,000 dead Palestinians in four months or so.

So I think that on the so-called factual reporting, it's not very difficult, actually, to get a very clear picture of what is going on even just using a person's, one's own iPhone, if you spend a short period of time going to primary sources, but the general public ought not to have to do that. The role of journalism should be to give people a range of perspectives, and those perspectives ought to be grounded in reliable, credible information. And that's out there, but a lot of our journalists, most of our journalists, seem to not present that in an unfiltered way or even in a way that is less heavily filtered, if I want to rein in my request a little bit. But that is sort of built into the commercial orientation of the media system that there are many considerations that have nothing to do with serving the public good by helping provide the populace with the information that we need and a range of possible lenses to think about them. What we see instead is an orientation toward minimizing
atrocities carried out by countries like the United States and Canada and their allies, which in the case of Israel, is less an ally than an appendage.

JJ: Alright then. We've been speaking with writer, activist and teacher Greg Shupak from the University of Guelph-Humber. His book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media ([link removed]) , is Available From OR Books. Thank you so much, Gregory Shupak, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

GS: Thanks again for having me.
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