The job of war correspondent and media worker is obviously not a safe one, but figures on all but recent wars are hard to come by. There’s a suggestion that 54 correspondents were killed in World War II. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has more reliable figures for the Iraq War: about 200 media workers over eight years.
As of November 22, 53 journalists have been killed in action in the six weeks of Israel’s destruction of the 2.3 million people of Gaza. Forty-six of the dead are Palestinian, three Lebanese and four Israeli. Nine a week, more than the 42 war media workers killed everywhere in 2022.
The pressing question is how many were deliberately targeted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in a process of assassination.
There is almost no serious doubt that IDF forces deliberately target war correspondents and media workers for killing. In May, the CPJ released “Deadly Pattern”, an investigation of 20 shooting deaths of media workers over the past 20 years. The report concluded that there was a pattern of targeted IDF assassinations, and also a denial of such by Israel.
A number of those journalists killed have died in bombings of their homes. It is difficult to know whether Israel is using precision bombing to known addresses to kill journalists with their families, or whether they are general casualties of the steady destruction of Gaza city.
Reporters Without Borders notes that Israel has claimed it is not targeting journalists, but that it also is making no effort to avoid killing them. The non-profit has filed a complaint concerning what it alleges is the lethal targeting of a group of journalists covering the Lebanon border in mid-October. Al Jazeera has also accused Israel of targeting its journalists after the 2022 killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, for which Israel has apologised. Abu Akleh was killed instantly when she was shot in the neck from behind, in the small space between the bottom of her helmet and top of her body armour, while covering the forced evictions of Palestinian families at Sheikh Jarrah and the demolition of their homes. Israel claims the killing was unintentional.
The sheer rate of death in Gaza — one in every 200 people have been killed in the past six weeks — has pushed the killing of journalists to second place. And many are simply dying in their capacity as Gazan Palestinians. Or Arabs. Or simply anyone who’s not an Israeli Jew on the IDF side. The most recent killings that appear to be a direct targeting were reporting pair Farah Omar and Rabih Me’mari from Lebanese broadcaster Al Mayadeen, alongside a local journalist, targeted on the Lebanon border. In October, a freelancer for the ABC, Roshdi Sarraj, was killed.
What seems to be the deliberate and comprehensive targeting of journalists is a new depredation by a country claiming to be part of an enlightened heritage. What has been a sporadic practice may now have become a general approach. The reasons for this are obvious. The destruction of Gaza is a gangster operation on a vast scale, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is burying his mistakes, and his fascist coalition partners are hoping to push expulsion and exterminatory killings.
Indeed, concern for this in the Biden administration was so great that it played a role in its decision around a pause in the campaign. A Politico report noted: “There was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.”
The US government doesn’t need any assistance down the stairway to hell, but it is noticeable how easily the imperatives of supporting Israel cause it to explicitly reverse the principles of enlightenment we are assured that Israel is part of the fight for: the importance of true information to making any decisions.
To shine some light on the smoke and shade of Gaza, and on the very attempts to prevent them from doing so, journalists are dying daily. They’re dying in their apartments, on the ground, dying in the silent death of a bomb you don’t hear, or from direct targeting as you see a machine gun suddenly start to turn towards you, or they’re bleeding out in the street as a stretcher is rushed to them.
The stomach turns in thinking about it, in what it’s like to get up every morning and do that. In wondering if you’re being targeted, if your job, your duty, is going to get your family killed. Israel has become the great annihilator, the nihilism at the heart of modernity given state form, turning its lethal technopticon towards the killing of any possibility of truth.
On social media, Gazan voices have gone silent, because they have been killed and the place is cut off. In Australia, the mainstream media is almost wholly silent. Israel didn’t need to run those trips for them; as Dostoevsky noted in The Gambler, some journalists are so sycophantic by nature there is no need to bribe them.
The silence of otherwise voluble liberal and left Zionists in Australia has been, well, loquacious. They are committing the ultimate moral failing, of unlimited loyalty to an entity rather than to the values they believed it to represent. Such loyalty should not be renounced lightly. But when such loyalty simply empowers a cynical death-dealing state that is drone-striking the principles they rely on to do what they do, to profess, then how can they live with themselves? How can they, by their silence, consent to the great silencing?
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