World
The Trias Politica and Australian governance
In recent years a growing number of Australians have lost confidence in their system of governance, but few journalists and political theory academics have suggested alternatives. If Australia is to improve its governance system and its democracy, it should look to European alternatives. The Australian system of governance is usually described as “Westminster”. This includes Continue reading »
Decolonisation is our safeguard against genocide
To ensure Aboriginal Peoples’ freedom from genocide and ecocide, we need decolonisation. For some, post the Australian 2023 Referendum, questions arise: where to next? More of the same isn’t an option; the evidence surrounds us as to why more genocide in all its forms, including assimilation and the ecocide of our territories doesn’t work. But Continue reading »
China: Perspectives beyond the mainstream media
China looms large in the Australian psyche. On a practical level, what happens in China largely determines the success of global action to deal with climate change, the profitability of our rural economy and the financing of our universities. Our national leaders are concerned about rising tensions in our region and the interplay of US-China Continue reading »
I Calculated How Much of My Money the U.S. Sent to Kill Palestinians. You Can Too.
Parents with their children holding a sign reading “Our tax dollars are killing kids like me” during a protest in Arlington, Va., on Dec. 9, 2023.
Photo: Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images
As 2023 ends, I’ve been asking myself: How much money am I, personally, contributing to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and its attack on Gaza?
The Israeli assault on Gaza launched after the October 7 attacks by Hamas has so far killed more than 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including thousands of children and over 100 journalists. Nearly 90 percent of the territory’s residents have been displaced, and it has been called “one of this century’s most destructive wars.”
So how much have I chipped in to create this hell on earth?
The best answer I’ve come up with is $150.
There are two ways of looking at this number.
One is that this is a relatively small amount of money. Another is that the U.S. is so astonishingly rich and powerful that we as a country can mete out overwhelming brutality to others and barely notice as individuals. This is, in part, what makes the dollar amount of my contribution especially horrifying.
What the U.S. Gives Israel
In any case, $150 is necessarily a guesstimate. It could be more or less. Let’s go through how I came up with the figure.
To start with, adherents of modern monetary theory would tell you the government doesn’t need to tax anyone to spend. I believe this is correct. It’s part of why the notion of “taxpayer money” is a dangerous misconception: What we’re talking about really is “public money” — it doesn’t belong only to taxpayers. For our purposes, however, these are distinctions without a difference.
Next, we have to look at how much money the federal government spent in 2023, and on what. The federal 2023 fiscal year ended on September 30, but I’m going to assume the FY2023 numbers are equal to calendar year 2023.
In 2023, the government spent about $6.3 trillion. About $1.4 trillion of that is the cost of Social Security, which has its own dedicated revenue sources, mostly payroll taxes. Then, $0.8 trillion was spent on Medicare, about half of which comes from general revenue. So let’s say the total federal spending that has to be funded from non-dedicated sources is $4.5 trillion ($6.3 trillion minus $1.4 trillion minus $0.4 trillion). This isn’t precisely right for various complicated reasons, but it’s close enough.
The total aid the U.S. will be giving to Israel in 2023 and early 2024 will be about $18 billion. (That’s the $3.8 billion in normal annual aid, plus $14.5 billion in supplemental aid that’s been passed by the House and will surely be passed soon by the Senate.)
If you want, you could argue that Israel uses this for things other than its attack on Gaza and its wider occupation of Palestinian lands. But let’s, in our thought experiment, apply the twisted logic of the U.S.’s laws against material support: All cash is fungible, which is to say that even if Israel doesn’t spend all the U.S. money killing Palestinians, those other expenditures free up money to put toward that purpose.
It’s also true that the U.S. is supporting Israel’s actions in ways other than direct aid that also cost money: shielding Israel at the United Nations, sending the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Groups to the Mediterranean, etc. So let’s call it a wash and just use the $18 billion number.
That $18 billion is 0.4 percent of $4.5 trillion.
What I Give Israel
The $4.5 trillion in outlays comes from various sources, mostly income taxes, corporate taxes, and borrowing.
I’ll pay about $27,000 in federal income taxes for 2023. I also purchased government bonds: the maximum-allowed $10,000 in inflation-protected I bonds.
My 401(k) and mutual funds probably bought some federal bonds too. And surely some of the burden of corporate taxes fell on me, also through my 401(k) and mutual funds. Then, I paid some tax costs that companies were able to pass along to consumers. But there’s no way to calculate all this, and it all was certainly a small amount in any case. So let’s just add the $27,000 together with the $10,000 and say I contributed a total of $37,000 out of that $4.5 trillion.
Four-tenths of a percent of $37,000 is about $150.
Israel’s War on Gaza
There you have it. That’s my monetary contribution to the extraordinary brutality of Israel’s occupation and its war on Gaza.
You can figure out your own contribution if you want: Add your income taxes to any federal bonds you bought this year and multiply that number by 0.004. It’s easy, but not very fun.
At that point, you may ask yourself: What can I do about this, beyond trying to stop this war?
There is a long history of tax resistance in America. However, technology has made it easier for the government to track where all your money is, and if you refuse to pay taxes, it will eventually seize what you owe out of your bank accounts. You will likely also go to prison.
You theoretically can also vote for anti-war candidates in 2024, but there often aren’t any. And even if they win, they won’t take office for more than a year, much too late to make any difference in the current war. Despite the unpopularity of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and cracks beginning to show in the Democratic coalition, the pro-Israel lobby and bipartisan support for Israel remain strong in Washington, where foreign policy is set.
So I don’t know what the answer is. If you figure it out, please let me know.
The post I Calculated How Much of My Money the U.S. Sent to Kill Palestinians. You Can Too. appeared first on The Intercept.
We spend billions on ‘wellness’ crap. Why?
‘Alternative’ medicines and therapies comprise the biggest scam in the country. But if you think that industry is going to be cleaned up … you’re joking. According to the best estimates, Australians spend well over $5 billion a year on alternative medicines and therapies. Globally, the market is valued at $2.4 trillion, equal to the Continue reading »
What We’re Reading
Nonfiction
“The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance,” Rebecca Clarren
That Rebecca Clarren’s Jewish ancestors escaped antisemitic persecution in Russia, received free land from the U.S. government at the turn of the 20th century, and settled in South Dakota is a foundational part of her family lore. What went unquestioned over the years is whether they had any right to that land in the first place. In this timely and unflinching book, Clarren investigates how her family benefited from genocidal U.S. policies against the Lakota and other Indigenous peoples. Crucially, as a beneficiary of stolen land, Clarren also consults with her rabbi and Indigenous elders about how to begin to repair those harms. That yearslong process resulted in, among other things, a reparations project to help “return Indian lands in the Black Hills (He Sapa) to Indian ownership and control.” As Israel rains bombs on Gaza, it’s hard to read this book and not reflect on the ongoing consequences of land theft, whether in the United States or in Palestine. — Maryam Saleh
“Camino a la Fosa Común (Journey to the Common Grave),” Memo Bautista
The concept of a “common grave” conjures an image of large, World War II-type trenches, where piles of unidentified bodies are discarded and buried. But in 21st-century Mexico, common grave burials are a strict process. Due to the high levels of violence, with tens of thousands of people disappeared, common graves in Mexico are heavily guarded and meticulously organized, in case authorities need to access remains for an investigation. It is a grim reminder of how the Mexican drug war violence persists, violence typically perceived through faceless statistics.
Journalist Memo Bautista’s Spanish-language book, difficult to find outside of Mexico City, gives life to the numbers of dead in Mexico, not just for those who have died of drug war violence, but also ordinary working-class Mexicans.
As Bautista writes in his introduction, many of us have an image of how we want our own death to look like: We’ll spend a day eating our favorite foods, playing our favorite games, surrounded by our favorite people, and then pass away peacefully in our sleep. Often, that is not the case. Bautista’s collection of nonfiction stories chronicles how the living deal with the aftermath of untimely deaths: from the sanitation officials who clean the Mexico City subway after someone is struck, to the grieving mother whose teenage son is killed in a rural community’s agrarian conflict, to the young workers embalming lifeless bodies in Mexico City.
Bautista’s eponymous story is about a charming and complicated homeless man, Escalera, who Bautista follows for a period of years. After dying of hypothermia in Mexico City’s historic center, Escalera’s journey ends in the “common grave.” — José Olivares
“Hat Box: The Collected Lyrics of Stephen Sondheim,” Stephen Sondheim
We all know Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. At the bottom, there are physiological needs, such as food and shelter. Then there are psychological needs, including love, societal prestige, and self-actualization. Finally, at the very top, there is the need for the musicals of Stephen Sondheim.
This is only partly a joke. Sondheim’s work is generally for people whose other needs have been met. But if they have — wow, it is going to make your life exquisitely vibrant. You’ve been to the shows. You’ve bought the albums. You (I) have delivered your monologue accepting an imaginary Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award for Private Sondheim Shower Interpretation. Next, you need “Hat Box.” It’s a two-volume memoir by Sondheim, except it’s purely about his work, and includes essentially all the lyrics he wrote through 2011, plus all the detail you could ever wish about how this spectacular, subtle artist made his spectacular, subtle art. — Jon Schwarz
“Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11,” Maha Hilal
In quiet moments, photographs I’ve seen from Getty Images and social media race behind my eyes in vivid detail, showcasing an unstoppable flow of atrocities in Gaza. How is it possible that Israel’s actions still maintain such fervent and radical support? How is it possible the United States continues to send endless weapons and military support to their genocidal campaign in Palestine in defiance of global protest? In thinking about how the lives of civilians — nearly 10,000 children — can matter so little, I have been rereading my friend Maha Hilal’s brilliant book “Innocent Until Proven Muslim.”
Israel’s rampage in the wake of an act of shocking violence on its own homeland feels like a repeating, almost too clearly, of America’s actions in the wake of 9/11. I wish I was shocked — but I’m not. I’ve spent my adult life thinking about the long shadow of the “war on terror.” This genocide in Gaza seems to be the logical extension of the demonization and dehumanization of Muslims that the U.S. has so intentionally perfected. Hilal’s book, a devastating exposé of how we’ve ended up here, at the very least provides a path forward. With meticulously researched examples, Hilal shows exactly how three administrations since 9/11 have painted Muslims as inherently violent at home and abroad. She weaves through American policy from the Patriot Act to CIA torture, Guantánamo Bay, FBI entrapment cases, and beyond, challenging readers to question the narratives perpetuated by policymakers and media that have brought injustice and indignity for decades. Her final radical argument that the very framework of the “war on terror” must be abolished is a powerful antidote to the injustice we feel today. — Elise Swain
“Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World,” Malcolm Harris
It’s a history of a small town. Of the Bay Area. Of a state. Of the American West. Of America. Of the West. It’s a history of empire, of conquest and genocide, of war-making and profiteering, of racism and eugenics, of moral bankruptcy and giant returns on investment. Malcolm Harris can be a very funny writer, but he isn’t kidding around when he called his latest book “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.” I expected the tony suburb to be an avatar of all the things Harris wanted to cover, but it’s remarkable how much Palo Alto is actually a central player in American and world history. Colonial extractive industries? It’s in there. The primacy of railroads? Early avionics in the world wars? Privatization of virtually every public function? Computers? Check, check, check, and of course! Want a framework where the awesome, genocidal power of social media makes perfect sense? It’s Palo Alto.
Books that present clever unifying theories, especially when they qualify as doorstoppers, can end up being forced and fraudulent (see: Malcolm Gladwell) or, perhaps worse still, boring laundry lists of disparate facts and ideas that fail to come together. Harris, though, is an engaging writer, and the theme works so staggeringly well that “Palo Alto” holds attention and holds together. The results are frightening. Palo Alto isn’t just a town that touches our collective history; it’s one that has grabbed on to it, slaps it around, and won’t let go until it squeezes every last breath and penny out of us. — Ali Gharib
“The Living,” Tsurisaki Kiyotaka
Tsurisaki Kiyotaka is a photographer of human corpses: “They are the only subjects I want to photograph — this is my personal dogma.” This is a fact, well, beaten to death with prior titles like “The Dead,” “Death,” and “Danse Macabre to the Hardcore Works,” as well as via documentary films like “Orozco the Embalmer.” However, Kiyotaka notes his situation has at times required him to “engage in other photography to financially support my passion of corpse photography — in short, I have engaged in photojournalism, or at least a good imitation thereof.”
The outcome of life constructed as fiscal requisite for the support of death is here manifested in nearly 200 photos of protests in Ramallah, West Bank; festivals in India and Thailand; Ukraine in 2022; the aftermath of an earthquake in Japan — these and more, coalescing in a dizzying array of approaches to the living as existing to sustain the dead. As Paul Virilio once succinctly summarized, “When you invent electricity, you invent electrocution.” “The Living” extends this sensory sentiment by visually augmenting the miasma emanating from all manner of circuitry frying the world (crypto, artificial intelligence, or whatever is the current flavor of the month at your eschatological creamery). The synesthetic boundary-blurring that Kiyotaka manages to achieve here allows you to smell the searing with your eyes and cry with your fists. — Nikita Mazurov
“Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents,” Paul Theroux
This is one of the best books I’ve read about friendship and particularly a friendship gone awry. It is hilarious, insightful, and timeless despite being written many years ago, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys good writing. — Murtaza Hussain
“Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations: The Art of Analyzing Hacked and Leaked Data,” Micah Lee
Have you ever thought it might be fun to learn how to dig through troves of hacked law enforcement documents, or decipher leaked chat logs from Russian ransomware gangs, or analyze metadata from videos of the January 6 attack? And, once you find the juicy bits, publish your findings and change the world?
I just wrote a book that teaches journalists, researchers, and activists exactly how to do this! It will be released on January 9, but it ships right now if you order it directly from the publisher — and you can get 25 percent off using the discount code INTERCEPT25, valid until January 15.
No prior technical or programming experience is required. All you need is a laptop, an internet connection, and a desire to learn new skills. The book is incredibly hands-on, it uses real datasets as examples (you download them and analyze as you read), and it’s crammed full of anecdotes from the trenches of 21st-century investigative journalism. — Micah Lee
Photo illustration: The Intercept
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot
I finished this book in about two days; I couldn’t put it down. This incredibly well-researched, engrossing, and often painful book is about more than Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cervical cancer cells were taken and used without her consent and led to huge strides in modern medicine, like the creation of vaccines for polio and HPV. It also tells the story of her children, her doctors, and her family’s fight to learn about just what happened to her cells after her death (they were never informed that her cells were being used and only found out decades later after speaking with a friend who worked at the National Cancer Institute).
Through interviews with Lacks’s husband, cousins, and friends, Rebecca Skloot paints a vivid picture of her life — and helps her family get closure after years of exploitation from researchers, scammers, and journalists. It’s a gut-wrenching read: The section where Skloot and Lacks’s daughter Deborah discover the truth about what happened to Deborah’s older sister Elsie, who was institutionalized when she was 10 and died five years later, will haunt me for a very long time. But there are also moments of beauty, like when Deborah and her brother Zakariyya see their mother’s cells for the first time. Equal parts scientific and narrative, this story is told with a lot of care and will sweep you in. — Skyler Aikerson
“Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon,” Michael Lewis
As one of the many spectators enthralled at the abrupt fall from grace of the crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, I was happy to learn that he would also be the subject of Michael Lewis’s next book. But it wasn’t until I read the New Yorker’s review that I knew this one would jump to the top of my pile. Since the book published a month before the eventual verdict in federal court, I wanted to know how Lewis’s “contrarian bet” would stand up to the coming headlines.
I don’t agree with the take that Lewis “staked his reputation” on his assessment of SBF. He chose to publish shortly before history would determine whether he was “right” or “wrong” because, I like to think, he knew his work would help people see beyond whatever headline announced the news. In the end (no spoilers), the fact that Lewis came to a more nuanced answer to the question of SBF’s guilt than a federal jury did helps remind us all what a reporter’s job is: not to proclaim the guilt or innocence of their subject, but to tell as much of the story as possible and let readers decide where they stand. I, for one, came away with a much more layered understanding of the case than any of the many articles written about it had given me before. — Greg Emerson
“Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law,” Mary Roach
Migrating elephants and jaywalking moose and dumpster-diving bears, oh my! Mary Roach combines wildlife biology, human behavior, and consistent humor to answer the age-old question: “How does that pigeon know how to wait until the last second to fly away before it gets hit by my car?” If you love wildlife, sometimes like people, and are interested in how we can improve the path to coexistence, you won’t be disappointed with “Fuzz.” — Casey Quirke
“The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” Ryan Grim
I find myself imagining a reader in the year 2100, studying the history of the 21st century and how the world finally came together, begrudgingly and in half measures, to keep global temperatures down. Perhaps the reader is a student of the booming industry of bioengineering tasked with populating the former state of Ohio with robotic birds. And they wonder to themselves, “How did it all happen? Where were the people pushing for action in, like, 2019?” Their personal algorithmic device will immediately conjure Ryan Grim’s “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” which covers not only Congress but also the Sunrise Movement and the conception and evolution of the Green New Deal. Unless, that is, the climate movement fails. In that case, Grim’s book will explain how the human race doomed itself to visiting aliens in a year unfathomable to man. — Nausicaa Renner
Fiction
“This Thing Between Us,” Gus Moreno
If you love smart horror, but you’re tired of smart horror’s requisite ghosts as metaphors for trauma, then this debut novel about a married couple terrorized by their Amazon Echo is for you. About 20 pages in, it springs into one of the most ferocious gallops I’ve ever read, dragging the reader across horror genres, state lines, and borders between worlds. A relentless nightmare that never feels gratuitous, even as it wraps its tendrils around you. I read it in a day, but I still haven’t shaken it off. Moreno’s future is bright: You can tell from the long shadow it casts over the world he made. — Anthony Smith
“The Chronicles of Amber,” Roger Zelazny
In this 10-book series, Roger Zelazny artfully spins a mesmerizing tale spanning infinite worlds, where readers are transported to the realms of Amber and Chaos from which all other worlds originate as mere shadows. Through multifaceted characters and detailed narratives, Zelazny shapes a sprawling mythology exploring identity, power, manipulation, and destiny against captivating fantasy backdrops. It certainly lives up to its reputation as one of the most revered fantasy series of all time. Opting for the print version? Be forewarned about its tangible heft. — Kate Miller
“The Bee Sting,” Paul Murray
I’ve been waiting for new work from Irish novelist Paul Murray ever since stumbling across “Skippy Dies” in a free book pile in southern Turkey over a decade ago, and was not surprised that his new novel, “The Bee Sting,” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s an immersive portrait of a family that meanders through each member’s lived experience so closely that you feel like you know them intimately, and yet there are surprises throughout as Murray reveals the narratives we tell ourselves in order to survive. The novel opens with the family’s financial troubles, but they quickly become subsumed by psychological trauma, academic stress, repressed sexuality, blackmail, internet stalkers, substance abuse, and climate change. It’s also propulsive and very, very funny. — Celine Piser
“Indelicacy,” Amina Cain
In a slim 158 pages, Amina Cain deftly weaves together a story about vocation, pleasure, gendered labor, restlessness, creativity under capitalism, jealousy, and desire. Whip-smart and beautifully wrought, “Indelicacy” is an eminently readable novella, an instant classic that you’ll want to revisit again and again. — Schuyler Mitchell
“The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray,” Jorge Amado
This 1959 novella by imprisoned, exiled, censored, and beloved Brazilian author Jorge Amado is even funnier than its translated title teases. “When a man dies he is reintegrated into his most authentic respectability, even having committed the maddest acts when he was alive” is what the dead man’s blood relations have long been waiting for. Unlike Henry Kissinger, Joaquim Soares da Cunha did not commit war crimes — just the unspeakable middle-class transgression of embarrassing his family. His body now cold (and controllable), they’re eager to impose their will and revise the narrative of the retired civil servant who disowned them, at the age of 50, to become Quincas Water-Bray, “the king of the tramps of Bahia … boozer in chief of Salvador … tatterdemalion philosopher of the market dock … senator of honky-tonks … patriarch of the red-light district.” His friends, his found family, refuse to let his memory be buried by hypocritical propriety. The boatloads of spilled cachaça and a few piquant whiffs of magical realism gave me a contact high. Most strangely, lo and retold, this Bahian tale inspired an American movie called “Weekend at Bernie’s.” — Nara Shin
The post What We’re Reading appeared first on The Intercept.
There Was No Cover-Up of Hamas’s Sexual Violence on October 7
Demonstrators gather during a “#MeToo unless you’re a Jew” protest outside of United Nations headquarters in New York City on Dec. 4, 2023.
Photo: Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images
One thing is true: Hamas and other Palestinian militants committed unspeakable sexual violence against Israeli civilians on October 7. “The full scale of the assault is yet to be uncovered,” according to a position paper published by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, a nongovernmental organization.
Two things are not true: That the October 7 rapes and sexual mutilation were ignored or covered up by the United Nations gender-equality organization U.N. Women and a conspiracy of Western feminists, global human rights organizations, and U.S. progressives. Or that behind this alleged rape denial lies antisemitism: “#MeToo, except if you’re a Jew.”
Yes, some individuals and extreme-left organizations have denied these atrocities or upheld them as justified resistance. But it is not U.N. Women’s role to make day-after condemnations of unverified acts of violence against women, and verifying such acts, particularly amid the chaos of war, takes a long time.
There has been no cover-up. If anything, the public’s fixation on sexual violence heightens attention to the Hamas-led crimes. The scandal that unfolded in early December was largely manufactured by right-wing pundits who until this moment didn’t give a fig about rape. Mainstream media, which had grown correctly cautious after repeating unconfirmed reports about who bombed Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City in mid-October, could not resist feeding their audiences’ prurience. Then some feminists took the bait, creating false moral distinctions — and strategic divisions — between those who care about rape and those who also recognize the urgency of ending Israel’s occupation and indiscriminate killing.
Ultimately, the outcry distracts from the annihilation of Gaza and its people and lends Israel justification in perpetuating it. Needless to say, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is exploiting the opportunity.
A protester holds a sign to protest U.N. Women during a rally in support of Israeli victims of sexual assault at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in New York City on Dec. 4, 2023.
Photo: Lev Radin/VIEWpress
How did U.N. Women, an unlikely villain, become the center of this whipped-up storm?
On October 13 — two days after Israel cut off food, water, and fuel to Gaza while it continued its indiscriminate bombardment — U.N. Women, whose mission is to promote gender equality globally, issued its first statement on the war: “UN Women condemns the attacks on civilians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and is deeply alarmed by the devastating impact on civilians including women and girls,” it began. The 198-word statement called for “unrestricted humanitarian aid,” a restoration of the basics for survival to Gaza, and the “immediate release of hostages.” It reiterated the group’s support of Palestinian women in their fight for social, political, and economic rights. It did not say the same for Israeli Jewish women, who are already granted these rights under Israel’s Basic Laws. Hamas was not mentioned.
On October 20, the organization published a “Rapid Assessment and Humanitarian Response in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Among the bullet points: 493,000 women and girls were already displaced from their homes; 668,000 were in need of protection from gender-based violence. This document did not mention Hamas’s attacks either. It did not report on human rights violations or even provide a death toll.
The United Nations more broadly was not idle on the subject, however. Also on October 20, its Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory called for submissions to its investigation of war crimes committed on all sides of the conflict. The investigation, launched three days after the attacks, is applying particular focus to sexual and gender-based violence.
The first organized criticism of U.N. Women came on October 30 from the U.S.-based National Council of Jewish Women, the Israel Women’s Network, and 140-plus Jewish and Israeli women’s organizations. “It is inconceivable that a UN organization that is responsible for women’s rights is ignoring the hostages captured and held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the murder of hundreds of innocent people,” their statement declared. In fact, U.N. Women on October 13 did not mention Hamas, but neither did it ignore the Israeli murder victims or the hostages.
Absent from this critique — or from subsequent ones — was a demand for accountability on the part of the Israeli government, which had rejected a Palestinian proposal for a five-day ceasefire and hostage release in mid-October and was now botching its own investigations into the sexual crimes.
Israel’s War on Gaza
In early November, Israeli women’s groups flagged what The Guardian called “significant failings” on the part of the state “in preserving forensic evidence that could have shone a light on the scale of sexual violence committed against women and girls in last month’s Hamas attacks.” One report suggested that the investigation’s lack of cohesion and coordination was to blame for the failure to photograph, preserve, or properly examine the bodies for evidence of sexual assault before their burial. In fact, said the Times of Israel, the problem wasn’t necessarily incompetence; not using “time-consuming crime scene investigation protocols to document rape cases” was the result of forensic triage, which prioritized identifying the dead, burned, and decaying bodies. That decision, claimed the Times, “has fueled international skepticism over Hamas’s sexual abuse of victims.”
While the government was stumbling, it fell to civil society groups, such as the ad hoc Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children as well as Physicians for Human Rights, to document the assaults. One of the authors of the physicians’ group’s paper told the New Yorker that they excluded videotapes recorded by the Israeli security agency Shin Bet, in which Hamas fighters assert that they were ordered to commit the murders and “sully” Israeli women. Such evidence was “unreliable,” said the PHR author, because of what the paper called “severe concern that the interrogations included the use of torture.”
On November 22, the Civil Commission presented its findings to U.N. Women in advance of the Security Council meeting on the effects of the hostilities on women and children.
On November 24, U.N. Women deleted an Instagram post condemning Hamas’s “brutal attacks” and calling for immediate release of the hostages, and replaced it with one missing the condemnation of Hamas. It did so, according to a spokesperson, to convey support for the temporary truce and hostage exchange, which had been extended the day before the prescheduled post went up.
On December 1, eight weeks after the fact, U.N. Women released a statement “unequivocally condemn[ing] the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7.” It continued: “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks.”
Protesters gather at the offices of United Nations Women on Nov. 27, 2023, in New York City.
Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The right was first to portray these events as collaboration with terrorists. Fox News — the outfit that’s paid Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham hundreds of millions of dollars to fan white paranoia and inform white Christians that Jews are replacing them — was now the great protector of Jewish dignity and life.
Among those leading the charge was Tomi Lahren, an Ingraham clone who hosts a rant fest on the anti-woke sports channel OutKick. Before this, the only things Lahren had to say about rape were that women lie, rape culture isn’t real, and nongendered school bathrooms lead to sexual assault.
Nevertheless, she began to make the rounds. On November 29, Lahren growled alongside Martha MacCallum, another thin, white, Foxie blond, after watching a CNN clip of U.N. Women Deputy Executive Director Sarah Hendriks explaining why the organization did not issue a straightforward condemnation of the Hamas attacks.
“U.N. Women always supports impartial independent investigations into any serious allegations of gender-based or sexual crimes,” Hendriks said. But investigation is not her organization’s department. She went on at length elucidating U.N. structure, “mechanisms,” and protocols. MacCallum called the response a “word salad,” composed of such arcane vocabulary as “‘context’ and ‘providing’ and ‘knowledge’” — and declared the whole thing a dereliction of moral duty.
It was indeed a specimen of the U.N.’s bureaucratic tone-deafness. Hendriks might have stressed the importance of statements based on facts, without whose accuracy the global body has no credibility.
She could have noted that documenting war crimes is a lengthy, painstaking process. Human Rights Watch issued a report two years after the Rwandan genocide of 1994, during which the Hutu-dominated government of Rwanda raped and sexually mutilated a quarter-million Tutsi women, girls, and men. The International Criminal Court tribunal against the perpetrators began in 1998 and lasted until 2022. The U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia spent nine years investigating war crimes committed during the Balkans wars of the 1990s including the rape, sexual torture, and enslavement of some 20,000 to 50,000 girls and women. The ICC is still looking into human rights abuses committed during Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, in 2014.
Israeli officials have twice revised the death toll from October 7 downward from an original estimate of 1,400. In November they announced it was “around 1,200.” A month later the data were more precise: 695 Israeli civilians killed, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, for a total of 1,139. Lahav 433, the country’s FBI, does not expect to finish its fact-finding on the Hamas-led incursion for many months.
But on Fox News, the punchline was preordained. It’s time to defund the U.N., Lahren asserted. The National Review chimed in: “UN Women Is a Disgrace.”
U.N. Women’s December 1 statement satisfied no one. Instead, the field of wrongdoers widened to include those who had not adequately condemned U.N. Women for not condemning Hamas. At the top of the list were women. The conservative TV talk show host Piers Morgan framed a segment on the issue: “Why are so many female so-called progressives finding it impossible to come out and scream from the rooftops?”
As always, brown and Black congressional progressives had to be punished. In an interview with Dana Bash on CNN, Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., repeatedly expressed disgust at Hamas’s actions, but also allowed that “we have to be balanced about the outrages that are happening to Palestinians.”
That, apparently, was impermissible. Among Jayapal’s detractors was Concerned Women for America, which supports Israel because Israel “is an important issue to God.” (Here at home, though, CWA respects Jews so much that it “is leading a movement dedicated to impacting the culture for Christ through education and public policy.”) Feminists for Life, which does not support a rape exception for abortion, also took a swipe at Jayapal.
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens also scolded the representative. His bona fides on violence against women can be found in other pieces, about, for instance, the “vindictive excesses” of the #MeToo movement. In 2016, he called antisemitism “the disease of the Arab mind.” Squad members Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., also got their share of vilification.
Once the right broke the ice, scores of media outlets — from the Daily Beast to Northeastern University’s newspaper — joined in. CNN’s “The Amanpour Hour” had previously conducted two interviews, one with a survivor of the music festival attack and another with an Israeli psychologist who specializes in trauma, in which neither the journalist nor the subject mentioned rape. Now it ran a segment headlined “Are Reports of Sexual Violence on October 7 Being Ignored?” The sole interviewee was Israeli legal scholar Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who cited the Shin Bet videotapes in which Hamas soldiers confessed to receiving “instruction and permission” from their commanders “to perform these atrocities.” CNN host Bianna Golodryga did not challenge these claims and even appeared to reinforce them, referring to the report by Physicians for Human Rights, which had strongly suggested that Shin Bet extracted such statements with torture.
Liberal feminists took to the podium. On December 4, Sheryl Sandberg, former chief operating officer of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at an event with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Hillary Clinton. Sandberg leaned in courageously: “We need to hear your voices loudly and clearly saying, ‘Rape is unacceptable,’” she said.
Feminists began leveling accusations at other feminists. In The Forward, Letty Cottin Pogrebin indicted unnamed “sisters” (in quotes) who acknowledged the attacks but “minimized” them or “implored us to put the attacks ‘in historical and political context’” — a sin equal to “justify[ing] the mass torture and murder of women and girls.” Who were the traitorous feminists who have “turned a blind eye” to Jewish women’s suffering? “Turned a blind eye” was one of the only phrases Pogrebin linked — but the link led only to a piece in the United Kingdom’s Jewish News, also arguing that feminists are turning a blind eye to the horrors of October 7.
“Why have Western feminists been so slow to condemn Hamas rapes?” Katha Pollitt mused in The Nation. It took the National Organization for Women until November 30, she noted, to come out against the use of rape as a weapon of war — but it didn’t name Hamas. Planned Parenthood said nothing until December 5. Why? Pollitt doesn’t know. But she’s shooting at straw women. NOW is hardly the bravest body on the block. Its founders could not even agree on demanding the legalization of abortion. And since when does Planned Parenthood comment on rape?
“There is a litmus test” applied to Palestinians by Jews and Israelis in the anti-occupation left, said Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man, a Jewish human rights litigator who challenges Israeli policies in court. Not only must Palestinians denounce Hamas, they must also do so in certain words, like “barbaric.” To fail the test is to be assumed indifferent to Jewish trauma. Equivalent denunciations — of the siege, the genocidal discourse of high Israeli officials — are not required of Jews.
This testing is not malicious. It comes from a desire, on the part of Jews, for comfort from one’s comrades in an hour of trauma. Nevertheless, it has a pernicious effect: silencing Palestinians, whose anguish and rage are both historic and reignited by the present, escalating catastrophe. Requiring the performance of caring undermines the unity needed to actualize it. “I am afraid this will tear apart the progressive left if we can’t get beyond it,” said Omer-Man.
The demand that feminists rebuke U.N. Women, and the implication that the failure to do so amounts to antisemitism, is another such litmus test. It undermines the solidarity critical to action. But it is destructive in another way. Whereas Palestinian–Israeli and Jewish anti-Zionist movements reject racial and religious fundamentalism, the dynamic here appeals to tribalism.
In Israel–Palestine, tribalism is being enacted as ethnic cleansing, which the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé defined as “an ideology that is being implemented in a place where there are two ethnic groups and one group wishes the disappearance of another group.” In the discourse about Hamas-led sexual violence, the tribalism demanding allegiance to one gender conflates care for one (or more than one simultaneously) with debasement of another. “When did intersectionality, a key ethos of 21st-century feminism, become Judenrein?” asked Pogrebin, in the ugliest sentence of her piece. Judenrein is a Nazi term meaning “cleansed of Jews.”
Only the vigorous enforcement of international human rights law — which is based on the equal valuing of all people — will end the violence. Such humanism, expressed through an anti-racist, anti-violence feminism, is embodied in an open letter entitled “Feminists for a Free Palestine. Stop the Genocide. End the Occupation” that was released at the end of October by 147 “scholars in feminist, queer, and trans studies who are rooted in social justice praxis.” Many of the signers were prominent activists and academics of color, including Angela Davis and the historian Barbara Ransby. Not a few were Jews, such as the political theorist Zillah Eisenstein. Signatures now exceed 1,000.
Those inclined to infer antisemitism from an emphasis on Palestinian suffering will find it in this letter, starting from the title. They will find bias here: “We refuse the killing, maiming, kidnapping, and imprisonment of children, without exception” — because the sentence ends: “and we remember that half the population of the Gaza Strip, which is effectively an open-air prison, are children.” The document does not indict Hamas.
But its universalist politics imply that indictment: “We refuse racist, Islamophobic, [and] antisemitic … discourse, and incitement to violence, without exception,” it says. “We refuse the racist weighting of human life, without exception. Humanity is not a hierarchy.” Its spirit is the opposite of the exceptionalism stirred by right-wing cynics in the U.N. Women flap. The letter ends: “Our feminism compels us to say: Free Palestine!” So does mine.
Demonstrators hold posters reading “UN Women, your silence is loud” along with a red paint-stained sheet reading “UNbelievable” during a rally in London on Dec. 3, 2023, to protest against what they consider a conspiracy of silence over alleged rapes and other sexual crimes committed by Hamas militants during the October 7 attacks.
Photo: Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images
While critics of U.N. Women were giving the Israeli government a pass for treating the sexual violence as an afterthought, the Israeli government and its apologists were deploying the uproar to do what the prime minister does best: shift the blame.
The December 4 event at which Sandberg appeared was presented by Israel’s mission to the U.N. The National Council of Jewish Women, the group that organized the first letter of protest, describes Israel as “a Jewish and democratic state” and supports “full and equal rights for Palestinian citizens … who live within the Green Line.” In other words, not Palestinians who live in the occupied territories.
Catching up to the scandal in the first week of December, Netanyahu pointed the finger everywhere but at himself. First, unaccountably, he seemed to be chiding the Israeli press. “Were you quiet because we were talking about Jewish women?” he asked at a press conference, in Hebrew. Then he identified the real bad guys and switched to English for the world to hear. “I say to the women’s rights organizations, to the human rights organizations: You’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation,” the prime minister snarled. “Where the hell are you?”
And where are the Israeli women whose pain their prime minister and his supporters are retailing in all its grisly detail? They are disappearing into propaganda, becoming talking points to legitimize the pain of other women, children, and men in the killing field on the other side of the fence.
Correction: December 29, 2023
The piece previously referred to an Israeli constitution, which does not exist. Rather, it has a set of Basic Laws. The piece has been corrected.
The post There Was No Cover-Up of Hamas’s Sexual Violence on October 7 appeared first on The Intercept.
Merry Christmas! We All Belong in Prison at The Hague.
The Grinch tries to locate a single American who doesn’t belong in The Hague’s detention facility.
Photo: Getty Images
We hope that all The Intercept’s readers are enjoying peace and contentment with their families this holiday season. That’s because human joy is anathema to us, and it is our institutional policy to locate such emotions and destroy them.
We’ve previously tried to obliterate your Christmas happiness by bringing up the children living in fear of our killer drones and how capitalism is killing us all. This year we’d like to point out that in any just universe, everyone from the U.S. to the European Union would currently be imprisoned in the international prison at The Hague in the Netherlands.
We’ve all committed many crimes, but the most salient today is our complicity in the ultraviolence of the past several months in Israel and Palestine. This includes complicity in the October 7 attacks by Hamas, in the same way that white Americans who failed to uproot slavery were complicit in the deaths of the five dozen men, women, and children killed by Nat Turner and his followers in 1831.
The Hague prison — officially the “United Nations Detention Unit” — currently has a capacity of 52. Since there are 750 million of us in America and the EU, they’d have to expand it a little. But it wouldn’t be that bad. The detention center includes access to “fresh air, exercise, medical care, occupational therapy [and] spiritual guidance.” That last part is especially important, because we’re going to need a being of infinite mercy to get us out of this one.
This isn’t advice for us to sit around feeling guilty. That does no one any good, least of all the people in Gaza and the West Bank. But we believe we must 1) recognize that we are guilty, 2) investigate how we committed these crimes, and 3) stop committing them as quickly as possible.
This all sounds awful. Merry Christmas, let’s get started.
Failure of Imagination
Our greatest crime is built into the glitchy operating system of human brains. People instinctively love to help other people, which is beautiful. The problem is we are cognitively incapable of perceiving more than about 150 others as fully human. The remaining 8 billion people on Earth are an undifferentiated mass of protoplasm that we can be easily convinced is trying to kill us.
Hillel the Elder tried to deal with this problem by explaining, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation.”
Just a few years later Jesus was craftier, informing his flock, “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
In other words, Jesus was telling his audience: “You know me and you like me, right? I’m one of the 150 people you consider human? Well, hold onto your f*cking hat, because everyone else on Earth is also human like me.”
This Christmas, Jesus would be saying, “Several baby Jesuses have been massacred on a kibbutz. Plus a bunch of baby Jesuses are being bombed by Lockheed fighter jets with General Dynamics MK80 series bombs. Hundreds of baby Jesuses have been shredded and smashed. Then lots of these baby mes were brought to the hospital by donkey over rubble-strewn roads, but that was pointless because the hospital had run out of anesthetic and supplies long ago. Since October 7, the explosive equivalent of the nuclear bomb the U.S. used on Hiroshima has been dropped on Gaza’s 2.3 million baby Jesuses and former baby Jesuses.”
Paradoxically, people need powerful imaginations to perceive reality, including the reality that others are people too. We have failed to use our imaginations to truly understand what Hillel and Jesus were trying to tell us. So here we are.
Failure of Action
Our failure of imagination has led to a failure of action, especially on the part of the U.S. government. If we saw the world clearly, we would have understood that the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has for 56 years been both an ongoing human emergency and a big problem for the U.S. empire.
In Secretary of State Colin Powell’s autobiography “My American Journey,” he described the USS New Jersey shelling Beirut in 1983 in support of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. “What we tend to overlook in such situations is that other people will react much as we would,” wrote Powell. “And since they could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target.” This was U.S. and French military barracks, which were simultaneously destroyed by truck bombs, killing 307 people.
We could have used the inflection point of September 11, 2001, to understand — these are difficult words to write — Powell’s wisdom. The 9/11 attacks were to a significant degree motivated by Al Qaeda’s desire to gain power in the Arab world by retaliating against the U.S. for our support for Israeli policy. And this was not a sign that Muslims are “inherently evil.” Rather, it shows they are people just like us, and hence some of them will inevitably be as appalling as some of us.
If we’d seen this, we would have made certain that we immediately ended the Palestinian nightmare — both on the grounds of basic justice and our own self-interest. But instead we’ve closed our eyes even tighter. The Israeli government made themselves so blind with racism that they saw the members of Hamas as mentally impaired savages who could never pull off an attack like October 7. They could have stopped it if they’d understood that they’re exactly like them: intelligent, organized, and capable of spectacular cruelty.
Failure of Commitment and Creativity
If U.S. potentates have failed to act in their own self-interest, that hasn’t been a problem for everyone else. There’s been lots of action by the rest of us. The trouble has been that we haven’t created any institutional structure that can translate all this action into enduring power. And one core reason for that is our failure of creativity.
It’s not fair to criticize the American left, for the same reason it’s not fair to criticize Santa Claus: Neither one exists. By historical and comparative standards, America is a weird outlier — atomized, depoliticized, complexified.
In theory, presidential campaigns could be vehicles to generate an organized left. In practice, the Democratic Party fundamentally opposes this, so if you’re going to try it, you’d better know that going in. When George McGovern was the Democratic nominee in 1972, he cultivated a huge new generation of volunteers and small donors. After he lost, he handed over his database to the Democratic National Committee, which threw it away. After Barack Obama rode a similar tide to victory in 2008, he essentially told everyone to go home and that he would handle it from there.
Sadly, the same thing has largely been true of Bernie Sanders. We now know that building an enduring movement was not the focus of his campaigns. This is especially heartbreaking because the surge in U.S. protests against the Israeli attack on Gaza has largely grown out of his campaigns — just without his involvement or support. You can only imagine what would be possible with it. Some day there will be another left standard bearer running on that scale, and we’d better lock down their commitment to something beyond themselves to start with.
In any case, we need to face the fact that changing anything significant in U.S. politics will require the rest of our lives. And for that to be bearable, it needs to be something that everyone actually enjoys and wants to do more than anything else.
We’re not sure what the answer is here, especially in a country with so much good TV to watch. But we’re pretty sure it will require something that people can’t get anywhere else. Let’s start with some good songs for everyone to sing, plus maybe some non-Nazi torchlight marches, and happy viral dances like those in Iran that make the people in power afraid.
Get Back to Work
Over the past few months, the Christmas Grinch has taken our hand and led us to the top of his little Grinch mountain. There we’ve stood with him, overlooking the desolate junkyard of the U.S. war on terror. First, the Grinch pointed to the gully with the bloody cesspool of 20 years in Afghanistan and Pakistan — almost a quarter of a million people dead. Then he pulled us in closer and read from the Costs of War website. “Over 940,000 people died in direct violence when you add Iraq, Syria and Yemen,” he whispered. “3.6 to 3.8 million people have died indirectly in post 9/11 war zones.”
Then he showed the area he’d designated for dead Palestinians. It was already quite full, but he’d reserved an adjacent area to be sure it had lots of room to grow.
All this is real, not a story for children. All we can do is look the truth in the face and learn from our past mistakes. Then we have to get back to work, and see if we can prevent ourselves from taking an involuntary trip to the Netherlands.
The post Merry Christmas! We All Belong in Prison at The Hague. appeared first on The Intercept.
Christ is born in Gaza
Why was Christ born in a stable? Because the Israelis bombed all the houses. Truly. Every year Jesus is born, dies and is reborn. He is reborn into our world – that is part of what makes Christian symbology meaningful. This year Christ is a brown skinned Middle Eastern man about to be born in Continue reading »
Exclusive: Israeli Military Censor Bans Reporting on These 8 Subjects
Weapons used by the Israel Defense Forces, security cabinet leaks, and stories about people held hostage by Hamas — these are some of the eight subjects the media are forbidden from reporting on in Israel, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.
The document, a censorship order issued by the Israeli military to the media as part of its war on Hamas, has not been previously reported. The memo, written in English, was an unusual move for the IDF’s censor, which has been part of the Israel military for more than seven decades.
“I haven’t ever seen instructions like this sent from the censor aside from general notices broadly telling outlets to comply, and even then it was only sent to certain people,” said Michael Omer-Man, a former editor-in-chief of the Israel’s +972 Magazine and today the director of research for Israel–Palestine at Democracy in the Arab World Now, or DAWN, a U.S. advocacy group.
Titled “Operation ‘Swords of Iron’ Israeli Chief Censor Directive to the Media,” the order is not dated, but its reference to Operation Swords of Iron — the name of Israel’s current military operation in Gaza — makes clear that it was issued sometime after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. The order is signed by the chief censor of the Israel Defense Forces, Brig. Gen. Kobi Mandelblit. (The Israeli Military Censor did not respond to a request for comment on the memo.)
The document was provided to The Intercept by a source who himself was given a copy by the Israeli military. An identical document appears on the Israeli government’s website.
“In light of the current security situation and the intensive media coverage, we wish to encourage you to submit to the Censorship all materials dealing with the activities of the Israeli Defense Forces (I.D.F.) and the Israeli security forces prior to their broadcast,” the order says. “Please update your staff of the content of this letter, with an emphasis on the news desk and field reporters.”
The order enumerates eight topics the media are forbidden from reporting on without prior approval from the Israeli Military Censor. Some of the topics touch on hot-button political issues in Israel and internationally, such as potentially embarrassing revelations about weapons used by Israel or captured by Hamas, discussions of security cabinet meetings, and the Israeli hostages in Gaza — an issue that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been widely criticized for mishandling.
The memo also bans reporting on details of military operations, Israeli intelligence, rocket attacks that hit sensitive locations in Israel, cyberattacks, and visits by senior military officials to the battlefield.
Concerns about the politicization of the military censor are not merely hypothetical. Last month, the Israeli censor reportedly complained that Netanyahu was pressuring him to crack down on certain media outlets without legitimate reason. Netanyahu denied the charge.
Self-Censorship and Secrecy
The Israeli Military Censor is a unit located within the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate. The unit is commanded by the chief censor, a military officer appointed by the defense minister.
Since Israel’s war on Hamas started, more than 6,500 news items were either completely censored or partially censored by the Israeli government, Guy Lurie, a research fellow at Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, told The Intercept.
“People self-censor, people do not even try to report the stories they know won’t get through.”
To put the figure in context, Lurie said it was about four times more than before the war started, citing a report in the Israeli outlet Shakuf based on freedom of information requests. The number of submissions to the censor, however, are significantly higher at this time of heightened conflict, so Lurie noted that news items are facing a normal level of censorship in light of the ratio to total submissions.
The actual number of new stories affected by the censor, however, can never be quantified. Because of a system of close relationships and a feeling for what to expect, Israeli journalists can censor themselves.
“People self-censor, people do not even try to report the stories they know won’t get through,” Omer-Man said. “And that is really showing right now in how little regular Israelis are seeing in the press about what is happening in Gaza to Palestinians.”
Chief Censor of the Israel Defense Forces, Brig. Gen. Kobi Mandelblit.
Photo: IDF
It is these kinds of unofficial censorship that give the censor in Israel its power, said experts.
In a 2022, a State Department report on human rights in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories took on the military censor, singling out two Arabic-language newspapers in occupied East Jerusalem. While noting that the IDF censor didn’t review the papers, the State Department said, “Editors and journalists from those publications, however, reported they engaged in self-censorship due to fear of retribution by Israeli authorities.”
At one time, the censor had an Editors Committee composed of three members: one from the press, one from the military, and a publicly elected member who served as chair. Though the Editors Committee no longer officially exists, a similar, albeit informal body still maintains some sway.
Though the law that mandates the censor gives it widespread powers, the censor maintains its respectability in Israel by being politically independent and exercising restraint, especially in comparison to other countries in the region.
“If you look at the law that governs censorship, it’s really draconian in terms of the formal authorities the censor has,” Lurie told The Intercept. “But it’s mitigated by this informal arrangement.”
Almost all of it happens in secret: Committee discussions are confidential, as are most communiques between media outlets and the censor.
Asked why the processes are so secretive and why even the news organizations won’t speak out, one Western journalist based in Israel and Palestine, who asked for anonymity to avoid reprisals, had a blunt assessment: “Because it’s embarrassing.”
Foreign Press and the Censor
That the memo of directives for the current Israeli war on Gaza was in English suggests that it was intended for Western media. Foreign journalists working in Israel must obtain government permission, including a declaration that they will abide by the censor.
“In order to get a visa as a journalist, you have to get approval from GPO” — Government Press Office — “and therefore you have to sign a document that says you will comply with the censor,” said Omer-Man. “That in itself is probably against the ethics guidelines at a bunch of papers.”
Nonetheless, many journalists do sign the document. While The Associated Press, for instance, didn’t respond to The Intercept’s query about whether it cooperates with the military censor, the news wire has in the past reported on the issue, including admitting that it holds itself to the directive.
“The Associated Press has agreed, like other organizations, to abide by the rules of the censor, which is a condition for receiving permission to operate as a media organization in Israel,” the agency wrote in a 2006 story. “Reporters are expected to censor themselves and not report any of the forbidden material.”
Israel’s War on Gaza
Asked if it complied with guidance from Israel’s military censor and whether its compliance had changed since the onset of the war, Azhar AlFadl Miranda, the communications director for the Washington Post, told The Intercept in an email, “We aren’t able to share insight,” adding that “we don’t publicly discuss our editorial decisions.”
The New York Times told The Intercept, “The New York Times reports independently on the full spectrum of this complex conflict. We do not submit coverage to the Israeli military censor.” (Reuters did not answer The Intercept’s questions.)
Foreign press that cooperates with the censor is subject to the same system: Many stories don’t get passed through the censor, but certain issues merit submitting the stories.
“They know that they need to pass onto the censor reports that they want to publish on certain subjects,” said Lurie. “There are subjects that the media know that they need to get the censor’s approval.”
One of the things that makes the written, English-language censorship order unusual, however, is the order’s overt reference to the Hamas war. “I’ve never seen that for a specific war,” Lurie said.
“There are subjects that the media know that they need to get the censor’s approval.”
One subject known to be sensitive in Israel is the country’s covert nuclear arsenal. In 2004, BBC journalist Simon Wilson interviewed Mordechai Vanunu, a whistleblower on the nuclear program, who had just been released from prison. The Israeli censors demanded copies of the interview, but Wilson did not comply.
Wilson was then barred from reentry, and the Israel government demanded an apology. Initially, the BBC refused to furnish one, but eventually the worldwide news giant folded.
“He confirms that after the Vanunu interview he was contacted by the censors and was asked to give them the tapes. He did not do so. He regrets the difficulties this caused,” the BBC said in the apology. “He undertakes to obey the regulations in future and understands that any further violation will result in his visa being revoked.”
The apology, like so much else of the censor’s work, was to have remained secret, according to a 2005 Guardian story, but the BBC accidentally posted it on its website, before quickly removing it.
The post Exclusive: Israeli Military Censor Bans Reporting on These 8 Subjects appeared first on The Intercept.