Ruling Challenges Media Stance on Palestine

Members of the International Court of Justice on July 19, the day they delivered their opinion on the illegality of the Israeli occupation. (ICJ)

Major international media faces a dilemma over whether to adapt its reporting  to the World Court’s  judgment last month  that Israel is an apartheid state illegally occupying Palestinian territory or continue to reflect a dominant narrative giving Israel ideological succor. 

The legal opinion followed a request in December 2022 from the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on the legal status of the occupation, as the United States and its sub-imperial allies continued to dispute international law on the matter. 

Western media outlets have for decades been wary of calling the occupation illegal, largely due to international law being disputed by Israel and its Western backers. Instead, a passive lexicon has until now been employed, obscuring the colonial and illegitimate nature of Israel’s violence as a belligerent occupying force.  But that has now changed.

The blatant nature of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza over the past 10 months has helped to nevertheless expose that violence, with many seeing past media coverage that represented Israel’s actions as a “war on Hamas” following its Oct. 7 attacks, justified by reference to an erroneous right of self-defence.

In reaction to the ICJ ruling, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) for instance says it will update its editorial guidance “as required.”

CNN, the BBC and The Guardian did not respond to an inquiry for comment from Consortium News. 

In November 2023, the ABC was criticized by its own journalists after a meeting of nearly 200 staff was held to discuss the broadcaster’s reports on Israel’s assault on Gaza. Journalists believed Israeli violence was being mis-framed, with stories missing historical context and Israeli claims being taken at face value.

“A passive lexicon has until now been employed, obscuring the colonial and illegitimate nature of Israel’s violence as a belligerent occupying force.”

The meeting led to an advisory panel set up to assess points arising from it. Afterwards, Managing Director David Anderson rejected the criticisms on the basis that the broadcaster was upholding professional standards outlined within its charter, particularly the principle of due impartiality. He said terms like “apartheid” and “genocide” would not be used by the ABC, but reported as allegations of ‘crimes’ like any other.

Anderson told Melbourne’s Radio 774: 

“Genocide is a claim that’s being made. It’s a serious crime. It’s an allegation of a crime. The IDF [Israeli Defence Force] and Israel reject that. Same with ‘apartheid’. We’ll report other people’s use of that. We won’t use it ourselves.”

The broadcaster was asked whether in light of a clear legal ruling by the world’s most pre-eminent authority on international law, Anderson would allow journalists to use the descriptor and ensure it would not be removed during the editorial process. 

The ABC was also asked whether it viewed the legal opinion as providing vital context to be included in stories involving the Israel-Palestine conflict going forward, both with regard to apartheid and the illegality of the occupation. 

In a short statement to Consortium News, it said: 

“We’re reviewing the ICJ judgment and will update the editorial guidance as required in due course.” 

Long History of Studied Ambiguity

Intifada in Gaza Strip, December 1987. (Efi Sharir, Israel Press and Photo Agency, Dan Hadani collection, National Library of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

There has been a long history of studied ambiguity within media about the illegality of Israel’s occupation. 

After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition came to power, for example, Reuters news agency ran a story on Dec. 30, 2022, on settlement expansion in the West Bank. Instead of explicitly stating that the annexations were against international law, it said: “Most world powers deem settlements built on land captured in war illegal.” Reuters declined to respond to questions from Consortium News about its editorial position after the ICJ opinion.

Similar subtle, corrosive use of language in reporting is widespread and pervasive in Western media.

According to international law, occupation is permitted if it is temporary and strictly military, intended to protect the security of the occupying state and safeguard the rights of the occupied people. 

Since 1967 Israel has failed to meet those conditions, almost immediately beginning a process of colonising Palestinian land with Zionist and religious fanatics in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which aimed to prevent ethnic cleansing and colonisation. 

By allowing settlements to be built in occupied territory, including East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Israel intentionally precluded the possibility of a future Palestinian state from being established via a process of incremental, de facto annexation. Land confiscations and settlement building increased after the Oslo Peace Accords were signed in 1993 and 1995, while increasing even further under the current coalition government led by Netanyahu.

Recent documents unearthed by Peace Now found the coalition had funneled over $20 million into protecting new farms it wants to develop into settlements.

The Oslo Accords give the Palestinian leadership very limited autonomy in terms of civil governance within designated areas that remain under military occupation within a supposed transitional arrangement towards eventual statehood involving further negotiations.

Ending the Diplomatic Charade

An Israeli parliament (Knesset) motion on July 18 ended the diplomatic charade and rejected Palestinian statehood on the grounds it would be an “existential threat” to Israel.

Western governments had backed Israel’s stalling tactic, turning a blind eye to settlement building that would make it practically impossible to achieve statehood. New settlements were never responded to with divestment or meaningful sanctions, the logical corollary of a practical desire for Palestinian nationhood without which professed support is rendered meaningless.

“Western governments had backed Israel’s stalling tactic, turning a blind eye to settlement building that would make it practically impossible to achieve statehood.”

Western governments are now under more pressure to follow through with divestment policies, although the chances of the 700,000-plus illegal settlers being removed from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, remain negligible.

In a 14-1 ruling, the ICJ directed Israel to immediately cease all settlement activity, evacuate settlers from occupied Palestinian territories, and pay reparations to Palestinians. It also voted 12-3 that U.N. states not render aid or assistance to Israel to continue the illegal occupation. 

On July 30, the U.N. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner said: 

“States must immediately review all diplomatic, political, and economic ties with Israel, inclusive of business and finance, pension funds, academia and charities.”

Like other Western leaders, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese  is under such pressure, with individual sanctions against violent settlers in the West Bank recently imposed rightly seen as an empty gesture. 

Israeli settler violence and theft of land is a structural characteristic of colonial domination, so that the Zionist project itself should therefore be the focus of government action.

ICJ judges pointed out that Israel’s permanent occupation of the territories, and its transfer of settlers into them, has necessitated the development of two separate and distinct systems of laws. 

Human rights organisations like Amnesty International have for years used apartheid as a descriptor for Israel’s discriminatory laws based around its military rule, making Palestinians in the occupied territories second-class citizens to maintain Jewish-Zionist hegemony. A growing list of former Israeli officials also agree, including ex-Mossad boss Tamir Pardo. 

Media outlets like the ABC are under a parallel pressure to dismantle newsroom practices that stop journalists fulfilling its public-interest charter by outright stating this as fact when reporting on Israel. 

As a state broadcaster, the ABC, like other Western media, are obliged to meet the informational needs of democratic citizenry, so the public are equipped to hold government to account for its foreign policy and decide whether it is appropriate to disinvest and withhold diplomatic and material support for apartheid Israel.

These outlets have until now merely reflected foreign policy positions of states or corporate backers funding them and the discourse of Western political elites. The problem for media is eroding trust and credibility brought about by its omissions, skewed framing and absence of historical context — in general, an institutional bias reflecting interests of Western imperialism. Media’s center cannot hold. 

With the deaths of over 40,000 Palestinians, including the industrial slaughter of children, induced famine and the destruction of the means of basic survival in Gaza, continuing to offer a representation of events that facilitates the colonial project may no longer be an option.

Opportunity for Newsrooms  

Ultimo Centre – the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s national headquarters in Sydney. (J Bar, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

Any further editorial passivity and lack of moral voice risks a complete collapse. In order to avoid it, legacy media leaders will need to assert self-preservation by creating a degree of separation between their newsrooms and the delusions of Western elites that they’re tasked with serving. The ICJ ruling offers an opportunity.

Being a crime against humanity, administering apartheid makes Israeli officials war criminals even without taking into account the regime’s crimes in Gaza, which the ICJ in a separate ruling in January said amounted to a case of plausible genocide. 

“Legacy media leaders will need to … create a degree of separation between their newsrooms and the delusions of the Western elites.”

Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Galant face charges at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Western complicity in these crimes is just as plausible, which can partly account for calls by U.S. lawmakers to sanction ICC officials.

In a scene of notoriety Netanyahu was feted by the U.S. Congress on Capitol Hill in late July, where he had been invited to speak. Receiving dozens of standing ovations throughout a speech that claimed Israel as the cutting edge of a civilisational battle between the rules-based international order and Palestinian resistance, part of an axis of barbarism. Netanyahu also repeated lies of baby killings and systemic sexual violence by Hamas on Oct. 7, used to justify its subsequent Gaza onslaught.

Those grotesque scenes reflect a pathological inability to recognise that the West’s ideological cover for Israeli terror, its own Orientalism, lies and fake concern for a professed system of universal rights, has now worn too thin to mask its true nature.

The rule of international law and rule of U.S. hegemony stands diametrically opposed and the non-Western world sees it, a reality Western media thus far has studiously avoided to represent to its own increasingly skeptical audiences. 

Western news leaders now have a choice, assuming they are not themselves as deluded as those wielding power, making rational choice impossible. Either continue as is, or attempt to achieve a semblance of credibility by aligning descriptors in reports with determinations of the U.N.’s top judicial body. 

The decision will ultimately come down to whether any moral agency remains within those institutions, but more likely, whether those states funding them change their diplomatic settings in the way that the ICJ advisory opinion requires.

Some hold out little hope. Canterbury University academic and geopolitical commentator Josephine Varghese said: 

“I don’t think the ICJ presents an imperative for media outlets like ABC to change their language. The Australian state is a close ally of the U.S. and Israel and their economic interests are deeply interwoven. Western states and media institutions, contrary to their own assertions, are largely anti-democratic in nature and strive, first and foremost, to protect the political and economic interests of their ruling class.”