Erasing historical context

Legacy media’s coverage of the Israeli conflict is generally presented as if it all began in response to the events of October 7, 2023. Israel has promoted this narrative as a convenient way to erase the many decades of violence that commenced the moment Israel was established.

Since the Nakba — when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed or displaced from their homeland — through to the repeated hostilities, military rule, blockades, mass killings and land seizures — Israel has been systematically oppressing the Palestinian people since 1948.

Ignoring this history and labelling instances of retaliation as the initiation of conflict is a deliberate strategy to remove all evidence of the occupation, and decades of human rights abuses from public consciousness, effectively erasing them from history.

This misrepresentation further extends to how October 7 itself has been presented. Early reports of beheaded babies and mass rapes were broadcast across Western legacy media based on Israeli accounts, despite the absence of verification, generating widespread public outrage. However, these claims have since been investigated by human rights organisations and proven to be false and unsupported by evidence.

Israeli military and official sources have also acknowledged that on October 7, the Hannibal Directive was invoked — a policy under which Israeli soldiers may be killed, or allowed to be killed, to prevent their capture, so as to avoid having to negotiate for their release.

Investigations into the events of that day have confirmed that many of the IDF soldiers were killed by the Israeli military and not by Hamas as originally reported. IDF whistleblowers have admitted this, yet these admissions remain conspicuously absent from subsequent mainstream reporting.

Even after official confirmation, media outlets have not retracted or corrected their earlier misreporting. This misrepresentation directs sympathy toward Israel, which is portrayed as the victim of an horrific and random terrorists attack, while Palestinian resistance is criminalised.

Whistleblower testimony has also claimed that Israeli forces were ordered by their superiors to stand down border-monitoring between 5:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. on the morning of October 7. This suggests that Israeli officials were aware of the impending attack and allowed it to proceed — providing the justification needed to conduct an all-out ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

By omitting the historical context of occupation, apartheid, and decades of violence, legacy media has legitimised this narrative, giving Israel a pretext to conduct a genocide while appearing to “defend itself”.

This conduct echoes George Orwell’s warning in 1984, where history is rewritten until “nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right”.

The unquestioned acceptance of Israeli claims

Just as Palestinian voices are routinely minimised, Israeli government and military statements are often relayed by major news outlets with minimal scrutiny. Journalists from major organisations, including CNN and the BBC, have described internal pressure to publish pro-Israeli claims without verification, while the perspectives of pro-Palestinian witnesses are largely ignored.^[1]

This bias creates a hierarchy of credibility, with Israeli officials presented as authoritative narrators of events and their statements framed as factual accounts rather than partisan claims.

Because Israel forbids journalists from entering Gaza and the West Bank unaccompanied, independent verification of data provided by Israel is often impossible. This has a decisive impact on how early reporting is presented to the public, and allows Israeli accounts to dominate the initial news cycle.

Investigations by Al Jazeera and other media watchdogs have documented editorial interventions in which reporting that contradicted the Israeli narrative was redacted, or excluded entirely – including casualty figures, eyewitness testimony, and assessments of damage to civilian infrastructure.^[2]

The result is a narrative in which Israeli claims define public understanding long before alternative accounts become available. Furthermore, any criticism of Israeli policy is automatically condemned by the Jewish community and labelled antisemitic, allowing Israel to adopt its default position of victimhood.

By presenting Israeli government claims as established fact while reducing Palestinian evidence to brief, heavily qualified fragments, Western media presents a version of reality that reflects a systematic bias toward Israeli interests. For people who are actively trying to stay informed, the effect is that they form opinions based on an extremely distorted account of events.

Downplaying Palestinian casualties

Western media consistently downplays Palestinian casualties by reporting the most conservative figures provided by Israeli authorities, resulting in an under reporting of the number of civilians killed in Israeli bombings.

Humanitarian organisations have warned that the real death toll is likely far higher than what is being reported, with tens of thousands of people still missing beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings — images of which are deliberately omitted from mainstream news coverage.

More concerning is how Israeli authorities routinely provide different narratives to different audiences. Lower or more cautious death tolls are given to Western media outlets, while higher numbers and more detailed information are reported in domestic broadcasts to celebrate the success of the campaign to the Israeli public.

The message to the outside world is that every effort is being taken to avoid harming civilians, while local reports assure viewers that the IDF is ever-closer to “finishing the job”.

This duplicitous reporting has become characteristic of official Israeli statements aimed at Western audiences, where minimising the death toll, coupled with reassuring language, is used to obscure the ethnic cleansing occurring in the region.

Furthermore, a significant contrast exists between what is presented in legacy media reports and what is broadcast in real time on alternative media platforms. While mainstream outlets present sanitised images of distant rubble and cautious mortality counts, unfiltered footage on social media shows obliterated hospitals and universities, mass casualties, young bodies blown apart, and families experiencing overwhelming grief.

Even when independent media provides detailed footage showing repeated attacks on civilian areas — including densely populated residential districts, designated safe zones, and aid queues — this record of events is never televised by mainstream media outlets. The result is a public denied its due outrage, and an aggressor shielded from accountability.

The euphemisms of occupation

Israel’s military rule over Palestinians is often disguised by euphemistic language designed to conceal the large scale destruction of Palestinian land and infrastructure, and the annihilation of the Palestinian people.

This language has been adopted by Western news outlets, and has become the default vocabulary through which Australians now understand the occupation.

The carpet bombing of densely populated areas is described as “precision strikes”, even when entire residential suburbs are levelled. Military occupation becomes “security operations”, as though the presence of armed forces in Palestinian territory was a neutral administrative function rather than apartheid.

Settler attacks are reframed as “clashes”, implying mutual confrontation rather than unilateral violence by Israeli settlers on native Palestinians. Home demolitions are described as “neutralising threats”, turning the displacement of families into a sterile security procedure.

Even collective punishment — blockades, mass arrests, infrastructure destruction, and human displacement — is rebranded as “retaliation”, to give the appearance that Israeli actions are reactive and therefore justified.

And Hamas is always to blame. Hamas has become the all-purpose, go-to excuse that allows Israel to justify any action as “reluctant self-defence”. Conversely, any show of retaliation by the Palestinian resistance is condemned and described as “unprovoked aggression” or simply a “terrorist attack”.

This is how the historical context of occupation is erased and replaced by a vocabulary that presents Israel as managing a security problem rather than engaging in an unprovoked acquisition of Palestinian land.

The sanitised language becomes even more effective once it is repeated over and over by news networks that all seem to operate using the same script. Headlines are published using phrases lifted directly from official Israeli statements, and newscasts across the Western world parrot the same formulaic talking points under the guise of unbiased reporting.

To protect this curated narrative, Israel has taken to systematically killing journalists to prevent the true accounts of events from being revealed. Unlike any other modern war zone, foreign journalists are forbidden from entering Gaza, with Israel claiming that war zones are too dangerous for independent reporting.

More than 245 foreign correspondents have been shot and killed since the events of October 7 — all of them wearing visible, internationally recognised press credentials.

To justify these killings, Israeli officials claim that Hamas operatives regularly pose as journalists and aid workers to monitor IDF activity — a claim dismissed repeatedly by international press freedom organisations, human rights monitors and the journalists’ own media networks. Yet these claims are still repeated in Australian reporting, without question.

Taken together, a pattern emerges: euphemistic language disguises the realities of occupation, journalists who might expose the truth are killed, false official claims are circulated to defend these actions, and of course all of this is denied in official interviews.

This is a deliberate, orchestrated strategy to make the unacceptable appear reasonable, to make the violence appear defensive, and to make the destruction of a people appear justified.

Misrepresenting Hamas

The majority of media coverage presents Hamas as if it simply appeared out of thin air as a terrorist organisation driven by a singular desire to destroy Israel, and somehow became Gaza’s governing body. This narrative ignores the political history behind Hamas’s emergence and hides the role Israel played in bringing it into existence.

After Israel occupied Gaza in 1967,^[4] it cracked down on secular Palestinian nationalist groups linked to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), who were the main movement fighting for Palestinian self-determination. At the same time, Israel eased restrictions on emerging Islamist organisations that were seen as less politically threatening, and as a useful counterweight to dilute PLO influence.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Israeli authorities welcomed and even supported Islamist networks connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was from these networks that Hamas eventually emerged.^[5] Although their history is well documented, it is almost entirely absent from mainstream news reporting. By omitting these origins, Hamas is portrayed as nothing more than an unstable terrorist organisation that happens to govern Gaza, rather than as a legitimate political movement shaped by dynamics that Israel helped create.

This narrative also contradicts legal reality. Under international law, Israel is classified as the occupying force in Gaza and the West Bank,^[6] while the Palestinian people constitute the occupied population.^[7] In these circumstances, the occupying power cannot legally claim self defence against a territory it controls.^[8] In contrast, the occupied population has the right to resist foreign domination.^[9] When these facts are applied to the law as it is written, the media’s repeated claims that acts of resistance by Hamas amount to terrorism, and that “Israel has the right to defend itself”, are the complete opposite of the truth. Israel is, in fact, the aggressor, and Hamas, as the resisting force, retains the right to defend itself.

Furthermore, Israel continually uses the 2006 election to argue that because Palestinians “voted for Hamas”, Hamas represents the political will of all the people of Gaza – and therefore all Palestinians support terrorism.

This rhetoric allows Israel to regard 2.3 million Palestinian civilians as if they are all terrorists – a ridiculous proposition given that more than half of Gaza’s population was not even born when the 2006 elections took place.

But once the distinction between the population and the terrorist organisation is removed, collective punishment becomes seemingly justified and an entire civilian population can be cast as a legitimate target.

Failure to report ulterior motives

For more than seventy seven years, Israel has conducted a continuous pattern of territorial expansion, military aggression, and the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The pace and scale of these actions have accelerated dramatically since the events of October 7, yet the public is repeatedly told, that all of this is done in the name of “self-defence”.
Until recently, this single explanation was widely accepted, but the scale of Israel’s ongoing military campaign has exposed how fraudulent that claim actually is. As previously established, an occupying power cannot rightfully claim self-defence against the population it controls. Therefore the truth behind Israel’s continued aggression warrants further investigation.

Historical records point to ambitions of territorial expansion that go far beyond reactive security measures. Early Zionist writings, including Theodor Herzl’s territorial proposals, imagined a state stretching deep into neighbouring regions. This information is entirely absent from mainstream media reporting, despite its relevance to understanding what is actually driving the ongoing ethnic cleansing and land annexation being carried out by the Israeli government.

In a recent address, Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly described intentions to extend the Israeli borders into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. A clip of this speech makes it clear that Israel’s long term goals may not be limited to its current borders – borders which have remained deliberately undefined for decades. Netanyahu’s vision seems to adopt those originally proposed by Theodor Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and founder of modern political Zionism, who outlined a vision of Israel that covered an area much larger than it currently occupies.

This long standing ambiguity around Israel’s borders is not accidental. Israel’s refusal to formally define its borders has functioned as a deliberate strategic choice, allowing continuous territorial expansion while avoiding the political accountability that comes with declaring the limits of the state.

Similar intentions were expressed in a recent interview conducted by Piers Morgan with prominent Israeli far-right Orthodox Zionist activist and a leading figure in the Israeli settler movement, Daniella Weiss. In their discussion, she stated that her life’s work was dedicated to expanding Israel “from the Nile to the Euphrates” within her lifetime.

Weiss appeared genuinely surprised that this objective, which she described as widely understood within Israel, was not common knowledge abroad. She was referring to the realisation of the Greater Israel Project — a political ambition that, for the most part, remains undisclosed to viewers of legacy news networks.

It is hard to fathom a mainstream media so constrained by institutional bias that it can continue to deceive the public about the national goals driving this genocide. Whether through dependence on official sources, fear of backlash, blatant pro-Israel bias, or a simple refusal to confront the truth, the media clings to this fiction of “self defence” to explain the motivation driving Israeli’s continued expansion policy.

The result is a public left completely misinformed about the political agenda unfolding in front of them.