Rallying Behind Palestine

As someone who inexplicably chooses to get most of their news through long-form essays and incredibly short-form tweets I don’t often check how events are being covered by Australia’s mainstream media outlets*. ‘

It can get a bit claustrophobic inside your own media bubble – even if you’re not aware of it. And although I didn’t expect much support for Palestinians in Australia’s corporate media I underestimated just how deep they’ve decided to bury their heads in the sand. After reviewing the coverage of yesterday’s solidarity marches it’s clear that Australia’s legacy media outlets are still intent on downplaying, slandering and whipping up hysteria about any event that draws attention to the Palestinian cause.

You’d think after a year of indiscriminate bombing attacks on the people of Gaza (combined with targeted air strikes on hospitals, schools, aid workers and the homes of Palestinian journalists) that our media would understand the urgent need for Australia to cut diplomatic ties with Israel. Failing that you’d think our media outlets would allow some good-faith coverage of the global protest movement against Israel. At the very least you’d expect these media organisations to stop parroting Israeli propaganda.

Instead we’re still seeing equivocation, disinformation and hand-wringing about the theoretical threat posed by anti-Semitism rather than the actual destruction wrought by Israeli weapons. And the scale of that destruction is truly mind numbing. In the first six months of their attack on Gaza it’s estimated that Israel dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs – exceeding the combined tonnage of all the bombs dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London over the course of World War II. Somehow the consensus across Australia’s corporate media is that this deluge of high explosives has all been carefully targeted at Hamas militants.

Even after a year of relentless massacres by the IDF, local rallies in support of Palestine are still being presented in the media as public displays of support for militant organisations rather than public demands for a ceasefire. To illustrate this let’s take a look at how the most recent protests were reported by mainstream Australian news organisations:

The Age (which used to be a fairly reliable source of news) appears to have used a Victoria police spokesperson as their only source in their coverage of the latest rally. The Age’s article singles out demonstrators who attended with flags of the wrong colour, mentions an arrest in Sydney over a Nazi symbol and does some pearl-clutching over the presence of signs bearing the dour bearded face of Iran’s dictator. Vicpol’s mouthpiece said that at least 7000 people were in attendance. Which is technically true but it seems like an odd way of describing a gathering of about 40 or 50 thousand people.

The Weekend Australian ran with an article essentially griping about how the police refused to arrest people carrying flags that sort of looked like the flags flown by Hezbollah. Not sure what outcome they’re hoping for here. Maybe, just to be on the safe side, we should ban all flags that use a green and gold colour scheme.

The Herald Sun ran an article entitled ‘Terrorist group Hezbollah praises Australian pro-Palestinian rallies against ‘Israeli aggression’’**. Naturally the Herald’s editors paired this article with a photo of a group of protestors made up entirely of young bearded men – something that I don’t think I could have managed to capture if I tried. This particular tableau appears to have been chosen because one man is holding a photo of Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khamenei and another is holding the national flag of Yemen.

The article on the Nine News website emphasized the heavy police presence at the rallies and quoted the leader of the Nationals who thought the protester should ‘get back in their corner’. They also quoted NSW’s police minister who, somewhat hysterically, declared that she didn’t “want the war in the Middle East played out in the streets in Sydney”.

Seven News led with a fairly anodyne photo of a crowd in Sydney but didn’t feel the need to mention why all these people had turned out to protest – only conceding that the October 7 attacks carried out by Hamas had ‘sparked chaos’ in the Middle East. Like most other mainstream news sources they chose to focus their coverage on the one person who apparently stepped over the line of polite discourse by holding up a sign combining the Israeli flag with a Nazi swastika. And while I’m sure the conflation of Zionism with Nazism is genuinely distressing to some Jewish people it’s objectively not as distressing as wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of actual people. Nevertheless so far no one has even suggested the idea of banning the Israeli flag. Likewise none of the major news networks who reported on this offensive sign saw fit to mention that the person holding it was, himself, Jewish.

Similarly underselling the scale of these demonstrations the ABC reported that ‘thousands’ of Victorians had gathered in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon ‘amid increased violence in Middle East’ – as if Middle Eastern violence was an inexplicable, natural phenomenon like solar radiation or plate tectonics. In deciding what to focus on the ABC placed their spotlight on a couple of people in Sydney who had turned up carrying signs featuring the image of the recently assassinated chief of Hezbollah – Hassan Nasrallah. This revelation provided a segue for the ABC’s journalists to go on a long tangent about the seriousness of Australia’s prohibition on ‘hate symbols’.

The dreaded passive voice is a central feature of all these news outlets when it comes to the death and destruction inflicted by the Israeli army. This rhetorical device is especially prevalent in the ABC coverage where the names of militant groups feature prominently but the IDF is curiously absent. Thus, when Israel’s planes take off, war escalates, bombs fall and deaths occur but no one, apparently, is to blame. To paraphrase Fight Club:

it’s company policy never to imply ownership in the event of a bomb… always use the indefinite article ‘a bomb’, never ‘your bomb’.

Even after the ABC has been taken to task for this sort of sleight of hand they continue to erase the IDF from their reporting. Earlier today ABC News published an article on Israel’s invasion of Lebanon under the headline ‘Massive blasts rock Beirut, Hezbollah rockets hit Haifa’. Take note: when things explode in Haifa the ABC recognises that someone is responsible. When things explode in Beirut the ABC reckons it might be another case of spontaneous combustion.

For the most part the ABC’s coverage of the Palestine solidarity rallies has consisted of hand-wringing at the possibility that certain ‘hate symbols’ might, at some point, make an appearance at these protests. This preoccupation with policing symbolism seems to be the second phase of the ‘do you condemn Hamas?’ screening question used by every mainstream outlet for the last year to put advocates for Palestine on the back foot at the outset of any interview***. When the ABC pressed the spokesperson for Islamic Council of Victoria for comment he correctly pointed out that any discussion of Hezbollah/Hamas flags could only be considered a distraction when set against the wholesale slaughter of Gaza’s inhabitants. Given the fact that ABC news appears to be taking every opportunity to shoe-horn flag-related ‘controversy’ into their coverage it’s clearly a very effective distraction.

The Guardian’s coverage was more of the same. To their credit they actually quoted some attendees at the Sydney Rally – so good on them for at least paying lip service to the actual issue. Unfortunately they also ran with an image of a heavily tattooed bald man holding some sort of ominous-looking black flag. Given the Guardian’s lop-sided coverage of Israel’s ‘war’ I can only assume this editorial decision was meant to reinforce the notion that these rallies provide some sort of cover for religious extremists. To that end I guess they’re banking on the fact that most Anglo-Australians are probably unaware that tattoos are prohibited under the more strict interpretations of Islam.

But The Guardian’s choice of photo is worth dwelling on because editorial decisions around imagery are often neglected in the wider discussion of Australia’s Pro-Israel media bias.

When it comes to the written word it’s a little easier to detect bias. For instance a study back in February this year revealed that five out of six of Australia’s largest media outlets did not publish a single social media post that humanised Palestinian victims of Israel’s bombing campaign. Their test for what constituted ‘humanising coverage’ was pretty simple.

To meet a minimum standard of humanising coverage, news outlets’ Instagram posts needed to include at least two of the three following criteria in their mentions of Israelis and Palestinians:

– Provide at least a first name for the person
– Show their face, and/or
– Use at least some of their own words (translations were ok).

Five out of six of these same publications managed to pass that test with regards to their coverage of Israeli citizens. In the case of the ABC their own staff have protested the editorial agenda of management which has generally “favoured the Israeli narrative over objective reporting”. The internal report also showed that ABC news editors had gone to great lengths to avoid using language that might aggravate Israel’s lobby groups including many of the terms that best describe Israeli practices in Gaza and the West Bank including ‘war crimes’, ‘genocide”, ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’.

Photo choices are obviously much more subjective and anyone who’s ever attended a public protest will be well aware of the media’s tendency to fixate on the most sensational and inflammatory signs at any demonstration – regardless of whether those sentiments are representative of the crowd as a whole.

So in an effort to counter that sort of visual bias here’s a selection of photos taken at Sunday’s march in Melbourne which ought to provide a more accurate representation of who actually attends these rallies. Marching alongside Melbourne’s Palestinian and Lebanese community you find people from various marginalised groups who are nonetheless sympathetic to the Palestinian cause on account of their own experiences of political persecution and foreign occupation – including Indigenous Australians, Irish, Jews, Greek Cypriots, Balochis, Bosnians, West Papuans, Kurds, Armenians, Ukrainians and Tibetans and many others. Alongside them you find all the usual suspects when it comes to matters of social justice – students, teachers, nurses and trade union activists.

All in all it’s a very diverse group.

* ‘outlets’ strikes me as a fairly apt term for these media organisations – given its association with industrial waste and surplus consumer goods.

**To be honest I’m not entirely sure what the scare quotes around ‘Israeli aggression’ are supposed to signify in this case because I think even the IDF’s hasbara mouthpieces would agree that Israel’s strategy has been pretty aggressive.

*** Of course, were it not for issues of cost and practicality, mainstream television news outlets would no doubt prefer to force Palestinian advocates to inhale helium prior to making any public statements.