Israeli forces block a road leading to a Palestinian olive grove, having declared the area a closed military zone, in the village of Deir Jarir in the occupied West Bank on October 21, 2026 [AFP]
Israeli forces detained our parliamentary delegation and barred us from the West Bank. The violence we went to investigate is Israeli state policy
This week I tried to enter the illegally occupied West Bank, along with two other British parliamentarians and an international delegation of observers. We were all interrogated and detained by Israeli forces for nearly eight hours and finally prevented from crossing the border.
Our unpleasant experience pales in comparison to the daily experience of Palestinians living under occupation. Year after year, decade after decade, Palestinians have faced not simply inconvenience but a systematic attempt to eradicate their existence. We have seen a genocide in its most brutal form in Gaza. But in the West Bank we see a slow-motion form of ethnic cleansing, perpetrated by Israeli forces and their settler militias.
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Action needed now
The UK’s announcement of sanctions is important. But the sanctions need to be enacted rapidly; we simply cannot wait six months.
There are three priorities.
First, the foreign secretary’s sanctions package must be enacted in the broadest way possible. The core problem here is not simply about fanatical settlers. It is state policy. Israel’s government has used settler militias to carry out brutal attacks on Palestinians and their land. It is therefore the state that must face sanctions.
What is more, stopping the construction of new settlements is not enough. We must make the whole settlement economy unviable, and roll back decades of apartheid. We have ample opportunity to do so. The text of Britain’s sanctions regulations suggests the government can sanction companies that profit from the illegal settlements. We must do so. And while attention has focussed on companies bidding for the E1 settlement, we also need sanctions targeting entities that help facilitate the maintenance of the illegal settlements that already exist. This should include companies that provide finance, insurance and surveillance technologies to the settlements and the infrastructure around them.
Second, although the government has confirmed that it will stop all arms sales to Israel that materially contribute to the occupation, components for F-35 jets are still allowed to reach Israel, helping keep those planes in the air over Gaza and the West Bank. Arms licences for aircraft that help train the very forces that oversee the occupation also continue. These loopholes must be closed. Let us be frank – we should not be selling weapons to a military which is perpetrating both a genocide and apartheid.
Finally, we cannot forget Gaza. The government’s changes to the Global Human Rights sanctions regime empower it to sanction actors involved in the blocking of humanitarian aid. With Palestinians in Gaza facing disease and starvation this winter, the government must act quickly. This is not simply about individual fanatics blocking trucks; it is state policy, for which Israeli ministers must face sanctions.
And it goes far beyond emergency aid, which will simply keep Palestinians on the verge of starvation. Gaza needs to be rebuilt, and for this the siege must end. Until it does, a full package of sanctions should be applied.
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister. He asks who could possibly object to the IDF starving people to death, conducting forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing all Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He says they’ve got a genocide to do for Israel and to stop objecting.Ed Miliband says that he and the Labour Party are full of shit criminalising people holding signs as terrorists despite anything he says.
‘So let’s all of us commit to stopping the sleep-walking into a new form of Nazism and by acting together, in unity, we can challenge their narrative’
SOLIDARITY campaigners came together in Cardiff on Saturday in a Unity March through a rain-soaked capital.
The Unity March was called by a coalition of organisations including CND Cymru, the National Education Union Cymru, PCS Cymru and Together Cymru to bring communities together in the face of far-right attacks.
In his address, Your Party leader Jeremy Corbyn thanked the marchers for the solidarity they were showing to the Palestinian people.
He said: “I reckon that between one and two million people in Britain have either attended demonstrations, gone to local events, signed petitions, lobbied their local MP or done something to support the Palestinian people.
“That is almost unprecedented for international solidarity in this country, so well done each and every one of you.”
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Former Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood spoke about the undercover ITV documentary on Reform UK.
“Many people saw on their TV screens this week what the mainstream far right have been carefully trying to hide,” she said. “We saw elected councillors and officials using language, arguments and imagery similar to that used by the Nazis and turning racism into a badge of honour.
“This language, these attitudes of superiority, this lack of empathy is what led, almost a century ago, to concentration camps.
“So let’s all of us commit to stopping the sleep-walking into a new form of Nazism and by acting together, in unity, we can challenge their narrative and their destination,” she said.
Nigel Farage blames the Muzzies.Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Racism is central to Israel’s Gaza genocide. How can you conduct genocide without it involving racism?
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
The dispute over whether Israel’s assault on Gaza amounts to genocide has largely been settled. Amnesty International, a UN commission of inquiry and the International Association of Genocide Scholars have all reached that conclusion, as have many leading scholars of genocide. The question that remains is how the greatest political crime of our time was allowed to happen. Adam H. Johnson’s How to Sell a Genocide goes a long way to explaining it.
Published by Pluto Press with a foreword by the Palestinian American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat, the book covers the crucial period from October 2023 to October 2024, when Western audiences were primed for genocide. Johnson shows that the mainstream American media did much of the priming. These outlets dehumanised Palestinians, treated the life of an Israeli as having more worth than the life of a Palestinian and supplied ready-made justifications for violence against the population of Gaza. Together, he argues, they formed a media ecosystem that was essential to Israel’s campaign to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza, in whole or in part.
None of this, in Johnson’s view, was inevitable. It took “deliberate choices by deliberate moral actors” – the editors, reporters, bookers, producers and TV presenters who decided in the first weeks that protecting the powerful mattered more than the truth. Rather than report honestly on Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza, they spun a comforting fiction for Western liberal audiences to justify the horror.
Setting out to prove, “beyond a reasonable doubt, that the genocide in Gaza was enabled, facilitated, and cheerled by establishment US media providing cover for months of a nihilistic campaign of starvation, bombing, arbitrary detention, shooting, and sexual violence,” Johnson cites hard data rather than relying on polemic or cherry-picked examples. The author draws on more than 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV clips from nine major outlets, testimony from journalists inside those newsrooms and comparisons with coverage of other recent conflicts.
Why leave out Fox News and the right-wing media? Because, says Johnson, outlets such as Fox, the Daily Wire and the Wall Street Journal are openly genocidal towards Palestinians and make no pretence otherwise; a book exposing them would be met by their own reporters and columnists with an “Okay, and?”
Instead, the author focuses on the outlets that Democrats read and watch. A Democratic president was in office when the genocide began, and support from Democrats in Congress, think tanks and the press was decisive in keeping it going. He concentrates on the first year, and above all the first few months, because that, he argues, is when the logic of the “war on Hamas” took hold, Americans grew used to mass death in Gaza and the genocide became a fait accompli.
With the destruction in Gaza too brutal and too visible to ignore, the media supplied excuses to ease the public conscience. Johnson calls these “Moats of Rationalization”: a scaffolding of deflection, double standards and orientalist tropes that allowed viewers and journalists alike to excuse the war crimes their own government was funding. The real job of the centre-left press, he argues, was not to convey reality but to “make their readers and viewers feel better” about their country, their leaders and themselves.
The first chapter shows how this worked by tracing how Israel weaponised the false claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies. The claim, which originated with Israeli military personnel and ZAKA, an organisation Johnson describes as far-right, spread from Israeli officials through CNN and other outlets to President Joe Biden within a day. It was part of an early push by media executives and pro-Israel groups to “ISIS-ify” Palestinian militants. Israel promoted the hashtag #HamasisISIS, and US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin called the attack “worse than ISIS”. Johnson’s analysis found that in the first month, seven major print and online outlets equated Hamas with ISIS 149 times. On air, CNN did so 350 times and MSNBC 369 times.
The media also abandoned one of its most basic duties: explaining why the attack happened. Providing context for 7 October was actively discouraged. When MSNBC’s Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin explained the history behind it on the day, Johnson’s sources say Comcast, the network’s owner, intervened; one summed up the editorial line as “We don’t want context.”
Strict gatekeeping of what can and cannot be reported also helped to sell the genocide. CNN ordered that all its reporting on Israel and Palestine be “approved in advance by the Jerusalem bureau”, which operates under Israel’s military censor. A source told The Intercept that lines were routinely edited to favour Israeli narratives. Yet lurid, unsourced claims about Palestinians were aired unchallenged, while allegations against Israelis, Johnson argues, had to be “triple vetted”.
The same double standard shaped coverage of sexual violence. Within days of 7 October, the Israeli claim that systematic rape was part of Hamas’s “terror strategy” was being repeated by liberal media outlets before Israel had offered any evidence for it. Like the “beheaded babies” story, Johnson argues, it cast Hamas as an organisation “for which any political settlement or ceasefire is not only impossible but morally objectionable”.
The flawed sourcing of the New York Times report “Screams Without Words”, Johnson says, pointed to “an ideological motivation at work” and to lower standards for stories that served Israel’s agenda. Israel’s sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, meanwhile, barely registered. In the first three months of the genocide and three months in late summer 2024, CNN and MSNBC made 502 on-air mentions of Palestinians committing mass rape and just two of Israelis raping Palestinians. The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico and Axios did the same in print: 128 mentions against nine.
An important part of selling the genocide relied on creating a two-tier moral system. In the chapter “Who is allowed to be human?”, Johnson shows how, within hours of 7 October, pundits and reporters began ranking violence and its victims on what he calls a “moral tier system”. Palestinian violence was treated as uniquely evil, driven by hatred, while Israeli violence was treated as regrettable but necessary.
Illustrating the impact of such framing, Johnson’s figures show that in the first 100 days, seven print and online outlets used “massacre” 344 times in their own reporting to describe Palestinians killing Israelis, and not once for Israelis killing Palestinians. Over the first year, the claim that Palestinians used “human shields” was aired 888 times on CNN and MSNBC, although Human Rights Watch has long rejected such a broad use of the term. Documented cases of Israeli forces using Palestinians as human shields went unmentioned. Israel’s “right to defend itself” was asserted 755 times on the two networks; Palestinians were granted the same right eight times.
Later chapters examine how US media helped the Biden administration “distance itself from the horrors of Gaza”; how it narrowed the debate to “how many Palestinians should die”; and how it covered “war crimes like earthquakes”, reporting the carnage as if it were a natural disaster and obscuring or leaving out Israel’s role entirely.
The chapter on campus protests, which Johnson calls “‘Antisemitism’ show trials”, contains the starkest comparison in the book. In the month after Harvard president Claudine Gay testified to Congress on campus antisemitism, six major print and online outlets ran 207 stories about her. In the month after six-year-old Hind Rajab was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, along with six relatives and the two paramedics sent to rescue her, the same outlets ran five. On air, the gap was wider still: CNN mentioned Gay 409 times and Hind 29; MSNBC mentioned Gay 210 times and Hind not once.
Johnson sees his job as that of a “prosecutor”, and the book reads like a case for the prosecution. It is packed with figures, which some readers may find heavy going, but the sheer weight of them makes the pattern of bias very hard to deny.
A book such as this asks us to consider what history has already taught us about the role of propaganda in mass atrocity. At Nuremberg, the Allies put on trial not only those who carried out mass murder but also the propagandists who primed the public to accept it. The lesson was that genocide does not begin with killing; it begins with words that teach people to see others as less than human. Johnson shows how US media treated Palestinian lives as worth less than Israeli ones, stripped Palestinians of their history and presented violence against them as necessary.
American newsrooms have yet to answer the questions this book raises about their coverage of Gaza. They reported the deaths, but they also offered endless excuses for them. Johnson has documented the choices that shaped that coverage. It is now for editors and journalists to explain why they so often showed more understanding for those doing the killing than for those being killed.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.
The smashed window of mayor Badoux’s car. Photograph: Emma Graham-Harrison/The Guardian
French mayor and archbishop also attacked during violent attempt to stop Palestinians harvesting olives
Israeli settler militants have attacked European diplomats, a French mayor and the archbishop of Cambrai in Taybeh, in the occupied West Bank, injuring three people and damaging a car, in the latest violent attempt to prevent Palestinians from harvesting olives on their own land.
Bernard Baudoux, mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries, was wearing his red, white and blue sash of office and attempting to enter a vehicle with diplomatic plates when he was assaulted and knocked to the ground on Saturday.
The masked militant shouted “Vive la France” as he launched the attack, a witness said. Badoux’s wife, and Vincent Dollmann, archbishop of Cambrai, were also threatened by the group of seven men, some armed with clubs.
The group had joined the olive harvest on lands belonging to the Christian town of Taybeh, along with the French consul general in Jerusalem, his wife and other diplomats, and the Belgian and Polish consuls.
Settlers first attacked a group working on the lower slopes of hills near Taybeh. As well as stealing olives, they kicked, abused and assaulted a Palestinian woman in her 70s and beat a man so badly he needed six stitches for a head injury.
Then they approached the diplomats and Badoux, who was in Taybeh for the launch of a twinning agreement with his town in northern France. During the attack, the militants smashed the window of an armoured car belonging to the Belgian mission.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.Ed Miliband says that he and the Labour Party are full of shit criminalising people holding signs as terrorists despite anything he says.
‘So let’s all of us commit to stopping the sleep-walking into a new form of Nazism and by acting together, in unity, we can challenge their narrative’
