 The media cover the Israel-Palestine conflict a lot. The deadly conflict between the Israeli forces. Conflict is escalating in Israel at this hour. The UN has expressed fears of a full-scale war. This is the story of Al-Wahta Street. A cease-fire agreement has reached. The fragile cease-fire that is holding. What happened in Jerusalem and what's happening in Gaza was the last straw. And yet, despite all that coverage, few people feel particularly informed about the nature of the conflict and what is really going on. But what if that was the point? What if almost all of this content isn't really meant to inform you and simply telling the truth was a radical proposition? And what if that wasn't the result of a conspiracy or a sensorial state, but a choice made by journalists and media organizations themselves? This is Emily Wilder. She posted this photo to her Twitter feed on April the 11th after she was hired by the Associated Press. A month later, she was fired. According to them, that was because of violations of AP's social media policy during Wilder's brief stint there. So I had a look at her Twitter feed, specifically between April the 11th and May the 21st. And to be honest, there wasn't much there. Except this from May 17th, where Wilder wrote, Objectivity fields fickle when the basic terms we use to report news implicitly stake a claim. Using Israel but never Palestine or war but not siege and occupation are political choices. Yet media make those exact choices all the time without being flagged as biased. Was this the tweet she was fired for? Simply highlighting the importance of using the appropriate words to convey the reality of a situation to the audience. And isn't that what journalism is meant to do? And what does it say about the mainstream media and its inability to actually report the Israel-Palestine conflict that such a thoughtful question gets you fired? You see, the media has a problem accurately reporting Israel's occupation of Palestine and that is what this is because it insists on seeing the conflict as one between two equals stuck in a cycle of violence. Something which, if you ask most people, is centuries old. So the problem is human nature or the backwardness of non-Europeans or the idiocy of religion. Any conclusion is fine as long as it isn't political and doesn't implicate choices made by governments. But the thing is, there was peace in the Middle East and for a long time. Certainly compared to Europe with Muslims, Jews and Christians living in relative harmony. This came to an abrupt end when it became increasingly clear that Jewish settlers from Europe were intent on creating a new state and taking an amount of land wholly disproportionate to their numbers. This was the revivalist nationalism known as Zionism combined with what some describe as a settler colonial ideology which sought to displace the land's indigenous Arab inhabitants. In 1948, Britain departed what was still called Palestine where it had been in charge since the fall of the Ottoman Empire leaving a vacuum. That was followed by a major conflict during which some 700,000 Palestinians around half the country's Arab population at the time were forcibly displaced. Now, the Palestinians call this the Nakba, the catastrophe. And to this day, a number of ultra-nationalist Israeli politicians such as Zippy Hotevely, deny it happened at all. It was by any measure an act of ethnic cleansing with multiple Israeli figures including future Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, the godfather of the Israeli nation, quite open about the need to transport the Arab population. This was called Plan Darlet. Some historians say it was defensive, others that it was offensive. But what we know for certain is that it displaced huge numbers of people with the aim being to ensure a Jewish majority over a substantial part of the country. Zionism understood itself as both a national movement and a settler-colonial movement. They understood that there was a population there. They understood it was the overwhelming majority. And the early Zionists, as much as they wanted to ignore the Arabs, understood that they were there and that they would have to do something in order to create a Jewish state. This takes us back to Wilder's tweet and how journalists used Israel but never Palestine, war but not siege and occupation, militants but never soldiers. When was the last time you heard the term ethnic cleansing or apartheid used regarding Israel and the media? Think that's hyperbolic? Well, the NGO Human Rights Watch disagrees and yet such terms rarely, if ever, find their way into reporting. Now take a look at this tweet from CNN Jerusalem correspondent Hadas Gold celebrating her sibling joining the IDF. Surely this is by any measure taking sides. And what would happen if a journalist shared a picture of their sibling on a Palestine solidarity demonstration or just wearing a kefir? From Emily Wilder's fate, we already know the answer. This is how media censorship functions in a supposedly free society. It works fundamentally in two ways, through incentives and disincentives, carrots and sticks. First, the carrots and how the media filters the wrong kind of people out of the profession. From kindergarten to university and then work, we're filtered for obedience and the media is no different. Journalists may like to think of themselves as fearless, but on big questions like this, they often aren't. Indeed, they are precisely where they are because they don't want to break with the lie and they do what they're told and they don't ask difficult questions. How can you know that I'm self-censoring? How can you know that I'm self-censoring? I'm sure you believe everything we're saying. But what I'm saying is if you believe something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting. So for instance, you can't say Israel is a settler colony, even though some of the very people who founded Israel or the Godfathers of Zionism say so. Why? Because that isn't the kind of thing serious, credible journalists say. And if you want career progression and who doesn't, that means you won't go around saying things that other people don't. And this is something Wilder learned the hard way. Of course, she did nothing wrong. The issue is simply that she might and that the filtering process, which so often works without really being seen publicly of self-censorship, had malfunctioned. Then there is the stick and the disincentives to produce truthful journalism. The electric fence approach to public relations, as some call it, where whenever you do something you shouldn't, there's an automatic shock. Obviously, you quickly learn your lesson and you self-censor. That's the point. This advert in The New York Times, targeting the Hedid sisters and pop star Jua Lipa, offers one example of such an approach. After extending their solidarity to Palestinians, these three influential women were targeted in an advert which called on them to condemn, of all people, Hamas. Now, clearly it's possible to oppose legal occupations and, yes, apartheid and, yes, decades of ethnic cleansing by Israel, while also not starting with Hamas. Anybody sensible knows that, but the point here is simple. It's about intimidation. And don't you dare make the slightest positive noise supporting Palestine or else there'll be consequences. Now, this electric fence approach is built into the media institution through a network of pro-Israel pressure groups who specialize in media monitoring and orchestrating complaints. One is Honest Reporting, a non-governmental organization that monitors the media for bias against Israel. Headquartered in New York City as editorial staff based in Jerusalem with affiliates in the US, UK, Canada, France, Brazil and Australia, New Zealand. Another is Camera, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. It claims to have over 65,000 paying members and that 46 news outlets have issued corrections based on their work after they've showered media outlets with complaints and emails. Gershengarnberg, a journalist-American prospect, has written that Camera is Orwellian-named and that, like others engaged in narrative wars, it does not understand the difference between advocacy and accuracy. In other words, it actively aims to assert a pro-Israel bias in media coverage. Then there are others like Palestinian Media Watch and Memory, the Middle East Media Research Institute, which the novelist Halleyn Barakat described as a propaganda organization dedicated to representing Arabs and Muslims as anti-Semites. Then there's Baikon, whose advocacy organization in the UK is called We Believe in Israel and whose current director is Labour NEC member Lou Geikhurst. One campaign by Honest Reporting allegedly saw them send 6,000 emails a day to CNN's chief executive at the time. Following the subsequent meeting they gained, they noted that CNN started to refer to Palestinian terrorism. In other words, the fight was about the very terms the media chooses to adopt. Elsewhere, Honest Reporting claims credit for Reuters' decision to stop referring to Hamas as an organization that seeks an independent state of Palestine. Following a 2004 article published in the British Medical Journal, which criticised Israel for a high level of Palestinian civilian casualties and claimed the pattern of injuries suggested routine targeting of children in situations of minimal or no threat, the journal received over 500 responses to its website and nearly 1,000 were sent directly to its editor. In an analysis of the responses published in the journal, Carl Saba concluded that the correspondence was orchestrated by Honest Reporting and aimed at silencing legitimate criticism of Israel. The BBC has been the subject of Honest Reporting's attention more frequently than most. As one source told Guardian journalist Nick Davies, if the editor of the Today program knows that an item will make the phone ring off the hook, he may think twice about running it. The result of all this is that simply relaying the facts becomes more difficult. And anything other than a pro-Israel bias is seen as providing support for terrorism. This is how censorship works in pre-societies. It's not an organised conspiracy. It's journalists like Emily Wilder or influential figures like the Hadid sisters and Jewel Ipper self-censoring because of positive and negative stimuli, carrot and stick. One side, Israel, is extraordinarily good at this. The other side, Palestine isn't. As a result, the general public can never get the full picture of what is happening with even the appropriate words that best explain the situation heavily contested. So if you want to know why Mark Ruffalo apologised for what he said or have you barred dem or Penelope Cruz, it's that metaphorical electric fence. Get involved publicly and there will be consequences for you which is exactly what the NYT advert was about. Such a strategy is about influencing media coverage so it is no longer accurate. Not to mention trying to restrict freedom of political conscience and speech and frankly anyone who cares about living in a free society regardless of their views on Israel Palestine should care deeply about that. Such inbuilt censorship, whether it's the filtering system of establishment media or the electric fence of information war means that the media rarely deviates from the script of governments repeating their framing and advancing their interests uncritically. One example of this is how British journalists will say that the UK is offering to broker a peace deal or a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians. But how can Britain be an honest intermediary when it sells weapons, collaborates militarily and shares intelligence with Israel? In March this year, the UK's new military strategy declared Israel as a key strategic partner. Such framing by politicians can't be critically examined by the media as it should be because of self-censorship. To be clear, nobody is stopping them from saying this is absurd or untrue, it's just that they don't do it. Journalists and news organisations are either chasing the carrot or avoiding the stick with truth and justice for the Palestinian people, the casualty. That is the result of intentional strategies pursued by specific interests and frankly an absence of moral courage in much the media to stand up to them. But if the media can't tell the truth, particularly while people lose their homes and entire families are killed in their beds, then what precisely is it for? Usually we would associate censorship with authoritarian government. But self-censorship in the media, particularly on the issue of Israel-Palestine, appears to be every bit as insidious and undemocratic. It stops freedom of political conscience, freedom of expression and most importantly seems very opposed to human rights. Does Navarro Media self-censor on the big questions of the 21st century? 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