In the four months since October 7, what have we learned? ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
To our friends,In the four months since October 7, what have we learned? That Hamas fighters beheaded zero babies. That the Israeli military’s evidence for sexual violence by Palestinian militants was unsubstantiated. That Al-Shifa hospital was, in fact, not the headquarters of the resistance. That, despite their public disavowals of the Gaza Health Ministry’s death data, the Israeli Occupation Forces use the very same information for their internal analyses. That the places they designate as safe havens are subject to repeated bombardment. That nowhere in Gaza is safe. In these same four months, what have U.S. newsrooms learned? Nothing. “Mainstream American outlets, ones that call themselves very professional in journalism, became spokespeople for the IDF after October 7,” the veteran Palestinian reporter Shuruq As’ad, a member of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, told us in an interview. “They really bought the story of the Israeli army about what happened that day, and it was a lie. They did not even cover the bases of simple, ethical journalism to make sure the information they delivered was accurate, and instead bought the story that Palestinians killed children and cut heads and burned and raped without any evidence. This was shocking to me. I knew that these outlets were never really accurate or two-sided [when covering Palestine] but with this it was even more clear.” Four months into the genocide, U.S. newsrooms are doubling down on their propagandistic coverage. They are pushing falsehoods about UNRWA to justify the famine that Israel engineered in North Gaza. They’re publishing editorial board opinions smearing popular demands for a ceasefire. They’re platforming racist zealots like Bret Stephens, the former editor-in-chief of IOF mouthpiece The Jerusalem Post, and washed-up political commentators like Thomas Friedman who, in a desperate attempt to make himself relevant again, compared Arab countries to various bug species. (Edward Said warned us about Friedman and his ilk in 1989, when he wrote that a certain class of Orientalists espouse “a threadbare repertoire of often racist cliches, all of them bearing the marks of colonial knowledge.” These talking heads “represent a narrow consensus associated, not with desirable political change, but with the equally political, basically conservative perspective of the status quo.”) Meanwhile, according to UN reports, Israeli forces have killed over 122 Palestinian journalists in Gaza since October 7. Many more are injured. The International Federation of Journalists says Palestinian journalists have been killed “at a scale and pace of loss of media professionals’ lives without precedent.” Reporters and their families have received direct threats from the IOF — proof that they, and the truth they alone can tell, are targeted for destruction. We reject the status quo of the zionist settler colony. We reject U.S. imperialism in all its forms. We reject the evictions in East Jerusalem, the repeated incursions on Jenin, the torture of Palestinian political prisoners, the myth of the zionist ethnostate. Decolonize the Fourth Estate. Free Palestine.
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Israel’s war on the truth is relentless, but it is not unstoppable. In November, the International Federation for Journalists announced a special appeal for the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate as part of its international safety fund. Every donation marked for Palestine (write “PJS-2023” in the comment box here) goes toward the purchase of safety supplies (tents, medical kits, rechargeable batteries) for reporters on the ground. For more information on the PJS’s efforts to keep its colleagues in Gaza safe, read this interview with Shuruq As’ad in The Nation. Please give what you can to keep our colleagues in Gaza alive.
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Email the “standards” desk
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Let the editors of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal know that their coverage of the War on Gaza is an abysmal excuse for journalism! WAWOG has created two email templates, one for the NYT sexual violence “investigation” and another for WSJ’s UNRWA “report,” both of which you can access here. We ask that you modify the language so that not all the emails are the same, and that you bcc us (now@wawog.com) so that we know how many people are using these templates — and whether we should keep making them.
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The Writer’s Guild of America East has drafted a solidarity letter condemning the killing of journalists in Gaza, the crime by which Israel seeks to conceal all its others. “Israeli military officials have explicitly said they will not ensure the safety of journalists operating in the Gaza Strip,” the letter reads. “The intentional targeting of journalists is a war crime; it is also an attempt to prevent the reality on the ground in Gaza from coming to light.” Sign here to add your support. (For proof that open letters do work, google “Northwestern students” + “drop charges” + “parody.”)
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Abolish the bureau chiefs
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What are the requirements for being a “Jerusalem,” “Tel Aviv,” or “Israel” bureau chief for a major media outlet in the West? According to our research: Strong preference shown to white candidates Male candidates encouraged to apply Insufficient knowledge of Arabic Must be comfortable living in a stolen home Willingness to work with the IOF’s military censor Strong ties to “Israel” a plus
Allow us to introduce you to some of the most exemplary bureau chiefs of the American press, present and past. Martin Fletcher first went to “Israel” in 1973, to report for MSNBC on the Yom Kippur War. He was on assignment when he picked up a hitchhiker, who turned out to be both a sergeant in the IOF and his future wife. A decade later, he returned to Occupied Palestine as a “Tel Aviv” correspondent for the network. He and his wife bought a house, had kids. In 1993, he was promoted to bureau chief, a position he held until 2009. In 2018, Fletcher wrote a novel called Promised Land, described by a Zionist newspaper as a “love letter to Israel.” Fletcher told an interviewer that he wrote the book because he “wanted people to think ‘Wow, this is a great place worth supporting, with all of its faults.’” His career in “Tel Aviv” was, in essence, a 26-year-long Birthright trip, sponsored by MSNBC. “I thought long and hard about whether to include the Palestinian, Israeli [sic] Arab view in the [novel],” he told another interviewer on his book tour. “The reason I left them both out was that in that period the Arabs … played almost no role in the story of Israel.” Fletcher’s novel reveals the truth of his perspective. His reportage — first as a correspondent, then as bureau chief, and finally now as “expert” — is the fiction. “You can’t hate people once you get to know them,” he recently told St. Louis Today while promoting an upcoming appearance at a Jewish book festival. How many Palestinians, one wonders, did he ever get to know? Let’s move on to the story of former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner. In 2010, Electronic Intifada revealed that his 20-year-old son had enlisted in the IOF. Ten days later, he made an appearance at Vassar College, where he was asked about the ongoing evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. Bronner was concerned, but not about the Palestinians. His worries were for the fate of homes like his in West Jerusalem, which were formerly owned by Arabs before they were ethnically cleansed from their land in 1948. “One of the things that is most worrying not just the Left but a lot of people in Israel about this decision is if the courts in Israel are going to start recognizing property ownership from before the State [of Israel was founded],” Bronner said. “I think the Palestinians are going to have a fairly big case.” The New York Times-owned property Bronner occupies in the Qatamon neighborhood of West Jerusalem was once the home of Hasan Karmi, a distinguished BBC Arabic Service broadcaster and scholar. Karmi and his family fled along with 10,000 other Jerusalemites in 1948 after Zionist militias occupied his neighborhood. He was never able to return. Bronner, who moved out in 2012, is now the “Israel” bureau chief for Bloomberg. Patrick Kingsley is the youngest person ever to become a Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times. Which is to say, he is young enough to know better. Kingsley was in his third year at Cambridge when, in early 2009, hundreds of his fellow students occupied the university’s law school building for seven days straight, in protest of Israel’s war on, and blockade of, Gaza. (He may even have been one of them.) Kingsley is rumored to be the kind of well-paid idealist who believes that the Times can be reformed. How is that process of institutional reform going for him? About as well as his UK driving test, which he failed seven times. In 2021, Kingsley wrote a profile of the Palestinian poet, scholar, and teacher Refaat Alareer. The Times’s Zionist readership quickly decided Kingsley’s profile was too humanizing, because it had failed to accurately represent Alareer’s negative views on Israel; the Times’s Zionist editorship responded by appending a stunning 237-word correction to demonize Alareer and delegitimize his teachings and his perspective. (Kingsley’s articles today need no such intervention, as he regurgitates dossiers full of state-department lies about Hamas and the hospitals.) When Refaat Alareer was murdered by the occupation on December 7, 2023, Kingsley was tasked with co-writing his obituary. It was a smear. After describing how Alareer was beloved among his students, Kingsley wrote that the late scholar was “known for posting hateful comments about Israel and its citizens.” What Kingsley calls hateful, we call truthful. What the New York Times calls truth, we call hate. The Twitter bio for Joe Federman states that he is the Associated Press’s “news director for Israel” and “the Palestinian territories.” It’s as predictable as it is galling that the correspondent responsible for covering Palestine won’t even say “Palestine,” since Federman is, unfortunately, just following AP house style. (These guidelines, adopted by hundreds of other newsrooms, forbid journalists from using Palestine “since it is not a fully independent, unified state.”) Federman is a company man. On December 15, as Samir Abu Daqqa bled to death, reporters in a Foreign Press Association group chat urged their peers to pressure the occupying forces into letting an ambulance through. “I don’t think we need to hound them,” Federman texted back, sounding more concerned for the busy schedules of the occupation’s spokespeople than for the life of his colleague. Last and not least, we have CNN’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Richard Greene. Recently, the Intercept reported on a July email that Greene sent to CNN staff, explaining that all coverage of “Israel,” including work produced in the US, is run through the Jerusalem bureau, which operates under the shadow of the IOF’s military censor. In Greene’s words, his censored and censorial bureau “aims to be a safety net so we don’t use imprecise language or words that may sound impartial but can have coded meanings here.” Examples of this “imprecise language,” an anonymous staffer explained, include “war crime” and “genocide.” We rest our case.
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Condemn propaganda by omission
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South Africa made history when it launched its case charging Israel with genocidal intent at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on December 29th. For the 83 days leading up to the court filing, which demands provisional measures and an emergency injunction in the form of a permanent ceasefire, Palestinians had been meticulously documenting their own genocide — a job mainstream news outlets refuse to do. In response, South Africa’s 84-page argument recognized that the ethnic cleansing did not begin on October 7, but instead in 1948, during the Nakba (the catastrophe), which displaced over 750,000 Palestinians. On January 11, a team of South African and Irish lawyers presented their oral argument for three hours, illuminating the mass killing of Palestinians; the bodily and mental harm; the repercussions of Israel’s campaign; the forced displacement and sanctioned starvation of people in Gaza; the destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system; and the disproportionate violence against pregnant Palestinian women. With an arsenal of evidence coming straight from Israeli officials’ mouths, South Africa easily evidenced genocidal intent in Gaza. For those of us watching from home, the argument was both a masterclass and a means of catharsis. But despite (or because of?) the historic nature of this hearing, no Western media outlet, except for Al Jazeera English, broadcast South Africa’s three-hour oral argument in full. Ostensibly, CNN, BBC, Fox, Sky News, and MSNBC did not think it newsworthy enough for the full airtime (Sky News and the Guardian did, however, decide that their viewers should listen in to Israel’s response in totality the following day). The choice not to televise the trial was part of the mainstream media’s Palestine strategy: to spread propaganda by omission. Broadcasting the entirety of South Africa’s presentation would show even dedicated viewers that Israel is not the helpless victim they’ve been presented as, thus losing even more popular support for the Zionist project. It would also make the networks culpable for facilitating genocide through their one-sided, libelous coverage.
On January 26, the ICJ announced its official order: that Israel could plausibly be committing genocide, and that the case has grounds to proceed. The court in essence granted the majority of South Africa’s requests for provisional measures, which included ordering Israel to end all genocidal acts in the Strip; this should, of course, entail an end to all killing, maiming and displacement of Palestinians. The court did not, however, explicitly call for a ceasefire, which The NYT, Washington Post, and other outlets framed as an Israeli victory. But the fact that the ICJ will continue to the merit stage of the trial charging Israel with genocide is the real (and unprecedented) legal victory. But this fine print means nothing for people currently starving and under deadly attack in Gaza. Had the court demanded immediate ceasefire, the ruling would not have been binding — none of the provisional measures are — and the Israeli government has made clear that they reject all court demands to end or diminish the onslaught. The demand for a ceasefire remains the most urgent priority for every anti-Zionist around the world. For an analysis of the role of law in the movement to free Palestine, watch the full recording of our February 3 panel at Making Worlds Books in Philadelphia, featuring Susan Abulhawa, Raz Segal, and Kayla Rothman-Zecher.
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Get a copy of the New York War Crimes
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Out now: editions four and five of the NYWC, a free paper by and for the movement. The fourth edition contains an excoriating close reading of a now-infamous piece of New York Times hasbara, “The Woman in the Black Dress.” The fifth edition, produced in collaboration with Samidoun, features a new essay by Khalida Jarrar. Copies are available at The Word is Change, Wendy’s Subway, The People’s Forum, and the Poetry Project in New York City. More locations in other cities coming soon! If you would like to stock the NYWC in a space of your own, please reply to this email with your name, phone number, and a little information about yourself and/or your space.
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The Radius of Arab American Writers has prepared a statement to be read at the beginning of each panel during this year’s AWP Conference & Book Fair, which begins on Wednesday, January 7, in Kansas City, Missouri. We quote from the condensed version of the statement here: “The event organizers would like to acknowledge that we are gathering during an active genocide taking place in Gaza, and that the current violence in Palestine is the continuation of decades of colonial violence under Israeli apartheid. We stand in solidarity with victims of genocide in Sudan and Congo, and with the Indigenous peoples on whose ancestral homelands this conference is being held. […] We stand firmly against anti-Blackness and recognize that police violence and all white supremacist violence must be named and opposed. […] Therefore, as we begin our event, we wish to underscore that none of us are free until all of us are free, and that all anti-racist, liberationist, and decolonial struggles are intertwined.”
Read the full statement here, even though AWP doesn’t want you to. When conference honchos caught wind of RAWI’s intervention, they issued a hand-waving missive implying that they would remove attendees who created a “hostile environment.” Let the hostilities begin.
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Don’t just mourn, organize
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A new organization called Film Workers for Palestine launched with the start of Sundance on January 18. They asked attendees to use their platforms at the festival to being attention to the horrors of Israel’s war, while acknowledging that “awareness” is not enough: “For over 100 days, images of Israel’s genocide in Gaza have flooded our screens, but this has not stopped the continuing atrocities.” Brian Eno, Mohammed El-Kurd, Mati Diop, and nearly 6,000 others have signed their statement. Film Workers for Palestine will be organizing around upcoming festivals. Join them here. Members of FSP-NWU are currently developing a data analysis report about workplace retaliation and censorship pressures that media workers are experiencing, usually due to their bosses’ complicity with the war machine. They hope that the report will aid their union in better supporting and representing the interests and rights of media workers in the US. To collect the data for this report, there are two surveys currently being circulated: A survey for media workers who believe they have experienced professional consequences for political expressions related to Palestine. A survey for media workers who feel pressure to censor their own speech related to Palestine at work and in public, for fear of professional consequences.
We encourage you to fill out one or both of these surveys if they apply to you, or to share them with friends or colleagues to whom they do apply. WAWOG’s labor committee seeks to help build a labor movement worthy of its name, one that understands that “an injury to one is an injury to all” isn’t just rhetoric, but a truth on which we act. Write to labor@wawog.com to learn more.
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Enlist in the real culture war
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More than 80 literary presses, magazines, arts organizations, and cultural institutions have now committed to PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Write to our boycott committee at pacbi@wawog.com for more information on how your institution, too, can sign on.
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A few of our favorite recent essays and articles, including some written by our members: The War on Hospitals, Joelle M. Abi-Rached “We are Fighting Nazis”: Genocidal Fashionings of Gaza(ns)After 7 October, Zoé Samudzi This Is What They Call It Now, Mary Turfah Acts Harmful To the Enemy, Jake Romm & Dylan Saba So You’re a Professor? Here’s What You Can Do to Oppose Genocide, Steven Salaita Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew | Part II, George Prochnik, Emily Dische-Becker & Eyal Weizman Where Nature Ends and Settlements Begin, Jumana Manna Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi Israel Bombed an Al-Jazeera Cameraman—and Blocked Evacuation Efforts as he Bled to Death, Sharif Abdel Kouddous Palestine’s Martyrdom Upends the World of Law, Bassem Saad
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We leave you with the words of, once again, the journalist Shuruq As’ad: “We have 8,000 Palestinians in prison. They have been kidnapped too, from their homes, brutally. We have children, women, old people, sick people. No one even sees them, not the Red Cross or their families. Why does no one talk about them? When CNN went to visit the hostages, they filmed them in their homes with their books and their friends and their rooms. But for the Palestinians who were released, they did no story, as if those children imprisoned at 12 or 13 years old are not human beings; as if their stories were not worth telling.”
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In truth and solidarity,W.A.W.O.G.Twitter: @wawog_now Instagram: @wawog_now For press inquiries: press@wawog.com For general inquiries: wawog@wawog.com
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IMAGE CREDITS: 1) Photograph by Nan Goldin. 2) Collage featuring the faces of (L-R) Richard Greene, Ethan Bronner, Joe Federman, Patrick Kingsley, and Martin Fletcher. 3–5) Photographs by Nan Goldin and Brandon English.
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