Israel Often Uses Misinformation Strategically. Western Journalists Should Say So.
By stacy lee kong
Image: UNRWA
Content warning: this newsletter contains graphic mentions of war, death and violence.
A note on language: As I have explained in many previous newsletters, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to characterize critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers has argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace as well as academics who study genocide and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.
In 2021, following Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president, the Columbia Journalism Review published an article reflecting on four years of covering his predecessor, former (and, terrifyingly, potentially future) president Donald Trump. Writers Michael Schudson and Jueni Duyen Tran were not only grappling with how journalists did, or did not, handle Trump’s incessant lies, including whether they explicitly identified his statements as such; they were also looking for lessons that could be applied when covering other public figures who deftly wield falsehoods to further their own gains.
They spent a lot of time thinking about what set Trump’s behaviour—using “assertion, rumor, speculation, conspiracy theory, or trial balloon… to keep him[self] in the public eye, to win the applause of devoted fans, to rile up the liberals he despises, or to displace other topics from the headlines”—apart from that of other notable presidential liars, and what would be the most correct way to describe this phenomenon. They landed on “extra factual,” a term coined by political scientist Kelly Greenhill. “Greenhill understands extra-factual statements to be ‘either unverified or unverifiable at the time of transmission’ and to typically ‘take the form of emotionally resonant narratives’ that are ‘intended to influence their recipients’ attitudes and behavior,’” they wrote, explaining that it was important to use a more precise term than simply “lying” because that word alone doesn’t communicate with enough nuance the inconsistency of Trump’s relationship to the truth, or “how dangerous this type of indifference to the truth can be.”
I bring this up because it reminds me of another political leader, and government, that regularly releases unverified or unverifiable statements that are designed to be emotionally resonant, and intended to encourage certain behaviours: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party. Netanyahu is a prolific liar, as Israeli newspaper Haaretz has detailed on many occasions (for example, in February 2023, July 2023, August 2023, September 2023—twice, and late January 2024). I’ve written before about Israel’s months-long denial that an IDF soldier shot and killed Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, which the government only apologized for in May 2023, and about Israel’s ongoing assertion that it’s not targeting journalists right now, despite several organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch, raising concerns that it’s doing exactly that. Since Oct. 7, there is clear evidence that Netanyahu, the Israeli government and their political allies have intentionally repeated unverified or false claims to paint all Palestinians as terrorists, thereby dehumanizing them and justifying collective punishment against them. In fact, in early December Haaretz published a long investigation debunking many of these claims.
So why, when Israel recently accused 12 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) staff members of collaborating with Hamas on Oct. 7 (which prompted several world leaders to pause their funding to the organization, though it is the primary source of humanitarian aid in Gaza) did so few news outlets acknowledge the Israeli government has a history of making unverified statements, not to mention that these outlets may not have reviewed any evidence themselves?
Let’s talk about it.
How did Western journalists cover Israel’s allegations?
A recap: last Friday, after two days of hearings in the genocide case South Africa brought against Israel, a panel of 17 judges belonging to the International Court of Justice “voted for urgent measures which covered most of what South Africa asked for with the notable exception of ordering a halt to Israeli military action in Gaza,” per CBC. “The court ordered Israel to refrain from any acts that could fall under the Genocide Convention and also ensure that its troops do not commit any genocidal acts in Gaza. Israel must report to the court within a month on what it’s doing to uphold the order.”
The same day, the Israeli government informed the UNRWA that it had evidence “several” of the organization’s Palestinian employees were involved in the Oct. 7 attack. The UNRWA responded immediately, terminating their contracts and launching an investigation. (According to Reuters, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres confirmed that “12 staff members had been implicated and that nine had been terminated, one was dead and the identities of the other two were being clarified.”) Western leaders also responded quickly. The UN agency, which was founded the year after the Nakba to provide Palestinians who had been displaced from their homes with education, healthcare, social services and other services, currently serves 5.9 million Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and is funded by a coalition of countries, including the U.S., Germany, the European Union, Sweden, Norway, Japan, Canada and others. And, following Israel’s allegations, 16 of them paused this funding, including top funders America and Germany, as well as the U.K. and Canada.
This led to a huge public outcry from the UN, aid workers, Palestinians and their allies, who argued that without this funding, the UNRWA could run out of money within weeks. Since it’s the primary aid organization in Palestine, this could mean the total collapse of the humanitarian infrastructure in Gaza. And for the most part, this is what Western journalists focused on. On one hand, I can’t fault them. Amid reports that Palestinians are resorting to eating grass and drinking polluted water because of a looming famine, the impact of this funding pause on Palestinians is incredibly important to cover.
However. In the news stories I read, even those that acknowledged the allegations were not proven, there was little space devoted to the wider context: when did these allegations surface? Why might they have surfaced? As Diana Buttu, a Palestinian legal expert in international law, told Al Jazeera, “I don’t think it is coincidental that these allegations came out immediately after the ICJ ruling. It is designed to deflect from the ICJ ruling and focus the attention on UNRWA and to undermine any attempts to hold Israel accountable or stop the genocide.” Not to mention, Israel has long had its sights set on the UNRWA, alleging that it is riddled with Hamas operatives. However, according to legal experts and humanitarian groups, Israel’s motives are less about rooting out terrorists and more about undermining Palestinians’ right to return. According to Human Rights Watch Israel-Palestine director Omar Shakir, “it’s clear that there has been a years-long politicised effort to undermine UNRWA’s work. It happened during the Trump administration, and there are pro-Israeli groups that entirely focus on UNRWA because they seek to liquidate the question of Palestinian rights or even their basic status of refugees to serve a bigger political agenda.”
Also: where did this intelligence come from? Was it obtained via torture, which Israel’s security agency, Shin Bet, has a long history of using against Palestinian detainees? And if so, how trustworthy can it be, since confessions extracted via torture are notoriously unreliable?
Israel has a long history of using unverified but emotionally gripping stories as a PR strategy
Which is to say, I don’t think any of the news coverage I saw adequately informed its audience that the allegations that prompted the funding pause may not even be credible. (The one exception is this Vox explainer, which was published on Wednesday.) Nor did journalists include the necessary context that the Israeli government has demonstrated a pattern of widely disseminating dramatic, horrifying and unverified stories that turn out to be either ultimately unverifiable, or downright false. Instead, many followed a well-established pattern themselves, amplifying Israel’s claims without contextualizing or independently confirming them.
And that’s irresponsible on several levels, because even if we stick solely to the claims that have been circulating since Oct. 7, many of the most horrific allegations have since been debunked. For example, the often-cited ‘40 dead babies,’ a viral phrase that has been repeated over and over on newspaper front pages, in op-eds justifying the bombing, ethnic cleansing, starvation and murder of Palestinian civilians and in my IG comment section, do not exist. IDF soldiers and members of Zaka, which Haaretz describes as “the ultra-Orthodox Jewish organization whose members retrieve bodies after terror attacks,” testified they personally saw the bodies of “dozens of” dead babies in the aftermath of Oct. 7, sometimes describing them as beheaded, burned and/or hanged. Lt. Col. Yaron Buskila of the Israel Defense Forces's Gaza Division told a journalist for ultra-Orthodox news website Kikar Hashabbat that he saw babies who had been hung on clotheslines. United Hatzalah president Eli Beer gave a speech at the Republican Jewish Coalitions’ Annual Leadership Summit in Las Vegas in late October claiming a baby had been placed in an oven and burned to death. The official X/Twitter account for the Office of the Prime Minister (a.k.a. Netanyahu) shared graphic photos, purportedly of babies’ bodies. And yet, the paper says none of these stories are true, citing “sources including Israel's National Insurance Institute, kibbutz leaders and the police, [which say] on October 7 one baby was murdered, 10-month-old Mila Cohen. She was killed with her father, Ohad, on Kibbutz Be'eri.”
The same article addresses the claim by a Zaka member that a pregnant woman at House 426 on Kibbutz Be'eri had been shot from behind and her abdomen cut open to expose the body of her fetus. But according to Haaretz, the occupants of House 426 were elderly and did not mention any pregnant women; furthermore the kibbutz itself said “the story of the pregnant woman reported by Zaka is not relevant to Be'eri,” while “the police say the case is not known to them, and a pathology source at the Shura army base told Haaretz that he was unaware of the case.”
In a third example, Sara Netanyahu, Netanyahu’s wife, claimed in a letter to U.S. First Lady Jill Biden that Thai citizen Nutthawaree Munkan, one of Hamas’ hostages, was nine months pregnant when she was abducted and had to give birth in Gaza. However, “her friends, employer and families denied that she was pregnant,” according to Haaretz. What’s more, “Munkan was released [in late November]; she was not pregnant and had not given birth. The army currently has no information about an abducted pregnant woman, and defense officials consider the story an unsubstantiated rumor.”
And most recently, senior IDF soldier Lt. Col. Guy Basson, the deputy commander of the Kfir Brigade, went on Israeli Channel 14 in mid-January to describe his experience on Oct. 7, where he claimed to have seen the bodies of eight dead babies in a communal nursery and the body of an Auschwitz survivor named Genia. However, according to Haaretz, these incidents did not happen.
Taking into account this pattern, it seems relevant to inform readers that Israel’s accusations may be exaggerated, or even totally unsubstantiated. And in fact, that’s what Sky News’ reporting indicates. In addition to an alleged 12 UNRWA employees who were named, the Israeli intelligence report alleged that “out of approx. 12,000 UNRWA employees in GS [Gaza Strip], about 10% are Hamas/PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] operatives and about 50% are first-degree relatives with a Hamas operative.” What’s more, the report claims, “UNRWA is forced ‘to act under the authorisation and supervision of Hamas’ and ‘it appears that UNRWA is assisting Hamas with securing humanitarian aid that is transferred to GS,’” allegations the UNRWA denies. After reviewing Israel’s dossier, Sky News has pushed back on those allegations, saying, “the Israeli intelligence documents make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA.”
Journalism needs nuance and context—and the language to describe this type of dishonesty
Let’s go back to Schudson and Tran for a second. The duo spent much of their piece arguing that Trump did not merely lie, but engaged in something far more complicated. “What is a fabulistic construction, a wish or dream or mythology parading as reality? These are not just lies,” they asserted, before identifying the course of action they believed journalists should take in the face of such dishonesty: “It will be journalists’ responsibility, as the front line of resistance to the varied array of reality denials, to call out liars on their deception (including, when appropriate, President Biden)—but it also entails finding, or creating, the language to describe utterances much more nefarious than a simple lie.”
But I don’t think we’ve really done that. It’s not unusual for news stories to contain context; many of the articles I’ve read over the past week or so have explained what the UNRWA is, when it was founded, why it was founded, who donates aid money, who’s suspended their donations and even sometimes mentioned Israel’s long-standing criticism of the organization. But for some reason, this context—the Israeli government’s motivations, the source of their intelligence, their habitual spread of misinformation—gets overlooked, time and time again. But it is just as important as these other details.
And also? I’ve said this before, but I think it bears repeating: as journalists, we don’t just have a professional, ethical and moral obligation to report the whole story. We also have an economic one. Our audiences are well-informed. They are following Palestinian journalists on X/Twitter, TikTok and Instagram. They are reading local news sources. They are seeking out the information that, as a whole, mainstream Western media is opting not to give them. And they’re smart, so they’re noticing the gaps.
Knowing all of that, what would possibly convince someone to believe news is worth paying for, funding with their tax dollars or even consuming—especially if they can see us drop the ball over and over and over again?
And Did You Hear About…
These thoughtful critiques of Nicki Minaj’s days-long campaign against Megan Thee Stallion, which, let’s be honest, is more misogynoir and social media posturing than rap beef.
The New Yorker’s smart breakdown of the marketing strategy behind Stanley cups’ surging popularity, and this equally smart piece from last week about why critiquing women’s obsession with Stanley cups is not misogynist. (Also, about the lead content…)
Black Twitter’s surprising endurance in the age of Elon.
This excellent analysis of the manosphere’s furor over Taylor Swift ‘infiltrating’ the NFL, and how that connects to the viral story from last week about the widening ideological divide between young men and young women.
This year’s Rom-Com Bracket.
Bonus: We’ve obsessed over this on IG already, but the trailer for Dev Patel’s upcoming revenge thriller, Monkey Man, looks very, very good.
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