The battle for public opinion

Photos: Flash90

With a toxic welter of journalistic laziness, media outlets’ pro-Palestinian bias, and Israel’s limitations in both traditional and social media, it was only a matter of time before slaughtered Jewish babies would be replaced by cries of proportionality and Israeli aggression

With reporting by Sandy Eller

IT took ten days for the media to overcome its uncharacteristic bout of sympathy for dead Jews.

In the aftermath of Hamas’s Simchas Torah pogrom, a stunned world rallied around Israel’s right to self-defense, and the sheer horror of the assault temporarily checked left-leaning media organizations’ anti-Israel animus.

But from the moment jets started pounding Gaza’s terrorists in retaliation, the clock began ticking: it was only a question of time before the slaughtered Jewish babies would disappear from the headlines to be replaced by the familiar narrative of Israeli aggression.

Few expected such a quick triumph for Hamas propaganda, though. Hundreds of Israeli victims had yet to be identified, and the press corps was still touring the blasted kibbutzim where defenseless civilians had been massacred, when at 6:59 p.m. last Tuesday night, an explosion rocked the parking lot of the Al-Ahli hospital in the northern Gaza Strip.

Within minutes, Hamas reported that an Israeli airstrike had killed 500 people at the medical center. It was a wild claim that a moment of editorial reflection ought to have flagged. For one thing, the Gazan health authorities in question were merely an arm of the terror group’s administration — hardly a trustworthy source. There was also no way that hospital staff could have counted so many casualties within so short a time frame. And there was always the off-chance that the region’s only democracy might have a different version of events than Hamas’s.

Yet none of that prevented news editors at the world’s most prestigious outlets from publishing stories painting Israel in the most damning light.

“Palestinian health ministry says an estimated 200 to 300 people killed in Israeli strike on hospital in Gaza,” CNN headlined uncritically. “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinian Officials Say,” screamed the New York Times’s headline. “A massacre — Gaza hospital blast estimated to kill hundreds,” was NBC’s version. “Hundreds killed in Israeli strike on Gaza hospital,” the BBC reported.

The gusto with which much of the media establishment embraced the Hamas narrative was revealing of just how unnatural it had been for many of the journalists involved to report on Israel as the unqualified victim in the aftermath of October 7th.

On social media the results were even worse. In a widely-shared post on a bogus account purporting to be the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, there was an admission that Israeli forces had bombed the hospital to inflict “euthanasia due to a lack of equipment and personnel.”

By the next morning, Israel’s version — backed by hard evidence — emerged. The strike was actually an Islamic Jihad rocket that had fallen short and triggered a fire at the hospital. On a visit to Israel, President Joe Biden said that the Pentagon’s own sources supported the Israeli version.

But by then it was too late: In the days it took for the press corps to issue mealy-mouthed admissions that they’d got it wrong, a modern-day blood libel had been born, ushered into the world by the Western media.

National Review, a conservative website, put it well: “The media will never forgive Israel for not bombing that hospital,” because “reporters and pundits wanted it to be true.”

It didn’t much matter that an Islamic Jihad  rocket misfired and landed in the parking lot of Al-Ahli hospital — as soon as Hamas claimed an Israeli air strike killed hundreds at the medical center, fiction turned into fact for the world’s most prestigious media outlets