Gaza Through Whose Lens?

This story was produced by students from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in December 2023.

Introduction

The war between Israel and Hamas has been covered and discussed widely across both traditional and social media. However, some of this reporting has amplified biased views about the affected communities.

This has had substantial impacts on people in the conflict zone and across the world. Misinformation and biases found in reporting on social media about the war in Gaza and extremism have had severe consequences for the Jewish-American, Muslim-American, Palestinian-American, and Arab-American communities. This bias and misinformation can lead to further polarization, which can further marginalize members of these communities, with an increase in incidents of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, including hate crimes. 

Experts have long identified a “backlash effect” of rising attacks against Arabs, Muslims, and Jews on the heels of conflict between Israel and its neighbors. The Hamas attack on October 7, coming after a period of diminished hostilities, has kicked off a new and dangerous era of the conflict and its depictions in the global media environment.

As the war in Gaza has continued, there has also been a war of representation taking place in the media. Decisions made by the media—from what stories to cover, to what words to use in headlines, to what images to show—significantly influence the public’s perception of the subjects they cover. 

One example from early in the conflict was the deadly blast at the Al-Alhi hospital. Well before the facts of that incident had been established, word choices in headlines had lasting impacts on how the event was understood. Issues of word choice have been the subject of fierce debate. For example, the BBC was criticized for its policy not to describe Hamas as “terrorists.” In response, veteran BBC correspondent John Simpsons said, “We don’t take sides. We don’t use loaded words like ‘evil’ or ‘cowardly.’ We don’t talk about ‘terrorists.’ And we’re not the only ones to follow this line. Some of the world’s most respected news organizations have exactly the same policy.” 

A Narrow Perspective

These are important debates, and some critics argue that Western news outlets must contend with deeper structural issues in order to resolve them. They contend that Western media outlets are too dependent on foreign correspondents over voices rooted in the regions they are covering. Given the Israeli government’s tight restrictions on foreign journalists entering Gaza, there is a key role to be played by Palestinian journalists on the ground. But in the current conflict, they face conditions more dangerous than in any other modern conflict.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of March 27, 95 journalists and media workers were confirmed dead, including 90 Palestinians, with dozens more injured, missing, or arrested.

UN human rights experts have raised alarm over these conditions, imploring the Israeli government to “allow journalists to enter Gaza and protect the safety of all journalists in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”  

From the Israeli side, military spokesman Nir Dinar said that Israel “has never and will never deliberately target journalists” and attributed the deaths of journalists during the conflict to the inherent risks of reporting from a combat zone. But the unprecedented number of journalists impacted compared to other modern conflicts suggests that the Israeli government is not blameless.

Beyond the immediate dangers presented by the Israel-Hamas war, Palestinian journalists face countless obstacles to reaching a Western audience. In a pre-war interview, Gaza-based journalist Maram Humaid lamented the Western media’s focus on war at the expense of other Palestinian stories, as well as their “distrust” of Gazan voices: “International media doesn’t trust local sources, organizations, and ministries. Not even local journalists.”

In addition, Gaza’s media ecosystem was already undermined by not only the effects of Israeli occupation, but also pressure from Hamas against dissenting voices. 

Gazan journalists have continued to work under these dire conditions. But their perspectives, which are essential to creating a more complete picture of the conflict, will likely continue to be underrepresented in Western media until conditions on the ground grow safer and structural barriers in the media industry can be overcome.    

On social media, many of the barriers and gatekeepers that exist in traditional media are not a factor. Indeed, Gazan journalists have had significant success in reaching audiences on platforms such as X, Instagram, and TikTok. But the openness of social media also creates its own problems of representation and misrepresentation when it comes to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Psychologists have shown that people who dehumanize others are more likely to treat them badly. The use of dehumanizing language is linked with people’s willingness to harm the dehumanized group. At the same time studies have found that people who are exposed to descriptions of groups of people or individuals with animalistic terms are more likely to endorse the use of torture on them compared to people with similar backgrounds who are exposed to positive descriptions  of the same groups.

Misinformation, combined with the use of dehumanizing language that dominates media platforms, has been proven to have real-life consequences. Nick Halsman, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, recently told the BBC, “There’s surprisingly little evidence that dehumanizing language causes violent behavior, but plenty of evidence says it accompanies it.”

Studies have found that people who are exposed to descriptions of groups of people or individuals with animalistic terms are more likely to endorse the use of torture on them compared to people with similar backgrounds who are exposed to positive descriptions of the same groups.

It is thus understood that the hostility that is observed in the media is connected with hate crimes in real life. For example, the recent killing of a six year-old Palestinian American by his landlord was directly linked with the attacker’s consumption of radio news about the October 7 attacks. 

At the same time, data from the Anti-Defamation League showed a 360 percent rise in anti-semitic incidents in the three months after the start of the conflict. This included dozens of physical assaults and hundreds of incidents of vandalism, including at synagogues and other Jewish sites.