The Jewish state must not be allowed to sanitise its image, because polishing Gaza genocide guarantees its repetition
ISRAEL’s allies worldwide are desperately scrambling to help it reestablish a convincing narrative, not only concerning the Gaza genocide but the entire legacy of its colonialism in Palestine and the Middle East.
The perfect little story, built on myths and outright fabrications — that of a small nation fighting for survival amid “hordes of Arabs and Muslims” — is rapidly collapsing. It was a lie from the start but the Gaza genocide has made it utterly indefensible.
The harrowing details of the Israeli genocide in Gaza have been more than enough for people globally to fundamentally question the Zionist narrative, particularly the racist trope of the “villa in the jungle” used by Israel to describe its existence among the colonised population.
People across the globe, including even Americans, have now decisively turned against Israel. What began as an alarming trend — from the Israeli viewpoint, of course — is now irrefutable reality. Polls indicate that support for Palestinians among US adults has risen, with 33 per cent now saying they sympathise more with the Palestinians — the highest figure so far and an increase of six percentage points from last year.
Even the once-unshakeable pro-Israeli majority among Republicans in the United States is softening in favour of Palestinians, with 35 per cent favouring an independent Palestinian state, a significant increase from 27 per cent in 2024, demonstrating a clear shift in a segment of the Republican base.
The Israeli government is now fighting with every resource at its disposal to dominate the information war. It is focused on injecting calculated Israeli falsehoods into the discourse and aggressively blocking the Palestinian viewpoint.
Recent reports of an Israeli campaign to win the social media war by granting millions of dollars to TikTok and social media influencers is only a fraction of a massive, coordinated campaign.
The war is multifrontal. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales this month claimed that the website’s page dedicated to the “Gaza Genocide” fails to meet the company’s “high standards” and “needs immediate attention.” According to Wales, the page requires a “neutral approach” — meaning, in practice, that blatant censorship is required to prevent the genocide from being accurately described as the “ongoing, intentional and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people.”
Israel has long been obsessed with controlling the narrative on Wikipedia. Reports dating back to 2010 confirm that Israeli groups established training courses in “Zionist editing” for Wikipedia editors with the explicit goal of injecting state-aligned content and shaping key historical and political entries.
The censorship campaign against Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices is as old as the media itself. From the very start, the mainstream media in the West has been structurally aligned with corporate agendas that are naturally allied with money and power; thus, the prominence of the Israeli view and the near-complete erasure of the Palestinian perspective.
More recently, however, Israel began realising the existential danger of digital media, particularly the open spaces on social media that allow ordinary individuals to become independent content creators. The censorship took an ugly and pervasive turn during the genocide, where the use of words like “Gaza” and “Palestine,” let alone “genocide,” would result in “shadow banning” or even the outright closure of accounts.
In fact, YouTube, which was previously known for being less severe in censoring pro-Palestinian voices than Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, last month shut down the accounts of three major Palestinian human rights organisations (Al-Haq, Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights), erasing more than 700 videos of crucial footage documenting Israeli violations of international law.
Sadly, though not surprisingly, not a single mainstream social media platform is innocent of censoring criticism of Israel. Thus, it becomes a daily practice that references to Palestine, the Gaza genocide and the like must be written in coded language, in which, for example, the Palestinian flag is replaced by an image of a watermelon.
Many pro-Palestine activists are now highlighting the direct complicity of the Western media, especially in the United Kingdom, in attempting to whitewash rape accusations against Israeli soldiers. Instead of using the unequivocal word “rape,” mainstream outlets refer to the horrific Sde Teiman prison episodes merely as “abuse.” While Israeli politicians and other war criminals openly celebrate the so-called abuse and hail the rapists as national heroes, mainstream British and French media outlets are still refusing to accept that the widespread torture, rape and mistreatment of Palestinians is part of a centralised, systemic agenda, not mere “abuse” by individuals.
Compare this to the wall-to-wall, sensationalised coverage of alleged “mass rape” by Palestinians in southern Israel on Oct. 7 — despite the fact that no independent investigation was ever conducted and that the claims were made by the Israeli army without credible evidence.
This is not mere bias and hypocrisy, but direct complicity, as stated in the Gaza Tribunal’s final statement last month. “The jury finds a range of nonstate actors to be complicit in genocide,” the verdict read, including “biased media reporting in the West on Palestine and underreporting of Israeli crimes.”
The final reckoning unfolds in the information war zone. The coming months and years mark the most critical fight for truth in the conflict’s history. Israel, relying on censorship, intimidation and manufactured consent, will use every method to secure a victory. For Palestinians and all who champion justice, this battle for history is as consequential as the genocide itself. Israel must not be allowed to sanitise its image, because polishing genocide guarantees its repetition.
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Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. He is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
