Weaponising words: How propaganda shapes Gaza narratives

An article in The Nightly highlights the dangerous power of language in framing Gaza, showing how media narratives can shift blame, obscure atrocities and influence public sentiment, writes David Heslin.

IN THIS AGE of declining mainstream media relevance, when freedom of the press has never been more vital or more under threat, it sometimes seems like we get the journalism we deserve.

This has been particularly evident in the mainstream press coverage of the genocide in Gaza throughout the past two years, from the “Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry” caveat dutifully attached to any mention of the likely significantly underestimated death toll.

This extends to the matter-of-fact acceptance of the novel concept of a non-living hostage — a designation that may have life-or-death consequences for the survivors of Gaza, given pressure in Israel to consider any remains not returned a breach of the ceasefire agreement. The Netanyahu Government is already withholding aid to living people who need it as a result.

This cushioning of the full horror of Israel’s military campaign has both emboldened its apologists and watered down the general public’s understanding of the humanitarian disaster our and our allies’ governments have enabled.

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But some exercises in propaganda are less subtle than others and a newspinion piece on Wednesday written by Aaron Patrick about executions in Gaza sets new standards for manipulative and deceitful journalism.

For those who haven’t heard of Patrick – and I must confess, I was one of them until yesterday – he’s the chief writer for the Kerry Stokes-run online publication The Nightly, which is where this article was published, and has also been a Walkley-nominated senior correspondent and deputy editor at the Australian Financial Review.

He also has a new book coming out that deals in part with the disgraced Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith, which early reports suggest may lean a little more into salvaging his “war hero” mythos than investigating the war crimes he was found to have committed.

Patrick is, incidentally, one of a long list of journalists who have previously visited Israel on a press tour organised by pro-Israel lobby groups.

All of this may provide some context for how he has chosen to frame the news of Hamas carrying out public executions in Gaza City.

I would suggest that Media Studies 101 lecturers save the piece for classroom discussion on how to spot manipulative techniques in journalism, if this one didn’t feel just a bit too obvious.

Patrick opens the article, titled ‘After the fighting ends, Gazans celebrate a public execution like a sporting match’, with a classic false dichotomy:

‘The world demanded peace in the Gaza Strip. This is what peace looks like.’

By “peace”, he means an end to the mass slaughter and destruction of the Gaza Strip as a place that could sustain human life.

But nobody with a heart looks at the endless stretches of grey rubble now strewn through the territory and sees peace. Nobody thinks that a pause on the assault of Gaza – a territory that is still, at any rate, besieged and occupied by Israeli forces – and leaving its people to their own devices is a victory won.

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Nobody with any interest in the cause of Palestinian justice and independence thought that the ceasefire deal proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump offered anything other than impunity and carte blanche to Israel, with the Netanyahu regime retaining the right to recommence the bombing on a hair-trigger.

This straw man serves a purpose, however: Patrick wishes to slate home the responsibility for the conditions following the ceasefire, in which rival factions fight to rule over the wreckage, not to the U.S. leader who brokered it, nor to the country that caused this immense devastation.

Instead, he wishes to cast blame on the people he wants to paint as the real villains: the activists, humanitarian organisations and critical media outlets who fought for an end to the brutalising of Gaza, along with the Western governments that eventually gave their tepid support to end the genocidal campaign that they had previously given (and, in many ways, still do give) economic and military support and diplomatic cover to.

Patrick returns to the theme throughout the piece, listing the journalists’ unions and charities that, in his view, aided Hamas by calling out the Israeli military campaign for the immense crime against humanity that it is, but makes this particularly explicit at the end:

‘War has been terrible for the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than the Israelis. But the bloodletting on Gazan streets is an unpleasant reminder that the millions of people who marched across the West on behalf of the Palestinian people were indirectly helping Hamas, which is now free to murder its own citizens at will.’

What a turn of phrase that is: ‘the bloodletting on Gazan streets’. As if, only now, a drop in the ocean of the red blood that has flowed on the streets of Gaza matters.

Discussing the footage that has emerged from Gaza over the last two years, Israeli journalist Nir Hasson writes eloquently on what he describes as the two colours that dominate these videos:

Since the war, everything has been grey. You can see this grey even from space, in satellite photos. It covers the faces of the wounded, of the survivors. It is the colour of the dead and the colour of the living.

The red comes from blood. It emerges from severed limbs, stains the clothes and shrouds, shines on the doctors' gowns and gloves. The grey videos document the landscape, the destruction, the clouds of dust. The red videos document the horrors in the emergency rooms and on the sidewalks, in the seconds after the attacks.

None of this is to in any way defend Hamas or minimise the crime of public executions. I, like most who have protested against the slaughter in Gaza, want to see the back of Hamas and its eventual replacement by a government elected by the people of Gaza in a free Palestine.

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Competing armed gangs – many of which appear to be funded, armed or otherwise aided by Israel, just as Hamas once was – fighting over the rubble is just a continuation of war by other means.

Patrick’s piece would have its readers believe otherwise. He wants to convince them that this squalid consequence of a land’s ruination, so reminiscent of other destructive military campaigns of choice conducted without a coherent plan for the day after, is what we were fighting for all along.

At every turn, Patrick strategically minimises Israel’s culpability and shifts the blame elsewhere; he equivocates on war crimes and points to those who have stood up against them as aiding Hamas’s propaganda efforts:

The Committee to Protect Journalists accuses Israel of a campaign to murder members of the media. The New York-based group puts the death tally in Gaza at 237. The allegation is disputed by the Israel Defence Forces, which accuses some Palestinian journalists of being Hamas fighters or sympathisers.

While Hamas welcomed the support of international journalists’ groups, it never respected press freedom.

At a cursory glance, it can be easy to miss just how many sneaky sleights of hand there are in this passage alone. The widely reported-on assassinations of Palestinian journalists suddenly become a mere “allegation” from one journalists’ union, whose location is no doubt mentioned to reinforce their geographical distance from the conflict.

The IDF’s unverified, likely spurious claims of collaboration, or mere sympathy – as if that were a crime worthy of summary execution – negates the claim. The facts are thus obfuscated.

But the most hideous aspect of this piece lies in the headline, which itself is drawn from a description of the video of executions:

‘A volley of shots rang out, followed by cheers of “God is great”. Some continued to fire at the prone bodies. Others fired into the air. The mood was celebratory: like the end of a sporting event.’

Why would you compare a scene like this to a sporting event? I suspect that the reason is that it implies not only mood but scope: tens of thousands of passionate football fans cheering in a stadium.

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The simile conveys that this was an act carried out not by armed forces with an audience of a few dozen supporters, but an event that occurred with the mass approval of the people of Gaza. And the headline reinforces that image: who is celebrating? Just “Gazans”: that ultimate rhetorical trick of journalists that renders the division between the some and the all ambiguous.

Since the beginning of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, members of the Netanyahu Government have deemed its people collectively culpable for the atrocities of 7 October 2023. We’ve all heard the dehumanising ways in which that has been communicated: “There are no innocents in Gaza.” The people of Gaza are described as “human animals”. They are, in this way of thinking, culpable for their own deaths.

Does Patrick believe that? I don’t know what’s in his heart, or whether he is capable of shame. But in putting this carefully framed piece of writing out into the world, he has contributed to the view that Gazans are mere brutes, people who worship violence, people that Israel has no choice but to keep killing.

That’s certainly the takeaway of many of the readers in the comments section below the article — readers who probably never took a Media Studies class and never developed the critical skills to recognise when they’re being manipulated. Those people who celebrate violence, they deduce, are the kind that will now be coming into Australia. Defence of atrocities abroad effortlessly turns into hatred of the foreigner at home. The refugees we helped create become the hated “Other” we shut the door on.

Patrick seems to have a comfortable place in the Australian media landscape. Perhaps he sleeps soundly at night as the people he so carelessly defames hunt through the ruins of Gaza City looking for water for their children or a fragment of their former homes to cling to.

But what’s clear is that the Australian public is not well served by journalism as poor as this — not our understanding of the world, not our capacity to act as informed democratic subjects, not our moral value system. I can only hope that enough people will, in future, skip over anything bearing Aaron Patrick’s byline, so much so that he is forced to develop some integrity or, even better, find a new profession out of the public eye.

Because we do, in fact, deserve so much better than this.

David Heslin is a film critic and editor based in Melbourne. He has previously written on film and politics for Senses of Cinema, Metro, Overland and ScreenHub, among other publications.