When truth becomes opinion. Media framing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

On 15 May 1948, the day after the birth of the State of Israel, the New York Times ran the headline: ‘Zionists proclaim the new State of Israel. President Truman recognises it and hopes for peace. Bombs on Tel Aviv. Egypt orders an invasion’.

Alongside the Israel that still recognises itself as a state governed by the rule of law, another Israel is taking shape, the one described in Cecilia Sala’s book: the Israel of the unpunished, of the Kahanists, which has found a broad electoral base in the settlements and its political legitimacy in the messianic message.

Independence was born amidst the bombs. However, according to investigative journalist Peter Bergman, Israeli radicalisation began after the victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 and is an imported phenomenon. It originated in Brooklyn, where in 1968 Rabbi Meir Kahane founded a group with the aim of combating anti- Semitism, but chose to do so through terrorism. Having moved to Israel in 1971, Kahane founded the Kach party, which means ‘only this way’ in Hebrew, and proposed the deportation of the Palestinians.

In 1982, when Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, the settlers, who were required to evacuate, found a political ally in Kahane. In 1984, Kahane was elected to the Knesset and, among his first legislative initiatives, proposed a ban on mixed marriages.

For Bergman, the turning point came in 2005, when Ariel Sharon ordered the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the dismantling of the settlements. Until then, the occupation of the Palestinian territories had been governed by special provisional laws. The dismantling of the Gaza settlements in 2005 frightened the settlers, who, from that moment on, became more hostile and began to infiltrate institutions, organising themselves more effectively.

An elderly Jewish lady, Hilda, wearing a yellow ribbon on her wrist in support of the hostages, says she was born in Gaza but is happy to live in Ramla. Not only for the selfish reason that bombs aren’t falling on her head, as they are on her family members who remained in Gaza City, but also because she is happy to live in a democracy rather than in a strip of land under siege governed by Hamas.

Then, however, she adds: ‘We are at war, and democracies at war are different from those at peace.’ Hilda is addressing a highly topical issue in Israel, especially following the attacks of 7 October: the suppression of Palestinian views within the country.

Over the past year, hundreds of Palestinians holding Israeli passports, like her, have been arrested for what they said, not for what they did, on charges of having somehow supported Hamas. Rachel, a survivor of the massacre at the Kfar Aza kibbutz, now lives in a temporary kibbutz-style hotel that reminds her of her home: nine hundred residents, two hundred dead.

Rachel survived because her bunker had a better lock than her neighbours’ and because her dog did not bark. Hamas militants targeted people who were still asleep in their beds or who had more vulnerable shelters, minimising the time needed to force entry and using it to kill or abduct.

These facts are in the public domain, yet they can be excluded from public discourse and treated as if they were secrets. Exposing them becomes problematic because their circulation clashes with the political and symbolic frameworks that govern what can be said.

This phenomenon is particularly evident in societies governed by powerful ideological apparatuses: even in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, it was more dangerous to speak of the concentration and extermination camps – whose existence was no secret – than to express ‘heretical’ views on anti-Semitism, racism or communism.

This dynamic does not disappear even in formally free countries, where unwelcome factual truths, whilst tolerated, are often transformed, consciously or unconsciously, into matters of opinion.

In this shift, the distinction between what happened and what is perceived or interpreted becomes blurred: once reduced to the level of opinion, the truth loses its binding force and dissolves into a plurality of viewpoints, taking on the form of δοκεΐ μοι (“it seems to me”).

Those who attempt to recount the facts therefore find themselves in the position of having to assert them in a space where they are not openly denied, but continually relativised, absorbed and rendered debatable.

The stories that Yossi Klein Halevi’s father told his son to help him fall asleep were tales of humiliation, flight and nausea. Born in Brooklyn, like the terrorist Baruch Goldstein and Rabbi Meir Kahane, he spent his childhood in the Borough Park neighbourhood, populated by Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe, like his father.

As a teenager, he had developed a rage that led him to spit on churches and mix with extremists. One Halloween night, Yossi Klein Halevi joined a patrol of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League. More than a political organisation, it was a street gang obsessed with the idea of fighting anti-Semitic blacks, neo-Nazis and demonstrators supporting the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

In New York in the late 1960s, if you belonged to an ethnic minority and didn’t show your fists, you didn’t exist. For the Jewish Defense League, the instinct was that violence was the solution to every problem, as Yossi Klein Halevi puts it. At the time, The New York Times had dubbed the group ‘the Jewish Ku Klux Klan’.

The rebellious teenager Yossi hated assimilation and shared his father’s belief that Jews should remain united and armed. As soon as he could, Yossi Klein Halevi moved to Israel. Today he lives in West Jerusalem with his wife and children and has embarked on a path of deradicalisation.

Halevi interprets his presence in Israel as the return of an indigenous people, uprooted by the violence of history, and claims a continuity which, in his view, cannot be understood if the media continue to portray Israelis and Jews as monsters. This stance also runs through his best-known work, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbour, conceived as an open book and republished in 2019 with responses from Arab and Palestinian writers and intellectuals.

Today, Israel is a bitter nation, where only the elderly still harbour any hope, whilst the young people – the generations who represent the future – think just as Klein Halevi did before his journey of deradicalisation.

It is a country divided between those who have known the Palestinians and remember when it was normal to talk to one another, and the young people who have never seen the Palestinians, even though they live just a few hundred metres away from them, because they grew up after the walls were built and the gates of their homes were sealed. The latter therefore see them only through the lens of terrorist attacks and, now, of the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

In late October 2023, when the Israeli army began bombing Gaza and cutting off the water and electricity supply to the Strip, an Israeli content creator went viral with a POV (point of view) video. In the video, we see him feigning happiness as he turns the tap on and off at home, takes a sip of water, switches the lights on and off, or watches television. The reference was to the fact that, after 7 October, the civilian population of Gaza could no longer perform the mundane actions shown in the video.

Around the same time, influencer Eve Cohen staged a performance in which she played the part of a Palestinian woman from Gaza. In the video, she wore a black dress, had a keffiyeh around her neck, and her face was made up to look like a victim. She clutched a bundle of rags to her chest, on top of which lay an orange with a smiley face drawn on it in place of a head, and she wailed in despair. Then a voice was heard shouting: “Stop!” and she began to smile and joke. The message was: the Palestinians in Gaza who are suffering are actually pretending.

Cohen and Liani are not isolated cases: countless Israeli TikTokers have posted similar videos. The creators impersonate Palestinians to show that their suffering is an act: for example, they produce make-up tutorials on how to make themselves look like victims of bombing. This is a widespread trend on social media.

One of the roots of this trend is ‘Pallywood’, a term referring to the accusation that images of Palestinian deaths and suffering are fabrications created for propaganda purposes to portray Palestinians as victims.

The term, a portmanteau of Palestine and Hollywood, originated in the early 2000s and is associated with the historian Richard Landes, of American and Israeli origin, who in 2005, in a documentary, cast doubt on the authenticity of the video showing the killing of Mohamed al-Durrah, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, during the Second Intifada.

A social media phenomenon that turns war into something ordinary – something to joke about and for influencers to run wild with – ultimately ends up making it seem unreal. In early 2025, a challenge based on a prank call began circulating on social media among Israeli high school students: pretending to be members of a humanitarian organisation, participants asked for donations for children in Gaza who had been left without homes, water or electricity.

The reactions, often angry or offensive, were recorded and shared on TikTok, with the aim being to hold back laughter for as long as possible before revealing the prank. The video was then posted on TikTok as proof of the ‘performance’.

A survey conducted in January 2023, prior to the attacks of 7 October, revealed that 73% of Israelis aged 18 to 24 positioned themselves on the right of the political spectrum, whilst different political leanings prevailed among those over 65. The same study indicated that 68% of Israelis aged 18 to 34 opposed the two-state solution, in stark contrast to the views held by their parents’ generation at the same age.

From generational divide to denial

The idea that a dissenting section of Israeli society has been progressively marginalised fits into a broader framework of repression and denial that runs through both societies.

As analyst Daniel Seidemann observes, Israelis and Palestinians are more alike than they are willing to admit, both living in a state of denial regarding their own crimes. In many Palestinian homes, there is widespread sympathy for Hamas, not so much as support for its political project, but as approval of the fact that on 7 October it brought the Palestinian issue back to the centre of international attention.

A minority openly acknowledges the violence that took place, but a significant proportion of the public prefers to believe that the atrocities shown in the videos never happened, as is also evident from a September 2024 poll, according to which almost 90% of respondents deny the violence documented on that day.

A similar dynamic is at play in Israeli society, where the devastation in Gaza remains largely out of sight within the country. The same event is thus portrayed in divergent narratives: Arab television channels incessantly show images of destruction and civilian casualties, Western broadcasters select which ones to show, whilst tend to exclude both. The result is a perceptual divide that makes it difficult to construct a shared space of reality.

This context is also marked by a significant political shift. A December 2023 poll shows that support for Hamas in the West Bank has tripled since 7 October, whilst support for Fatah and the Palestinian National Authority has plummeted. Hamas is now more popular in the territories where it does not govern than in the Gaza Strip, where direct experience of its rule has led to disillusionment.

The very structure of the Palestinian state, as outlined in the 1993 Oslo Accords, contributes to the fragility of the situation. As is also evident in the book The Children of Hatred, it is an entity with limited state attributes, whose economy remains heavily dependent on Israel: exports and imports are controlled by the Jewish state, the labour market is subject to its production decisions, and tax revenues are collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, which receives them only when and if they are transferred. Over time, the territories have lost much of their industrial base and now have some of the highest unemployment rates in the world, fluctuating between 25% and 30%.

In the debate on the conflict, one of the most common criticisms concerns the vocabulary used by the Western media, which are accused of being biased in their reporting, speaking of “Israelis killed” and “Palestinians dead”. Sala challenges this interpretation, noting that there is no single, uniform stance in journalism, just as there is no single stance amongst people. Journalists are many and diverse, and they use different language: there are colleagues who write “Palestinian killed” rather than “Palestinian dead”, though not all of them.

Over the past two years, the intensity of events has made it impossible to ignore what is happening, even though this has been a violent conflict from the outset. The problem, however, is not so much about awareness as it is about its duration.

Emotional engagement, such as that seen in the summer of 2021 regarding Afghanistan, tends to wane quickly, whilst conditions on the ground remain unchanged. The risk is that the same will happen with Gaza.

The key, as Sala suggests, does not lie in sporadic emotional attention, but in continuity. Crises do not arise suddenly, but build up day by day, and addressing them only when they erupt prevents us from understanding their urgency when they occur. The point, therefore, is not merely how we report on them, but how long we are prepared to do so, especially given that high-intensity conflicts, such as the one in Sudan, receive very little attention, despite being among the most serious currently underway.

When reporting on conflicts, dealing with trauma and harrowing stories creates a constant tension between empathy and detachment. Sala describes this situation as one of the most complex aspects of journalistic work: the most difficult part is not only the impact of others’ suffering, but also the fact that a journalist’s task is to understand what has happened, even when this means disappointing a source who would prefer a more partisan and militant journalist.

Activism, activism and journalism remain distinct fields. Journalists are human beings and cannot be neutral in an absolute sense, but whenever an event occurs, they must examine its dynamics and report on what they have understood, whatever conclusion their investigation may lead them to. This also entails the risk of upsetting people they care about. It is the price of the profession.