Johnathan Cook
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Today's Guardian headlines sum up what's been wrong with years of the paper's coverage of Gaza.
"Neither war nor peace". That's a reference to the non-existent ceasefire. But actually, it's just another example of the Guardian refusing to state the obvious: that what's happening to Gaza is not war or peace, it's a slow-motion genocide – the ultimate crime.
Palestinians in Gaza are not just living "amid disease, despair and ruins" – as if they are unfortunate victims of an earthquake. They are living in an ever-shrinking concentration camp, subjected to continuing drone attacks and air strikes, and still denied the essentials of life.
It is Israel actively doing all this to the people of Gaza. But once again Israel is completely absent from the headline.
In the subhead, notice how the "change" in Palestinians' lives is still being attributed – three years on – to Hamas' single-day attack, not to Israeli leaders' endlessly repeated genocidal lust. The Hamas attack wasn't the cause of the genocide: it was the pretext Israel needed to carry out a long-held plan.
And how does the Guardian refer to Israel's genocidal three-year rampage that's killed and maimed many 100,000s of Palestinians? It's simply a "subsequent Israeli offensive".
One of the reasons for all this blandness in western media coverage is that ensures Israel doesn't complain, it doesn't accuse outlets of being antisemitic.
Blandness in the face of a genocide is another term for moral cowardice.
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