‘Genocide Can and Should Never Be Just a Normal Story’CounterSpin interview with Gregory Shupak on Palestinian genocide

Janine Jackson interviewed the University of Guelph-Humber’s Gregory Shupak about the Palestinian genocide for the September 13, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: The September 11 New York Times reports a fatal Israeli airstrike hitting part of the Gaza Strip that Israel had declared a humanitarian zone. On a separate matter, we read that Secretary of State Antony Blinken rebuked Israel for the killing in the West Bank of 26-year-old US human rights activist Aysenur Eygi.

While it relayed terrible news, the Times story also contained the mealy-mouthing we’re accustomed to. Blinken rebuked Israel’s killing Aysenur Eygi “after the Israeli military acknowledged that one of its soldiers had probably killed her unintentionally.” People did dig with their bare hands through bomb craters in the dark to search for victims, but “health officials in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants when reporting casualties.” And while it notes that the UN and other rights organizations have said “there is no safe place in Gaza,” the Times repeats that “Israel insists that it will go after militants wherever it believes them to be.”

What’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank is horrific, the possibility of an expanded war in the Middle East is terrifying, but for elite US news media, it’s as though war in the Middle East, and Palestinians being killed, is such a comfortable story that there’s no urgency in preventing the reality.

Joining us now to talk about this is media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and he’s author of the book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Gregory Shupak.

Gregory Shupak: Hi.

New York Times, 9/10/24

JJ: So the New York Times September 10 had a story about how health workers are trying to vaccinate children in northern Gaza against polio, but supplies of fuel and medicine are being obstructed by Israeli forces, including one convoy of UN groups that was held at gunpoint for eight hours. So the meat of the Times story is here:

The Israeli military said in a statement that it had intelligence suggesting that there were “Palestinian suspects” with the convoy, but did not say what they were suspected of doing. In another statement on Tuesday, it said that “Israeli security forces questioned the suspects in the field and then released them.” The episode highlighted the challenges facing humanitarian efforts, like the vaccination campaign, and what UN officials say is increasing Israeli obstruction of aid deliveries to Gaza.

So Israel holds up a humanitarian group at gunpoint for eight hours, and they don’t offer anything resembling a reason, and the upshot is “this highlights challenges”; “UN officials say” that this is an obstruction of aid. Knowing reporters, we know that some of them are saying, “Look how we pushed back against Israel here. We said they couldn’t say what the suspects were suspected of.”

But it doesn’t read as brave challenging of the powerful to a reader. And of course we know that that language is a choice, right? So what are you making of media coverage right now?

GS: Two main observations come to mind, not specifically with regard to the story you’re talking about–although that does continue, as you said, the longer-term trends of this mealy-mouthed refusal to just report what has flatly and plainly and obviously happened, and who’s responsible for it. But setting that aside, I would note a couple of other things that have troubled me.

One is that I think so much of the Palestinian issue right now has just been metabolized into US election coverage, so that most of what the public is getting on the issue is “how is the political theater going to be affected by the fact that a genocide is occurring in which the US is a direct participant?” rather than more urgent questions, such as “how can this genocide be immediately stopped?” So I think that that’s a real case of focusing on the wrong question.

I think, likewise, you get some attention to, “Well, how is the Harris campaign going to suffer because the Biden administration, of which she’s a part, has alienated so many Arab and/or Muslim voters in the United States because of the Gaza genocide?” Again, that just reduces the Palestinians and their supporters amongst Arabs and Muslims–not to say that there aren’t many other segments of American society that do support Palestinians to one extent or another–they’re just here reduced to, “Well, how’s this going to factor into the electoral calculation?”

And so that, I think, is, again, really not at all adequate to the challenge of responding to one of the worst series of massacres that we’ve seen since World War II. In fact, the UN special rapporteur just the other day, said that this is the worst campaign of deliberate starvation since World War II. So just treating this as a subset of US domestic politics is not proportional to the severity of what’s unfolding.

The second observation I was going to make is that I think, to a really, really depressing extent, the mass murder of Palestinians, the mass starvation of Palestinians, the total destruction of essentially every structure in Gaza by this point, it’s becoming a “dog bites man” story, in that it’s just become, and I hate to use the word “normalized,” because I think it’s totally overused these days, but this is sort of a case study where it’s barely even newsworthy, that really just shocking atrocities are dropping day by day.

So last week, Israel bombed a shelter within the compound of the Al-Aqsa hospital, I believe it’s the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in Deir al-Balah, and this has, as far as I can tell, effectively zero coverage in major English-language American or Western media broadly. But, again, that is a real travesty to just allow this to not be a leading story every day because it keeps happening; in fact, the fact that it keeps happening ought to be in itself proof of how dire and urgent these matters are.

JJ: You wrote for Electronic Intifada back in July about how even after credible source after credible source confirms that Israel is carrying out a genocide against Palestinians, you said “we find ourselves living through a mass public genocide denial,” and without at all trying to be coy, I wonder, are we now at acceptance?

GS: Yeah.

JJ: Now it’s just kind of a factor. And I wrote down “dog bites man” because it very much gives that feeling of, “Oh, well, these folks are at war with one another. That’s just a normal story.”

Gregory Shupak: “It’s got very little to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitics and capitalism and colonialism.”

GS: Yeah, and first of all, genocide can and should never be just a normal story, but that is very much what it’s being treated like. And second of all, it’s also: yes, brutal, violent oppression of Palestinians has been the case since Israel came into existence in 1948, and, in fact, in the years leading up to it, there were certainly steps taken to create the conditions for Israel. So it is a decades-old story, but there is a kind of hand-waving that creeps into public discourse, and I think does underlie some of this lack of attention to what continues to happen in Gaza and the West Bank.

In reality, this is a very modern conflict, right? It’s a US-brokered, settler-colonial insurgency/counterinsurgency. It’s got very little to do with religion and everything to do with geopolitics and capitalism and colonialism. But it’s easier to just treat it as, “Oh, well, these backwards, savage barbarian and their ancient, inscrutable blood feuds are just doing what they have always done and always will. So that’s not worthy of our attention.” But that, aside from being wildly inaccurate, just enables the slaughter and dispossession, as well as resistance to it, to continue.

JJ: Finally, to promote the idea or to support the idea that this genocide is kind of OK, or par for the course, anyway, and that protesting it is misguided, or worse–that requires mental gymnastics, including charges of antisemitism against Jewish people. Jewish people are leaders in the opposition to Israel’s actions, including on college campuses. And I would encourage folks to read Carrie Zaremba’s piece on Mondoweiss about the lengths that university administrators are going to right now to crack down on and impossibleize dissent and political expression.

But the point is, we still see the dissent. So even the problems that we’re talking about, that media are ratifying and pushing out day after day, people are seeing through them, and there is dissent. And I just wonder what your thoughts are, in terms of, maybe not to use the word hope, but where do you see the resistance happening? You’re a college professor.

GS: Certainly on campuses and many other places as well. Labor organizations: there was a coalition here called Labor for Palestine, and I know there are similar outfits in the United States and other parts of the world. Religious organizations of all sorts, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, likely others as well.

I would, in addition, say that certainly, in terms of just getting out analysis and information, that one of the very few advantages or bright spots that we have, I think now as compared to the past, is that it is easier for independent sources like FAIR, Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss and others to circulate quickly to wide audiences. And that, I think, has been a big reason why the Palestinian counternarrative has been able to puncture, I think, the public consciousness more so than it could in the past. I think it’s totally the independent educational efforts by the Palestine solidarity movement that has done that.

Wall Street Journal, 2/2/24

And one major tool at their–perhaps I will dare say our–disposal is independent media, because this is where you’re getting much more information, much more accurate information, and much more rigorous analysis than the fluff and pablum that you get on the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, much less the blood-curdling racism you get on the Wall Street Journal and its editorial pages. So I think that this era does have one serious advantage, and that’s that outlets like those that I’ve mentioned have a much greater capacity to reach people who might not otherwise be exposed to this anti-Zionist narrative.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Gregory Shupak. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber, and his book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media is still out now from OR Books. Greg Shupak, thanks so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

GS: Thanks for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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