Plausible Deniability

In an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, the columnist Thomas Friedman said:

No international journalists have been allowed into Gaza to independently report … But there will be a day this war ends. I don’t know when. And when it does, Gaza is going to be overwhelmed by reporters and photographers. And when that happens, it’s going to be a very bad day for Israel, and it’s going to be a very bad day for world Jewry because the scenes are going to be horrific. It’s not that we haven’t gotten glimpses and whatnot, but the real stories – also there are evidently a lot of bodies still buried under the rubble that couldn’t be excavated. And when you talk to Israeli soldiers, people who have served there, one of the things they talk about that they never forget is just the stench, because evidently there are just a lot of bodies that have not been recovered. So there is a real looming challenge to Israel when this war is over.

Why must ‘we’ wait for the ‘international journalists’ to get the ‘real stories’? Haven’t we already seen more than enough – certainly more than ‘glimpses and whatnot’? These questions take us to one of the central problems of the role of digital media in the contemporary news ecology. On the one hand, it is often said that the genocide in Gaza is being ‘live-streamed’. On the other, it is said (by Friedman, among others) that what’s plain enough for anyone to see in those videos doesn’t amount to proof. Brave reporting by the likes of Anas al-Sharif, an al-Jazeera journalist killed by Israel on 10 August with five of his colleagues, is systematically dismissed and discredited.

On 9 October 2023, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a ‘complete siege’ of Gaza: ‘No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.’ Since that day, Western journalists working for authoritative Western organisations – such as Friedman at the New York Times – have been barred entry to Gaza unless they’re embedded with the Israeli army.

But plenty of journalists have continued to cover Israel’s assault on Gaza. The explicit problem for Friedman is that they are not ‘international journalists’. The implicit problem is that they are Palestinian – or ‘local’ – journalists.

Despite unbroken coverage by Palestinian journalists inside Gaza, these conditions have been misleadingly called a ‘media siege’. For their efforts, Palestinian journalists have been targeted and killed by the Israeli army. Their killing follows unsubstantiated Israeli allegations that they are ‘terrorists’. When ‘international journalists’ relay unfounded Israeli allegations against Palestinian journalists, they are legitimating murder. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 170 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israel since Gallant ordered the ‘complete siege’ of Gaza (as have nine Lebanese journalists), making it the ‘deadliest period for journalists’ since the CPJ began collecting data in 1992 (a period that includes half a dozen genocides).

Despite frequent internet blackouts, Israel has never managed to cut off the flow of news and information entirely. There have been co-ordinated efforts to provide e-sims to Palestinian media workers, and satellite connections mean that a complete shutdown of communications may not be possible.

Beyond the infrequent outrage at the frequent killing of Palestinian journalists, Israel has relied on the hierarchies of credibility – the institutional biases – that undergird coverage by Western media. Since 9 October 2023, Western news outlets have appended their reports with disclaimers such as: ‘These reports could not be independently verified.’ Footage produced by Palestinian journalists, media activists or bystanders is branded as ‘unverified’.

These disclaimers don’t deny that something happened; they don’t repress knowledge of a massacre, the aerial bombardment of a hospital or killings of civilians at food distribution sites. But they allow doubts to remain as to what might ‘actually’ have happened and who might ‘really’ be responsible.

The claims of Palestinian media workers besieged in Gaza are invariably put through the process of ‘digital forensic’ verification by the likes of BBC Verify, even while the claims of Israeli officials perpetrating the most grievous crimes are ventriloquised by journalists (e.g. the refrain that ‘Israel would say that it is acting in self-defence’).

There have been daily reports by Palestinians of mass shootings by Israeli soldiers and US contractors at the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s ‘aid distribution’ sites. Palestinian journalists have documented these massacres, circulating videos on social media. The remaining hospitals in Gaza have reported multiple mass shootings. Israel has admitted to opening fire on crowds of Gazans approaching the aid site in a ‘threatening’ way, but also claimed there were ‘no known injured individuals’. Official disavowals were diligently reported by Western media outlets. It wasn’t until Israeli soldiers confessed to the Israeli press that they were ‘ordered to shoot’ at unarmed Palestinians that the story was picked up and systematically reported by ‘international journalists’.

Not all Western journalists play by these rules. In recent months, the BBC has taken to prefacing reports with the phrase: ‘Israel continues to ban entry to international journalists.’ This is well-intentioned, and welcome, but it hardly dispels the sense of murkiness around reports of what’s happening in Gaza. Fergal Keane commendably doesn’t attach disclaimers to his reports and collaborates with Palestinian journalists who remain anonymous to protect them from targeting by Israel. But other BBC reporters play by Israel’s rules, such as Lucy Williamson who was willing to be embedded with the Israeli army during the invasion of Lebanon.

The politics of access to Gaza are similar to those established by the Assad regime during the uprising and war in Syria, and the results for supporters of the perpetrating state are eerily familiar. Besieging a territory and banning entry to authoritative journalists creates a useful sense of ambiguity. Many supporters of the Assad regime (unlike regime officials) didn’t deny that massacres were taking place. Instead, in the words of the political scientist Lisa Wedeen, they adopted a ‘logic of disavowal’. For example, they might admit that massacres and mass disappearances were taking place in Syria, while continuing to act as if the regime would eventually reform itself. Wedeen’s political reading of the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal entailed the alienation of knowledge from belief, or knowing from acknowledging, in cases where knowing should lead to political judgment.

There are plenty of Israeli officials who deny outright that any crimes such as starvation are taking place in Gaza. But their denials are increasingly treated as implausible and beyond the pale. Elon Levy, for example, eventually lost his job as an Israeli government spokesperson for a particularly barefaced lie, denying that there were any restrictions on the entry of aid to Gaza. Disavowals, however, continue to sound plausible, even in the face of mounting evidence gathered at great risk by Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

The disavowals can take many forms, but are usually phrased to signal diligence and scrupulousness. They might express the need to wait for expert investigators, such as ‘international journalists’ or lawyers, before ‘we’ can say for sure what’s happening; they might regret the loss of civilian life, while proclaiming that Israel (unlike the terrorists) doesn’t target civilians; or they might recognise that atrocities are taking place, but refuse to accept that they involve anything beyond the usual prosecution of war. Such commentators are honest enough to admit that something ‘terrible’ is happening, while also withholding the kinds of judgment that usually – or that should – come with the acknowledgment of the most grievous atrocities.

It is often said that Israeli commanders follow the procedures of international humanitarian law (IHL). More than any other claim, this has established the conditions for Israeli officials and Western governments to disavow Israeli atrocities. This is particularly the case with the slippery notion of intent under IHL, which effectively functions as an intricate disavowal mechanism. Throughout the genocide in Gaza, Israeli commanders have admitted that their bombs and bullets kill civilians, but because the deaths were ‘unintentional’, they disavow any legal – as well as moral and political – responsibility for their acts of killing.

The politics of access to Gaza has helped sustain Western complicity in the genocide, despite the steady stream of evidence produced by Palestinians at enormous risk to their own lives. What it amounts to isn’t denial so much as plausible deniability. The term ‘plausible deniability’ – which became common currency during the Watergate scandal – is generally used to describe the position that superiors create for themselves to avoid culpability for the crimes committed by their institutions; lower-ranking officials might not know the scale of systematic wrongdoing, and yet be liable for it. But plausible deniability is also an apt description of the conditions that allow Western governments, members of the public and ‘international journalists’ to continue to support Israel as it bombs, starves and snipes at a besieged population.

There is a long history of discrediting Palestinians as truth-tellers. After Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which culminated in the siege of Beirut and the massacre of more than four thousand unarmed civilians in Sabra and Chatila, Edward Said argued that Palestinians had been denied ‘permission to narrate’. There were plenty of facts circulating that had brought unprecedented public attention to the question of Palestine. What those facts lacked, according to Said, was an ‘authorising historical narrative’, by which he meant a Palestinian national narrative, with ‘a coherent narrative direction pointed towards self-determination’.

As Nadia Abu El-Haj argued even before 7 October 2023, ‘something has shifted’. The politics of official denial and state secrecy about the Palestinian national narrative, including the history of the Nakba, has given way to a politics of public disavowal, particularly in Israel. In the wake of revisionist histories by the Israeli New Historians, the logic has become: we can admit the truth of our country’s violent origins without acknowledging the demand that ‘this historical wrong be repaired’. Right-wing politicians tell that history as triumph while liberal historians narrate it as tragedy. But neither the Israeli left nor the Israeli right tells the story of the Nakba in a way that seriously countenances redress and repair. Across the Israeli political spectrum there is a suspension of the kinds of political judgment that should come with acknowledging what they know.

With the military strategy of starvation siege and the gruesome veneer of humanitarian aid, Israel – in collaboration with the US and the Boston Consulting Group – has assembled a concentration camp in Gaza. From the sieges within the siege, Palestinian journalists are smeared as terrorists and assassinated by airstrike. Even when their reports reach Western media, Palestinian journalists are systematically denied the right to be credible and authoritative about the fact of the genocide they face. Palestinians must be verified. There’s an unintended truth to Thomas Friedman’s analysis. Thanks to journalists such as Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues who risked their lives, for over six hundred days the genocide has been live-streamed for the world to see. And yet we are told we must wait for the experts – for lawyers to formulate judgments, for international journalists to be granted access. Or we are told to wait for the word of the perpetrators – for those same facts to be confessed by soldiers complaining about the stench of their victims from beneath the rubble they made.