The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is now reaching new and ever-more shocking depths, with an estimated two million Palestinians facing imminent and catastrophic food insecurity because of a two-month Israeli blockade of relief entering the strip. The recent distressing images of emaciated children, including one particularly upsetting photograph of six-month-old Siwar Ashour, have appalled the world. The UN says hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza are at immediate risk of famine. Millions of words have been written describing the unfolding horror. But one question that is rarely answered is how ordinary Israelis feel about this. How much do they know about the imminent Israeli-induced famine on their doorstep?
As an Irish person living in Tel Aviv, I have written here before that the war you see in the media is not the war we see; that Israeli media – in particular the three mainstream news channels – simply do not show the most harrowing images that the rest of the world has been seeing for nearly 18 months of war. As an Irish-born journalist and an Israeli citizen, I have become increasingly exasperated and exhausted watching the main evening news in Israel.
[ I am Irish and live in Israel. The war we see on TV is not the one you seeOpens in new window ]
Understandably, a nation at war will generate and endeavour to sustain its self-serving narrative of what has happened since October 7th, 2023. Facts may be facts – but explanations, interpretations, perspectives and testimonies can radically differ, especially at a time of war. Although it is increasingly grotesque to describe recent Israeli military actions in Gaza as the acts of a nation “at war”.
In recent months, the gap between how the mainstream media inside and outside Israel report on what is happening in Gaza has widened.
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But what once could be described as understandable differences of polarised political opinion has now evolved into a chasm of counterfactual storytelling, infected at times with pernicious language. The use of phrases such as “baby killers” or “murderers of children”, which is now commonly used in the mainstream Irish media, raises eyebrows in Israel. For many here this language is a not-so-subtle allusion to the classic and centuries-long anti-Semitic trope of blood libel. Israelis themselves, however, are increasingly trapped inside a misinformation bubble that risks, if not the very existence of the state, certainly its status as a country previously regarded as having a free and open democratic press. With the notable exception of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, the media in both Hebrew and English are failing ordinary Israelis.
[ The Irish Times view on the war in Gaza: the world is still standing byOpens in new window ]
I recently returned from a brief trip to Ireland, my first since the October 7th Hamas terror attack on Israel. The one question I was repeatedly asked was: what do Israelis see – or not see as is the case – about the war on Gaza?
With this in mind, I took what I knew to be the risky step of showing an image of six-month-old Siwar Ashour to close friends in Tel Aviv, and asked them two simple questions. First, had they seen the images of Siwar, or any similar images of starving children in Gaza before? Secondly, how do they feel that this has been done in their name?
I do not often bring up the horror of Gaza with my Israeli friends and certainly not my Israeli in-laws. Who wants to invite a brother-in-law over to Shabbat dinner or birthday celebrations if they persist in talking about plausible genocide or ethnic cleansing? But with hindsight, in shying away from these difficult conversations, I perhaps missed the opportunity to learn and reveal something unknown about this war.
The friends I asked are, like me, all parents of young children. No one I asked said they had seen the specific image of baby Siwar. And while they all acknowledge the horror of the war in Gaza and accept the gravity of the food shortages, not one of them could recall seeing any images of emaciated children on Israeli television news.
Here, I have changed their names.
Tal (48) says he does not support the war. “There is the Israeli government, Netanyahu, and there is the Israeli people. This government should be arrested,” he told me. He said he feels helpless, and understands the “disgust” abroad at some images he has seen on CNN.
Yoav (42) says Israelis are “exhausted; we are still running to bomb shelters”. But he doesn’t reject accusations of an Israel-manufactured famine. He puts it bluntly: “Famine, it’s starvation, they are being starved.” He then adds: “This government’s argument is we shouldn’t be feeding those who are trying to kill you ... and people buy that”.
Maya (47) is also keen to separate herself and her family, friends and acquaintances from the Netanyahu government. “I did not vote for this government. I despise this government. It has done so much damage to the Israeli people. I would do anything I could do to replace, remove or bring it down.”
She did, however, add that the priorities of those around her may be different. “The average Israeli wants the war to end, the hostages to be released and soldiers to return home.” But then she says, with some hesitation, that “[the average Israeli] doesn’t care much about the Palestinians after October 7th”.
My friends’ attitudes are perhaps typical of Tel Aviv, not all of Israel. A recent poll on Channel 13 news revealed that while 53 per cent of the Israeli public believe the war has been sustained because of the political self-interest of the government – with 35 per cent of the opinion that the war was dragging on for operational needs – just 46 per cent of overall respondents were against the continuation of the war.
Still, there are some hopeful signs in Israel. Just last month “advertisements” appeared on bus stop shelters across Tel Aviv, with the faces of dozens of children killed in Gaza. The caption read: “Refuse to go to War. 18,000 children dead”. The sponsor of these subversive images that challenge the silence of the mainstream news channels is an Israeli-Palestinian organisation called Standing Together.
I have little doubt that history will not be kind to how Israeli news channels met their responsibilities to show the truth of what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is doing and has done in Gaza in the name of all Israelis.
I also do not doubt that Israeli children will be asking their parents in the years ahead some variation of the question I asked: what did they know or not know about the Israeli-induced starvation in Gaza.
Paul Kearns is an Irish-born freelance journalist based in Tel Aviv
