The following article on the role of journalism in resisting war and genocide is written by media organizers and journalists Lara Witt and Maya Schenwar with Media Against Apartheid & Displacement (MAAD) for Issue 42 of Critical Resistance’s cross-wall newspaper The Abolitionist. Issue 42 prints the first week of December 2024 and will be sent for free to thousands of imprisoned people in jails, detention centers and prisons across the US and some internationally. Supporters outside of cages can sign up for paid subscriptions to sponsor free subscriptions for prisoners. Sign up by November 25 to receive your own copy of Issue 42 with feature articles on anti-war organizing hot off the press directly from our printing house in California. After November 25, copies are first come first serve and CR will have only a limited supply. If you subscribe after November, a CR member will mail you your copy in the winter or early spring of 2025 from our national office in Oakland, California while we still have some available.
Movement Media Organizations Are Uniting for Palestinian Liberation
By Lara Witt & Maya Schenwar with Media Against Apartheid & Displacement (MAAD)
The US-backed Israeli siege, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in Gaza and the occupied West Bank is raging on. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli airstrikes with 2,000-pound US-supplied bombs and Hellfire missiles, on-the-ground invasions, snipers, and executions have left more than 42,000 Palestinians dead in Gaza (the vast majority children and women) at time of writing, erasing entire bloodlines from civil registries and obliterating most of the land’s infrastructure. Most Palestinians in Gaza have been multiply-displaced, as Israel targets different neighborhoods, preventing people from accessing remaining water wells, shelter, food, medicine, and care. Because of Israel’s systematic targeting and elimination of hospitals, sanctuaries, homes, and shelters, over two million Palestinians are currently at risk of dying from imposed starvation, indiscriminate bombing, and the spread of infections and diseases like polio. During the first week of September in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, Israel launched Operation Summer Camps, forcibly displacing 4,000 Palestinian residents, razing 70 percent of the city’s streets, killing 19 people, and destroying water and sewage pipes, as well as electrical and communication cables. This largest colonial incursion in two decades is an escalation of US nonprofit-funded settlers and the apartheid government’s military campaign of terror.
Israel has made no secret of its genocidal and settler-colonial intent to fully overrun all of Palestine with support from Western nations, especially the US, which has sent over 500 weapons shipments and billions of dollars of taxpayer funding at time of writing. But you might not have known this if you were purely relying on mainstream media sources. The vast majority of television news networks, corporate-owned newspapers, and even small nonprofit outlets have worked overtime to platform Israeli state and military sources—with the objective of denying that a genocide is happening while simultaneously justifying and manufacturing consent for it. Even as the Israeli government blatantly expresses its intention to obliterate Gaza, most Western news outlets persist in portraying the genocide as a “conflict” with two equally culpable “sides.” The battle against truthful media is itself a front of struggle. Much like mainstream local news coverage that sensationalizes “crime” and depicts prison as a necessary solution to violence—rather than a form of violence in itself—many mainstream news outlets absurdly portray Israel’s genocide as a route to keeping Israelis “safe.”
This is why movement journalism (“journalism in service to liberation,” in the words of the Southern media collective Press On) is crucial, and why it is the responsibility of movement media to intervene and center Palestinian and anti-Zionist narratives. If we take this responsibility seriously, media-makers who prioritize Palestinian liberation must work together to amplify the truth, pushing back against the dominant corporate media that are working overtime to obscure it.
“The battle against truthful media is itself a front of struggle. Much like mainstream local news coverage that sensationalizes “crime” and depicts prison as a necessary solution to violence—rather than a form of violence in itself—many mainstream news outlets absurdly portray Israel’s genocide as a route to keeping Israelis ‘safe.'”
Last November, for example, we joined 25 media-makers from independent US-based organizations in Chicago to talk about the future of media and how we might build it together. We originally planned to focus on jointly covering the 2024 presidential election. With the drastic escalation in genocide against Palestinians and the US corporate media’s complicity, we decided to focus on Palestine instead. Over two days, we built the collaboration that became Media Against Apartheid & Displacement (MAAD), a website and social media presence that points readers toward articles from trustworthy, independent news sources reporting on the genocide, occupation, and colonization of Palestine, the Western backing that makes these atrocities possible, and the global protest movement in support of Palestinian liberation. MAAD also gathers media focused on other parts of the world in which settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, state violence, surveillance, displacement, and occupation are occurring, uplifting coverage and narratives that point the way toward a future of real freedom. Our partnerships grew, and MAAD collaborators now include Prism, Truthout, In These Times, Mondoweiss, Palestine Square, Haymarket Books, The Real News Network, The Forge, Waging Nonviolence, The Dig, Kansas City Defender, Briarpatch, Baltimore Beat, Hammer & Hope, Scalawag, Convergence Magazine, and Analyst News.
Alone, none of these small, independent outlets could thoroughly cover the genocide in Palestine. MAAD makes it possible for us to write together a wide-ranging first draft of history. MAAD also represents an unprecedented organizing effort among media organizations, uniting in our refusal to be complicit in the politics of mass murder. This refusal requires us to provide readers and listeners with the historical context missing from most US narratives.
Israel’s genocidal campaign did not start last October. It is a brutal extension of more than 75 years of European and US settler-colonial state-making. Yet, as Palestinians are slaughtered, US mainstream media has abandoned its duty to accurately report on the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and illegal occupation. As Truthout has noted, corporate media has spent many decades denying Palestinians’ humanity, both implicitly and explicitly, deploying the mainstream myth of “objectivity” to silence Palestinian journalists.
In Palestine, part of Israel’s genocidal campaign involves literally silencing Palestinian journalists through targeted murders. As of September 30, 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports the killing of at least 116 media workers and journalists in Gaza since October 7, 2023, making this the most lethal period for journalists in the region since the organization began collecting data over three decades ago. Many other reporters have been arrested or injured. The Israeli military raided and shut down the offices of Al Jazeera in the West Bank; through- out Palestine, journalists and their families have been threatened, assaulted, and doxed.
By Sarah Farahat, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative
Meanwhile, in the US, one of the many ways mainstream media quells dissent within its newsrooms is through the repression, firing, and blacklisting of those journalists who report on the genocide and through the marginalization of Palestinian-American and Muslim reporters, who are censored or hindered from doing their jobs simply because of their ethnicities. In an op-ed titled “Why journalists must speak out about Gaza,” nine movement journalists argued that the attacks on journalists in Palestine are part of a regime of occupation, apartheid, and extermination that dates back to before the 1948 Nakba. They also described the censorship of journalists within the US, stating:
On US soil, journalists and media makers are being fired or pushed out of the profession for their advocacy. Jewish journalist Emily Wilder was fired from the Associated Press (AP) in 2021 after conservative activists targeted her for pro-Palestinian social media posts written prior to her employment with the AP. In 2022, The New York Times fired Palestinian journalist [Hosam] Salem in Gaza, citing his personal Facebook page that he used to speak out against the occupation he lives under. Multiple journalists have also resigned or canceled contracts with The New York Times in part because of its Gaza coverage, and in late October, Artforum fired editor-in-chief David Velasco for his participation in an open letter supporting Palestinian liberation. eLife editor-in-chief Michael Eisen was fired in October for retweeting an article from the satirical paper The Onion. These acts go hand in hand with the recent cancellation of campus groups at Brandeis University and Columbia University that are critical of the Israeli occupation and siege in Gaza.
This kind of media manipulation and the pattern of censorship and blacklisting of reporters isn’t new. Black, Indigenous and people of color—including Palestinian refugees and Palestinian Americans in the US—are acutely familiar with these journalistic failures. The way the media is covering Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza mirrors how journalists and editors have long portrayed systemic injustices and state violence committed against Black people in particular. There is no clearer example of this than how the US covers the criminal legal system. Like Israel, the US is a settler-colonial state, and the mainstream media manufactures the propaganda necessary to continue settler colonialism and imperialism. The US committed—and continues to commit—a genocide against Indigenous peoples; it enslaved and tortured millions of Africans and continues to target Black people through the violence of surveillance, policing, and imprisonment. Through its drawing of borders and hostile, anti-asylum, and racist policies, it ongoingly designates Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled, neurodivergent, poor, undocumented, substance-dependent, and vulnerable people as worthy of death or imprisonment. The current government puts migrants in camps, uses cruel and unusual techniques to deter migration, and devises ways for migrants to die in the borderlands.
While the US government commits atrocities across the globe and calls it freedom, the media largely falls in line and parrots state propaganda, creating a system that either breaks trust with the public, creating a breeding ground for misinformation and disinformation, or fuels the forces of fascism, manufacturing consent for imperialist forever wars and genocide. Traditional media primes US readers to simply accept that there is nothing to be done beyond the ballot and obscures the power of resistance movements and solidarity across communities. What’s more, social media algorithms are deprioritizing and sometimes outright censoring coverage of Palestine. These realities make it all the more urgent for us, as movement journalism organizations, to say without reservation that we are committed to a free Palestine and to put that commitment into practice through our work.
For many of our organizations, this commitment to Palestinian liberation is deeply tied to our dedication to prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition. As Nadine Naber writes in Truthout, “During this profoundly terrorizing moment of Palestinian genocide, we need to acknowledge how the structures of incarceration, anti-migrant violence, and US conquest have always gone hand in hand.” In our publications, we document training exchanges between local police forces and the Israeli military, the imprisonment of many thousands of Palestinians in administrative detention in Israeli jails, and the surveillance and policing of anti-Zionist movements across the country and worldwide. We chronicle how, even before Israel began its escalated genocide against Palestinians, Gaza was widely understood as an open-air prison because of Israel’s blockade on movement, travel, food, and other goods, and restrictions on exports and construction. Our publications further portray the ways in which anti-carceral struggles—from Palestine to the US and beyond—are interconnected, from the messages exchanged between imprisoned hunger strikers in the US and Palestine to the formation of INCITE Palestine Force, an arm of one of the longest-running abolitionist organizations in the country.
Many of our publications bring this abolitionist lens to our coverage of the police repression of pro-Palestine protests and direct action, some of which have resulted in mass arrests (both planned and unplanned), leading protesters to experience the violence of jails firsthand. As Sumona Gupta writes in Scalawag, “Militarized police responses, as noted in the response to US student protests, are part of a long history of colonial repression tactics, meant to quell disruptions in the state status quo.”
Movement journalists are drawing these connections between systems of oppression across borders and across seemingly disparate issues. For example, as Mondoweiss has observed, activists have long protested the imprisonment, torture, and sexual abuse of growing numbers of Palestinians in Israeli jails, as well as the broader occupation and apartheid. Documenting these intersections is critical, as dominant media tend to report on issues in silos, creating an illusion of conflicting struggles that feeds imperialist agendas.
We recognize, too, that the repression of journalists who are truthfully covering Palestine is part of a broader reality of media repression that props up the PIC, colonialism, and imperialism around the world. The repression of accountable journalism is a state tool against resistance movements everywhere. This includes censorship of journalists writing from inside prisons and jails. It includes the surveillance, prosecution, and imprisonment of whistleblowers and media workers who expose state secrets. And it includes the assassination of journalists beyond Palestine, including, in recent years, in Sudan, Myanmar, Brazil, India, Mexico, and the US.
“While the US government commits atrocities across the globe and calls it freedom, the media largely falls in line and parrots state propaganda, creating a system that either breaks trust with the public, creating a breeding ground for misinformation and disinformation, or fuels the forces of fascism, manufacturing consent for imperialist forever wars and genocide.”
By coming together in this time of genocide, our movement media organizations are saying no to an ethos of competition and isolation, recognizing that a principled coalition strengthens all of our work. Together, as MAAD, we can better work to shift the political narrative, change public opinion, and record the vital work of movements, even amid censorship and repression. Our publications are breaking with the rules of normative media to tell the true stories of colonization, occupation, and genocide—and the liberatory grassroots movements that hold the power to free us all.
About the Authors:
Lara Witt is a writer, the editor-in-chief of Prism, and the co-founder of Media Against Apartheid & Displacement. Their goal is to provide platforms for marginalized voices and reshape the media landscape.
Maya Schenwar is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism and co-founder of Media Against Apartheid & Displacement. She is also Truthout’s board president and editor-at-large. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming book We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition and co-author of Prison by Any Other Name.
Support The Abolitionist Newspaper reach thousands of imprisoned people for free. Subscribe and support the project today.