What if these were the headlines?

• Palestinians launch new ground invasion of south Israel
• Israelis [are] displaced again as Gaza resumes bombing
• 18 March 2025: The day 185 Israeli children were massacred by Palestinians
• Palestinian Ramadan massacre obliterates any remaining Muslim claims of moral leadership
• Palestinian envoy to Austria suggests executing Jewish children in secret recording
• Gaza will annex parts of Israel until imprisoned Israelis are freed
• Gaza bombs Israel’s Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem again killing patients
• Jewish-American student suspended for revealing professor was a medic in Gaza
• Palestinian bombing in Israel kills Jewish family preparing for Passover:
  air strike kills a family of five, including three children, as they slept in their car
• Tributes pour in for two murdered Israeli journalists
• Twice engaged, twice bereaved: Israeli loses two fiancés in air strikes by Palestinians
• ‘Child After Child’: Gazans have killed  270+ Israeli children since ditching cease-fire last week, Says NGO 

These are all headlines published by legitimate sources over the past week or so, except that I have replaced “Israel” or Israelis as subjects with Palestinians or Gazans. Now we see how it would look if Gaza were the oppressors with genocidal power – not Israel.  

Actually, we cannot imagine any of these listed tragedies happening to Israelis, or to Jews.  Reading through the headlines, there is the sense of extreme violence, death and the proof of ethnic cleansing.

But as Australian journalist and artist Caitlin Johnstone notes, half-joking, 

“The world needs Israel. Without Israel where would sexual predators go for safety and protection? Where would we get our surveillance technology? Who would use human targets to field test new kinds of murder robots, military explosives, and AI systems used to kill entire families?”

Good questions. 

Below: Al-Akhrass and Jamal were fired; Savanna Craig was jailed — all three are Canadian journalists

There is no ceasefire in Gaza because Israel deliberately broke it

In the last week Israel’s IDF and police have killed hundreds of Palestinians throughout Gaza.  When Israel fully ditched the cease-fire last week, after many violations since mid-January, Ahmad Alhendawi, Save the Children’s regional director, said  

“Children and families in Gaza have barely caught their breath and are now being plunged back into a horrifically familiar world of harm that they cannot escape.

“These airstrikes come as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain displaced, their homes destroyed and uninhabitable, with tents all that stand between them and explosive weapons designed for wide reach.  … Children are the most vulnerable to explosive weapons. Their lighter bodies are thrown further by the blasts, and their bones are softer and bend more easily, with higher risk of secondary injuries and long-term deformities and disabilities. Their small bodies have less blood to lose—a death sentence when emergency services can’t safely operate and reach them.”

The Gaza Ministry of Health released a 1,516 page report that confirms 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since 7 Oct. 2023… its first 27 pages listed murdered Palestinian children under the age of one year.

taken from CNN coverage

The Gaza Ministry of Health has just released a 1,516-page report which says 50,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed in Gaza since 7 Oct. 2023.  The report includes 474 pages that list 15,613 children under age 18 who have been killed; its first 27 pages listed murdered Palestinian children below the age of one year.  More than one quarter of the dead are children under age five years.

The report about the death toll did not make it into one Canadian media outlet.  Though articles citing the Gaza Ministry of Health’s murdered person count are in many news outlets which are not sycophantic to Israel, such as these, with their headlines:  

• Al Jazeera: Israel’s war on Gaza killed 50,000 Palestinians since Oct. 2023\
• Reuters: The lives lost in Gaza: a closer look at those killed in the conflict so far
• Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Over 15,000 Palestinian children killed in Gaza genocide, says Health Ministry
• BBC:  More than 50,000 killed in Gaza since Israeli offensive began, Hamas-run ministry says
• Sky News:  Israeli strike hits key Gaza hospital as number of Palestinians killed passes 50,000
• Le Monde (France):  Why the Gaza Health Ministry death count is considered reliable
• MSN: More than 50,000 have been killed in the war in Gaza, Health-run health ministry says days

Montreal writer and activist Yves Engler was arrested & jailed for 5 days…he criticized Dahlia Kurtz’s… calls to deport Palestinian solidarity activists.”

The reign of civil terror is fully evident in occupations in Canada such as journalism: 

1. TV video journalist for CTV in Halifax, Yara Jamal, was fired for self-identifying as a Palestinian
2. Global TV fired on-air journalist Zahraa Al-Akhrass in Toronto. She posted about Israel’s genocide on her social media.
3. Montreal writer and activist Yves Engler was arrested and jailed for five days.  The Electronic Intifada reported, “The posts for which Engler was arrested last week were reported to police by pro-Israel commentator Dahlia Kurtz. Engler had criticized Kurtz’s anti-Palestinian writings, including her calls to deport Palestine solidarity activists.” In response, Kurtz accused Engler of harassment, leading to his jailing by Montreal police.

1. Palestinian guests on CBC – or pro-Palestinian guests—are frequently cancelled before being interviewed
2. Kevin Metcalf was fired from the advocacy organization, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, for writing about what was happening to Gazans, and denigrating Israel’s genocide.
3. Savanna Craig was arrested when she, as a journalist, covering an April 2024 pro- Palestinian protest in Montreal.  She was detained for simply being there along with 44 activists also arrested.  She faced the criminal charge of mischief, which carried a potential two-year jail sentence and a $5,000 fine.  Fortunately, in October, police dropped the charges against Craig – but the terror, the financial stress and the fact she faced a criminal charge shows what can happen. 

I’m sure these are not the only journalists who faced censure, firing or not being hired at all. 

There are dozens like them in the US, the UK and even in Australia. 

Media concentration, thanks to neoliberalism, is the order of the day.  In Canada, the number of news outlets have shrunk considerably in the last seventeen years.  A recent study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives revealed that 2.5 million Canadians live in a postal code that have one or zero local news outlets.  That is double the number from 2008.  Canadians are losing media outlets (TV and newspaper) at the rate of 25 per year. Journalists are lining up for casual work or any crumbs they can catch at the few stable news offices such as the Toronto Star and the CBC.   

That could be one reason for the paucity of any sort of concerted pushback against the “official” Jewish community and its leaders, and the pro-Israel lobby, which are always on the hunt for those who criticize Israel, or call Israel’s war on Gazans a genocide.  No journalist wants a target on their back – at least not one painted by the notoriously right-wing pro-Israel lobby.  It’s little wonder that almost all news articles, commentary, TV news and even mainstream podcasts play up the “massacre” of the Israeli Jews on 7 Oct. 2023.  Yet few to none expose the murderous regime that Israel is imposing on Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Syria.   

Image at the top: March 2025–Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a house, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. (credit: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled)