فبراير: هيئة تحرير صحيفة وول ستريت جورنال تشيد بالحرب
التاريخ: 
16/12/2024

Editor's Note: This article is part of the Press on Palestine series, an initiative by Palestine Square. It includes selections from February 2024. Press on Palestine highlights bias in mainstream American reporting on Palestinian and Arab-Israeli affairs.

1. The Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2024
Taking Rafah Is Essential to Defeat Hamas By the Editorial Board

When pro-Palestine advocates accuse Western media of complicity in genocide, it is based on clear examples of such outlets publishing disinformation and misleading headlines, engaging in lazy journalism that justifies atrocities, taking Israeli talking points as fact, and — in the case of  — calling for mass murder in bold letters. 

The editors ridicule the idea of protecting civilians in Rafah, but claim that the fact that “there are too many civilians” is a Hamas “military doctrine.” They omit that the reason why the city of Rafah is overcrowded is because the Israeli regime has forced thousands of Palestinians from their homes — under threat of carpet-bombing — to evacuate to the city which they claimed was a “humanitarian zone.” Beyond justifying Israel’s need to invade Rafah, the editors also justify the Israeli Occupation Forces’ (IOF) invasion of hospitals in Gaza. They avoid any  mention of the the published investigations into the deadly raids of Al Shifa Hospital and Nasser Hospital that identify Israel’s atrocities — including mass graves and sniper shots to the head of patients and the displaced — as well as debunk the IOF’s claims about Hamas’ presence at these hospitals. 

WSJ’s editors appear to vehemently defend — if not worship — Netanyahu. They completely  accept his claim that a corridor for people to evacuate Rafah will be created — it never was — and accuse the UN of obstructing safe passages for Palestinians. The very thought of an occupying force — four months into genocide — relentlessly bombing an overcrowded city it previously claimed as safe and lying about providing a safe corridor (just as it lied before) doesn’t seem like an understandable series of events for WSJ editors. 

The editors continue with their hysterical defense of Netanyahu’s regime, stating that Israel’s political apparatus is in agreement regarding the “war” and that Biden should step aside. There is no mention of the impact of Israel’s relentless campaign in Gaza: it is as if the Palestinians do not exist. By the fourth month of the genocide — upon the publication of this article — Israel had killed at least 28,000 Palestinians, the overwhelming majority women, children, and the elderly. 

It comes as no surprise, perhaps, that the WSJ — the paper of record for Republicans — is  intent on  opposing the Democrats… even if it means supporting war crimes and justifying the murder of displaced Palestinian children. The editorial targets U.S. President Biden, accusing him of taking action to deter Israel’s violence in Gaza. Evidence of such deterrence is absent, as Biden has supplied the Israel regime with every weapon it requested throughout the genocide that he has openly supported. 

Throughout the genocide, the editorial pages of the WSJ have slowly turned into a fascist manifesto, cheering for the killing of thousands of Palestinians, whom they dehumanize in coverage. Any true stories are obscured, while the paper cheers on a foreign military — one that is deemed a killer of children by the United Nations —  as if it were its own. 

2. The Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2024
A U.N. Agency Is Accused of Links to Hamas. The Clues Were There All Along. By David Luhnow and Carrie Keller-Lynn

The article’s title promises the reader information regarding Hamas’ alleged infiltration of UNRWA. What the reporters deliver, however, is an underwhelming case, rendering the headline as clickbaity and intended to deliberately misinform readers. 

The authors allude to clashes between mysterious unnamed sources and UNRWA teachers over supposed “textbooks promoting the hatred of Jews and Israel.” There is no suggestion that this is merely an allegation: the claims of the elusive sources are taken as gospel. Here, WSJ leans on a decades-long tradition of racist, orientalist discourse, which assumes that Arabs are innately intolerant, just itching to sow this prejudice into their young. Yet, what are these instances of supposed “Jewish hatred”? The article provides none. 

The supposed “hatred of Israel” that is taught is a more comical claim. Firstly, it implies that ones hostility toward an occupying power — which condemns them to restrictions of movement and inadequate healthcare, deprives them of basic human rights, tortures them and ethnically cleanses them — as being irrational. What is expected of Palestinians is cooperation in their ethnic cleansing; an element of the condition of being a “perfect victim.” 

While outlining UNRWA’s backstory, the reporters from WSJ describe the organization as having been founded to support the “refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.” This perforated recount of history strips events of crucial detail. Conveniently left out is the fact that all aforementioned refugees were Palestinian. The image painted is one of unintended casualties — a sparse few who were unfortunate to be caught in the crosshairs of war as opposed to the deliberate displacement of 750,000 Palestinians forced out of their ancestral lands.

Among the “clues” are a series of claims all asserted by Israeli officials. WSJ neglects to treat this information with any basic journalistic skepticism, despite the fact that the commanders of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) routinely invent false claims. Forensic Architecture is just one organization to have disproved the lies of the Israeli regime regarding its deliberate destruction of Gaza’s healthcare sector. Israeli officials frequently claim that civilian sites are legitimate military targets, when overwhelming evidence from forensic investigators, human rights groups, doctors, surgeons, and other parties clearly debunks this pedalling of falsehoods. We can now confirm that this article falls into a pattern at WSJ of giving cover to Israel’s genocidal aims, given chief news editor Elena Cherney's later reported admission that claims surrounding the radicalization of UNRWA couldn't be independently verified. 

WSJ asserts — with remarkable confidence — that school books “inject doses of antisemitism and martyrdom into class exercises.” In example,the authors criticize the mention of Dalal al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian resistance fighter who took part in the 1978 Coastal Road attack. This stands in stark contrast to the teaching of Israel’s Zionist history. Israeli textbooks feature numerous figures with terrorist pasts, including former prime ministers such as Menachem Begin — involved in the King David Hotel bombing and the Deir Yassin massacres — and Yitzhak Shamir, who was responsible for the assassination of senior British diplomats. Given al-Mughrabi's significance in Palestinian history, her inclusion is inevitable, regardless of her status within the Israeli colonial imagination.

In what is probably the most audacious portion of the article, WSJ performs linguistic gymnastics in an attempt to dilute the Israeli-orchestrated Palestinian plight, while decontextualizing history yet again. The authors write about  refugees who “couldn't return to their homes,” but deliberately do not mention that this right of return was denied them by Israel itself and that, should they return, they would have little to return to, with their homes having been destroyed or seized by the occupiers.

WSJ reporters explain how many Arab countries and refugees have — in an arrogant manner,, it seems, judging by the piece’s tone –- refused permanent resettlement of the refugees outside of Palestine. This includes, WSJ tells us, the refusal of a Jordan Valley development project that would have permanently rehoused 200,000 refugees. Ignoring the fact that millions upon millions of Palestinian refugees reside in various Arab countries, this disjointed narrative is included as a way to convince the reader that Palestinians themselves — along with their fellow Arabs — are impediments to their own survival. This is an article that clearly shifts responsibility from the perpetrators — the Israelis — to the dehumanized victims of the region. 

Luhnow and Keller-Lynn go on to brazenly claim that the refugees wished to “return to their lives in Israel” —- outrageous phrasing, given they had to be displaced and their homes stolen to create what would be Israel. In not naming the refugees as Palestinian, WSJ peddles erosive narratives that seek to eradicate them as a people. This is just one of countless instances in which this newspaper deliberately attempts to strip Palestinians of their identity and nationhood.