As atrocities mount in Gaza, long-held notions, both about the media and about the Jewish population at large, are coming under the scanner. That includes assumptions made so far about the morality of the liberal media in the West, and notions of whether journalists are deemed protected from the impunity of governments and armies.

More significantly, a relook is taking place at whether the Jews are any longer the underdogs, even in Jewish perception. If drawing a comparison between what the Holocaust did to the Jews and what the Jews are doing to the Palestinians today would have been unthinkable before, it no longer is.

But first, the media. As the world becomes increasingly discomfited about Israel’s blocking of aid to Gaza and the pictures of desperate starvation that are emerging, the government turns increasingly on the Palestinian journalists who are getting these pictures out, even as they themselves are starving. The targeting of a media tent on August 10, killing six journalists, at least four of them from Al Jazeera, has forced media advocates, if not the world, to stop and ask whether there are any precedents for this kind of sustained targeting of the media. The estimate of media workers killed since October 2023 now averages200 or more. The Committee to Protect Journalists has pointed out that the laws of war are clear: journalists are civilians. To target them deliberately in war is to commit a war crime.

International journalists were blocked from entering Gaza shortly after the October 2023 conflict began. Israel has consistently accused Palestinian journalists, whom international media networks now use, of working for Hamas, notably Anas al-Sharif of Al Jazeera who was the most prominent of the six killed. Both he and Al Jazeera have denied this. Before he died, he had written online that he was “drowning in hunger, trembling in exhaustion, and resisting the fainting that follows me every moment.… Gaza is dying. And we die with it.” Even as he wept on air while covering the hunger crisis, he was labelled a terrorist by an Israeli military spokesperson.

A year back, in August 2024, the CPJ called on Israel to stop making unproven claims that journalists slain by its forces are terrorists or engaging in militant activity, and demanded swift, international, and independent investigations into these killings. No international investigation has happened, even as the killings mount.

In July this year, the CPJ was calling for Anas al-Sharif’s protection in the face of Israeli smears.

In the meantime, the liberal media in the West is being exposed by Al Jazeera’s own media review published by its media institute. It took note of the headlines on Anas al-Sharif’s killing. While the Financial Times said, unequivocally, “Israel kills prominent Al Jazeera reporter in Gaza”, The New York Times headline read: “Israeli airstrike kills four Al Jazeera journalists, Network says”. The Wall Street Journal chose to be equally cautious. “Israel kills five Al Jazeera Journalists in Airstrike, Network says”. ‘Network says’ suggests hedging rather than stating a fact, despite abundant evidence, Al Jazeera Journalism Review noted.

To visit this site is to discover constantly updated, painstaking documentation on what Western media bias on Israel looks like.

But even as Western media outlets pull punches, it is liberal media within Israel and Palestine which are reporting critically on the genocide in Gaza, calling out war crimes. Since October 2023, Haaretz has been among a handful of Israeli media outlets to report critically on the genocide in Gaza, not hesitating to use the term. It has suffered for it, including losing government advertising.

Investigative reports from other outlets, such as Local Call and +972 Magazine, have detailed Israeli military tactics, including bombarding residential areas in Gaza without clear intelligence on Hamas commanders’ locations, as well as “intentionally weaponized toxic byproducts of bombs to suffocate militants in their tunnels”, Al Jazeera’s media review says.

Then there is a very different media take, which is coming from YouTube and shedding light on the churn in Jewish self-perception post-Gaza. In January, Peter Beinart, a Jewish-American of South African origin, who is editor-at-large at Jewish Currents and a professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, published a book called Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. It explores the moral dilemma many Jews are confronted with today.

Several discussions with him on YouTube have followed which collectively explore this dilemma. On Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Stewart asks Beinart, “We learn in Judaism that we are the underdog… But what happens when David becomes Goliath? And the responsibility there. Is that what troubles you?” Beinart says even Israel’s leading human rights organisation, B’Tselem, has come out with a report saying that it believes this is genocide. There are wild cheers from the audience when he says that this is about remembering Jewish history and what was done to “our own families who were slaughtered, and who were genocided and who were starved to death while nobody in the world cared, our obligation is to care. Our obligation is to risk something.” The comparison with the Holocaust is being made, even as he says that he is not saying this is as bad as the Holocaust.

Both men agree that Israel’s actions are putting the likelihood of a surviving Jewish State much more at risk. “If we want Israeli Jews to be safe, in the long term Israeli Jews are only going to be safe if Palestinians are safe,” Beinart says. He revisits the history of Palestinian protests over the years and how brutally Israel dealt with them even when they were peaceful. “We send the message to Palestinians that non-violent, ethical protest doesn’t work... That makes it easier for Hamas to commit the crimes that they did on Oct 7.”

Elsewhere, at Harvard University’s Divinity School, Beinart talks about how the Zionist consensus has really eroded, “if by Zionist, we mean support for a state that gives Jews legal supremacy over Palestinians.” There is certainly not a consensus among people under the age of 40, he argues, citing polls which increasingly show that younger Jews think Israel is practising both apartheid and genocide, and are expressing views which are considered anti-Semitic.

He also describes how Israel pursued its project of ‘having as much land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible’. “The fewer Arabs the better — that was the national project from the beginning.” And argues that Israel is increasingly becoming a template for many other governments around the world that also have “disposable populations” that they would also really just not like to have around. “I just always imagine someone like Narendra Modi with his Muslim problem in India watching what Israel is doing and saying, wow. This is an option for us. And I just fear that, and especially with the ethnic cleansing that happened in Nagorno-Karabakh of Armenians by Azerbaijan the summer of 2023, I feel like this is also just laying the foundation for a whole new era of ethnic cleansing around the world.”

An unfounded canard perhaps, but one that should cause us profound unease.

Sevanti Ninan is a media commentator. She also publishes the labour newsletter, Worker Web.