If you only can call out horror when it’s history, what is journalism good for?

Because if you obscure the fact that this is a colonial dynamic, then it’s much easier to just present what has happened, both in the longer term and since October 7, as “Israel is just a country defending itself.”

they’re all obscuring that at the time of the post–World War I British mandate in Palestine, the population of Palestine was 90% Palestinians. And even when the UN issued its 1947 partition plan, Palestinians owned more than 94% of the land between the river and the sea.

So you can’t understand the basic hinge point in this war, like the fact that most people in Gaza, 70% of them or thereabouts, are refugees, without understanding that they got to be refugees because creating a colonial state in Palestine required expelling 750,000 Palestinians and also their descendants.

But that is sort of built into the commercial orientation of the media system, that there are many considerations that have nothing to do with serving the public good by helping provide the populace with the information that we need and a range of possible lenses to think about them. What we see instead is an orientation toward minimizing atrocities carried out by countries like the United States and Canada and their allies, which, in the case of Israel, is less an ally than an appendage.