'Balancing the narrative' in Palestine

While the world has witnessed the total moral bankruptcy and genocidal bloodlust of the Israelis, it has also seen the righteousness and steadfastness of the Palestinians in full detail.

An article under the title House Arab, published in Bidoun magazine, appeared some weeks ago. Written by Ismail Ibrahim, an Egyptian journalist, it recounts his experience working as a fact-checker at the liberal propaganda rag The New Yorker in the aftermath of October 7.

Among the article’s many illuminating passages, which bring to light the inner workings of highly-regarded Western pseudo-journalism institutions, there is one that stands out. Ibrahim writes:

I was assigned, at some point, a piece about a spree of killings and land thefts carried out with impunity in the West Bank since October 7th. The piece mostly focused on a single settlement where a man who had gone to pick olives on his land one Saturday was shot by an off-duty Israeli soldier. His execution had been captured on video. The story included a cast of settlers, anti-occupation rabbis, and West-Bank Palestinians who had spent their lives fearing that their homes would be stolen, and that if they were killed or dispossessed, there would be no recourse for them. I ran into the story editor in the hallway, who said he was having trouble balancing the narrative because all the Israeli characters seemed evil, while all the Palestinians were angels. A long section that documented, without any editorializing, that Palestinian dispossession was an ongoing process that had begun long before October 7th was whittled down to a single paragraph after a series of fights between the editor-in-chief and the story editor on one side, and myself and the freelance writer on the other. [Emphasis mine.]

That bit — “he was having trouble balancing the narrative” — is not a confession of editorial difficulty. It is a confession of ideological bankruptcy. It betrays an assumption so deeply embedded in Western journalism that it rarely even announces itself: that every story must be balanced between two sides, presumed to be morally equivalent, even when the material reality is defined precisely by radical imbalance. It is the quiet axiom that truth itself must be symmetrical, that injustice must be diluted until it resembles a disagreement between equals.

But some positions are not merely unbalanced; they are impossible to balance. One cannot “balance” the dispossessed with their dispossessors, the raped with the rapist, the murdered with the murderer, or the genocidaire with their victims. The very attempt to do so is complicity. Balance, in such cases, does not clarify reality — it falsifies it. And that’s precisely the project every mainstream Western journalism institution, not just The New Yorker, has indulged in ever since the supposed “founding” of the illegitimate Jewish state in Palestine.

For most distant observers, “balancing the narrative” was easy when Gaza was portrayed as a tiny block of land in what was labelled the “turbulent Middle East” — a decontextualised framing of both the region and its people, created by the same forces. But things have changed 180 degrees after October 7. Now everyone sees Gaza and they see the Palestinians of Gaza. And once you see them you can not unsee them.

This kind of narrative management was possible only because Gaza was distant, and its inhabitants unfamiliar. Politicians and editors relied on that distance and unfamiliarity to present the situation as complicated, and as an evenly matched fight between two forces, one righteous and the other barbaric. This, in turn, made it easy to repeat, for example, the mythical two-state slogan, a talking point that has functioned less as a political vision and more as a way to avoid admitting what was actually happening on the ground.

Moreover, the sheer repetition of the two-state mantra also served as a cloak that hid the inherent injustice of that equation: the genocidal land usurpers — who view their victims as subhuman cattle — occupy nearly all of the land, while their victims are forced to live in glorified pens in the name of a mythical state that would never materialise.

October 7 has not revealed anything new. It has merely stripped away the last shreds of plausible deniability. In its aftermath, what has come into view is a continuity: the genocidal campaign in Gaza being carried out with enthusiastic Western backing; the open celebration by Israeli politicians, media figures, and soldiers of collective punishment, mass starvation, systemic rapes, and annihilation; the treatment of Palestinian abductees — children included — subjected to torture, sexual violence, killings, and degradation in Israeli dungeons, practices that human rights organisations have documented for decades and that are now defended openly rather than denied.

The reality became impossible to “balance” once Gaza came into full view over the past two years. People now see, without mediation, the scale and nature of the atrocities to which Palestinians have been subjected. They see residential neighbourhoods reduced to dust. They see hospitals levelled, and maternity wards blown apart. They have seen way too many children with their heads blown off and their intestines splattered on the floor to keep a count. They see babies starving to death because food and water has been deliberately cut off. They see entire families killed and buried under rubble. They see soldiers recording themselves vandalising houses, burning down schools, prancing around in the lingerie of the dead and displaced women, and boasting about the devastation they have carried out.

Yet another poll lays bare the genocidal nature of Israeli society

While the world has witnessed the total moral bankruptcy and genocidal bloodlust of the Israelis, it has also seen the righteousness and steadfastness of the Palestinians in full detail. The Palestinians have continued their lives with rare dignity and faith under unbearable conditions. Students have studied for high school exams in flimsy tents. Teenagers have revised lessons on cracked phone screens because their schools no longer exist. Families have walked long distances to find potable water sources. Mothers have deprived themselves of food to keep their children alive. Doctors have operated without anaesthetic and without supplies. Journalists documented their people’s genocide until they themselves were targeted and killed.

For the uninitiated, however, what has perhaps been the most revealing is the social consensus surrounding Israeli barbarism. The public discourse inside Israel, far from recoiling at atrocities, has increasingly celebrated it. Calls for extermination are not fringe mutterings but prime-time talking points. Sexual violence against Palestinians, once euphemised or buried, is now joked about, justified, and dismissed in ways that would be unthinkable if the victims belonged to any population deemed fully human by the West. This is not a matter of individual pathology; it is the moral logic of settler colonialism turbocharged with religious bigotry reaching its logical conclusion.

84% of Israelis rate IDF’s moral conduct as ‘Excellent’ or ‘Very Good’ during the Gaza genocide

And yet Western media continues to act as though the primary ethical challenge is tone. It continues to “balance the narrative.” The problem, we are told, is excess — excess anger, excess grief, excess clarity. Palestinians must not only endure dispossession, dehumanisation, and death; they must do so politely, in a way that reassures their barbaric executioners and the audiences that identify with them. They must be silent victims of their own execution. To speak plainly about reality is to be accused of bias. To name genocide is to be “polarising.” To refuse false balance is to be “activist.” And to name the genocidaires “antisemitic.”

What Ibrahim encountered in that hallway was a refusal to abandon a murderous, genocidal fiction. The fiction that religiously-sanctioned overwhelming violence against defenceless people can be narrated without taking sides — even when the sides are the murderer and the murdered. The fiction that morality can be split down the middle. The fiction that a boot on a neck can be described as a balanced altercation.

There is no balanced narrative to be found here, because there is no balanced reality. Until journalism, diplomacy, and liberal conscience reckon with that fact, they will remain what they have long been: instruments of oppression that will insist upon a balance even in the face of a live-streamed genocide, while insisting that you deny the evidence of your own eyes and swallow their narrative whole.

Like Ibrahim, refuse to pay any more reverence to the hideous liberal pieties. If Gaza has awakened you, please don’t go back to sleep.

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