Letter to Nad Sivaramen about Falling into Israeli Propaganda Traps
11.07.2024
Below is the copy of a letter sent by LALIT to Nad Sivaramen, as Editor of L'Express in the Sentinelle Group. It was sent on Sunday.
Dear Nad Sivaramen, with copy to your journalist Aline Groëme-Harmon,
We write this letter, on behalf of LALIT. It is about the need for institutions like the Press, and for individual journalists, to see their own role in terms of “the big picture” when it comes to something so grave as what is unfurling right now in Palestine: a colonial genocide perpetrated by the State of Israel. We are referring to a lack of necessary context for the two pieces L’Express recently published around an Israeli woman taken hostage into Gaza by two men on a motorbike, and on her genuine suffering.
History will judge us forever after, however, on the stands we take during a historical event that is so serious, so inhumane and so brazenly perpetrated in front of the eyes of the world as the Israeli genocide in Gaza is. Journalists, of all people, have no excuse that they did not know. We all know. Unless we are digging our heads, like ostriches, under the sand, which we know you are not.
That the forcible expulsion and killing of Palestinians began with the Nakba some 76 years ago and has continued slowly but ceaselessly ever since, if with sudden bursts of mass slaughter every few years, is now well documented. We, the undersigned, have both, along with thousands of others, recently read the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé’s blow-by-blow account in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which we would advise as an excellent summary of documented knowledge on this colonial history of “de-population” by means of force. That is the main missing context in the pieces we write to you about.
Then there is the second fact that the Israeli State had constructed an impenetrable, electronically controlled, state-of-the-art fencing around the Gaza strip turning it into a prison, or more accurately, a concentration camp for the past 18 years. The 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza, already pushed out of their land into Gaza in 1948, were then 18 years ago locked in by a military siege. On 7 October what happened was that the Palestinian resistance fighters, from four or five different political currents including Hamas, broke the fencing down in a total of sixty different places. The Israeli army was humiliated. The USA’s intelligence was too. All the electronic war machinery did not stop a massive prison break out of Gaza. Then Palestinian resistance fighters attacked the Israeli occupation forces, the colonial prison guards, and defeated them. Another humiliation for the Israeli occupation forces. Another humiliation for the USA military backers of Israel. (The fighters, it is worth mentioning, were followed by a motley crew of hundreds of other people who saw the prison walls breached and ran along out of Gaza on to their grandparents’ land – just because they were free to – as did some members of petty criminal gangs.) The fighters then attacked and defeated all eleven military bases around Gaza along the fencing, killing some 400 Israeli soldiers – and then in addition killing 700 Israeli civilians including 38 children, the latter constituting war crimes. (These are maximum figures because it is well known that the Israeli Defense Force killed many in its counter-attack, using inter alia hell-fire missiles that burn everything down in a terrible way, from Appache Helicopters. Some of the deaths and atrocities may have been committed by the gang members who were amongst those who took advantage of the breached fencing. Investigations for war crimes will determine this.) During this “prison break”, the resistance fighters then took more than 200 people as prisoners-of war in the case of the military, and as hostages in the case of the civilians. Anyway, there was an attack on the Israeli wall and on its bases, and the Israelis lost. This then provoked a response from the Israeli occupation forces that was not only disproportionate, but was a full-blown genocidal onslaught against civilian Palestinians. As we write, there are some 38,000 Palestinian killed, mostly civilians and all oppressed by a colonial occupation, of which 16,000 were children, and that figure is just since 7 October last year – not counting before that, since 1948. This figure alone is 54 times the number of Israeli civilians killed in the “prison break”. This is 421 times the number of Israeli children killed during the “prison break”. The International Court of Justice judges have already, by an overwhelming majority, declared “plausible” the fact that Israel is committing genocide, and they have called, in a formal “order” issued, on Israel to stop the killing, maiming and starvation of the civilian population. Israel has persisted.
All this to say that we were somewhat distressed at the lack of analysis and of background context in the two pieces L’Express recently wrote and published. The first was an interview by Aline Groëme-Harmon on 25 May of released Israeli captive, Sapir Cohen, about her traumatic experience as a hostage, and the second a short follow-up article by Aline Groëme-Harmon on 31 May about the possible release of her boyfriend, also taken captive and now believed to be still alive. Without the necessary context, these articles look like “complaisance” articles, organized by the Israeli propaganda machinery, the kind of exercise referred to now as “Hasbara”, from the Hebrew word, and referring often to the public diplomacy aspect of Israel’s information warfare, often implicating the press.
On our website we have previously denounced two cases of L’Express publishing Israeli propaganda: one recently, on 15 January 2024, when Anju Ramgulam visited Israel during the genocide as guest of the IDF, itself, the very perpetrators of the genocide, and another much earlier, on 20 February 2022, when we criticized another journalist, saying how “the Israeli propaganda machinery is hard at work in Mauritius of late, having billeted L’Express newspaper, via one of its journalists into its army of justifiers world-wide. She thus interviewed an Israeli spokesman in a complaisant way and then wrote a follow-up article of equal complaisance. No mention, for example, of illegal occupation of Palestine, annexation of part of Syria, the three recent human rights Reports published on Israel as an Apartheid State, nor even of its illegal nuclear weapons. Having first accomplished media ‘cover’ this way, the Israeli state now seems to be making an advance into influencing the Mauritian state directly”. One of our members wrote personal letters to the third journalist mentioned, who has, since then, not continued in the role of Israeli enabler, which is why we have not named her today.
All this to introduce our seven questions to you. Readers, we believe, deserved answers.
Question 1: Why did L’Express not ask Sapir Cohen what she thinks about the Israeli State committing genocide on the Palestinian people, or even what she thinks of the South African ICJ case and interim order to stop committing acts of genocide? Or did such questions fall under the “conditions fixée au préalable”? Yes, L’Express agreed to the arrangement: “on ne parle pas de politique”. First of all, this condition is not acceptable for a newspaper, especially in the context of genocide. And second, since when does genocide fall under the definition of “politique” that one can be “for” or “against”, as it were? Or worse still, that one can agree not to mention at all? Saying “C’est donc avec un éléphant dans la pièce” does not excuse you for that degree of collaboration with the Israeli narrative.
Question 2: Sapir Cohen says she is on a world-tour telling about her experience, “Depuis sa libération, Sapir Cohen voyage pour raconter ce qui lui est arrivé.” A quick Youtube search confirms this. She came to Mauritius as a detour from a trip to South Africa where she was hosted by the Jewish National Fund of South Africa, which describes itself as “an affiliate organization of the South African Zionist Federation”. Is this tour not part of the “politics” of the state of Israel, that she acts like part of? Who exactly is paying the cost of her trips around the world? And who hosted her in Mauritius? Just before her visit to South Africa, she spoke at an event sponsored by a Zionist organization HaShomer HaChadash in Israel. (You may like to consider listening to some of the YouTube interviews, again by historian Ilan Pappé, on the history of the Zionist political lobby – in the UK and USA, in particular – which expose the modus operandi of the lobby and its relation to these two State apparatuses.) Zionism is a colonial political project, begun in earnest by the British State and carried on in equal earnest as a political project by the United States of America. Sapir Cohen is on a tour that is, itself, a political project. She can’t avoid “parle pas de politique”.
Question 3: Is the “video-choc” shown to Aline Groëme-Harmon the one produced by the IDF Spokesperson's Unit? If so, should it not be made clear that the montage is the work of the propaganda wing of the very army being tried for genocide? Is the source of the collage not worth a mention?
Question 4: The “personnes qui l’accompagnent”, including one of them that brought the video along, before Sapir Cohen’s brother ushered her in, are they from the Israeli State? It is not clear. But, our guess is they are part of a “political” project of the Israeli state that your journalist has been lured into.
Question 5: The Kibbutz Nir Oz that Sapir Cohen is from is built on land where Israeli terrorists killed Palestinian families and expelled the rest into Gaza in 1948. Is it not stolen land? Would that not have been a reasonable question to ask? Why did all those people pour out of Gaza on 7 October? Many of them just to see their still-alive grandparents’ land? For example, was it land belonging to the Abu Sitta family from Gaza? This would be reasonable background context. The Palestine Land Society has an article on this at https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/articles/2024/i-could-have-been-one-of-those-who-broke-through-the-siege-on-october-7
Question 6: Given that Sapir Cohen brought up points about the conditions of her captivity in Gaza that result directly from the actions of the IDF, is it ethical for L’Express to just pretend that there is no context in Gaza, no context of a genocide being perpetrated while she is held there? Three or four examples:
a) The interview reads, “Otage, ‘vous avez tout le temps faim. On ne vous donne pas assez à manger’. La ration: un pain pita par jour.” We feel sorry for her. She is young, alone, afraid and then is hungry too. But do readers not need to be reminded in a short phrase that the Israeli occupying forces vowed to cut food, water and essential supplies, and did so? That the Israeli State is killing people by means of intentionally imposed famine? And that her hunger is caused, at least in part, by this? Do readers not need to be reminded that children in Gaza die from Israel’s intentionally engineered starvation visited upon the totality of the Palestinians living in Gaza? How many children’s lives might have been saved by a pita bread a day, had the Israeli army not blocked food, bombed crops and killed aid workers bringing in food?
b) When Sapir Cohen experienced the smell of sewerage when she was held in the tunnels for part of her two-month ordeal, “Les tunnels avoisinent les égouts. L’odeur y est nauséabonde, suffocante,” we sympathize. But do readers not need to be informed that the Israeli army, in order to punish the Palestinians, actually targets their sewerage system? And that it does so in order to cause epidemics? Do we not need to be reminded by L’Express that the smell of sewerage is constantly referred to in Gaza by almost everyone? And that the Hamas civil servants who go to repair the ruined sewerage plants are assassinated by the Israelis? The smell for 2.3 million people of Gaza is terrible. Sewerage, dead bodies rotting under the rubble, and rubbish strewn all around because civil servants cleaning it up get assassinated by Israel? Should readers not be informed, when talking about bad odors, that the Israeli Army Reservist Major General, former Head of the Israeli National Security Council, and adviser to the Defense Minister no less, Giora Eiland, on the fateful day of 7 October 2023, already described the Israeli order to cut off water and electricity to Gaza, writing in an online journal: “This is what Israel has begun to do — we cut the supply of energy, water and diesel to the Strip . . . But it’s not enough. In order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza”. He also says “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf . . . Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” And, to cap it all, he confesses this, to our point: “The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer . . .” These quotes are easily available in the fine South African submission before the ICJ (copy on LALIT site in the Documents Section, for easy reference). Are these types of argument by Israel to justify targeting the sewerage system in Gaza not important to tell readers, when Sapir Cohen mentions “odeurs”. L’Express readers need to know that in Gaza, and curiously for the same reason often in the West Bank, Palestinians have been haunted every day, day in and day out, until now, by the same smell, and worse, that poor Sapir Cohen had to suffer for part of her two months’ imprisonment?
c) And why was she moved from house to house three times, and then twice in different tunnels? She describes this, and it must indeed have been a terrible ordeal for her. We sympathize. But, surely the reader needs to be reminded that the Israeli army literally corrals, literally herds, as if they were cattle, the whole of the Gaza population, forcing whole families to flee with nothing but a motri in their arms, from place to place? Again and again? They forcibly displace the old and infirm, the babes in arms and those on life-support systems in hospitals that they bomb, those suffering Alzheimers and those who are amputees from the previous Israeli bombardments and from snipers that shot intentionally at the knees of peaceful marchers at the Great March of Return in 2018. That is why she, Sapir Cohen, was being moved from house to house and then into two tunnels. She was suffering for two months, just as the people of Gaza have suffered for eight months, if not since 1948. Because the IDF is imposing this regime on purpose as an act of genocide. The context is necessary.
d) More broadly, why is she, Sapir Cohen, like the other 200 captives, taken hostage at all? It is a war crime to take a civilian captive. (It is not clear if Sapir Cohen had been exempted from the army or is an army reservist – that also, by the way, would be a relevant question to ask.) But, what is the context for taking such a drastic action against hundreds of civilians? Why? Let us start with before 7 October. As of that date, some 1,250 Palestinians were snatched from their daily lives, and then held without trial or even a charge by Israel in Israeli jails. If they are not hostages, what on earth are they? That is four times as many as were taken captive in Israel by the Palestinian groups. So, 1,250 or so Palestinian hostages rot in Israeli jails and no-one in the Western World leadership knows? Or cares? And how do the Palestinian resistance fighters get them released? When Palestinians hold protests, they get shot at. So, the context is that the Palestinian fighters take captives in order to get their own captives released. It does need a mention, does it not? The number of Palestinians held hostage had, by January 2024, already risen to 3,291. It has presumably continued to rise dramatically. That is just the hostages. The prisoners that have charges – often absurd, or bankal charges, often in colonial, military courts – laid against them are more than double this figure.
Question 7: Would it be useful for your journalists to be warned by senior staff of how the Israeli state performs its propaganda or “mass consciousness activities”, as it puts it? And to question if you are participating in it, willy nilly? Surely your staff need to be warned against the “atrocity propaganda”, what in German is called “Gräuelpropaganda”, meaning a state justifying its own genocide by means of invented horror stories, usually beheading babies or mass rape, just as in the case of the Israeli “Gräuelpropaganda”. The Guardian, despite being notoriously pro-Israel, recently published a study on this broad and deep Israeli political propaganda, athttps://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/24/israel-fund-us-university-protest-gaza-antisemitism
And, on the same note, it is well-known that the New York Times, as part of Israel’s “atrocity propaganda” campaign, published a now-disgraced version of the lurid inventions of the Israeli state about “mass rape” of 7 October. The unveiling of this fraud is also perhaps worth journalists at L’Express, who handle this dossier, studying. 60 top professors of journalism challenged the NY Times on this: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/5/8/nyt_investigation
Were there not already enough real atrocities, killing and capturing of civilians on 7 October, without inventing lurid lies, as the Israeli propaganda machine did? All the lies about beheaded babies, that even President Biden more than once repeated, without any apology after he was corrected. All the lies about a foetus being ripped from a womb, a breast being cut off a woman and thrown around as if it were a ball, the baby in the oven lies, the mass rapes lies, were used by Israel (and the USA) for two reasons: to attempt to hide their military defeat of 7 October and to attempt to justify the unjustifiable: the subsequent genocide they now perpetrate. The Press needs constantly to stress this context.
We hope you will consider our letter and get back to us.
Yours sincerely,
Ragini Kistnasamy and Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
