The following is the start of Assal Rad's new book, Don't Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide.
I've so far read a tenth of the book, which was released on Tuesday. It's well written. Rad's words and style reminds me dearly of how Noam Chomsky writes; Rad picks up much from the Edward S. Herman/Chomsky book Manufacturing Consent.
The rest of this post is the start of Rad's book.
In May 2021, I was reading the news on my phone when a headline stopped me, not because it shocked me, but because it carried the familiar tone that Western media outlets have perfected in constructing their narrative of Palestine. The article was about Palestinians being forced out of their homes in East Jerusalem. I remember pausing, then rereading the headline and subhead to take in the careful linguistic choices and the essential information that was missing. As a historian of the region, I was not surprised to see the way the media reflected the official account of their country’s foreign policy positions. The headline used the word “evictions,” which suggested paperwork, municipal procedure, and real estate disputes. It did not say that East Jerusalem is recognized under international law as occupied Palestinian territory and that these expulsions were just another episode in a long history of forced displacement and land theft. This history was not denied outright, but it was laundered to erase Israeli violence and Palestinian victimhood. The language was softened enough to dull its meaning, referring to “contested neighborhoods” instead of “occupation,” saying “to remove” rather than “to ethnically cleanse.” These word choices were no accident. I found myself mentally rewriting it, inserting the missing context, restoring the agency and violation that had been carefully edited out. What would happen, I wondered, if the headline actually said what was happening? If it distinguished the occupier and the occupied? So, I decided to make those changes. I took a screenshot, crossed out the problematic language, made my edits in red, and posted it. I did not expect a strong reaction. But as the post gained traction and the image spread, I realized it could do more than correct headlines. It offered a way to expose how reality itself had been slanted to fit our political ecosystem.
This work only became more pertinent as the genocide in Gaza unfolded starting in October 2023. Previous studies have examined how so-called papers of record like The New York Times have long distorted stories about the Palestinian struggle to serve the policy objectives of the U.S. and Israeli governments. However, because the Gaza Genocide was live-streamed to our devices, the gap between reality and its media representation became undeniable. The same euphemisms and omissions I had once corrected with some public engagement were now visible to anyone comparing what they were watching in real time with what they were reading in the news. The scale of Israel’s violence in Gaza laid bare the hypocrisies of the Western world and the anti-Palestinian bias that drives public discourse in a manner that was undeniable.
For years, mainstream media have helped normalize Israeli occupation and cruelty against Palestinians, with carefully chosen language, to construct a narrative that suited Israeli talking points and the Western governments that repeated them. By adopting frameworks that obscure Israel’s decades-long military occupation, its blockade of Gaza, and its apartheid policies, Western media normalized war crimes and helped maintain the illusion of Israel’s perpetual victimhood. Worse still, they used euphemistic language and misleading narratives to dilute public understanding of international law and immunize Israel from accountability in order to justify the worst crime against humanity: genocide.
I spent more than two years tracking, documenting, and analyzing Western media’s coverage of the genocide in Gaza. My goal was not to nitpick headlines or play semantic games. It is to show how language is used as a weapon to obscure and sanitize. When indiscriminate bombing is called “targeted strikes,” a policy of starvation is described as a “humanitarian challenge,” and genocide is reframed as “self-defense,” these linguistic choices are not accidental. They are political decisions that determine whose lives count and whose deaths are permissible.
Headlines matter because people often do not read beyond them. People regularly consume headlines, social media posts, push notifications, and news sound bites passively while scrolling on their phones or seeing a news ticker in the background of their daily lives. This everyday intake then becomes the language entrenched in the public mind. Most people do not follow specific events closely or have expertise, and articles are often behind a paywall. Thus, what is passively consumed from the news media, combined with popular culture and political discourse, is crucial in influencing public opinion. The words chosen in those headlines—especially in outlets seen as objective or authoritative—affect how the public understands global events. That polling among Americans often shows a gap between the reality on the ground and their knowledge of the facts speaks to the way information is presented to them.
If the truth were plainly stated—that a U.S.-backed ally is carrying out mass atrocities against a besieged civilian population—it might provoke outrage, demands for accountability, and a crisis of legitimacy for U.S. foreign policy. But if the story is blurred—if Israel is abstracted, Palestinians are dehumanized, and a war crime like starvation is rendered as an unfortunate emergency of “malnutrition”—then the machinery of consent can continue to function.