Palestine and the English Language (Spring 2024)

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness,” George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” In our time, things are no better. You can find ample examples of such linguistic contortions in our nation’s most widely read newspaper: here the indefensible is finding good cover. Here the abominable actions of the Israeli military are obscured, softened, and given tacit support.

New York Times headlines about Israel’s brutal invasion of Gaza have conjured a grammatical world of passive subjects without active agents, a moral world of victims without perpetrators. “They Returned to Northern Gaza, Only to Be Ordered to Evacuate Again,” we read on June 27. “Scores Killed in Central Gaza After Israeli Strikes,” we read on June 8. “With Schools in Ruins, Education in Gaza Will Be Hobbled for Years, we read on May 6. Even the Times’s honorably intentioned article profiling 36 of the more than 40,000 Gazans killed since October 7 had this for a title: “Lives Ended in Gaza.” These headlines assiduously evade that most basic of English sentence structures: Subject, Verb, Object. This makes for “question-begging” political language at its finest. Who is ordering the evacuations? Who is doing the killing? Who is hobbling education? Who is ending lives? If the answers are obvious, the agent is obfuscated, vaguely intimated but unseen thanks to the passive voice.

There are exceptions. “Debris From Destruction Adds to Health Crisis in Gaza,” we read in June. “Strikes Flatten Mosque in Rafah in Southern Gaza,” we read back in February. There we have it: Subject, Verb, Object. Still, something is off. There is padding, blurring, omission. The perpetrators appear, but in disguise—as inanimate things. In the first case, the Times mystically attributes agency to “debris” itself, not its author, the IDF. (It would seem that “Israel is Creating a Health Crisis in Gaza” is insufficiently roundabout, is too crassly clear.) In the second case, the agent is “strikes.” (Why not tell us who did the striking? Why not simply print, as Al Jazeera did about another Israeli attack, “Israel bombs mosque”?) The Times, by the way, performed no such acrobatics months ago, when it came to describing the efforts of desperate Gazans, who are currently facing starvation, to access food: “Amid Food Shortages, People in Gaza Are Ambushing Aid Convoys,” we at last read in direct, unsophisticated English.

The passive voice and the attribution of agency to inanimate things are not the only tools at the Times’s disposal. There is also the conjunction “as,” which the paper of record has used to great effect, as the rhetorical equivalent of a smokescreen. “Israel Pushes Into Rafah as Displaced Palestinians Search for Safety,” we were told on May 28. (We were not told: “Israel Displaces Palestinians.”) Perhaps the most mystifying headline of all appeared above a February 29 article about Israeli troops firing on Gazan civilians: “As Hungry Gazans Crowd an Aid Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll.” “As” here creates an impression of incidental simultaneity, of coincidence—the “Israeli Gunshots” are just hanging there, outside the chain of cause and effect, a noun in want of a verb. The body of the article is equally oblique. We learned that “Israeli forces opened fire on Thursday as a crowd gathered,” not that “Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd.” The sentence smudges the relationship between those doing the shooting and those being shot at; it thus scrupulously muddles causality.

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The Times’s bias was visible from the very beginning of the conflict. At the start of this year, The Intercept reported that between October 7 and November 25, as the Palestinian death toll soared, mentions of Palestinians in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times fell. Further, “highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre,’ and ‘horrific,’” The Intercept found, “were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around.”

In fact, the Times’s pro-Israel slant long predates October 7. Holly Jackson, a doctoral student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Computer Scientist, recently conducted a computational analysis of over 33,000 Times articles published during the First and Second Palestinian Intifadas (1987–1993 and 2000-2005, respectively). Jackson’s results, published this year in the peer-reviewed journal Media, War & Conflict, are decisive: “anti-Palestinian bias persisted disproportionately in the NYT during both periods and, in fact, worsened from the First Intifada to the Second.”

The Times, of course, is not alone. On June 30, The Washington Post announced that “Gaza’s remaining hospitals will stop working in two days.” Five days before, The Wall Street Journal declared, “Gaza’s Hunger Crisis Deepens in the South.” These papers, too, do a good job of managing readers’ attention — of detaching Gazans’ suffering from the Israeli military that is causing it.

Such pro-Israel bias, which The New Republic also covered in March of 2023, is consequential. It is particularly consequential when it manifests in newspaper headlines, past which roughly 60% of Americans do not read. Most links shared on social media are never clicked. Media shapes public opinion, and headlines are doing the shaping.

Whether causes are withheld or stated clearly, whether actors are omitted or included, whether the perpetrator is named or unnamed—these may be decisive factors. They may be the difference, for a reader, between numb, inert dismay at “Lives Ended” and effectual opposition to the political forces—Israel and the United States, which continues to supply billions in military aid to Israel—that are directly or indirectly responsible for ending those Palestinian lives.