( Middle East Monitor ) – Israel’s allies worldwide are desperately scrambling to help Tel Aviv re-establish a convincing narrative, not only concerning the Gaza genocide, but the entire legacy of Israeli colonialism in Palestine and the Middle East.
The perfect little story, built on myths and outright fabrications — that of a small nation fighting for survival amid ‘hordes of Arabs and Muslims’ — is rapidly collapsing. It was a lie from the start, but the Gaza genocide has made it utterly indefensible.
The harrowing details of the Israeli genocide in Gaza were more than enough for people globally to fundamentally question the Zionist narrative, particularly the racist Western trope of the ‘villa in the Jungle’ used by Israel to describe its existence among the colonised population.
Not only have people across the globe, but even Americans have decisively turned against Israel. What began as an alarming trend — from the Israeli viewpoint, of course — is now the irrefutable new reality. National polls indicate that support for Palestinians among US adults has risen, with 33 per cent now saying they sympathise more with the Palestinians — the highest reading so far and an increase of six percentage points from last year.
Even the once unshakeable pro-Israeli majority among Republicans is softening in favour of Palestinians, with 35 per cent of Republicans favouring an independent Palestinian state, a significant increase from 27 per cent in 2024, demonstrating a clear shift in a segment of the Republican base.
The Israeli government is now fighting with every resource at its disposal to dominate the information war. It is focused on injecting calculated Israeli falsehoods into the discourse and aggressively blocking the Palestinian viewpoint.
Latest reports of an Israeli campaign to win social media by granting millions of dollars to TikTok and other social media influencers is only a fraction of a massive, coordinated campaign.
The war is multifrontal. On 4 November, news reports revealed that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales personally intervened to block editing access to the page dedicated to the Gaza Genocide. He claimed that the page fails to meet the company’s “high standards” and “needs immediate attention.” According to Wales, that specific page requires a “neutral approach” — meaning, in practice, that blatant censorship is required to prevent the genocide from being accurately described as the “ongoing intentional and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people.”
Israel has long been obsessed with controlling the narrative on Wikipedia, a strategy predating the current Gaza genocide. Reports dating back to 2010 confirm that Israeli groups established specific training courses in ‘Zionist editing’ for Wikipedia editors, with the explicit goal of injecting state-aligned content and shaping key historical and political entries.
The censorship campaign against Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices is as old as the media itself. From the very start, mainstream media in the West has been structurally aligned with corporate agendas that are naturally allied with money and power; thus, the prominence of the Israeli view and the near-complete erasure of the Palestinian perspective.
Years ago, however, Israel began realising the existential danger of digital media, particularly the open spaces in social media that allowed ordinary individuals to become independent content creators. The censorship, however, took an ugly and pervasive turn during the genocide, where even the use of words like ‘Gaza’, ‘Palestine’, let alone ‘genocide’, would result in shadowbanning or outright closure of accounts.
In fact, very recently, YouTube, which was previously known for being less severe in censoring pro-Palestinian voices than META, shut down the accounts of three major Palestinian human rights organizations (Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights), erasing more than 700 videos of crucial footage documenting Israeli violations of international law.
Sadly, though not surprisingly, not a single mainstream social media platform is innocent of censoring any criticism of Israel. Thus, it becomes a daily practice that references to Palestine, the Gaza genocide, and the like must be written in coded language, where, for example, the Palestinian flag would be replaced by an image of a watermelon.
Many pro-Palestine activists are now highlighting the direct complicity of Western media, especially in the UK, in attempting to whitewash the rape accusations against Israeli soldiers. Instead of using the unequivocal word ‘rape’, mainstream outlets refer to the horrific Sde Teiman episodes merely as ‘abuses’. While Israeli politicians and other war criminals are openly celebrating the so-called ‘abuses’ and the rapists as national heroes, mainstream British and French media are still refusing to accept that the widespread torture, rape, and mistreatment of Palestinians is part of a centralised, systemic agenda, not mere individual ‘abuses’.
Compare this to the wall-to-wall, sensationalised coverage of alleged ‘mass rape’ by Palestinians in southern Israel on 7 October — despite the fact that no independent investigation was ever conducted, and that the claims were made by the Israeli army without credible evidence.
This is not mere bias and hypocrisy, however, but direct complicity, as stated by the Gaza Tribunal’s final statement on 26 October 2025. “The Jury finds a range of non-state actors to be complicit in genocide,” the verdict read, including “biased media reporting in the west on Palestine and under-reporting of Israeli crimes”.
The final reckoning unfolds in the information warzone. The coming months and years mark the most critical fight for truth in the conflict’s history. Israel, relying on censorship, intimidation, and manufactured consent, will use every method to secure a victory. For Palestinians and all who champion justice, this battle for history is as consequential as the genocide itself. Israel must not be allowed to sanitize its image, because polishing genocide guarantees its repetition.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.
Via Middle East Monitor )
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