Disinformation has been a key part of Israel’s US-supported war on Palestinians since before October 7, 2023, but it has been amped up since. Yet as various state and media claims are proven false, it hasn’t changed US media’s respectful centering of the same sources. Israeli media actually provide a less contorted view.

Adam Johnson is a media analyst, and cohost (with Nima Shirazi) of the podcast Citations Needed. He has also written for us here at FAIR. His book is called How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, out from Pluto Press. We hear from Adam Johnson, this week on CounterSpin.

Israel is scheduled to hold general elections on October 27, with a fierce contest between incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud party, and former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the Yashar party. These will be the first elections since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.

We can’t go on; we must go on.

This isn’t an original thought. I’ve cribbed it from Samuel Beckett and twisted it for our purposes. The line comes from Beckett’s inscrutable novella The Unnamable. It’s spoken by someone curled in a fetal position, confined to a giant jar. He’s immobile. He can’t move. But he knows he must if he’s going to survive.

In 1987, the Israeli human rights attorney Felicia Langer was paying a visit to the Neve Tirza women’s prison when a client named Siham shared some disturbing news: the prisoners held there had recently been sprayed with a chemical agent that left them writhing on the floor. Langer grabbed a tissue that had been exposed to the substance – a piece of evidence, perhaps, in a future legal case. Then, on impulse, she lifted it to her face and inhaled deeply. Her hope, she wrote later, was that doing so might enable a doctor to identify the toxin.