In this study of the colonial contexts of US-backed Israeli atrocities in West Asia, Denijal Jegić analyses the victim-blaming narratives employed by media actors to justify the extension of genocide into Lebanon.
While the Israeli regime continues to commit unspeakable crimes in its genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza, the regime has in recent weeks intensified its war against Lebanon, in addition to its hostilities against Iran, Syria and Yemen. Israel’s relentless and sadistic war against Lebanon follows a similar approach as its genocide in Gaza. The Israeli regime is bombarding civilians and civilian infrastructure, spreading death and destruction in its attempted settler-colonial conquest. The Israeli effort to confront the Lebanese resistance and make at least parts of the country uninhabitable has received considerable backing from Western political elites as well as mainstream media. Just like in Gaza, corporate mainstream media has contributed to the manufacturing of consent for genocide in Lebanon.
Genocide and Settler-Colonial Conquest
The Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah intervened in the Israeli genocide in Palestine in October 2023 and had for months carried out resistance operations targeting Israeli military infrastructure, in order to engage the Israeli military in the north of Occupied Palestine and thus reduce pressure on the Palestinian people being killed under Israeli blockade. Although the manufactured colonialist narrative presents October 7 as the starting point of the war, Hamas’ operation was conducted in the context of an ongoing Israeli illegal military occupation and blockade of Palestine and over a century of Zionist colonialism. Lebanon and Israel have been in a state of war since the violent proclamation of that state during the Nakba in 1948 when “Israel” launched its first attacks against civilians in South Lebanon.
The current Israeli war on Lebanon is thus a continuation of the Zionist settler-colonial conquest. Since the proclamation of the state of Israel in 1948, the regime has invaded Lebanon on numerous occasions and terrorized the South of Lebanon during a brutal military occupation. Israeli presence in Lebanon has been characterized by war crimes, massacres, death and destruction. Israel’s current terror campaign against Lebanon represents an attempt to weaken the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, primarily because of Hezbollah’s intervention in the genocide and solidarity with the people of Gaza in the absence of any response from the international community.
Turning Beirut into Gaza
Since its unprecedented escalation of the genocide in Gaza in the last year, the Israeli regime has doubled down on its genocidal fantasies toward Lebanon, which had been repeatedly proclaimed by members of the regime in previous years and, in fact, span the history of the regime’s colonial communication. Following declarations that Israel would send Lebanon back to the Stone Age and obliterate its civilian infrastructure, the Netanyahu regime threatened in the past few months that it would turn Beirut into Gaza.
In current iterations of the genocidal discourse against Lebanon – a discourse that predates the emergence of Hezbollah – the regime is tying its threats against Lebanon’s civilian population to its attacks against the Lebanese resistance movement, which the regime and its Western backers have designated as a “terrorist” organization. The Israeli regime is carrying out a psychological war. Similar to its lies about Hamas in Gaza, the Israeli regime is fabricating accusations to terrorize Lebanon, claiming that Hezbollah was hiding weapons in civilian homes and under hospitals, as the regime continues to indiscriminately bombard people. In fact, the Zionist fantasy that Lebanese homes are used as missile factories, weapons storages, and rocket launchers is not new. The Israeli regime is currently recycling its own genocidal justifications that it has used for decades.
Israeli Terrorism and Lebanese Resistance
The Israeli regime’s targeting of Hezbollah is indeed part of its genocidal conquest. In its settler-colonial conquest, the colonizer removes everything that stands in its way. The Israeli project has never declared its borders and has included at least parts of Lebanon in Zionist visions of a Greater Israel.
Since its emergence as a popular resistance and liberation movement in the 1980s in response to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, Hezbollah has arguably become the world’s most powerful armed resistance movement. Efforts to weaken Hezbollah have been abundant. The US-backed Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006, continued economic and diplomatic pressure against Hezbollah and Lebanon from U.S. proxies in Europe and the Arab region, incitement in Saudi-backed Lebanese media, and soft power efforts through the NGO-industrial complex in Lebanon, itself characterized by potent German government influence, represent concerted efforts to influence public opinion in Lebanon against Hezbollah and to divide the Lebanese population politically within an imperialist discourse that establishes a dichotomy between alleged Western civilization, democracy, and human rights on the one side, and an Iranian-aligned Islamist movement on the other.
These efforts have failed. Not only is Hezbollah an armed resistance movement that has protected Lebanon against Israeli and Takfiri aggressions and incursions into Lebanon, it is also a democratically elected political party which, in the last parliamentary elections, gained the largest number of votes. Hezbollah is also a socio-economic organization that provides social infrastructure and welfare to a significant part of Lebanon’s population. It is part of the Lebanese people and continues to represent the resistance against colonialist-imperialist aggression against Lebanon.
Israeli assassinations of resistance leaders, including the martyrdom of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, not only failed to weaken Hezbollah, but served as a clear reiteration of the people’s continuous commitment to the resistance. Israel cannot remove the people’s connection to their land. Confronted with another unsuccessful attempt to invade Lebanon via its southern border due to the strength of Hezbollah, the Israeli regime has continued to escalate its terrorism via heightened airstrikes. Using mass forced displacement as a means of war, the regime is attempting to instill internal chaos and incite division amongst the Lebanese population, as Israel has done so often in the past. This attempt was evident in Netanyahu’s recent address to the Lebanese people in English, in which he urged Lebanese citizens to destroy Hezbollah, repeating the threat that otherwise they would experience the same fate as Gaza. In other words, the Israeli regime made it clear to the Lebanese that if they do not kill each other, Israel will kill them.
Colonial Communication
That the Israeli regime is able to expand its genocidal atrocities into Lebanon after a year of increased, relentless, unspeakable crimes in Gaza has been possible because of the absence of any intervention from the international community in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As a result, the regime continues its atrocities unhindered without having to face any consequences or accountability. Effectively, however, the Israeli regime has acted as a proxy for the United States, as the Biden-Harris administration continues to provide the military infrastructure and weapons for the genocide and to use its dominance in the world to protect Israel from any consequences. In fact, any discursively projected difference or distance between the governments of Israel and the United States in this case is fallacious and has only served U.S. political elites to spread lies that would allow its Israeli proxy to continue the genocide unhindered, while the US government lies to its citizens about tirelessly working on a ceasefire. As a result, both the victims and anyone who dares to intervene in this genocide are condemned and labeled as terrorists.
The justifications for the war against Lebanon have always been present in dominant Western political communication and disseminated by mainstream media. In fact, the Israeli regime’s colonial communication cannot be separated from the political identity of the collective West.
Manufacturing Consent for Genocide
Once again, Lebanese people are referred to as militants, the densely populated neighborhood of Dahiye is described as a military stronghold and the massacres are euphemized into ‘targeted killings’. The Israeli PR campaign around the events of October 7 has entailed atrocity propaganda, accusing Hamas and Palestinians of beheading babies and raping settlers. Neither the fact that these fantasies were exposed as lies, nor the fact that it was actually Israel that killed thousands of Palestinian babies and enforced systematic rape of Palestinians in Gaza seemed to matter in the dominant discourse. Until today, US presidential candidate Kamala Harris keeps repeating the same lies during her electoral campaign.
Dominant media has played a significant role in disseminating disinformation and, at times, outright lies in favor of the Israeli regime. Israeli claims are often presented as information and not verified, while Palestinian voices are either obscured or treated with suspicion. At times, the framing and word choice of Western media outlets create mysteries in order to obscure Israeli crimes when those facts are clearly visible.
Language
Even after over a year of an unspeakable genocide in Gaza that followed more than seven decades of colonial violence, mainstream media tend to find euphemisms to describe the situation. Terms such as ‘conflict’ or even ‘cycle of violence’ have long helped downplay the extent of Israeli violence and imply a parity of power between the aggressor and the victim. Categorizations such as ‘Israel-Hamas war’ or ‘Israel-Hezbollah conflict’ fail to identify the imbalance in power relations and the colonial and imperialist origins of the violence. Effectively, the war is waged by a first-world heavily militarized and developed nuclear power against the people native to the region. Similarly, the origin of the aggression is often obscured through selective use of words and the passive voice, implying that Lebanese and Palestinians simply ‘die’ due to an ‘escalation’ rather than being killed in a genocide. Some coverage focuses on the humanitarian crisis without contextualizing it as a consequence of the Israeli aggression, thus presenting human suffering as not related to the colonial war. At times, people are described as fleeing their homes due to fighting rather than being forcibly expelled by Israeli violence.
Bias through omission of information
A widespread method, particularly in headlines, is the creation of bias through the omission of information. Media content on attacks carried out by the Israeli regime often fail to identify the perpetrator. On some occasions, headlines may be misleading even if the context, cause, and consequence appear clear. When the Israeli regime bombed a densely populated civilian area in Beirut and massacred civilians, the BBC wrote the headline: “Beirut strikes: Rescue workers search for signs of missing under rubble”. CNN led with “Strikes hit central Beirut: CNN team on the ground.” One has to wonder what kind of strikes these are and where they came from? Given that many audiences only read headlines or skim through the teaser of a news article, these representations hide the perpetrator and even the nature of these strikes from the reader’s perception.
Blaming the victims
Cause and consequence are often obscured or even reversed. An episodic framing of a news story may fail to provide crucial information about how a certain event started. As a result, victims and aggressor may be identified as two equal sides or even reversed. Israeli attacks are thus at times presented as responses or retaliation to attacks by Hezbollah or Hamas, without identifying the Israeli regime as the occupying force or aggressor. In the particular case of Lebanon, the significant differentiation that Hezbollah has primarily targeted military infrastructure in response to Israel’s targeting of civilians is often absent.
The actions or reactions of Lebanese people are sometimes framed as the trigger for Israeli aggression. Following Netanyahu’s speech, in which he warned the Lebanese population that, if they did not destroy Hezbollah, they will experience the same fate as Gaza, the BBC wrote “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.” In this case, Netanyahu’s genocidal threat is euphemized into an ‘appeal’ with the outlet implying that Lebanese were expected to react. In line with colonial narratives, such phrasing implies that if the Lebanese people had only acted differently, they may not be experiencing this violence.
Similarly, Iran’s military operation against Israel on October 1 was framed as an escalation. Throughout the year of genocide in Gaza and numerous Israeli assassinations of resistance leaders, including the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, in addition to ongoing Israeli provocations, Iran has showed patience and restraint. When it responded, it was accused of escalating and attacking. However, Israel’s attempted attack on Iran on October 26 was again presented as a ‘retaliatory.’
Dehumanization
Targets of US-Israeli aggression are regularly dehumanized in dominant media through particular categories and labels that aim to deem them legitimate targets for military violence. The Dahiye (Suburb) of Beirut and other areas of the country with a Shia majority population, which have been relentlessly bombarded by the Israeli regime, are more often than not referred to as a “Hezbollah stronghold”, a term that evokes a military presence and may thus be understood by unfamiliar audiences as a military target. Channel 4, for example, presented the headline “Israel carries out ‘targeted strikes’ on Hezbollah stronghold.” LeMonde referred to the Bakaa as “Hezbollah’s historic stronghold” in one headline and claimed that “Israel unleashed a wave of air strikes on Hezbollah’s southern Beirut stronghold’ in another. According to the Guardian. “Israel launches intense attacks on Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut’s south” These are mere examples of a pattern that has long been present before the current war.
Dahiye is a very densely populated area with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. Many residential buildings include commercial stores and public services on the first floor. The Israeli bombardment of Dahiye has resulted in massacres and forced displacement of civilians and large destruction of civilian infrastructure. In fact, during its 2006 war on Lebanon, the Israeli regime coined the ‘Dahiye Doctrine’, a military strategy aimed at inflicting maximum damage to civilian infrastructure. Referring to this large-scale terror against civilians as a targeted strike on a stronghold downplays and potentially justifies the Israeli crimes.
Labeling
Civilian infrastructure is also presented as a legitimate target when referred to as ‘Hezbollah-linked’. Just like the characterization ‘Hamas-controlled’ was used in Gaza to cast doubt on Palestinian voices, including the reported death toll, the term ‘Hezbollah-linked’ has served to imply a connection to the armed group that would implicitly favor the Israeli narrative. Reporting on one of the numerous attacks on Lebanon’s medical infrastructure, Channel 4 presented the headline “Nine killed in Israeli strike on Hezbollah-linked medical centre.” More than a hundred healthcare workers have already been killed and dozens of healthcare centers were closed. Similarly, when the Israeli regime launched its attacks on the charity organization Al-Qard al-Hassan, headlines such as France24’s “Why Israel is attacking Hezbollah-linked Islamic finance institution Al-Qard al-Hassan” under the category “explainer” emerged, suggesting that there is a link to Hezbollah which implicitly justifies its targeting, with news agencies and many mainstream media outlets providing an abundance of similar “explainer” pieces suggesting there is a reason why the charity had to be bombarded. Hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon have received financial support through this charity, particularly in recent years due to the ongoing economic crisis in Lebanon and collapse of the currency. Israel’s attack against this institution is an attempt to economically destroy the livelihoods of regular people. These crucial facts go missing in such a framing.
Such labels also have the effect of casting doubt on sources, when used to refer to testimonies or official information. Oftentimes, governmental institutions are described as ‘Hamas-controlled’ or ‘Hezbollah-linked’, while at the same time Israeli and US sources may enjoy more legitimacy in Western media. Phrases such as “Israel says” or “Israeli military says” are, in fact, often parts of actual headlines, presenting Israeli narratives as information.
Hezbollah as the common enemy, terrorist and Iranian “proxy”
These labels are reminiscent of the general labeling of Hezbollah in Western political and media discourse as “Iranian-backed” or an alleged “Iranian proxy” which has been widely and uncritically used for years to describe not only Hezbollah, but also any other forms of armed resistance against US aggressions in the region. Alleged explainers, analysis, and “expert” opinions on “Iranian proxies” have been omnipresent in Western media, with headlines such as “What to Know About the Axis of Resistance, the Iran-backed Militia Network” by the New York Times.
Unlike the transactional relationship the United States enjoys with its proxies, Hezbollah’s connection to Iran is not one of a proxy and sponsor, but rather represents a close alliance based on shared values, histories and goals. Interestingly, the Israeli regime is usually not referred to as a “US proxy” or “US-backed militia”, although this characterization would indeed be accurate.
The framing of Hezbollah as an Iranian agent serves not only to undermine its indigenous roots and legitimacy in Lebanon, but also to delegitimize its resistance against Israel. This framing also portrays Hezbollah as a threat to Western civilization, in exploiting long present anti-Iranian hatred and anti-Shia sectarianism peddled by the Israeli regime and its Western and Arab allies. For over four decades Iran has been conceptualized as the common enemy in dominant Western media discourse, in accordance with the US government’s targeting of Iran and relentless efforts at regime change. The designation of Hezbollah as a ‘terrorist organization’ by the United States and its proxies has further facilitated a criminalization and demonization of the movement to an extent that it is possible in Western discourses to make any claims about Hezbollah and Iran without evidence. The legal designation as a ‘terrorist organization’ has provided the United States and Israel with a useful pretext to easily justify their attacks against Lebanese civilian infrastructure as a fight against ‘terrorism’.
Similar to the ‘Iranian-backed’ label, sectarian language is often adopted. Hezbollah is thus regularly referred to as a distinctively “Shia militia”, and while Hezbollah is in fact an Islamic resistance movement, the characterization of “Shia” has often been used in mainstream Western, Arab, and Israeli discourse to exploit present anti-Shiite discrimination. More recently, terms such as “Shia villages” and “Shia houses” have been used in the Israeli discourse, in attempts to further dehumanize the Muslim Shia population and present them as legitimate targets. The sectarianism is also in line with broader colonial ambitions to divide the population and incite internal strife.
In addition to blaming the victims, some media outlets have outright mocked or celebrated the Israeli attacks. Following the Israeli terrorist attack through manipulation of pagers in Lebanon the New York Post, for instance, wrote on their front page “Beep Beep Boom. 2,800 Hezbollah terrorists hit by exploding pager plot.” In a dystopian scenario, on two consecutive days in September, thousands of communication devices exploded simultaneously throughout Lebanon, killing dozens and injuring thousands of people. One can only assume that, had such an attack occurred in Israel or elsewhere in the West, it would have triggered outrage, shock, and anger rather than ridicule in Western media.
Structural Questions of Ethics and Racism
Today’s violent media representation did not emerge in a vacuum, nor do the illustrative examples cited in this paper nearly provide a comprehensive overview of the manifold dimensions of the manufacturing of consent for genocide. In their reporting on Israeli violence in Lebanon, dominant mainstream media continue to replicate some of the same phrases that have been used for decades to downplay Israeli aggressions and to obscure clear and simple facts by turning them into allegedly complex issues.
This manufacturing of consent for genocide is possible due to histories of Orientalism deeply embedded in the Western lens that have facilitated the dissemination of different forms of racist speech. Within this context, dominant mainstream media coverage of Lebanon and Palestine is also marked by an anti-indigenous bias, which is evident above all in the complete absence of any reference to the colonial structures and power relations. This absence in itself has created the conditions for coverage that is implicitly or outright in support of the colonizer. As a result, readers are often presented with mysterious strikes, humanitarian crises and cycles of violence with the victims more often than not blamed for the terror that is being inflicted on them. The bias in dominant Western mainstream media is further impacted by the broader political economy of the media, the political affiliations and allegiance of media outlets as well as internal editorial policies and style guides which may instruct journalistic practice but are not necessarily transparently communicated with the broader public.
As much of the dominant western mainstream media continues to disseminate narratives in line with the US State Department and lies in favor of the Israeli regime, even at times when the Israeli regime is transparent about its genocidal intent, questions of ethics and accountability remain. Media should function as the fourth estate and ideally hold power to account rather than to work on its behalf and as its proxy. The corruption of Western media, albeit not new, is clearly highlighted in the manufacturing of consent for the genocidal violence currently inflicted against the Palestinian and Lebanese people.
Denijal Jegić is Assistant Professor of Communication at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut, where he teaches Communication and Multimedia Journalism. His multidisciplinary research focuses on critical theory, media representations, media activism, historiography of communication, colonialism and resistance, and lies at the intersection of media, literature, and cultural studies.
