The double standard with Israel and Palestine leaves us in moral darkness | Moustafa Bayoumi

Biden and Zelenskiy support a war they say was unprovoked' but a defenseless population will pay for media misinformation

I always dread watching US news coverage of wars, and now is no exception. After Hamas's deadly attacks in Israel and Israel's hellish bombardment of Gaza, I checked in on MSNBC. Before long, I heard one of their reporters talk about the violent history between these two nations" - as if Palestine were a country - and had to turn off the TV to get a break. Palestine is not a country. That's the whole point. Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel all live under various regimes of organized discrimination and oppression, much of which makes life nearly unlivable, and if the US media can't even frame the issue correctly, what use is there in even covering it?

It's not just laziness either. The reflexive identification with Israel, by both US media professionals and politicians, always obscures the fuller picture of what's happening between Israel and the Palestinians. On 7 October, the National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson stated that the US unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians". Every one of us must stand up and denounce the killing of every civilian, Israeli or Palestinian or otherwise. But Watson's use of the word unprovoked" is doing a lot of work here.

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian US