The crimes of the apartheid State of Israel would shame all the devils in hell

That Israel is an apartheid state engaged in the systematic and structural oppression of the Palestinian people is an objective fact. As is the illegality of the occupation of the West Bank. As is the continuing establishment and expansion of settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And as is the siege of Gaza, constituting as it does the collective punishment of the Strip’s 2.3 million inhabitants.

Yet to go by the coverage in the West of the latest round of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, you might be inclined to believe that it is Israel not Palestine under occupation and siege. That it’s the people of Israel not Palestine living under a system of sustained structural oppression. That there are over 4000 Israelis in Palestinian jails instead of the other way round. And that it’s the Palestinians who have dispossessed the people of Israel rather than vice versa.

Here Malcolm X hovers into view with the biting observation that “If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the people being oppressed, and loving the people doing the oppressing.”

When this particular morsel of wisdom is applied to the way the generational Israel-Palestine question is treated in the West, we are left in no doubt that what passes for news coverage is in truth…