Israeli journalists join the live-streamed genocide
A mainstream Israeli journalist recently blew up a house in Lebanon as part of a news report while embedded with the military. The broadcast shows how mainstream genocidal activity has become in Israeli society.
The level of militant lust for revenge in Israeli society is uncharted these days. The latest example came on Friday, when Israeli Channel 12 journalist Danny Kushmaro released a 27-minute report on Israel’s destruction in southern Lebanon. The title of the presentation was “This is not the Third Lebanon War, it is the last one.”
Channel 12 is the most-watched commercial channel, it’s considered centrist and mainstream. In the report, Kushmaro is embedded with Golani infantry soldiers riding into a village in southern Lebanon, called Ayta Al-Sha’b. The village is almost entirely razed to the ground, but there are still some buildings left. Kushmaro’s report is replete with vitriol, where he repeatedly refers to “these evil people”, whom he chides for “hating Israel”.
At the end of the story, Kushmaro is offered the task of pressing a button to denonate a building. “A moment before we leave, we have one mission left,” Kushmaro narrates. The officer is seen telling him of a house nearby, where he claims that “there is direct line of sight to Dovev and Meron – from here they shoot.” Kushmaro presses the button and the house explodes, serving as the climax of the whole report. Kushmaro signs off with a close-up where he says “Don’t mess with the Jews.”
Twitter/X user B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) has prepared an 8-minute cut version providing essential scenes from the report, with English subtitles.
Dahiya redux
In this report, Kushmaro is literally promoting the notorious “Dahiya doctrine,” an Israeli military doctrine promoting the intentional large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure which was named after the Lebanese neighborhood in southern Beirut following its destruction by Israeli forces in 2006. The Dahiya Doctrine was coined by former centrist Minister Gadi Eisenkot, when he was Chief of Northern Command in 2008. Eisenkot outlined “what will happen” to any enemy that dares attack Israel:
“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,” Eisenkot declared in Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot in March 2008. “We will apply disproportionate force on [the village] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.”
The latter words are repeated almost verbatim in the report. The Channel 12 report’s subtitle reads, “This is not a village, it’s a military base,” referring to Ayta Al-Sha’b. These words are attributed to the Golani brigade commander in the subtitle, but in the report itself, it is Kushmaro himself who shares this formulation.
A reflection of the Israeli center
This is really unbelievable on so many levels. First, in this report we are essentially seeing here the same phenomena that the world has watched in countless filmsIsraeli soldiers have published of themselves live-streaming their own genocidal acts to the world, posing and boasting as they blow up entire residential blocks in Gaza. But now, we are seeing a journalist do it, as part of his reporting. He is literally and actively participating in an armed attack, as a journalist.
Second, Israel is constantly engaged in the attempt to tarnish Palestinian journalists and associate them with armed forces or resistance organizations – as it has recently done in the past week with six Al-Jazeera journalists. The campaign is meant to legitimize Israel’s systematic targeting of them, whereby now at least 180 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7 last year – that’s more than double the number of journalists killed in World War II (69), or the Vietnam War (63). That pattern is continuing in Lebanon.
But every accusation is a confession—and Danny Kushmaro is now in the lead, boasting of being a journalist who is actually an active combatant, engaging in an act that is very possibly a war crime in itself, and filming himself doing so! Regardless of the legality issue, Kushmaro is now openly blurring the distinction between the protected status of a journalist and that of a combatant.
Kushmaro even received vehement criticism from the right. Shai Goldstein, from the rightwing channel 14 program “Fathi and Shai,” complained that “a journalist is not supposed to take an active part in the fighting. A journalist is a civilian. It’s not in order and it’s not legal. Whoever permits a citizen to activate explosive devices during combat should stand military trial. The boundaries have been completely blurred. Order must be re-established.”
But Goldstein is not a very good example of such legality and order. He is the one who hosted one of the gang rapists of the Sde Teiman case on his show two months ago, almost drooled over him, and said passionately: “I think that if I was there and I had the chance, I would go all out on these people.”
One could assume that if Goldstein had been given the same position as Kushmaro, he would probably have found it hard to resist pressing that button.
Kushmaro is a representation of where the Israeli center is. The Dahiya doctrine is now the Israeli zeitgeist.
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