Stefan Tarnowski is an assistant professor and anthropologist based at Cambridge University. His most recent article published by the London Review of Books is Plausible Deniability.

This article provides a detailed, withering confirmation that Palestinian journalists cannot be truly believed until, as Professor Harry Glasbeek recently put it: “trusted Western journalists bound by objectivity verified their claims”.

Tarnowski begins this article with a quote from a recent article by the leading New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman:

“No international journalists have been allowed into Gaza to independently report … But there will be a day this war ends. I don’t know when. And when it does, Gaza is going to be overwhelmed by reporters and photographers. And when that happens, it’s going to be a very bad day for Israel, and it’s going to be a very bad day for world Jewry because the scenes are going to be horrific. It’s not that we haven’t gotten glimpses and whatnot, but the real stories – also there are evidently a lot of bodies still buried under the rubble that couldn’t be excavated. And when you talk to Israeli soldiers, people who have served there, one of the things they talk about that they never forget is just the stench, because evidently there are just a lot of bodies that have not been recovered. So there is a real looming challenge to Israel when this war is over.”

While Friedman is fretting profoundly about looming terrible damage to Israel’s global reputation, Tarnowski sharply wonders: “Why must ‘we’ wait for the ‘international journalists’ to get the ‘real stories’? Haven’t we already seen more than enough – certainly more than ‘glimpses and whatnot’?”

This bold assumption of the power to suspend verification and apply final judgment draws on a pattern of globalised, collective Western adjudicating behaviour stretching back several centuries. Tarnowski juxtaposes it with the grotesque horrors created by Israel and the US (conspicuously backed by so many limpet allies) in the final paragraph of the article:

“With the military strategy of starvation siege and the gruesome veneer of humanitarian aid, Israel — in collaboration with the US and the Boston Consulting Group — has assembled a concentration camp in Gaza. From the sieges within the siege, Palestinian journalists are smeared as terrorists and assassinated by airstrike. Even when their reports reach Western media, Palestinian journalists are systematically denied the right to be credible and authoritative about the fact of the genocide they face. Palestinians must be verified. There’s an unintended truth to Thomas Friedman’s analysis. Thanks to journalists such as Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues who risked their lives, for over 600 days the genocide has been livestreamed for the world to see. And yet we are told we must wait for the experts – for lawyers to formulate judgments, for international journalists to be granted access. Or we are told to wait for the word of the perpetrators – for those same facts to be confessed by soldiers complaining about the stench of their victims from beneath the rubble they made.”

The theory and iniquitous application of plausible deniability are comprehensively explored in this excellent article.

Recommended.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.