Since 7 October 2023, a significant share of French audiovisual media coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza, and subsequently of the war in Lebanon, has revealed an inability to inform accurately, as well as a deeper crisis in the categories through which the Middle East is rendered intelligible.
What has prevailed across a majority of television channels is therefore not merely an editorial political bias, a compassion asymmetry, or a hierarchy of urgencies. It is a genuine reconfiguration of the gaze. The Israeli narrative of the war, together with its military terminology, was adopted and then gradually detached from history, the social sciences, and international law.
From that moment on, the societies targeted by the “Israeli operations” ceased to appear as inhabited worlds, shaped by social relations, memories, institutions, aspirations, and by individual as well as collective experiences. They became spaces of “surgical” intervention, theatres of manoeuvre, maps saturated with objectives and risks. The consequence of such a shift was decisive: by substituting a cold commentary for politics, this coverage did not merely impoverish analysis; it also helped render acceptable extreme forms of violence and criminality.
Biased Terminology
One of the symptoms of this drift lies in the place accorded to military technology. Continuous news channels, but also some debate programmes, devoted extensive attention to Israeli intelligence capacities, surveillance systems, the “precision” of strikes, the supposed effectiveness of “targeted killings,” the quality of interceptions, and the ingenuity of clandestine operations.
This fascinated focus was far from innocuous. It produced a decentring effect: rather than apprehending war through its human consequences, it captured certain of its episodes through the means by which they were carried out. The gaze became fixed on instruments, on screens, on aerial images, on technical performances. Destruction itself came to be perceived as the outcome of a controlled operation, rather than as a possible war crime and a social catastrophe.
The detour through technique established both moral and intellectual distance. It made it possible to speak for long minutes about a “strike” without ever mentioning the bodies it tears apart, the families it scatters, the homes it pulverises, the schools and hospitals it puts out of use.
Corresponding to this technicist aestheticisation is a mutation of language. One of the most striking characteristics of audiovisual coverage has been the almost immediate adoption of the vocabulary produced by the Israeli military apparatus. Terms such as “elimination,” “neutralisation,” “target,” “cleansing,” “buffer zone,” “terrorist stronghold,” and “collateral damage” circulated with remarkable ease, as though they belonged to an ordinary descriptive register. Yet this lexicon is far from innocent. It does not merely inform about the war; it reorganises its perception. It substitutes outcomes for deaths, operational sectors for neighbourhoods in ruins. It shifts attention away from Palestinian and Lebanese victims toward the supposed rationality of Israeli armed action. Such a language euphemises the atrocious, inscribes it within a horizon of necessity, and attenuates its moral significance.
More than that, it obscures its political and legal qualification. Once residential buildings become “targets,” civilians who are killed become “human shields,” and ravaged territories become “secured zones,” war ceases to appear as a question of responsibility and presents itself instead as a problem of management. This language does not simply describe reality; it reformulates it in such a way as to make it bearable. And the regular presence of the French-speaking spokesperson of the Israeli army on television sets or in news bulletins, like that of the Israeli ambassador in Paris, often alone and without contradiction, offered direct access to Israeli propaganda, allowing it to unfold and address viewers freely.
Between Dehumanisation and Invisibilisation
It is within this discursive space that dehumanisation takes place. Yet the meaning of the term must first be clarified. To dehumanise is not merely to minimise suffering or to lack empathy. It is a process through which individuals and groups are stripped of the attributes that inscribe them within the shared horizon of human equality. To dehumanise is to replace the person with a category, and biography with a number. It is to ensure that certain victims, Israeli victims, are narrated through their stories, their ties, their names and faces, their interrupted projects, while others, Palestinian or Lebanese victims, are dissolved into tallies, statistical controversies, or automatic suspicions. Some lives spontaneously call forth mourning and solidarity; others must first prove that they deserve to be recognised as fully human. Dehumanisation constitutes a central racist mechanism in situations of extreme violence. For it makes possible what, without it, would appear unbearable. It prepares minds to accept that entire populations may be bombed, displaced, starved, or treated as a logistical problem.
This phenomenon is also measurable through the words that are missing. The problem with dominant audiovisual coverage lies not only in the terms it employs, but also in those it excludes, delays, or surrounds with “disproportionate” precautions. Notions such as occupation, colonisation, blockade, impunity, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, war crime, crime against humanity, and the crime of genocide have too often been treated as suspect formulations, immediately relegated to the realm of militancy, even though they are прежде всего historical, legal, and analytical frameworks of indispensable importance. A language that renounces naming occupation makes it impossible to understand the structure of domination. A language that remains silent about colonisation erases the continuity of territorial dispossession. A language that dismisses in advance any discussion of apartheid forbids itself from thinking through the institutional dimension of discrimination and violence. As for the denial of Israeli crimes, especially the crime of genocide, although invoked by the vast majority of international organisations, jurists, and experts on the subject, it constitutes the real pro-Israeli militancy adopted by certain media outlets in their declared determination to deny or relativise Israel’s crimes. For what is not named remains difficult to think, and what remains difficult to think becomes easier to tolerate.
The Retreat of the Social Sciences
This reduction of the available vocabulary also forms part of a broader context: the retreat of the social sciences from the media sphere. Where one would expect illuminating analyses of state configurations, historical trajectories, political economies and collective memories, forms of mobilisation, and the structures or social effects of conflict, what too often unfolds instead is an expertise of flows: rapid, interchangeable, inclined toward simplificatory and approximate diagnoses. It allows a lazy culturalism to flourish, presenting the Middle East as a space naturally destined for violence, shaped by irrational passions or imprisoned in immemorial hatreds. Such a reading is not merely impoverished; it is ideologically functional. It dispenses with the need to examine policies of occupation, the differentiated effects of war, and the concrete forms of impunity. It replaces history with essence, domination with culture, and political structures with identities presumed to be closed in upon themselves.
Since 7 October 2023, this culturalist tendency has converged with a more general rightward shift in French public debate. The security framing has imposed itself all the more forcefully insofar as the armed actors opposed to Israel could easily be subsumed under the label of terrorism. The mere fact that these organisations were Islamist or armed was enough, in a large part of the commentary, to extend to the entirety of Palestinian and Lebanese territories and populations a reading in which the Israeli war appeared above all as a legitimate response to a threat. Within this logic, the Israeli destruction of hospitals, schools, bridges, power plants, and places of worship, the killing of doctors, teachers, and journalists, the forced displacement of populations, the policy of starvation, the blockade preventing the passage of medicines and children’s food, the torture of prisoners, and the repeated violations of international law were relegated to the background. The term terrorism was thus transformed into a general operator of justification. It contaminated the way Gaza and southern Lebanon were viewed, authorising a reading in which society disappears behind “the barbaric enemy,” and in which the civilian population is insensibly absorbed into an environment deemed hostile.
The case of Lebanon is particularly revealing of the ravages of this schema. For although the Palestinians, especially in Gaza, have for decades endured a culturalism and dehumanisation already manifest during previous wars, in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, the Lebanese could believe themselves spared, given the memory of a treatment regarded as comparatively objective in the French media until 2006. To reduce the devastating Israeli war, which caused more than 2,000 deaths, 7,000 injuries, and more than one million displaced persons, to “an Israeli response to Hezbollah terrorism” is to erase almost everything that constitutes the specificity of the situation. And to regard Hezbollah exclusively as a terrorist movement justifying the Israeli “operation” makes it impossible to grasp what makes it an actor rooted in a particular history, linked to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, which began in 1978, that is, five years before Hezbollah’s creation, to forms of social organisation, to a militant base, to internal confessional balances of power, to an organic relationship with Iran, to a durable economic collapse and a profound crisis of the Lebanese state, and to memories of war that remain vivid. To understand this is to be able to think about Lebanon otherwise than as an empty theatre offered up to Israeli narratives.
Censorship and Self-Censorship
To all this must be added the question of censorship, understood in a broad sense. It is not merely a matter of explicit prohibitions or spectacular institutional decisions. Censorship in relation to Israel, the genocide in Gaza, and the officially announced destruction of dozens of Lebanese towns and villages also operates through atmosphere, diffuse intimidation, preventive delegitimation, and the threatening instrumentalisation of the struggle against antisemitism. Certain words become costly; certain solidarities become forbidden. Thus there emerges a public space in which prudence no longer consists in being rigorous, but in avoiding whatever disturbs a dominant order. This contraction of the sayable affects the media, the university, cultural institutions, and sites of knowledge production.
It is compounded by another phenomenon: the control of visibility itself. When a bombarded territory is closed to the international press, when local journalists pay an exorbitant human price, more than two hundred killed in Gaza and six in Lebanon, in order to document the war, when images are filtered, contextualised solely by military sources, or subjected to drastic conditions of circulation, it is not merely information that is obstructed. It is the very structure of proof that is altered. The testimony of victims becomes easier to relativise, and the narration of the war is partially confiscated by those who wage it.
Such a configuration prevents any understanding of what the history of the region nevertheless shows with constancy: neither invasions nor Israel’s brute force produce stability. In Palestine as in Lebanon, the effacement of the long durée makes it possible to present each sequence of violence as an absolute beginning, even though it is inscribed within older continuities of aggression and impunity.
The original version of this article was published in French in ACRIMED.
Ziad Majed
