Platforming Genocide - A Gross Breach of Journalistic Standards by TVNZ

In which I make a complaint to the head of NZ's public broadcaster for giving the Israeli Ambassador - 6 months into a genocidal war - free reign to lie, obfuscate and smear the Palestinian people.

On April 21¹ New Zealand’s publicly funded broadcaster, TVNZ, aired a 43-minute interview with the Israeli ambassador - Ran Yaakoby - on its flagship current affairs show Q+A . In this interview the Ambassador was given free rein to lie, obfuscate and make inflammatory statements against the Palestinian people with barely any pushback from the interviewer - Jack Tame. The interview was offensive, discriminatory, inaccurate and grossly unfair - in other words it breached all standards of decent journalism.

The interview began with a brief discussion about Iran - during which the Ambassador was allowed to fluff and flannel to such a degree that the uninformed listener would have gained the impression Iran was the aggressor and Israel the innocent party in the conflict between the two states.

The interview became, however, considerably more egregious when Tame turned to Gaza - opening with a question worthy of one of the UK’s main Israel cheerleaders Piers Morgan:

“What do people not appreciate about the scale and the horror of [the Oct 7] attack?

Remember, this is the Ambassador of a country which stands accused - in the International Court of Justice - of genocide and which has been found to be credibly guilty of a multitude of war crimes. Rather than open with these crimes, however, Tame provided Yaakoby with the opportunity to wax lyrical about Israel’s raison d’être for its actions - which he proceeded to do with great relish.

I don’t think I know where to begin. On Oct 6 there was a ceasefire on the request of Hamas - which controls Gaza. On 7 Oct the ceasefire was broken with a very planned, well practiced attack. The commander of Hamas, gangs from all over Gaza with weapons and private civilians followed. 1400 people were butchered - it’s a morning show so won’t get into detail - decaptiations, burning people alive, rapes, gang rapes, 2 cases of necrophilia, males were mutilated, children killed in front of their parents, parents in front of their children - so many horrible ways of death - done to instill terror. that’s what terror groups do.

Thanks to Tame the New Zealand public was regaled with the same litany of unsubstantiated allegations and outright lies about October 7 that the entire Western world has been hearing non-stop via all our major media outlets for the last 6 months. And to make matters worse there was no pushback from Tame - despite all of these allegations being (to date) entirely unsubstantiated and, in a number of cases, completely debunked. 

These allegations are atrocity propaganda and, like all atrocity propaganda, they were deliberately spread to dehumanise and demonise the ‘enemy’ - in this case the Palestinians - in order to make it easier to justify the violence subsequently perpetrated against them. Not only did Tame not push back against these baseless allegations, he also failed to challenge Yaakoby on his claim there was a ceasefire prior to October 7, there was not, and nor did he grill him about the behaviour of the Israeli military on October 7, making no mention of the fact, as verified by numerous sources, that Israel killed many of their own people that day.

As I noted above, given the October 7 attack is Israel’s #1 justification for the carnage they are wreaking in Gaza this seems like a strange way to start what really should have been - given Israel’s genocidal and illegal actions over the last 6 months - a far more combative interview.  Just imagine - for a moment - if it was the Russian Ambassador in the hot-seat. Do you think it would have been appropriate for Tame to open with ‘Tell me Ambassador - what do people not appreciate about the scale and the horror of the Ukrainian nationalists’ war on the people of the Donbas during the 8 years leading up to the Russian invasion and the existential threat to Russian sovereignty of NATO encroachment up to Russia’s borders?”. Such a question would have given the Russian Ambassador the opportunity to get on the front foot right from the start - allowing him to frame the attack on Ukraine as, at least partly, justified.

I am quite certain, of course, that if Tame had opened an interview with the Russian Ambassador with such a question he would have ended up being severely reprimanded - if the fate of the Radio New Zealand journalist who made minor edits to Reuters copy about about Ukraine is anything to go by. And yet this is exactly what Tame did when faced with the Israeli Ambassador.

This question allowed the Ambassador - right from the outset - to depict Israel - a country that has been massacring people lining up for aid, carrying out extra-judicial executions, burying people alive, imprisoning without charge, and torturing, raping & sexually assaulting prisoners - as the innocent victim of depraved monsters who kill for no reason other than hatred - a depiction which then provides justification and cover for Israel’s subsequent actions.

Of course, as Tame would well know, the Hamas attack did not come out of the blue. As legal expert Dr Ralph Wilde pointed out, in his Submission to the ICJ on behalf of the League of Arab States, this is not a war that began in Oct 2023. Rather it is a drastic scaling up of the force exercised in Gaza - including a brutal blockade and regular bombing campaigns since 2006, and in the West Bank - constant expansion of illegal settlements, a system of apartheid, checkpoints, arbitrary arrests and imprisonment without trial - on a continual basis since 1967. And as Dr Wilde pointed out:

a justification for a new phase in an ongoing illegal use of force against an occupied people cannot be constructed solely out of the consequences of a violent resistance - October 7 - to that illegal use of force. Otherwise an illegal use of force would be rendered lawful because those subject to it violently resisted. Circular logic with a perverse outcome.

Tame’s next question to the Ambassador was “how many civilians have died in Gaza?” The Ambassador muttered something abut “the fog of war” and how “no-one serious is counting people”. He then claimed that Israel “knows” they have killed 14,000 combatants and that “they have hundreds, maybe thousands more prisoners under interrogation in Israel”. He pointed out that he calls them ‘combatants’ because “they don’t wear uniforms and they embed themselves within the population”

Once again Tame does not challenge the Ambassador. He did not ask him how, particularly given they don’t wear uniforms, Israel knows these ‘combatants’ were in fact combatants? There have been numerous reports out of Gaza making it very clear that many of those arrested and killed - often in ways strongly suggesting extra-judicial execution - were civilians. Mass graves have been discovered at several locations after Israeli forces have withdrawn - at Al Shifa, once Gaza’s largest medical complex and at Nasser Medical Complex to name only two. According to a report by Al Jazeera, witnesses say that some of the bodies at the site were clearly patients.

At the Nasser Medical Complex more than 300 bodies were recovered and, according to Al Jazeera’s correspondent Hani Mahmoud, the bodies retrieved from the grave included women, children, patients and medical staff. Mahmoud further noted that medical staff and evacuees who had managed to leave the hospital before the IDF’s withdrawal had described scenes of “horror, mass killings and arrests to the point the entire hospital turned from a place of healing into a massive graveyard”.

At least some of these mass graves had been discovered prior to the Q + A interview and yet Tame was either unaware of them, or he chose not to bring them up as a challenge to the Ambassador’s assertion Israel has mainly been killing ‘combatants’.  Tame could also have challenged the Ambassador on this assertion by mentioning the flour massacre - and all the subsequent massacres of people lining up for aid but - again - he chose not to. Furthermore, Tame did not even bother to put Yaakoby's feet to the fire regarding the fact that attacks on hospitals and on patients are war crimes under international law.

Tame then asked again - so how many civilians? Yaakoby shrugged and said “I’m not taking the Hamas estimations. I will give you numbers of people killed by our side . . . None of what I saw published by Hamas Health Ministry seems more than propaganda”.

Once again, Tame does not challenge the Ambassador, despite the fact that it has been made clear by various international bodies that the Hamas Health Ministry figures have always been considered to be reliable and that ‘doubting’ those figures is a deliberate attempt by the Israelis to avoid responsibility - and censure - for the excessive death toll caused by their actions in Gaza.

This is a particularly vile accusation in light of the fact that the number cited by Tame to the Ambassador - 34,000 - far from being an over-estimatation is certain to be a massive under-estimation of the number of people killed in Gaza to date. Indeed, a recent report by Human Rights Monitor Euromed suggests that the number killed is, at the very least, 42,510, with 38,621 of those being civilians, including 10,091 women and 15,780 children. The report goes on to note that:

The bodies of several thousand are still stuck under the rubble, while thousands remain missing and are presumed dead. These statistics include the killing of 137 journalists, 356 medical personnel, and 42 civil defense personnel.

Based on these data, the daily death toll for Palestinians has reached 212, including 50 women and 79 children. These are horrifying statistics and unprecedented in the context of contemporary warfare.

Next, after letting the Ambassador away with asserting that there probably weren’t anywhere near as many Palestinians killed as the ‘Hamas Health Ministry’ have reported Tame then tried, ineffectually, to challenge Yaakoby on the proportionality of the Israeli response. Yaakoby responded by telling Tame that Israel

operates by the rules of war - our military lawyers sit with the units before during and after each operation - sometimes they even interrupt an operation.

Again Tame failed to push back - despite the fact he would have had access to mountains of evidence, as meticulously documented by South Africa for its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, that Israel does not, in fact, abide by the rules of law. The Ambassador repeated this assertion again a little later in the interview - adding that “you have to consider the right to self-defence”. And, once again, our intrepid interviewer missed yet another opportunity to challenge Yaakoby. As has been pointed out by numerous legal experts Israel does not, in fact, as the occupying force, have the right to ‘self defence’ against the population whose lands it is occupying.

Tame then made another feeble attempt to pursue the issue of proportionality and the Ambassador rolled out the all-too familiar ‘human shields’ defence. This claim - like so many others - has been debunked on numerous occasions, including by Human Rights Watch and by Amnesty International. Instead of challenging the Ambassador on this, however, Tame gives credence to the claim by saying: “No-one is defending the use of human shields - no-one is forgiving the ways they embed themselves in civilian populations”.

The Ambassador then suggested that Israeli soldiers are dying in order to save lives in Gaza. He pointed out to Tame that “In 24 hours we could have flattened the whole of Gaza” but instead Israel opted to put troops in on the ground. He suggested that “all those blaming Israel are not considering the fact that Israel has acted in this asymmetric urban warfare in the most moral way, the most ethical way”. Again, no pushback from Tame - he just let the Ambassador away with saying that Israel is moral and ethical because - despite its capacity to do so - it hasn’t killed every last Palestinian in Gaza.

Again, do you seriously think a New Zealand interviewer would let the Russian Ambassador get away with saying something like this? “We are acting with great restraint in Ukraine, conducting extremely targeted strikes and trying our hardest to avoid civilians despite the Ukrainian military hiding in civilian buildings such as hospitals and supermarkets. We are extremely moral and ethical because - even though we could have - we haven’t flattened the whole country and killed them all”.

Can you imagine this claim going unchallenged? Of course you can’t. Then why was the Israeli Ambassador not challenged when he made exactly the same sort of claim?  We could have killed them all - we didn’t - therefore we are a very moral and ethical army showing great restraint.

Tame also failed to bring up another major rebuttal to Yaakoby’s claim that Israel is acting ‘ethically’ and ‘with restraint’ in Gaza - the fact that scores of Israeli politicians, officials, military leaders, soldiers, public figures and commentators have openly called for genocide over the past six months.

Other unproven allegations / Israeli talking points Tame either let the Ambassador away with completely or only pushed back on ineffectually include:

1. The completely unproven and frankly ludicrous claim, in light of the numbers of women and children killed, that the ratio of combatants to civilians killed in this war is in favour of combatants.

2. The claim that there isn’t any starvation in Gaza, despite evidence gathered by several international agencies - including, as Tame did manage to point out, USAID - that there is starvation in Gaza. Indeed, Israel has been credibly accused of deliberately using starvation as a weapon of war. Tame even let the Ambassador away with repeating a favourite Israeli talking point - “I could show you clips and videos of the markets in Gaza” so there couldn’t possibly be any starvation!

3. The claim that it is the UN’s fault that aid isn’t making it into Northern Gaza. According to Yaakoby “the UN is incapable - simply incapable . . . of dispersing this food in the same rhythm it is entered”. This is a bald-faced lie - multiple international aid agencies including Human Rights Watch, UNRWA, USAID and Amnesty International have attested to the fact that Israel, not the U.N or anyone else, is responsible for restricting the amount of aid getting in to Gaza. Tame also failed to ask the Ambassador about the ‘protests’ by Israelis at the border crossing which have prevented trucks from entering Gaza - and which the IDF have turned a blind eye to - and the attacks by Israelis on trucks and on police officers guarding the convoys.

4. The claim that “about 60% of the convoys are being hijacked by Hamas, local forces, gangs etc” and that “they sell the free food [and] also throw it when it expires instead of giving it on time to the population because what they can’t sell they won’t give”. The Israelis have provided precisely zero evidence to back up this claim

5. The Israeli talking point that it can’t be a genocide because the Palestinian popoulation has increased since the 1967 war. “If this is a genocide then we are really failing at this genocide” Yaakoby noted - again unchallenged. At the very least Tame should have pointed out to the Ambassador that it is not necessary to wipe out all - or even the majority - of a population in order for actions to be considered genocidal. He could also have pointed out that genocide scholars have been warning that Israel’s assault on Gaza is genocidal in nature since the early days of the war, as well as drawing the Ambassador’s attention to the meticulously documented report by the UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese - Anatomy of a Genocide.

6. The claim that Palestinan children are indoctrinated into hating Israelis. This is another well-worn Israeli hasbara talking point and serves simply to remove all context and all agency - the Palestinians just hate Israelis because they’ve been taught to hate them. I have neither the time nor the space to educate you about the history of this conflict - suffice to say, the Palestinian people have have been oppressed & dispossessed by Israel for over 75 years and they have the right to be free of that oppression just like any other people have the right to be free. It’s a shame Tame didn’t take the opportunity to ask the Ambassador how he would feel about the Israelis if he was a Palestinian in Gaza - if he was forced to accept living under a blockade since 2006, to accept regular bombing raids over his city which killed and injured his friends and family, to accept having to ask for Israeli permission to leave the enclave and face the possibility that permission would be refused - even for medical treatment. Or perhaps he could have asked him how he might feel if he was a Palestinian in the West Bank - if he was forced to accept living under apartheid, to accept soldiers knocking on his door in the middle of the night and telling him to leave because settlers are wanting to move in, to accept being at the constant risk of being imprisoned without cause or trial, to accept being sniped at in the street, to accept being forced to line up at countless checkpoints every day just to get to work, to accept a multitude of humiliations and degradations dished out to him by soldiers, police and settlers every damn day. Would he need to be ’taught to hate’ those who inflicted such suffering upon him and upon his parents and his grandparents?

7. The ridiculous claim that continual expansion of settlements - illegal under international law and the cause of untold misery and a profound injustice - is not a hindrance to peace. That Tame didn’t push back more on this arrant nonsense was - even in the context of this journalistically inept interview - surprising.

8. The claim that Israel isn’t responsible for instigating any of the violence - according to Yaakboy 1948 and 1967 were started by ‘Arab militaries’ and 2023 was started by Hamas. Again, Tame allowed Yaakoby to present Israel as the victim, just sitting there innocently in the Middle East not causing any trouble - but nevertheless being constantly harassed by evil Arabs. Again, I don’t have time to educate you about the origins of the Israeli state or its subsequent history but I can tell you right now that these claims are straight out of the Zionist hasbara handbook. They’re simplistic myths that no serious historian would entertain for a moment - even a Zionist historian like Benny Morris. For the New Zealand Ambassador to Israel to trot out such nonsense on public television with absolutely no pushback from the interviewer was insulting not only to the Palestinian people - who he was essentially blaming for all the whole conflict from 1948 onwards - but also an insult to the intelligence of the people of New Zealand.

9. The claim that if Hamas were to lay down its arms there would be peace but if Israel were to lay down its arms the country would be destroyed. Again, this is another common Israeli talking point with absolutely no basis in fact. As Professor Avi Shlaim pointed out in 2005:

   The Palestinians do not pose a threat to Israel’s basic security; it is the other way round. Israel is not fighting for its security or survival, but to retain territories it conquered in 1967. The war that Israel is waging against the Palestinian people on their land is a colonial war. Like all other colonial wars it is savage, senseless, directed mainly against civilians, and doomed to failure.

To give a platform - on national television - to the Ambassador of a country found to be ‘plausibly’ committing genocide by the ICJ and then to fail to hold him to account for his country’s grave breaches of international law and for the genocidal statements of its politicians & military leaders - subsequently enacted by its military on the ground in Gaza is an absolutely shameful breach of journalistic integrity - a breach that should result in serious consequences for those responsible.

I was shocked when I heard the interview was planned but I hoped that perhaps Jack Tame, who is usually a competent interviewer, would take the opportunity to provide some much needed balance to NZ media coverage of Gaza thus far and actually hold the Ambassador to account for Israel’s actions. Instead Tame asked the Ambassador vague and general questions, let lies, smears and obfuscations go completely unchallenged and essentially let the Ambassador run the usual Israeli line, the same line they’ve been running for 75 years, that Israel is the victim and the Palestinians are the oppressors - the ‘beasts’, the wild-eyed ‘terrorists’ who hate Israelis for no reason.

To make reparations - to the Palestinian people here in New Zealand, and to the rest of the New Zealand public - I demand that:

1. TVNZ issue a public apology to the people of New Zealand for this journalistic debacle.

2. TVNZ publicly identifies and apologises for the lies and misinformation presented by the Israeli ambassador without challenge from Jack Tame.

3. TVNZ give Palestinian voices the same time as the Israeli ambassador to respond to the ambassador’s lies and misinformation.

4. TVNZ conduct an open inquiry into its reporting failures over the past six months whereby it has consistently prioritised Israeli spokespeople, Israeli justifications, Israeli explanations and Israeli propaganda while sidelining and ignoring Palestinian viewpoints.

Please respond without unnecessary delay.

Note: The above is not an exact copy of the letter I wrote to the Head of TVNZ - a few edits and additions were made when I copied it over to Substack - plus some links were added so points of fact can be followed up by readers. It is, however, substantively the same and I am hopeful the message will be received loud and clear!

1. When I published this post I mistakenly said the date the programme aired was April 20, I have amended this to April 21 which was when the programme was actually aired.