Don't Say Palestine

A searing indictment of Western media that lays bare how a so-called free press, long tasked with speaking truth to power, instead became a vital part of the machinery that enabled the genocide in Palestine.

If you're not writing the truth about crimes against humanity, you're culpable in them.

Human rights activist and Middle East scholar Assal Rad is known online as the 'headline fixer' - with a special focus on exposing double standards in Western media, especially about Palestine. Israelis are described as 'children' and 'civilians', while Palestinians are 'people under 18' and 'collateral damage'; Israelis are killed; Palestinians die. Even in the wake of the ceasefire, major Western media continually obfuscates Israeli violence in Palestine,

This pattern of dehumanizing language, Don't Say Palestine reveals, has been so consistent throughout the Palestinian genocide that it amounts to a policy. Over the past three years, headlines in outlets from CNN to Reuters to the New York Times have consistently downplayed Israeli responsibility, 'othered' Palestinians, and called into question inviolable tenets of international law like the sanctity of hospitals and journalists in warzones. Highlighting the linguistic moves and framing devices at play and surfacing stories Western media decided not to report, Rad maps with devastating clarity mainstream media's instrumental role in sanitizing, white-washing, and downplaying a human rights crisis.

Don't Say Palestine offers both a moral reckoning and an urgent call to action. When these years are studied, this will be the book people read to understand how 'this' was allowed to happen, and the one people turn to when looking to rebuild their faith in the media.

'Amidst some of the worst journalistic failures of this century, Assal Rad has consistently done vital work to point out the myriad ways institutional hypocrisy, cowardice and willful obliviousness work hand-in-hand with state violence to justify and normalize any manner of atrocity. Her intellectual rigor and moral clarity - not only on the journalistic malpractice that so often marks Western media coverage of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but on how this malpractice eventually seeps into all coverage - is unwavering. At a time when it would have been so much more convenient to stay silent, I and so many others are grateful for her willingness to speak' -- Omar El Akkad , National Book Award winner of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

'A poignant reminder of the power of words to normalise, or legitimise, genocide' -- Yanis Varoufakis, author of 'Technofeudalism'

'If you've ever wondered how the media manipulated perception through subtle use of language this is the book for you to read. Assal Rad in her superb book shows how no other institution is as instrumental in shaping perception like the media which is not a record of truth telling but a carefully curated narrative and elaborate system of erasure, euphemism and deference to power' -- Raja Shehadeh, author of What Does Israel Fear From Palestine?

About the Author

ASSAL RAD is an activist, historian of the modern Middle East, and a Fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC and DAWN. Her first book, The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, The National Interest, The Independent, Foreign Policy, and more, and she has appeared as a commentator on BBC World, Al Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and elsewhere.