Instead, news consumers are still being bombarded with variations of the narrative of Israel’s putatively disproportionate response to the mass murder, rape, torture and mutilation of men, women and children in southern Israel on Oct. 7th – a framing that took shape within days of the antisemitic massacre. With some notable exceptions, media outlets soon decided that Hamas wouldn’t be the story, as, to shine light on the decisions of their pogromists would require something that’s in rare supply in the media monoculture – self reflection and the ability to reconsider strongly held beliefs in light of new evidence.
Palestinian supporters, Shany Mor wrote early into the war, are dedicated to the proposition “that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome.” Hamas’s gruesome attack, he concluded, “poses a threat to this worldview” and, instead of triggering “a recoiling from the cause in whose name they were carried out,” they resolved the cognitive dissonance by “heightening Israel’s imagined malevolence.”