CNN’s Ben Wedeman looked exhausted as he fielded questions from an anchor in the United States in late November 2023. He had just reported on the deaths of two Palestinian boys in the West Bank, one of whom, a fourteen-year old, reportedly bled to death because Israeli troops refused to allow a Palestinian ambulance to reach him.

The anchor naïvely asked whether this reflected an increase in violence in the area. You could almost see Wedeman grit his teeth as he brusquely responded: No, this was not unusual; more than 250 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank since October 7 in escalating attacks by Israeli settlers and the military, and thousands more had been killed or injured over the past decade. The veteran correspondent restrained himself from adding, “You’d know that if you had been paying attention”, but the expression on his face telegraphed the message loud and clear.

That exchange epitomized the sense of exasperation bordering on hopelessness felt by many of us who have reported on the region’s seemingly endless conflicts.

Forty years ago, I stood in front of the mound of rubble that minutes before had been the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. The four-story building had been leveled by a suicide truck bomber. As our cameras rolled on October 23, 1983, shocked and wounded survivors scrambled to dig out their comrades. In all, 241 American servicemen died that day.

Back home, Americans watching our coverage asked, “Why?” The answer lay in the fatal collision of the same actors in the drama now playing out in Gaza: Israel, the Palestinians, Iran, and a U.S. administration that sees the Middle East only through a black-and-white lens.

Compassion Fatigue: A World Rarely Seen
I arrived in Beirut as a journalist in 1980. I’ve produced countless television and newspaper stories and have written six books on the region. Some days, I think I would have been better off specializing in Renaissance literature for all the impact it’s had.

Of course, that is nothing compared to how Palestinians are feeling.

Every few years, when things in the region get so bad that it briefly captures the attention of the American public, we “experts” wake up to the same questions: “Have the Arabs and Israelis always been fighting?” “Who was there first?” “Is Gaza the same as the West Bank?” “Wasn’t there a peace deal a while ago?” “Why aren’t the Palestinians ever satisfied?” “What’s wrong with these people?”

Some of the answers can be found in the largely untold story of what happens on the ground when the world is not looking. One grim example: Even before the current crisis, 2023 was the deadliest year on record for Palestinian children, who were being killed at a rate of more than one a week, according to Save the Children. In total, at least 188 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023 before the current crisis, the most in at least fifteen years, according to the UN, while six Israeli children and twenty-four adult Israelis across the country also lost their lives in that period.

How many Americans were aware of that? And how many news organizations reported on the deaths? When stories did appear, you had to work to find them. Case in point: A February 2023 Israeli military operation in Nablus described as “the deadliest such raid in years” that left eleven Palestinians dead and more than a hundred wounded, which  The New York Times buried that on page nine.

Americans are largely oblivious to the monthly body count among Palestinians in part because the killings receive so little coverage in the media. It’s all just too unpleasant and confusing to think about.

And then, there is the systemic bias that sits not with correspondents in the field, but with editors back home. One study of fifty years of American newspaper reporting about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict found that headlines focusing on Israel were four times more common than those mentioning Palestinians, and words such as “terror” appeared three times more often than “occupation”. In recent years, “references to Palestinians’ experiences of being ‘refugees’ or living under ‘occupation’ steadily declined” as the media—and the American public—got bored or other stories beckoned. Compassion fatigue, and all that.

As a result, when they looked at the news on October 7, countless Americans were asking “Why?” and media organizations scrambled to produce basic explainers to make up for years of journalistic neglect.

Hatred produces hatred. Generations’ worth. That is one constant of the Palestine/Israel story. Ironically, one of the most vivid portrayals of that tragic reality can be found in the Netflix series Fauda, produced in Israel. The star and writer are both former members of an undercover Israeli unit that operated in Gaza and the West Bank. They provide a raw and gripping portrait of the spiral of violence that traps and radicalizes both sides. It is a world where there is no black and white, only shades of gray—a world rarely seen on American TV news.

When I was recently interviewed on an Arab TV channel, the host thundered at me: “Americans love Israel and hate Arabs, don’t you agree?” I respectfully disagreed. Yes, I told him, the bonds between the United States and Israel are close. But I pointed to the rallies across the United States demanding a ceasefire and rising criticism of Israeli policies among many American Jews. He scoffed. For him, and millions of Arabs and Muslims, there is no nuance. From their perspective, Palestinians are dying in horrifying numbers and America is supplying the weapons.

Most Americans still don’t get that.

America’s Responsibility
In 1982, as he watched videotaped scenes of dead Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camp, murdered by Lebanese Christian militiamen under the watchful eye of Israeli troops who had invaded and occupied Beirut, PLO leader Yasser Arafat turned to me and whispered, “This shameful crime of genocide is an international responsibility, and first it is an American responsibility”.

A few years later, Iran’s ambassador in Damascus, Ali Akhbar Mohtashami, who pulled the strings on a wave of suicide bombings and kidnappings targeting Americans in the 1980s, told me: “We think that as long as America as a superpower looks to Israel in a special way and prefers it to all other countries, there will be difficulties.”

And here we are once more, with a White House that has pledged unwavering support to an Israeli prime minister who has framed the Gaza war as “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness”.

“I say frankly to the American statesmen who are now managing the genocide in Palestine,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told the UN General Assembly in October, “if the genocide in Gaza continues, they will not be spared from this fire”.

Time to Pay Attention
None of this, of course, is meant to condone the brutal slaughter of Israeli men, women, and children by Hamas on October 7, or argue the United States should abandon Israel.

It is meant to emphasize that if Americans—or their favorite media outlets—weren’t paying attention to the rising anger before, it is time for them to start. Itis time for the American public to recognize that the rest of the world views U.S. policy through a very different prism than most U.S. citizens.

As I wrote in my 2006 book, Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens:

The essence of this worldview disconnect was encapsulated in the question that rose like a collective moan from the U.S. body politic after 9/11. “Why do they hate us?” and was mirrored by an equally bewildered, “Why can’t they see?”

One of the great tragedies of the post-September 11era was that this disconnect meant that the United States squandered a huge groundswell of empathy among the world’s Muslims. There were several reasons: a failure to differentiate between the subset of extremists who celebrated the attacks and the majority of the world’s Muslims; the scale of America’s military response; a tone-deaf communications strategy, epitomized by George Bush’s reference to a “Crusade” against terrorism; and the American media’s one-dimensional and “patriotic” approach to coverage of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

“In the past, when the Marines were in Beirut, we screamed, ‘Death to America!’” Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement declared on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “Today, when the region is being filled by hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, ‘Death to America!’ was, is, and will stay our slogan.”

From the perspective of most Arabs and many others around the world, the pattern set by the Bush administration after 9/11 is being repeated in the Biden administration’s “ironclad” support for an Israeli government that has proclaimed it is at war with “human animals” and that “the entire nation” of Palestinians “is responsible”—an ironic choice of words, given that Israeli governments have historically refused to recognize a Palestinian “nation”.

In outlining the Biden Doctrine for the Middle East back in February 2023, White House Coordinator Brett McGurk, a practitioner of the Bush “bomb ‘em and let Allah sort it out” approach to the Middle East, stated that U.S. policy “will always promote human rights and the values enshrined in the UN Charter”. He emphasized, “they’re not slogans”.

Just months later, the United States is actively providing the weapons that are laying waste to Gaza. Meanwhile, the image of an American president, who is a self-declared Zionist, physically embracing Benjamin Netanyahu will be emblazoned on posters at “death to America” rallies for years to come.

Of Consequences and Outcomes
Forget about what all this means to the United States—let’s talk about what it means to human beings. How many decades of slaughter does it take for policymakers to realize killing innocent people has consequences and that the outcomes rarely mirror the confident predictions voiced in those rosy policy planning sessions or prematurely celebratory news conferences?

Humankind may be “doomed to repeat history,” but it is particularly tragic when those events are part of modern history, which we have lived through and watched play out in our newspapers and TV screens. We should at least be able to learn from what happened in our own lifetimes.

Lebanon

In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and laid siege to Beirut. At least 19,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were killed. Israel’s goals and the outcomes: 1) Crush the PLO—its fighters were forced into exile; 2) Drive the Syrians out of Lebanon—they stayed until 2005; and 3) Install a strong, pro-Israeli central Lebanese government that would sign a peace treaty with Israel—the Lebanese government collapsed less than a year after signing the deal, which was scrapped.

As Israeli warplanes were bombing Beirut, former Prime Minister Menachim Begin predicted the fighting “will soon be finished” and the war would usher in forty years of peace. In 2000, after Israeli public opinion turned against the interminable death toll that had claimed more than 1,200 Israeli service members, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared “this 18-year tragedy is over” and withdrew from south Lebanon. The pretense of Israel’s myth of invincibility had been punctured.

The implications were not lost on the Israelis themselves. “A few hundred Hezbollah combatants have defeated the big and strong Israeli army,” Israel’s Yediot Ahranot newspaper wrote in an editorial. Haaretz columnist Doron Rosenblum asked, “What did we gain from all those wasted years, from all the needless bloodshed?”

The answer was tragically simple: a new, more powerful enemy. While the PLO’s fighters might have been dispersed to the far reaches of the Arab World, in their place rose the Iranian-backed movement Hezbollah, which today effectively controls the government of Lebanon and is one of the world’s most heavily armed non-state actors.

Israel would fight a major war against Hezbollah in 2006—that killed or injured more than a thousand Israeli troops, claimed the lives of at least forty-four Israeli civilians, and wounded more than a thousand more—and remain permanently locked in an ongoing low-level border conflict that would claim scores more lives. At the same time, some 1,500 Israelis would die in attacks by Palestinians inside Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, prior to October 7.

So much for forty years of peace.

Afghanistan

The goal of Israel’s war in Gaza is the elimination of Hamas. The Bush administration said much the same of the Taliban in mounting its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

“Our military went to Afghanistan, destroyed the training camps of Al-Qaeda, and put the Taliban out of business forever,” President George W. Bush boasted in 2003.

It’s not like history wasn’t littered with signs of what was coming. Afghanistan is famously known as “the graveyard of empires”. American policymakers didn’t need to go as far back as 330 B.C. and Alexander the Great. Some of them were involved in the proxy war that drove the Russians out of Afghanistan—a war mounted by some of the same militants who became the Taliban.

But America, of course, was different. “The history of military conflict in Afghanistan [has] been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We’re not going to repeat that mistake,” Bush promised a year after the invasion. At about the same time, then-White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice announced that the Taliban had been “eliminated”. Nineteen years later, with a death toll that included some 70,000 Afghan civilians, 79,000 allied Afghan and Pakistani government troops, and more than 6,000 U.S. service members and American military contractors, at a cost of 2.3 trillion dollars, the United States ceded Afghanistan back to the Taliban in a chaotic withdrawal that will be a permanent stain on the Biden administration’s record.

Iraq

From the earliest days of his presidency, the team around George W. Bush pursued an agenda to invade Iraq and plant the seeds of a “New Middle East”.

“President Bush has insisted that the Iraq conflict is part of the war on terrorism,” I wrote as U.S. forces unleashed their “shock and awe” assault on Iraq. “Yet far from coherently demonstrating that the invasion will reduce the threat, there are numerous signs it will further inflame Muslim rage, radicalize the moderates, and unite voices at both ends of the Islamic political spectrum.”

Mine was just one of countless voices in media and policy circles predicting Iraq would be a repeat of Lebanon on steroids. “The idea of a quick and easy democratic transformation is a fantasy,” the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warned. But for the Bush administration—like the Reagan White House in Lebanon—it was all cut and dried.

“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Bush proudly proclaimed six weeks after the invasion began, standing beneath the now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner on the deck of the USS Abraham. “We have fought for the cause of liberty and for the peace of the world.”

If that display of American exceptionalism was not enough, the newly appointed U.S. administrator in Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, exulted to reporters: “We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say, ‘Damn, we’re Americans.’”

The overt goal of the invasion was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and neutralization of his supposed “weapons of mass destruction,” but the broader agenda was to rewrite the political map of the Middle East.

“Iraqi democracy will succeed—and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran—that freedom can be the future of every nation,” Bush confidently declared. “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”

Instead, as Algerian researcher Abdelkrim Dekhakhena put it in a study for the Social Science Research Council, “Chaos and destruction became the ‘manifest destiny’ of these peoples and democracy became a dangerous fantasy”.

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein resulted in a bloody scramble for power among manifold ethnic groups, a dramatic increase in Iranian influence in Baghdad, and a brutal insurgency that claimed the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers. And the 2011 withdrawal of most of the 170,000 U.S. forces opened the way for the rise of the Islamic State, which seized one-third of Iraq and Syria and forced the Obama administration to send troops back not only to Iraq but Syria as well, where they remain to this day. Cost in human lives: about 300,000 dead in Iraq alone, with more than one million internally displaced, 4.1 million in need of humanitarian assistance, and a reconstruction bill estimated at more than 88 billion dollars.

Rather than a stable democracy that is an inspiration for the region, Iraq today is an unstable and violent morass of ethnic and religious groups where American troops continue to be targets. As the Council on Foreign Relations warned in October: “There remains a larger concern that the aftermath of the conflict and challenges of reconstruction and reintegration will lead to the breakup of Iraq and that sectarian tension will plague the region for years to come.”

Gaza

So when Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy confidently tells reporters that as the government discusses “day after” contingencies for Gaza, the “common denominator” is that the Strip will be “demilitarized” and will “never again” become a “terror nest,” students of modern Middle East history—and those of us who have covered it—take that with a very large heaping of Dead Sea salt.

Death and Destruction Through the Lens
The quantum difference between Gaza and the post 9/11 wars is in the coverage. The American and Arab media provided their audiences with two completely different views of the Iraq and Afghan wars. The epitome of the disconnect was the U.S. siege of Fallujah, where American networks were embedded with the Marines and Arab cameras were at the receiving end of the U.S. assault. Americans saw stalwart troops defending freedom; Arabs saw dead babies.

Now, while the narrative may be different, the whole world is seeing the death and destruction in Gaza through the lens of the same cameras, wielded by Palestinian journalists, more than seventy-five of whom have been killed reporting on the conflict. Even U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has warned that although Israel may prevail on the Gaza battlefield, it faces “strategic defeat” in the court of global public opinion, with huge implications for the future, even as America’s own standing among its allies erodes.

Emblematic of the shifting narrative: Social media lit up when CNN anchor and former Israel lobbyist Wolf Blitzer confronted an IDF spokesman over an Israeli airstrike in early November that killed fifty civilians and injured 150 others.

“You knew there were civilians there. You knew there were refugees. But you decided to still drop a bomb on that refugee camp attempting to kill that Hamas commander?” Blitzer pressed, his voice incredulous.

To some, it carried a hint of Walter Cronkite’s famous broadcast declaring America’s war in Vietnam was doomed. President Lyndon Johnson is said to have declared, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America”.

“You know Israel has lost the public relations front when Wolf Blitzer, former AIPAC spokesperson, is questioning the IDF on its cruel and unusual collective punishment of the Palestinian people,” said one in a long string of such comments on X, formerly Twitter.

In this age of fragmented media, Blitzer’s influence is nothing like that of Cronkite, but his—at least momentary—transition from flag-waving supporter of all things Israel to critic of its tactics in the face of the carnage unfolding on the world’s television screens is emblematic of the degree to which, as a result of this conflict, the American media has—for the moment—shifted from largely ignoring the Palestinians to focusing on the same carnage the rest of the world is witnessing, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, even as the Biden administration ramps up billions of dollars in more military aid to Israel.

So perhaps, when the inevitable terrorist retribution comes in the years ahead, Americans will know why “they” hate “us.”