By Dean Malchik, Editor, unREVISE

Journalists have too often asked the wrong question during interviews about the Israeli actions in Gaza. The interviewers usually begin with, “Before we start, do you condemn Hamas and its attacks on October 7?”

It has become laughable to hear journalist after journalist start out their interviews with this question.

As Israelis have continued to murder innocent Palestinian men, women, and children and bomb hospitals, schools, religious institutions, refugee camps, and everything else month after month after month, the question about Hamas seems unfair, as if anything justifies Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaigns and sniper fire against civilians and now its starvation campaign.

It often seemed that the question was one that someone or some entity directed them to ask.

Fortunately, with the ever-growing evidence that Israel is committing war crimes and a genocide against the Palestinians, some journalists have stopped asking the question directly.

Today, they should instead be asking, “Do you condemn Israel and the U.S. for their genocide in Gaza?”

The fact is that Hamas, in its entire existence, has committed exponentially less violence and terrorism than Israel and the U.S. In fact, Israel and the U.S. are the leading state terrorists in the world.

They’ve murdered more innocent men, women, and children; murdered more journalists, humanitarians, and healthcare workers; destroyed more hospitals, schools, religious sites; starved more people; and committed more war crimes and crimes against humanity than any other nation.

Violence from Hamas pales in comparison.

In addition, either together or alone, Israel and the U.S. have attacked more countries than any other nation in the world in the last 25 years. They’ve attacked Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Qatar, and Yemen. 

And their tactics have been the tactics of so-called terrorists.

The pager attacks on Hezbollah, for example, which Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu constantly brags and jokes about, were acts of terrorism. 

Those attacks could have easily harmed more civilians than they did. What if one of those pagers had been in the pocket of someone flying a plane or driving a school bus. Innocents, perhaps even children, would have been killed.

Israel’s indiscriminate bombings of hospitals in Gaza are also terrorist attacks, and the fact that the bombs come from the air rather than from inside a room don’t make them less so.

For some reason, we often treat acts of state terrorism different from acts of individual terrorism; in fact, we sometimes don’t consider them terrorism at all. But Israel’s indiscriminate bombing is intended to terrorize the civilian population to force the Palestinians to capitulate; it is not done with a direct and discriminate military objective. It is simply state terrorism from the air.

Israel’s murder of journalists, aid workers, and healthcare workers is the same.

So today, if journalists want to be fair, they should constantly begin their interviews with their Israel-supporting guests with this question: “Do you condemn Israel and the U.S. for their genocide in Gaza?”

And if their interviewees try to dodge the question, they should put heavy pressure on them to answer it, not simply move on to the next question.

It’s only fair.