The U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza rages on. We’ve surpassed 630 days of unhinged, blood-thirsty, inhumane, world(s)-ending settler-colonial violence that has permeated our screens and has shattered the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, and around the world. Israel has followed every step of what makes a genocide a genocide. Israel’s goal is to erase Gaza; it has destroyed the vast majority of buildings and critical infrastructure for life. It has cut off aid, starved, maimed, shredded, terrorized, tortured, and killed Palestinians in Gaza with the backing of almost every Western nation, especially its settler-colonial sibling, the U.S. 

The U.S. provides Israel with more than weapons and military support; its media manufactures consent for genocide and launders war crimes while the government wields legislation to criminalize resistance and dissent, and while academia and industry do the same. Despite being an active funder of the genocide, the U.S. retains its seat on the United Nations Security Council and weaponizes its vetoes to continue perpetuating the very crimes it was meant to stop—that is, if you pretend that the U.N. can act as an apparatus to end the death-making from European and colonial entities.

Meanwhile, Israel has targeted and killed over 230 journalists and banned international journalists from entering Gaza. Media workers in Gaza, if not killed by Israel, have witnessed their families being murdered and suffer under the same conditions imposed by the occupation. And as Palestinian reporters continue to report on the massacres of their own people, the U.S. mainstream press suppresses Palestinian voices in favor of Israeli military narratives, parrots lies to justify the slaughter of an entire people, and abandons journalistic rigor entirely by refusing to acknowledge the truth that is plainly and despairingly before us. The U.S. mainstream press is also responsible for this genocide, and we must fight back against that. 

Prism, as a U.S.-based newsroom, has had a policy to cover U.S. and U.S. territories-based news. Anything that touches international soil must still have a narrative foothold in the U.S. However, when the genocide first began, Prism was spurred into action. First, we just covered U.S.-based resistance efforts, pro-Palestinian organizing, and state repression. We highlighted the voices of U.S. Palestinian communities, university students setting up encampments, and those fighting alongside them. In the last year, it has been harder and harder to keep that foot grounded squarely here as we witnessed our tax dollars invested in life-destroying weaponry, genocidal technology, and support for Israel’s military. Every starving child in Gaza is starving because of the U.S.’s unwavering backing of Israel. Every missing person buried and decomposing in the rubble is made possible thanks to our tax dollars supporting Israel. Every massacre, disappearance, torture, and assault is made possible by our tax funding. Support for the occupation state is U.S. policy, and Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism are part of U.S. policy, too. 

As a newsroom committed to collective liberation, we bear responsibility for covering the grip of the empire throughout the global south as part of our stories of resistance, love, death, and the dreaming and remaking of a better world.

In recent months, there has been less and less news coming out of Gaza because there are fewer journalists there, because Israel has killed them with U.S. support. Western mainstream media have suppressed and retaliated against the journalists speaking out for Gaza and for journalistic rigor within their newsrooms, or killed reporting exposing Israel’s war crimes. Prism has the moral duty to cover the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and Israeli military and settler violence in the West Bank as a matter of editorial policy and without a narrative foothold in the U.S. If we don’t have universal healthcare, or living wages, or student loan debt elimination, or an expanding social safety net, it’s because our government officials would rather send those billions to kill the indigenous population of Palestine. And make no mistake, Americans live in Israel and continue to establish illegal settlements in the West Bank and steal Palestinians’ homes with impunity. Americans stealing land in another settler colony urges Prism, as a newsroom dedicated to the narratives of oppressed and colonized peoples, to stretch our lens. 

Anti-imperialist movement journalists at Prism have organically begun this progression from covering movements for liberation and fascist, capitalist repression at home, and connected these movements to our communities in the global south. U.S. imperialism forces displacement and creates the need for migration. Then, through fascism on U.S. soil, the deportation machine and the imperialist machinery kidnaps, imprisons, and deports our kin. Prism is thus compelled to follow the thread from the U.S. national context to imperial impacts in Venezuela, El Salvador, Mexico, Haiti, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kashmir, Vietnam, and on and on and on. As a newsroom committed to collective liberation, we bear responsibility for covering the grip of the empire throughout the global south as  part of our stories of resistance, love, death, and the dreaming and remaking of a better world.

To quote Malcolm X, “The only way we’ll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world.”

Therefore, our commitment is to work with journalists who are dedicated to sharing these stories, because there can be no liberation without a strong anti-imperialist movement. We will welcome coverage from the West Bank or from those based in Gaza, and continue to build our analysis of U.S. imperialism. What does this mean technically? If you’re a reporter or writer, this month Prism will revise our guidelines to allow writers and reporters to send pitches centering U.S. imperialism and Palestine, regardless of a direct U.S. angle, because the consequences of U.S. policy and imperialism are global. This is (if you allow me to be subversive) our version of the Palestine exception, where Palestine urges us to be explicit and unwavering in our commitment to anti-imperial movement journalism and liberation for all.