Don't Say Palestine

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.

'Assal Rad brilliantly exposes how, for the past years, reality itself has been distorted to fit a political ecosystem ... Rad demonstrates how media narratives create permissive conditions for genocide through strategic omission, selective visibility, euphemism, and the erasing of Palestinian voices ... This is not reporting - it is complicity'

• Prologue: Why I Correct Headlines Chapter 1: When Dehumanization Becomes Standard I: Rationalizing Atrocities II. Selective Justice: The West's Misleading Narrative of Palestine III: Iraq as a Precedent: The Death of Accountability IV: The Language of Dehumanization V: Narration and the Power to Define Events Chapter 2: Gaza Shattered the Myth of the Rules-Based Order I: The Double Standard Doctrine II: Joe Biden Was Always Israel's Partner in Crime III: The Biden Administration Facilitated Genocide IV: The Failure of the International System V: The Collapse of Credibility Chapter 3: Freedom of the Press Is a Slogan, Not a Policy I: The Ethos of Journalism II: This Is Censorship III: How Western Journalists Failed Their Palestinian Colleagues IV: The Cost of Silence Chapter 4: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide I: Constructing the Gaza Narrative II: Starvation as a Weapon of War III: The Unprecedented Killing of Aid Workers IV: Destroying Gaza's Health-Care System V: The So-Called Ceasefire VI: Destruction by Design, Not Disaster Chapter 5: Responsibility and Reckoning I: The Press as Power II: Refusing to Call It What It Is: Genocide III: Lessons from the Gaza Genocide