The Age called out the Myanmar genocide. Why not Gaza's?

The paper's treatment of the Palestinians reeks of double standards.

By Jeff Sparrow – a writer, editor and broadcaster.

Opinions expressed by contributing authors belong to the authors alone.

What you say in a genocide matters. This is well understood in the Age newsroom, as shown by this editorial:

There is a genocide happening today … Our government should urgently, repeatedly and loudly call for international intervention, and lead in imposing sanctions. We should send bountiful aid to the victims, and halt economic and diplomatic relations […] unless and until the savagery is stopped. All of us, as Australians, should shun travel […] for tourism or business.

And our government should, as it did with the Syrian refugee crisis a few years ago, rapidly engineer an intake of […] refugees.

As you probably guessed, that wasn’t about Gaza. It was an editorial (accessible via the Gale database) the Age ran on 14 September 2017 titled ‘PM must lead efforts to halt Myanmar genocide’, as part of a prolonged and admirable campaign the paper ran on behalf of the persecuted Rohingya people.

In relation to Gaza, the Age’s actual position was far more equivocal. As the war began, the editorialist explained in its headline, “Israel has right to safety but compromise is key” – a position from which the paper has not yet diverted.

Selective use of ‘genocide’

That bothsidesism has determined the paper’s attitude to the question of genocide. In August, for instance, the Age published a poignant account of the sufferings of the Murad family, trying to rebuild their lives in Melbourne after an Israeli bomb killed Dinah Murad as she and her children fled Gaza City. The article features a brief snippet from Palestine Australia Relief and Action founder Rasha Abbas, which it presents like this:

“At the front of everybody’s mind, the immediate need of all those people we support here, is the safety and wellbeing of their families [back home]. The focus is ending this genocide,” she says.

Israel denies claims of genocide, which have been brought before the International Court of Justice.

The reference to the ICJ implies that only a court can determine genocide: an argument invariably made by western politicians when pressed about Gaza. Various laws constrain the portrayal of, say, a murder suspect. But they don’t apply to genocide. Assessments about when and how the media uses the term remain entirely political, as the Age’s coverage of Myanmar demonstrates.

In a December 2017 editorial, the Age declared:

Myanmar’s murder of up to 13,769 Rohingya people – almost half of them in August alone – is a crime against humanity. It very clearly fits that definition, of a deliberate, systematic campaign causing death and human suffering. Those murdered include at least 730 children under the age of five, Medecins Sans Frontieres has revealed.

The passage appeared long before Gambia brought Myanmar to the ICJ. The Age understood that the Rohingya could not afford to rely on that slow and unreliable process. “A quarter of a century ago,” the editorialist explained, “the world stood by and watched, allowing genocide in Rwanda. A similar catastrophe is unfolding …”

Today, Gambia’s genocide case against Myanmar remains unresolved. Anyone who, in 2017, had resolved to wait on the court’s judgment would be waiting still, long after the worst killings were over.

And the Age didn’t – in fact, it denounced others for not using the word ‘genocide’ in relation to Myanmar, as in this editorial dated 4 October 2018 (another Gale link):

Amazingly, [….] US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo […]is wondering whether to use the term genocide. It is evidently genocide, as The Age has repeatedly stated in imploring the Australian government to take a lead on humanitarian intervention.

The same could have been said about Gaza – but, of course, it wasn’t.

Avoiding the obvious

Allegations of genocide in Gaza have featured repeatedly in the Age over the last two years: as opinion pieces, as letters to the editor, and, in particular, in news reports about protests. But they have been consistently undermined by the absence of contextual information.

Consider the first weeks after the Hamas attack.

On 27 October 2023, the Age described Adel Salman from the Islamic Council of Victoria referring, during a prayer service in the Flagstaff Gardens, to ‘genocide’ in Gaza. In the next week, it ran two opinion pieces (one by professor of linguistics Nick Enfield, the other by columnist Sean Kelly) pondering the semantics of genocide. On 9 November, the Age reported concerns by staff at the ABC about their employers’ ‘unwillingness to use language such as “invasion”, “occupation”, “genocide”, “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” regarding Israeli government policy and allegations made by human rights groups’.

The last sentence revealed the problem. What allegations? Which human rights groups? By then, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention had decried “the genocidal siege of Gaza [that] will bring neither security nor peace”.

Yet the Age did not report the statement.

Over the next week, the Age described demonstrators chanting “You can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide” at Labor MP Pater Khalil. But it did not mention the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor’s denunciation of “the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip”. It reported marchers holding ‘signs calling for a ceasefire, labelling the bombardment of Gaza a genocide’ but said nothing about the International Federation for Human Rights making the same point.

Like the regime in Myanmar, the Israeli army prevented foreign journalists from entering the conflict zone. That made assessments by credible NGOs, human groups and other experts correspondingly important. The Age did not always ignore those assessments but, when they were reported, it was often without acknowledgement of their significance.

For instance, a Human Rights Watch report about Israel using starvation as a weapon of war received considerable coverage in the Age but almost exclusively in reports about Antoinette Lattouf’s dismissal from the ABC.

The Age did not cover the 19 November 2024 statement by Mohan Pieris, the chair of the UN’s Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, who insisted that “a genocide is unfolding before our eyes … history will not forgive or forget our inaction”. It did not acknowledge that, on 30 December 2024, Genocide Watch declared bluntly that “a genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel is underway in Gaza”.

The Age reported on, several occasions, the South African effort to bring Israel to the ICJ. But when the court issued its interim finding – in which it ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts – the news appeared in the ninth paragraph of a 28 January 2024 piece entitled ‘Australia to pause $6m aid as UN investigates claim employees participated in October 7 attack’. The bulk of the story centred, as the headline implied, not on the court’s ruling, but on Penny Wong’s decision to withhold humanitarian assistance to the main UN agency for Palestinians in Gaza.

The presentation of Amnesty International’s finding of genocide was equally muted. On 5 December 2024, the Age published an Associated Press piece that summarised Amnesty’s report and explained that it “adds an influential voice to a growing list of players that have accused Israel of committing genocide”. Yet it did not acknowledge that much of the ‘growing list’ – which, by then, included a huge range of NGOs – had never been shared with its readers.

In July 2025, two major Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel declared the Israeli campaign in Gaza a genocide. The Age reported neither announcement.

It said nothing when, around the same time, Oxfam issued a press release explaining that “ending Israel’s genocide of Gaza is a test not only of our world order but of our collective humanity”.

The important declaration, on 31 August 2025, by the International Association of Genocide Scholars that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide” featured in the Age’s online coverage (courtesy of the AAP). But it did not appear in the print edition.

On 17 September 2025, the Age published, on its front page, the genocide finding by the UN Commission of Inquiry as a front page story. It still has not, however, published an editorial condemning that genocide.

Unfit for purpose

Throughout the western world, the mainstream media has failed the people of Gaza, refusing to give appropriate weight to the mounting evidence of genocide. A study by Deepcut and Newscord showed the ABC humanised Israelis more than Palestinians and provided more space to Israeli perspectives in its coverage of Gaza. Other studies have revealed similar biases in US and UK media. In this sense, the Age is not an outlier, it is part of a western mainstream that has been exposed for systemic and institutional biases, rendering them unfit for purpose.

Writing about Myanmar, the Age editorialist concluded: ‘[W]e have a moral responsibility not just to act, but to lead by example. We cannot squib it.’ On Gaza, that is exactly what they did.