I’ve recently had conversations with a number of people who, it turned out, were completely unaware that before the October 7th attack on Israel, Gazans had tried huge non-violent demonstrations for almost two years.

Every week, thousands of unarmed men, women and children in Gaza’s open air prison had gathered in a nonviolent, Gandhian march to end the Israeli blockade that was strangling them and to return to their stolen homes and villages.

And every week Israeli snipers had shot dozens of them, killing and maiming unarmed people of all ages – men, women, children, medics, journalists. On the first day alone, atleast fifteen people were killed and 750 others were shot. (See detailed reports here. and videos below.)

Yet, US news reports mentioned these so infrequently, if at all, that many Americans have no idea that these massive weekly demonstrations even took place.

One of the most blatant and egregious examples is PBS.

PBS’s Frontline program had actually co-produced a documentary with the BBC about the Great March. While this still contained considerable pro-Israel spin, It showed a level of Israeli violence that most Americans never see.

At the last minute, PBS suddenly canceled the broadcast.

The reason given was that it was simply postponed because of a more important breaking news story.

However, the allegedly timely news story that preempted the Gaza documentary consisted of a minimal, widely known update to a news story that had been on the website for 2 months. PBS told callers the film would be broadcast at some unnamed time in the future.

The next story from PBS was that the film was supposedly not a PBS documentary, even though it had been announced as such in numerous places. Moreover, this fraudulent excuse had not even been mentioned when the film was preempted. The upshot was that PBS now announced it would never show it.

Had this film not been blocked, quite likely vastly more Americans would have seen Palestinians’ courageous attempt to use nonviolence, would have seen Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed demonstraters in cold blood, and more Americans would have demanded that their government stop supporting Israel… And then, perhaps, the desperate October 7th breakout would not have occurred.