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By Mandy Turner
“The silencing of pro-Palestinian or anti-genocide voices is the reason why this genocide is still going on after 10 months.”
Ghassan Abu-Sittah, Rector of the University of Glasgow, 1 August 2024
In 1986, on British television, an advertisement was screened for the Guardian newspaper which featured a young skinhead man who appears to be snatching a businessman’s briefcase from his hands in what looks like a street mugging. The evidence looks clear: there is a violent hooligan trying to rob a respectable man in broad daylight. But then the camera widens to show viewers that the young man is in fact trying to pull the businessman away from bricks falling from overhead scaffolding, rescuing him from a painful accident or quite possibly death. The voiceover, in the typical upper-class “BBC World Service” accent of that era, says: “An event seen from one point of view gives one impression. Seen from another point of view, it gives quite a different impression. But it’s only when you get the whole picture, you can fully understand what is going on.”
This report assesses seven leading Western think tanks for content and coverage on Israel and Palestine for eight months between October 7, 2023, and June 6, 2024, based on the principles captured in this advertisement. To understand an event and process, it is essential to look at it from different points of view and provide wider context. If you fail to do this, you are providing a partial picture and potentially misleading your audience. Scholars and activists have long pointed to the biases in Western media in the context of Israel and Palestine. However, think tanks are rarely scrutinised despite the fact they target parliamentarians, policymakers, the media, and political leaders – and are therefore also important to analyse.
I assessed the flow of ideas, people, and money in the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Cato Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (also known as Chatham House). The main questions guiding my research were:
1. How are these think tanks placed within the Western political landscape?
2. Who staffs them and what circles do they move in?
3. What viewpoints do they generally express regarding Israel and Palestine, and what viewpoints did they promote for eight months from October 7, 2023, to June 6, 2024?
4. Are they “independent thinkers” offering a range of different viewpoints as regards Israel and Palestine or are they operating as “hegemony factories” supporting and bolstering the foreign policies of the governments in which they operate?
In summary, my research shows that five out of these seven Western think tanks promoted a pro-Israel perspective – although this varied in degree between extreme and more subtle. Pro-Palestinian perspectives were in some instances completely ignored; in other instances, they were marginalised; and in one instance, they were ridiculed. For these five think tanks – the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, CFR, CSIS, and Chatham House – extensive and continual bias towards Israel was shown even eight months after October 7, 2023. At any time, such bias is reprehensible, but at the time of a genocide it is unforgiveable. Portraying Israel in favourable ways has played a crucial role in silencing pro-Palestinian perspectives, decontextualising the situation, and helping to provide cover for a genocide. The two think tanks that were the most critical of Israel were the Cato Institute and the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), both for very different reasons.
The fact that not all seven Western think tanks promoted pro-Israel bias implies that those that did made a deliberate decision to do so – a decision that would have been made by people in leadership positions, i.e., “gatekeepers”. In this report I show how this happens through the careful curation of what narrative is given dominance via techniques of framing, selective coverage, the omission of relevant facts, and who is allowed to speak by processes of inclusion and exclusion.
Citation: Turner, Mandy, 2025. “Hegemony factories or independent thinkers? Western think tanks on Israel and Palestine after October 7”, Security in Context Research Paper 25-01. April 2025, Security in Context.
