I’ve given this matter a lot of thought, and I don’t say this lightly even now, but it’s time:
People have got to move past the point where their reaction is to run and hide when presented with positions and assertions that question the official state narratives on Israel and Palestine. And folks, that’s true whether your state is America, Canada, England, or Israel, itself.
Israel’s military and state media have been caught lying so many times over the last 16 months, it’s frankly a little embarrassing for them. Israel has plenty of money and tech resources, and boasts the fourth most powerful military on Earth, but they’re actually not very good at falsifying durable narratives for global consumption, yet.
Whether it’s lies about weapons caches under hospitals, office calendars being code for secret terrorist plans, or simply the regime’s willingness to engage in insane levels of friendly fire on its own Jewish citizens, every single one of Israel’s PR ploys to suppress the real and amplify the unreal has either been disproven fully or cast under a different light by the surrounding context.
In this online era, the Israeli regime’s PR plots and spins get unraveled pretty much immediately, and often definitively. Problem is, when the only station you’ve got on is the station run by them, you’re not only not getting the full picture, you’re getting an intentionally distorted picture.
On the issue of Israel and Palestine, the actual reality on the ground has been the subject of the most massive media manipulation campaign the world has ever seen, full stop. More money and other resources have been spent twisting and otherwise suppressing the reality of this thing than humans have spent on any other political PR cause. More than tobacco. More even than climate change. This effort’s been going on for decades, with numerous books written and even published in the U.S. about the phenomenon, with no real reduction to its intensity as a result.
When Professors Mearsheimer and Walt broke through with their seminal work, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the reason it dropped so hard and raised so many eyebrows is because of just how comprehensive the media blockade on Palestine and its people had been in the U.S. up to that point. Nothing it contained was at all controversial in its content, and the scholarship of the two professors who authored it was about as impeccable as they come, but Judeo-Christian America gasped and clutched its pearls at the tome’s revelations all the same.
Recent polling confirms that the overwhelming majority of Americans want a lasting peace between Israel and Palestine that recognizes Palestinian land and civil rights, with only 33 percent still opposing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Only 33 percent (probably the same 33 percent, give or take) approve of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. A strong majority believes America should condition military aid on Israel ending the occupation, and a similar majority (62%) believe the U.S. should use its leverage to see the same done.
You’d think these kinds of things would be obvious, but just to hang a few lanterns:
⬤ You don’t despise and work to undermine fact-checkers when the facts are on your side.
⬤ You don’t conjure justifications or rationales for blowing up hospitals, schools, and wells. Moral armies avoid blowing up hospitals, schools, and wells, as required by international law.
⬤ You don’t kill journalists in record numbers when you have no fear of the reality on the ground getting out and being shared with the world.
⬤ You don’t shut down media sites and publications that criticize your regime when your government respects democratic institutions like an independent press.
⬤ You don’t use starvation as a weapon of war, and certainly not against a captive civilian population, when you’re in the right as to who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed.
⬤ You don’t spend millions of dollars formulating and implementing a counter-narrative strategy when the unchallenged and impartial historical record poses no threat to you.
You do things like this when you are the villain, at least from any humanist, egalitarian, or pluralistic (or just plain human decency) point of view. Oppressors do these things: Fascists, authoritarians, totalitarian regimes, and colonizers.
Suggesting that the occupying nuclear military power, maintaining the world’s longest-running illegal military occupation, might bear the brunt of both the scrutiny and the responsibility for events unfolding as a result of its illegal military occupation is not “fringe” or “conspiracy talk”.
It’s common sense and plain talk.
It’s plain talk that Israel, and not those it occupies, is unquestionably the primary source of the ongoing and overall instability in the region, and common sense that if peace is ever to come, it is the occupying state actor who must act in order for that peace to be brought about.
Suggesting that there’s a context to the offensive that Hamas fighters led on October 7th, and that not everything on this entire subject could possibly come down to a small faction that didn’t even exist before 1987, is not “fringe” or “conspiracy”, and certainly not “siding with terrorists”.
It’s common sense and plain talk. Common sense that even if one could successfully eradicate Hamas wholly, that wouldn’t solve the underlying issues. Plain talk that screaming “But Hamas!”, when Hamas literally wouldn’t exist but for the occupation, is ugly whataboutism and unhelpful.
It’s plain talk that Jewish Israeli lives aren’t quantifiably more important or valuable than are Palestinian lives, and common sense that any media apparatus that tells you that they are is a biased one that’s intentionally playing to your prejudices and bigotry and ignorance and fear.
Enough of this naked emperor nonsense.
My family and community have put up with this all our lives. Those of us in the diaspora are proud to be citizens of wherever we ended up — in my case, the U.S. — but watching people and newspapers and magazines (and now, podcasts) all around you run this steadily streaming bid to convince people that up is actually down, left is actually right, and red is actually blue… Watching Zionist-funded politicians tell your fellow Americans that you are “an invented people”, when that’s obviously a meaningless term intended to justify cruelty and normalize oppression…
It’s exhausting and dehumanizing, friends, and frankly, feels an awful lot like gaslighting.
Interesting how few Americans, often so concerned with gaslighting in other arenas of life, stop to consider that aspect: Honestly, I can’t recall ever seeing one of my liberal colleagues take a moment to observe the fact that every day of our lives, Palestinians living in the west have to not only experience this very well-financed and intensive effort to vilify, silence, and discredit us, but we’re also forced to experience the fact that this effort is trying to convince us of all that, too:
“No, you weren’t run out of your homes and off your lands at gunpoint within living memory. No, there is no massive multi-generational trauma, no military occupation, no urgent and ongoing humanization crisis, no active settler-colonial project into those lands that were spared before.”
This past week, Israel dropped over a million leaflets onto the people of Gaza, essentially telling them to leave or die. Israel trying to convince these human beings that after everything they’ve suffered, their only possible future is once again a choice between ethnic cleansing or death…
The same choice Zionist terrorists gave my family during the Nakba over 77 years ago.
It’s enough, already. Let us not talk falsely, now.
Not on this. Not anymore.