Why Is Everybody Lying About Israel?

Three loud lies and one quiet truth

I guess it’s time to reread Dostoevsky’s Something About Lying . Though it’s about 19th century Russia, the message is universal – people lie to make people more comfortable by confirming their pre-existing beliefs. And this extends to lying to oneself.

I didn’t expect to be writing about Israel again. But since my last post , the synagogue in the Seattle area where I had my Bar Mitzvah was defaced with Pro-Palestinian graffiti , and my former law school was disrupted by Pro-Palestinian rallies in the lobby during classes .

On Oct. 7, Israel was the victim of the terrorist organization known as Hamas, which has been the governing authority in Gaza since 2007. Hamas wants to wipe out every Jew in Israel, and has openly proclaimed that they will continue to initiate violent attacks against innocent Israeli civilians in the future. Israel is fighting on three fronts: on the battlefield with bullets, where they’re gradually winning, and in the news and schools, where they are losing badly and are widely seen as the aggressor.

Anti-Semitism is rising everywhere.?It only takes leaders saying both sides are to blame in order to normalize the amplification of Hamas propaganda. Obama’s “nobody’s hands are clean ” comment, a surprising reversal of Trump’s infamous “very fine people on both sides” response to Charlottesville neo-Nazis, is not all that different from the tightrope that Saudi Arabia is walking by condemning the IDF ground invasion of Gaza while at the same time calling Hamas tactics un-Islamic .

LIE #1: Palestinian civilians are targeted by Israel and are dying in large numbers.?

REALITY: Israel’s critics disregard years of photo and video evidence that Hamas terrorists launch attacks from civilian buildings (apartment buildings, hospitals, schools and mosques), and hide their militants and supplies there, as a deliberate strategy of using “human shields”. This goes back to 2008, as this NATO report shows , and as Hamas proudly admitted in 2014 . And the source of the numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties for major news organizations is the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which has every incentive to inflate the numbers because it supports their accusation of genocidal intent by Israel.

The news reports numbers from Hamas because they have to report some numbers, but they don’t know the real numbers of dead Palestinian civilians in this war, and neither do you. Israel used to dispute the numbers of civilians killed, but has largely given up in recent years.

Almost none of the reports that originate from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry mention Hamas militants killed. They’re either “Palestinians”, “civilians” or “people in Gaza”. Go ahead and search Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN and Fox News. Yet it is well known that Israel has some of the most advanced missile guidance systems in the world. And when Israel occasionally reports that a targeted bombing killed a Hamas leader and no civilians , Hamas does not dispute it.?

So, we are supposed to believe that Israel is extremely skilled at targeting rockets at Hamas leaders, but at all other times is indiscriminately bombing civilians? Yet most of the world now believes this! We must also keep in mind that families of Hamas militants killed by the IDF receive financial payments due to their “martyr” status, which they aren’t going to jeopardize by telling Al-Jazeera or the BBC that the deceased was fighting the IDF.?

To be clear, I am not disputing that civilians are being killed by collateral damage from Israeli bombs. This is a horrible outcome that makes peace more difficult to attain. There’s likely a tactical calculation by the IDF that they save X IDF lives by bombing Y Hamas militants in a location rather than sending in ground troops, even though there is a some probability of also killing Z civilians. Not very palatable to anyone who believes that all war is morally wrong, but vastly different from the mainstream news story.?

The painful truth is that civilian deaths from bombing are extremely common in wars throughout the last century, including bombings conducted by the US, and not a “war crime” under the International Criminal Court so long as killing civilians isn’t the military objective. Did you know that in WW2 the Allied forces killed anywhere from 300-600k German civilians in bombing runs ? It turns out there’s a new Apple TV+ show about the Allied heroes from the air force divisions, called Masters of the Air . Do we feel any outrage about dead German civilians from the Nazi era? If not, why is that??

Meanwhile, there are actual undisputed ethnic genocides in Sudan and western China right now , but the liberal activists and news outlets amplifying anti-Israel messages have little to say about those cases.?

For a deeper dive on how Hamas has planted the seeds of their propaganda campaign through social media influencers, see the Coalition for a Safer Web report here about the Hamas “Influencer” Intifada.

LIE #2:? Hamas’ attack was a reaction to awful things that Israel did to Palestinians in recent years (e.g. unlawful detention of suspected militants, supporting West Bank settlements by Israelis, turning Gaza into a “prison”...take your pick).?

REALITY: The root cause of Palestinian anti-Semitism springs from education that predates the recent activities of the Netanyahu government. An entire generation of Palestinian kids in Gaza have been taught that Israel and the Jews are evil, and that violence against Israeli Jews is a righteous cause under Islam. Even worse, some of this education was directly funded by the UN and Western charities seeking to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza.

This concern about education is not new. Starting back in 1998, it intensified in the mid 2000s after shocking reports by Palestinian Media Watch that were highlighted by then-Senator Hiliary Clinton. But it just doesn't stick in the news cycle.

In 2015, the EU passed legislation requiring textbook reform as a condition for continued funding to the Palestinian Authority. It didn't work.

Here is a comprehensive independent UN watchdog report in 2023 about UNRWA, the UN agency that runs education for Palestinian refugee schools in Gaza and neighboring countries, as summarized in this article: https://unwatch.org/un-teachers-call-to-murder-jews-reveals-new-report/

This report, which was presented to the US Congress in context of reviewing their funding of UNRWA, finds that dozens of teachers at ten schools of UNRWA created teaching materials in 2021-2022 that glorified terrorism against Jews and encouraged martyrdom. The report is split into the social media posts of educators (which praise “martyrs” who killed Israeli civilians in shootings and bombings), and the classroom educational materials. The latter is particularly important for understanding the mindset of young militants in Gaza.

Below are three examples out of many documented in the report , from classroom photos and Telegram/Facebook group posts:

• UNRWA’s Al-Zaytun Elementary School: 5th graders were taught to glorify Dalal Mughrabi, a terrorist who carried out the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in which 38 Israeli civilians including 13 children were killed. Photos taken of a classroom blackboard show how she is presented as “the fighting leader” and a “hero” who is to be honored by naming children and streets after her.? Photos of a classroom blackboard from Social Studies class show a map labeled Palestine that fails to recognize the State of Israel.??
• UNRWA’s Al-Maghazi Middle School for Boys B: a reading comprehension exercise for 9th graders celebrated a Palestinian firebombing attack on a Jewish bus as a “barbecue party.” Another one showed what “predators” and “prey”? are with fictional descriptions of Israelis brutally murdering Palestinians in entirely fictional stories. And a grammar exercise for 5th-graders taught that martyrdom and jihad are “the most important meanings of life.”
• UNRWA’s Asma Middle School for Girls B: ?A 6th grade grammar exercise stated that “I will commit jihad to liberate the homeland” and “I will not give up a centimeter of my land.”?

This report reinforced a 2021 article about UNRWA that included: “A 5th grade Islamic education lesson “asks students to discuss the ‘repeated attempts by the Jews to kill the Prophet’ and then asks them to think of ‘other enemies of Islam.’”

There is a very disturbing trend of Pro-Palestinian news articles that claim to debunk these facts, but then cite to reports that actually support them. This is Orwellian newspeak at its worst.

For example, this 2021 article lede is “No, Palestinian Textbooks Are Not Antisemitic. A new study unequivocally refutes the accusation made by right-wing Israeli organizations”, but it links to a 2021 Georg Eckert Institute report with examples that run contrary to the lede, including:

• Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians during the 1970s are not condemned but rather portrayed as a legitimate method of resistance.
• In maps of the region, Israel is absent. The textbooks prefer to use the term ‘Zionist occupation’ instead of mentioning Israel.
• In one case, Jews are collectively depicted as enemies of Muhammad who attempted to kill him; this accusation is later linked with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If you want to see the source, check out Chapter 4 of the report starting at p.124.?

Sadly, the education issue is not limited to Gaza. Qatar, a major source of funding for Hamas, is also a major donor to US universities - many of the same that have seen the most aggressive Pro-Palestinian rallies last month. See also the recent refusal of the heads of MIT, Harvard and U Penn to agree that advocating for the genocide of Jews qualifies as harassment . The Hill has a good recent summary on the donor issue for those who would like to “follow the money.” This is a hard problem for the US to solve, given that Qatar is a US ally in the region, though they harbor Hamas leadership at the same time.?

LIE #3: The formation of the State of Israel in 1948 was a “colonization” of Palestinian natives by Jews.

REALITY: Jews were in Israel, including Gaza and the West Bank, thousands of years before Islam was even a religion . The Jewish people were colonized by foreign empires over and over again since that time, including by Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans and the British. It’s particularly ironic, in light of the Balfour Declaration, that many mainstream news organizations in the UK repeat this narrative while framing the current war.

Arabs in the region, who were also previously colonized by Western powers, were also offered a state at the end of WW2, and rejected the offer. Both Jews and Arabs were victims of colonization, but because Israel is a political ally of the US, this lie continues to have legs with enemies of the US and with young people attracted to either neo-Communist or anti-imperialist worldviews. This is a crucial lie for Hamas to gain foreign support for a religious war from people who are not Muslim but are political. See also, Mao providing financial support to Arab/Palestinian revolutionaries in the 60s .?

I would draw your attention to a more eloquent writer than I, Simon Montefiore, in the Atlantic piece The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False :

[The decolonization narrative] is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.” …When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

THE QUIET TRUTH:? None of these lies will change the outcome of the war in Israel. Nearly every major war since WW2 has been a proxy war. Hamas’ main backer is Iran. Iran’s only major backer is Russia, which is too weakened by the Ukraine war to meaningfully back them up. Iran could not come close to beating the US and Israel in a military engagement. And the other neighboring Arab nations (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan) have learned from past experience that piling on to create a bigger war usually leaves Israel stronger, and with more territory, than when it began.?

But this all matters a great deal outside of Israel, as we can see from the recent wave of violent Pro-Palestinian / anti-Israel demonstrations in Europe and the US. It is easy to imagine a major terrorist attack against Jews in the West in the near future, inspired by potent deceit that reverberates from schools to newsrooms to social media.?

This is not the time to remain silent. ?