The Lies That Sustain Israeli Genocide
Big lies and small lies, they all come together to weave a false narrative so people can justify their support for the mass murder of Palestinians
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I have studied the history and politics of Israel and Palestine for four decades and have been working on the issue professionally for more than twenty years. The fact that people have entirely different narratives of the issue, and that there is a good deal of sheer dishonesty around it, is hardly news to me. As is usually the case when there is such a massive disparity of power, the bulk of the dishonesty comes from the more powerful, and thus the “pro-Israel” side, but there is enough to go around.
But since the events of October 7, the lies and sheer mendacity that have, of necessity, been employed by Israel and its supporters to convince people that a massive effort at genocide was something other than what it is are simply off the charts.
This intense wave of propaganda started on October 7 itself, when Israel felt it needed to embellish what were already terrible and horrific crimes committed by Palestinians who managed to breach the prison wall Israel built to seal Gaza off. It has continued steadily since, right up to the two false narrative Israel and its supporters have put out that I will discuss here. It has been perhaps the key factor in maintaining what support Israel still has for its genocidal campaign, as a credulous western media has been fully complicit in spreading a dishonest narrative.
I am going to discuss two cases that are around today. One is a relatively small example of propaganda, but its blatant dishonesty is emblematic of the problem. It is also the kind of thing we see daily. The second, a much more important example, is one in a series of big lies that have been told, on par with the falsehood about UNRWA workers being involved with October 7.
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) Blatantly Misrepresent a Poll
The AJC has long been among the worst purveyors of pro-Israel nonsense and anti-Palestinian hate. But now that former Rep. Ted Deutch—who, on the floor of the House while he was still a member, called the only Palestinian-American woman in Congress, Rashida Tlaib, an antisemite for citing characterizations of Israel by Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem as an apartheid state—is the CEO, things have gone from bad to worse.
Last week, the AJC put out an ad claiming that, “New polling data from IPSOS (sic) and Axios shows that the anti-Israel rallies on college campuses are deeply unpopular with the students that they claim to represent. Support for the protests is as low as 19% among students.” (Note: the poll was actually conducted by Axios and The Generation Lab, not IPSOS)
That sounds grim, doesn’t it? And it would be if the poll said anything even remotely close to that. But it doesn’t.
The question that garnered the 81% of respondents was about “holding protesters accountable, agreeing with the notion that those who destroyed property or vandalized or illegally occupied buildings should be held responsible by their university, per the survey.”
Only a tiny percentage of the encampments even went as far as occupying a building on campus, and even fewer saw vandalism or property destruction, all of which was quite minor. The question is almost entirely hypothetical.
But regardless, the question asked had absolutely nothing to do with whether the respondents supported the protests, much less whether they supported Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza. The 19% didn’t reflect support for the protests, as AJC falsely claimed. It was the percentage who felt that protesters could vandalize whatever they wanted free of consequence. It’s remarkable that even 19% said they supported that.
There was a pertinent question in the poll, but the AJC didn’t like the answer so much. “Students were still more likely to say they support the pro-Palestinian encampments than oppose them. 45% said they support them either strongly or a little bit. 30% were neutral, and 24% were strongly or a bit opposed.”
When you consider that the whole question of Palestine and Israel is scary for a lot of people and that the U.S. media has fed them a steady diet of pro-Israel propaganda, and yet a plurality of university students still support the protests, that’s remarkable. And that pertains to encampments that might be inconveniencing the respondents. The actual sympathy for the people of Gaza rather than the barbaric Israeli attacks is at least as great.
You can see why the AJC desperately wanted to bury the reality here. But that doesn’t diminish the mendacity of the blatant lie they put out. This wasn’t fudging a few words or shading the truth. It was just a flat-out lie, and a lot of people bought it.
The Latest Big Lie
To Jews, few things are as offensive as the denial of genocide. The reasons, of course, are obvious, and it is that sensitivity that makes Holocaust denial such an offense to such a wide range of us, across political, religious, and ideological spectra.
Yet, as is so often the case in human affairs, it becomes much harder to see such an offense when we do it ourselves. The widespread denial of the massive crimes Israel is still committing in Gaza has reached a near-religious level of fervor, even while some are starting to find it so overwhelming that they can’t look away anymore.
In most Israeli media, casualty figures from Gaza are routinely cast into doubt. This is done by sourcing them from the “Hamas-run Ministry of Health.” This ministry, part of the pseudo-governance structure of Gaza before Israel’s onslaught, has, like many Gaza agencies, operated in a technocratic and bureaucratic manner, and the fact of its being part of the governing structure in Gaza is incidental as far as who holds the meager authority that can be held in a besieged and imprisoned territory.
For years, human rights organizations, as well as world governmental bodies have used the statistics from the MoH, evaluated them, and found them dependable. That includes not only the United Nations, but also the United States and European countries. Even Israel has agreed that their numbers are generally accurate.
But since October 7, with the full support of U.S. President Joe Biden but without any evidence, the figures from the MoH are cast into doubt. Like Israel’s complete fabrication of UNRWA involvement in the October 7 attack, there is no evidence to support the allegations against the MoH. An attempt to undermine the figures was published in March by the disreputable Tablet Magazine, but it was so threadbare and obviously flawed that it was laughed out of serious discussion by everyone but the staunchest supporters of Israel, who really didn’t care if there was actual evidence or anything substantive at all. They were simply happy to have an article to cite, accurate or not.
Then last week, the UN Office of Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) made a small misstep. They had been producing infographics several times a week, updating various, grim, statistics and reports on the utter devastation of Gaza. Included in those infographics were the number of recorded fatalities, along with estimates of the number of women and children among the dead.
Until the infographic of May 8, those were vague estimates, based on incomplete data, and were listed as such. For example, the last time these figures were published, they reported that of the 34,735 fatalities, “>9,500” were women and “>14,500” were children. The figures are obviously estimates.
But on May 8, OCHA was able to announce that nearly 25,000 of the dead had been identified. They were able to report a breakdown of the 24,686 fatalities.
That meant that 10,159 bodies remained unidentified. In addition, both the May 8 infographic and the prior one from May 6 noted that more than 10,000 additional people were missing or under rubble and were not included in the total count. That meant that aside from the breakdown of men, women, children, and elderly, there were some 20,000 more missing and dead that had yet to be identified.
Israel, which was not working in a war zone, with their city literally being blown to bits around them, with access to all the modern equipment one could find, and having to deal with the horrific fallout of one day of attacks, still took months, in some cases, to identify the dead, was forced to revise their casualty figures downward, and had to deal with a number of cases of mis-identification from October 7.
In Gaza, the identification process is far more difficult, yet the Ministry of Health has maintained standards of transparency throughout, with this new reporting being just another example of it.
Yet rather than recognize that what the Ministry of Health, and therefore OCHA, were doing was maximizing the precision of their reports, the Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel falsely claimed that Hamas had revised the numbers downward.
Nothing of the kind happened. In fact, the death toll rose between May 6 and May 8 by 109. With the added specificity, the percentage of women (20%) and children (32%) among the dead dropped slightly from 27% for women and 42% for children, but the figures remain appallingly high.
It’s not hard to understand that women and children would be overrepresented among those bodies being harder to identify, as their bodies would have been more likely to have been burned or mangled by bombs than to be shot, than combatant-age men, who would be more likely to be in the open in the areas of Israeli ground advancement. Thus, one could expect they’d more often be difficult to identify.
None of this takes a great deal of thought to recognize. And it’s hardly as if an infographic that shows that 52% of Israel’s victims have been women and children differs much from one that reflects 59%, especially when the lower figure is bolstered for the first time by a count of the elderly that Israel murdered (8% of fatalities, a more significant figure than it first appears since very few of Gaza’s populace get to be elderly under the conditions Israel has imposed for so many years; half of Gaza’s population was under 18 before this started and 70% were under 30).
The UN does need to be chided here for their lack of foresight and poor communication. After everything they have gone through with Israel and its shady supporters, they had to have expected that this change would be twisted into something it was not. But they didn’t explain what had happened until after the bad faith actors had already run through the media with their dissembling.
Even at a press conference where a UN official was directly asked about it, the reporter—unsurprisingly from Al Jazeera—had to ask several follow up questions to get the official to be clear about what he was saying. It was clear there was no talking point prepared on this issue. After the debacle of the UNRWA fraud, that is inexcusable.
What this amounts to is genocide denial. It’s not only on par with Holocaust denial, it’s worse because this is a genocide happening right now, and no one is putting a stop to it. Denial is part of the reason (along with the basic racism of both conservative and liberal Westerners).
The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a hawkish, pro-Israel far-right think tank has been pumping out this noxious lie, as have other Israeli and pro-Israeli mouthpieces. It’s been repeated by half-witted pundits like “Morning Joe” Scarborough, and is now widespread. Most who now parrot this lie haven’t even seen the infographics in question.
Even leaving the dishonesty aside, just look at what these people are saying. They are beaming with pride that the onslaught they have lusted over for seven months has killed “only” 7,797 children and 4,959 women. That is the kind of vicious hostility to the lives of people of the “inferior” group that zealous nationalism engenders. That is what it now means to be “pro-Israel” in 2024.
News Roundup
Criticizing Israel? Nonprofit Media Could Lose Tax-Exempt Status Without Due Process
By Seth Stern, The Intercept, May 10, 2024
Britain's support for Zionism has caused 76 years of conflict. It is time this barbarism stops
By David Hearst, Middle East Eye, May 15, 2024
Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center
CNN International Investigations and Visuals Teams, CNN, May 10, 2024
One Year On: The Calamities of the Sudan Conflict
By Imad K. Harb, Arab Center, Washington DC, May 14, 2024
Genocide in Gaza: Analysis of International Law and its Application to Israel’s Military Actions since October 7, 2023
University Network for Human Rights, May 15, 2024
Joe Biden has done more than arm Israel. Leaked documents reveal his own officials see him as complicit in Gaza’s devastating famine
By Richard Hall, Bel Trew and Andrew Feinberg, The Independent, UK, May 15, 2024
Interior Dept staffer becomes first Jewish Biden appointee to publicly resign over war in Gaza
By Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press, May 15, 2024
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