By Dorothea Shefer-Vanson in Mevasseret Zion, Israel
The erstwhile Nazi propaganda minister must be rubbing his hands with glee down there in whichever circle of Hades he is now spending his time. The past-master at the art of producing and disseminating false information in order to discredit Jews while escalating enmity and loathing towards them has found talented successors in the contemporary world of communications. Using a succession of lies, falsehoods, distortions of the truth and blatant misrepresentations of reality, the Palestinian propaganda machine now represents Israel, the tiny Jewish country which has been under attack from the moment of its establishment, as an evil rogue state causing distress and unrest throughout the Middle East. Every lie and calumny has its roots in the inversion of truth and justice, just as Joseph Goebbels portrayed Germany’s loyal Jewish subjects as enemies of the state, turning reality on its head and deploying it against his unsuspecting victims. Here are just a few examples.
- The genocide lie: When there is war there are also civilian casualties. Were no civilians killed when the Allies bombed Dresden in WWII? In Berlin? Hamburg? Oh sure, the targets were military, but no matter how accurate the bombers were, the cost to civilian life was not always avoidable. Hamas built tunnels in Gaza in order to cause harm to Israelis not to protect civilians. Huge quantities of weapons were located in schools and kindergartens, hospitals served as nerve-centers from which to launch military attacks, with no thought given to the need to protect whoever might be using the site for a medical purpose. Besides, the IDF is known for its efficacy, so that if genocide in Gaza had been its purpose it would surely have done a better job rather than allowing the population to double in size so that it now numbers two million.
- The apartheid lie: Anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with the Apartheid system that existed in South Africa would know that people were classified according to skin colour, and that this served as the basis of all services and situations. Separate entrances to buildings for blacks and whites, separate bathrooms, separate seats on public transport, and so on. Anyone who visits Israel will see Arabs and Jews working side by side, using the same buildings, shops, hospitals and medical centres. In fact, many of Israel’s health services are manned (and womanned) by Arabs as well as by Jews. Arab citizens of Israel have equal rights, vote at elections and even have representatives in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Arab justices sit on the bench of all the levels of the judiciary, including the High Court. So all the talk of apartheid is just another inversion of the truth.
- The Palestine lie: When the British Mandate ended in 1948, the area known as Palestine covered the entire Holy Land. Palestine was the Mandate’s term for the region, taken over from the term imposed by the Ancient Romans (who, by the way, crucified Jesus) when they exiled the Jews from their land back in the first century C.E. Anyone born in the area during the period of the British Mandate was defined as Palestinian on their birth certificate, and this includes my Jewish husband (born in Haifa in 1940). The Arabs were offered a state, but declined, preferring to attack the nascent Jewish state. They were defeated, but refused to recognize Israel’s existence and continued to launch attacks, including wars, from time to time, either singly or in concert (1956, 1967, 1973, etc., etc.), the latest murderous onslaught took place on 7th October 2023. Israel reacted and repelled the invader, as it had every right to do. In the years since 1948, when Israel was founded, various attempts were made by well-meaning international politicians to enable the establishment of a Palestinian state, but whenever it came to the crunch, the Palestinians declined the offer, preferring to maintain a permanent state of hostility, thereby condemning the Arabs who had fled the country in 1948 to the status of permanent refugees, rather than rescuing them from their fate, as Israel did in 1948 with the waves of immigrants expelled from the Arab countries in which they had been living for many generations. The idea of Palestine is a fiction that the Arabs use to present themselves as victims, whereas in reality there are huge swathes of Arab-controlled territory where the ‘Palestinians’ could easily be settled.
As former US President Bill Clinton wrote after his failed attempt to persuade Yasser Arafat to accept a Palestinian state: ‘The Palestinians don’t want a state, they just want to kill Jews.’
The sad fact is that there was a Palestinian state. It was called Gaza. There were no Jews or Israelis there. There was self-determination. Truckloads of money were supplied by Qatar and other Arab countries. But instead of cultivating the productive capacity of its population, all that the self-governing state of Gaza could produce was a force bent on murder, rape, pillage and bestiality. One could say that it got its just desserts, but it still stands as an object-lesson in what happens when every humanitarian concept is abandoned. Thus, funded by Qatar and other Arab countries, the Palestinian propaganda machine continues to propagate lies, enabling gullible individuals to delude themselves into thinking that they are helping a humanitarian cause, when in actual fact they are aiding a cause that is anti-humanitarian and at odds with human decency.
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Dorothea Shefer-Vanson is an author and freelance journalist residing in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion, Israel.