Saturday, November 01, 2025

Apartheid Israel Is a U.S.-Sustained Genocide

The Unraveling Lie: Dialectics, Empire, and the Palestinian Truth


Intro: The following is a statement from a U.S. war criminal, Harry S. Truman, who authorized the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, revealing the foundational logic of American complicity in the Nakba:

I had been to Potsdam and I’d seen some of the places where the Jews had been slaughtered by the Nazis. Six million Jews were killed outright—men, women, and children—by the Nazis, and it was my hope that they would have a homeland where they could operate. So when the time came for that, we set up the Israeli government in Palestine. We moved some of the Arabs out. And they were not moved out and thrown out; they were compensated for the land that they had to give up. The Jews organized a government over there, and it’s been a successful one ever since. They’ve done things over there that never have been done in that part of the world before, and while it’s a small republic, it’s an energetic one.

We started with a quote that lays bare the imperial/colonial mentality: a narrative of European guilt and redemption solved at the expense of the native Arab population; the racist framing of Palestine as a backward region in need of “energetic” settler innovation; and the lie of a peaceful, compensated transfer, which whitewashes the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians from their historical homeland.

For over seventy-seven years, the Nakba has been shrouded in a fog—a miraculous concoction of deception, propaganda, and outright lies, spun in the halls of Western power to conceal an ongoing genocide. Yet, through the smoke and terror, Palestinians have always carried a fundamental certainty in our hearts: this entire edifice of falsehood would evaporate into the air when people began to know the truth. We are now living through that violent, glorious unraveling. The recent spectacle of two Americans—themselves the heirs of a settler-colonial project on stolen native land—Tucker Carlson and Jeffrey Sachs, stumbling through the graveyard of our history, is a stark symptom of this collapse. It is a rare crack in the imperial monolith, allowing shards of raw truth to pierce the manufactured reality. But for Palestinians, who have paid for this truth with generations of blood and exile, what matters is not a shard of revelation, but the full, unvarnished, and terrible totality. And this totality reveals that their well-intentioned confusion, their half-answers, are themselves a product of the very system they attempt to critique.

The connection between the imperial power and our occupied land is not a simple alliance of interests. It is a dialectical relationship, an evolving motion in two directions, a feedback loop of mutual reinforcement. The Yankee empire did not merely midwife the zionist settler-colonial project; it breathed life into its expansion, providing what Carlson quantifies as “$300 billion at least” over 80 years, a “$30 billion” injection in less than two years, and even a quarter of the world’s “THAAD missile batteries” to protect its outpost. But the dialectic is not a one-way street. The zionist entity, this imperial spearhead and criminal tool, is not a passive instrument. Its relentless expansion and its wars—what Professor Sachs, in a moment of stark clarity, identifies as “seven wars right now”—are not merely supported by the empire; they actively generate new global crises that the empire must then manage. As Sachs outlines, Netanyahu’s doctrine, articulated in the “Clean Break” document, is to deliberately create unrest and then ensure “the United States will go to war for us.” This is the grim synthesis of their relationship: a laboratory where tactics of fragmentation and annihilation are tested on Palestinian bodies, and the empire, as both patron and student, learns and exports these methods.

Watching Sachs and Carlson, any aware Palestinian thinks: here are citizens of the state that inherited and amplified the original sin of the Balfour Declaration, once again offering their sick prescriptions from the sidelines of our agony. They present the bankrupt “two-state solution,” a notion Sachs himself champions, insisting “there needs to be a state for the Palestinian people alongside a state of the Israelis.” But this “solution” is the original colonial formula, a weapon wielded with strategic cynicism. The zionist colonialists have only ever entertained this division when they were weak, using negotiations as a tactic to buy time; once their strength was consolidated through imperial backing, they have always refused it, revealing their true goal of total possession. As Sachs himself reveals, the current prime war criminal of this project, Netanyahu, has stated plainly to the world, “there will never be a state of Palestine.” Therefore, this “solution” is not a path to peace but a tool of pacification. Obscuring the settler-colonial and genocidal nature of the state is its only function. It is an attempt to launder a project, which Sachs himself calls a “genocide” and “mass murder,” into a legitimate “neighbor.”

How can a structure built on what he describes as making “Gaza completely uninhabitable and unlivable” ever be a normal state? Its very existence is predicated on our negation. Why, then, do these American intellectuals insist on peddling the corpse of an idea that the zionist land-robbers themselves have already murdered, an idea whose only function is to provide a diplomatic cover for endless occupation and land theft? It is the ultimate arrogance: the arsonists, their hands still smelling of petrol, offering to manage the fire they set.

Professor Sachs, for all the good information he presents, offers only a half-truth, and in doing so, performs the very dilution we must resist. He meticulously lists the symptoms—the “AIPAC lobby,” the “Christian zionist vote base,” the “mass media propaganda”—yet arrives at a stunning confession of intellectual surrender: “To tell you the truth, none of it really adds up… a bit of a mystery.” He cannot see the elephant in the room: the American way of life itself, an engine of capitalist hegemony that requires dominance over the resources and strategic chokepoints of the globe. The Eastern Mediterranean is a vital artery, and the zionist state, as American officials have themselves admitted, is the “spearhead” to maintain that dominance. Sachs marvels that a “tiny and inherently insignificant country” with a “population of Burundi” commands such devotion. He fails to understand that it is not insignificant; it is the indispensable garrison, the “rogue state” whose lawlessness, as he notes, serves as the sharp edge of imperial power. That a learned professor cannot synthesize this is a testament to the deep indoctrination that bends the American mind, a society that, while lecturing the world on freedom, is itself one of the most deeply conditioned on Earth.

This is not a simple struggle. It is a system of interconnected dialectics, a machine of power whose gears are grinding against each other. Alongside the external contradiction—the primary struggle between the native and the settler-colonial alliance—two internal conflicts churn with transformative fury. There is the internal dialectic among the Arab natives of the land, a struggle between the progressive will of the masses and the reactionary cowardice of the comprador regimes, who play the role of the jailer’s assistant, hoping to manage the prison in exchange for a few scraps of privilege. Simultaneously, there is the internal dialectic within the imperialist camp itself, where the relationship between the core and its settler-colonial outpost has become a feedback loop of “absurdity.” As Carlson exposes, a “client state” now barks orders, with IOF officers “barging into meetings” at the Pentagon and a “foreign leader,” Netanyahu, openly plotting to censor American speech, demanding “We push Congress to force a Tik Tok sale” and to “talk to Elon.” This is the dialectic turning in on itself: the weapon created by empire now dictates to its creator, creating what Carlson rightly identifies as a state of “serial humiliation.” But this “humiliation” is merely a symptom. The actual, deeper truth is that this absurdity is the logical, inevitable result of an imperial project that requires its own subjects to be so deeply indoctrinated that they cannot even recognize their own subjugation. The convenient truth is to lament the symptom; the actual truth is to condemn the system that produces it.


Israeli withdrawal and US presence!!

And this theater of humiliation is only possible because of the deep-seated indoctrination, the profound bend in the imperial brain, that prevents the Yank political class from even perceiving its own subjugation. The comprador in Washington is mentally shackled, unable to see that the master it serves abroad has made it a slave at home. This is not a policy failure; it is the logical outcome of an ideological system built on supremacy, now consuming its own.

This is why building a genuine united front requires an uncompromising ideological struggle against dilution. There can be no unity with those who premise their politics on our continued erasure. The front must be united on the non-negotiable principles of the Palestinian cause: the recognition of the ongoing Nakba, the inalienable Right of Return, and the understanding that zionism is a racist, settler-colonial project. The “good lies” of American pundits, who now criticize the “mass murder” but still cling to the frameworks that enabled it, are not welcome. Their task is not to help us find a more palatable version of our oppression, but to confront, as Sachs accuses, their own state’s “complicit[ity] in genocide.”

And now, the magic is turning on the magician. The dialectic produces its own terrifying contradiction. The indoctrinated citizens the Yank capitalist system created are now at the steering wheel of the very empire that conditioned them, steering the supremacist and bloody White House toward the abyss. The relationship has become so pathological that Carlson simply advises, “get some freaking self-respect and stop being ordered around by a client state.” The empire’s own tools of deception are now yielding a monstrous political reality that threatens to consume it from within. The world sees this, and as Sachs notes from the halls of the UN, it is now “two against the world,” with over “95% of the world population” standing against the Yank-zionist axis, leaving the U.S. regime in a state of nauseating isolation, defending the indefensible.

The liberation of Palestine is not a local event. It is the most concentrated front in a global struggle against a hegemonic imperialist system—the dismantling of the very lies that prop up the empire. When these Yank voices finally understand that their stupid, recycled ideas are not welcome, a corner will have been turned. The truth is not a compromise. It is the only foundation for justice. The full truth is that our struggle will not end with a negotiated settlement between the jailer and the jailed, but with the decolonization of the land and the bending of a crooked world back towards justice. The fog is lifting. The lie is unraveling. And we have always known it would.

Amel-Ba’al, a symbolic name in keeping with a Palestinian tradition, is a Palestinian refugee located on the unceded land known as British Columbia. Read other articles by Amel-Ba’al, or visit Amel-Ba’al's website.

The Pure Evil of America’s QME Doctrine


Shameful US legislation commits to ensuring Israel always has superiority in weapons, technology, training, command and control, and intelligence over its neighbours.

It’s time everyone knew why the US is joined at the hip with a loathsome genocidal ethnocracy like Israel whose stated aim is domination of the Holy Land and beyond.

In 2008, Congress enacted legislation requiring that US arms sales to any country in the Middle East other than Israel must not adversely affect Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME). This ensures the apartheid state always has the upper hand over it neighbours. It is central to US Middle East policy and aims to keep the region at or near boiling point and ripe for exploitation.

The UK has superglued itself to this evil US-Israel partnership for so-called security and other dubious reasons.

Legislation defines QME as “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or non-state actors.”

In a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on 4 November 2011, Andrew Shapiro (Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department), enlarged on QME saying:

As a result of the Obama Administration’s commitment, our security relationship with Israel is broader, deeper and more intense than ever before. One of my primary responsibilities is to preserve Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, or QME. This is not just a top priority for me, it is a top priority for the Secretary and for the President.

It is widely known that our two countries share a special bond that is rooted in our common values and interwoven cultures…. We are committed to that special bond, and we are going to do what’s required to back that up, not just with words but with actions.

Most British people would be mortified to think we as a nation had a special bond or any shared values with such a repulsive regime yet some of our senior politicians seem (mistakenly) to think we have.

“The cornerstone of America’s security commitment to Israel has been an assurance that the United States would help Israel uphold its qualitative military edge,” continued Shapiro. “This commitment was written into law in 2008 and each and every security assistance request from the Israeli Government is evaluated in light of our policy to uphold Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge.”

And he explained how, for three decades, Israel had been the leading beneficiary of US security assistance through the Foreign Military Financing programme (FMF) which was providing $3 billion per year for training and equipment. A 2007 memorandum of understanding provided for $30 billion in security assistance over 10 years, allowing Israel to purchase the sophisticated defence equipment it needs to maintain its qualitative military edge. 60 percent of US security assistance funding to some 70 countries went to Israel.

But here’s the really warped bit. Shapiro claimed: “Our support for Israel’s security helps preserve peace and stability in the region. If Israel were weaker, its enemies would be bolder. This would make broader conflict more likely, which would be catastrophic to American interests in the region. It is the very strength of Israel’s military which deters potential aggressors and helps foster peace and stability. Ensuring Israel’s military strength and its superiority in the region, is therefore critical to regional stability and as a result is fundamentally a core interest of the United States.”

Well, that worked well, didn’t it? Israel is an unwelcome alien intruder and has spent its time picking quarrels with its neighbours, stealing their lands and slaughtering their citizens, safe in the knowledge that the mighty US protects them regardless of their aggressive behaviour.

Shapiro went on:

The United States also experiences a number of tangible benefits from our close partnership with Israel. For instance, joint exercises allow us to learn from Israel’s experience in urban warfare and counterterrorism.

Yes, gained and honed from decades of surveillance, assaults, bombardments and brutal persecution of the captive Palestinian people under Israeli military occupation, and having to deal with Palestinian resistance. And now genocide, which must have provided a wealth of ‘advanced’ experience.

Israeli technology is proving critical to improving our Homeland Security and protecting our troops. One only has to look at Afghanistan and Iraq…. Israel is a vital ally and serves as a cornerstone of our regional security commitments. From confronting Iranian aggression, to working together to combat transnational terrorist networks, to stopping nuclear proliferation and supporting democratic change and economic development in the region – it is clear that both our strategic outlook, as well as our national interests are strongly in sync…. Our security assistance to Israel also helps support American jobs, since the vast majority of security assistance to Israel is spent on American-made goods and services.

It was then time for him to demonise Iran.

The Iranian regime continues to be committed to upsetting peace and stability in the region and beyond. Iran’s nuclear program is a serious concern, particularly in light of Iran’s expansion of the program over the past several years in defiance of its international obligations.

So, speaking of international obligations, how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?

What the updated 2012 legislation says

The US views its QME policy as crucial for Israel’s survival and for maintaining a strategic balance in the region, citing Israel’s role as a “bastion of liberal representative government”. And these barmy ideas are enshrined in something called the ‘United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012’. Read the whole thing here, if you have the stomach for it.

It kicks off by saying Congress makes the following findings:

Since 1948, United States Presidents and both houses of Congress, on a bipartisan basis and supported by the American people, have repeatedly reaffirmed the special bond between the United States and Israel, based on shared values and shared interests.

The Middle East is undergoing rapid change, bringing it hope for an expansion of democracy but also great challenges to the national security of the United States and our allies in the region, particularly to our most important ally in the region, Israel.

The Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran is continuing its decades-long pattern of seeking to foment instability and promote extremism in the Middle East, particularly in this time of dramatic political transition.

At the same time, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to enrich uranium in defiance of multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions.

A nuclear-weapons capable Iran would fundamentally threaten vital United States interests, encourage regional nuclear proliferation, further empower Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, and pose a serious and destabilizing threat to Israel and the region.

Over the past several years, with the assistance of the Governments of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas have increased their stockpile of rockets, with more than 60,000 now ready to be fired at Israel. The Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to add to its arsenal of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, which threaten Iran’s neighbors, Israel, and United States Armed Forces in the region.

US law requires the President to certify to Congress that any arms sale to a Middle Eastern country other than Israel will not negatively affect Israel’s QME. And the legislation incudes this statement:

It is the policy of the United States to reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. As President Barack Obama stated on December 16, 2011. ‘America’s commitment and my commitment to Israel and Israel’s security is unshakeable.’ And as President George W. Bush stated before the Israeli Knesset on May 15, 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, ‘The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friend-ship runs deeper than any treaty’.

Given the present situation, America’s unquestioning commitment to the demented Israeli regime is probably the most mischievous, damaging and idiotic piece of foreign policy ever devised in the history of the modern world. The UK has no reason for cuddling up to this evil love-in, and the smallest shred of decency should tell us to steer well clear. There are other much more palatable allies to be had.

Stuart Littlewood, after working on jet fighters in the RAF, became an industrial marketing specialist. He served as a Cambridgeshire county councillor and a member of the Police Authority, produced two photo-documentary books including Radio Free Palestine (with foreword by Jeff Halper), and has contributed to online news and opinion publications over many years. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.

The World Confronts the Genocide Washington Is Trying to Bury


On October 4th, 2025, in an interview with Axios, President Trump stressed that one of the main goals behind his Gaza plan was to restore Israel’s international standing. “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world,” Trump said. “Now I am gonna get all that support back.”

Under Trump’s plan, a supposed ceasefire took effect on October 10th. But Israel only withdrew from less than half of the Gaza strip, and killed at least 93 people in the next two weeks, after killing at least that many per day for the previous two years. Israel has only allowed 15% of the humanitarian aid called for in the plan to enter Gaza, and has kept the critical Rafah crossing from Egypt into Gaza closed. The daily life-and-death struggle to find food, water and shelter carries on unabated for two million people in Gaza.

While the reduction in the daily scale of Israel’s mass murder is obviously welcome, this is not a real ceasefire. Like previous Israeli ceasefires in Gaza, as in Lebanon, this is a one-sided ceasefire that Israel violates at will, on a daily basis, with no accountability.

This is only the first part of Trump’s plan for Gaza, and there is still no agreement on the other parts, such as the disarmament of Hamas, who provide the only government and police force in Gaza. They now have the added job of protecting their people from Israel-backed criminal gangs and death squads, some with links to ISIS, who prey on them from the Israeli-occupied areas, stealing aid supplies, assassinating local leaders and terrorizing the population.

Hamas is obviously not going to disarm under these conditions, and previously said it would only surrender its weapons once Palestine has an internationally recognized government with its own armed forces. On the other side, Israel has not agreed to other parts of Trump’s plan, such as its withdrawal from the rest of Gaza, nor to any plan for the future of Palestine.

In the United States, where corrupt politicians and corporate media take U.S. and Israeli lies at face value or even repeat them as statements of fact, some may believe that Trump’s plan has resolved the crisis in Palestine. The rest of the world is not so naive or easy to manipulate, but many other governments are also beholden to oligarchies that profit from trade, investment and arms deals with Israel, even as the public in those same countries reels in shock at Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians and U.S.-backed impunity for its crimes.

Trump’s Gaza plan, like much of his foreign policy, cynically exploits the greed and fear of political leaders and their oligarch patrons. Admitting that Israel has “lost a lot of support in the world,” he offers a shortcut back to “business as usual” for governments eager to protect—and even expand—profitable ties despite Israel’s ongoing atrocities and open contempt for international law.

In his first term, Trump brokered the “Abraham Accords,” normalization deals between Israel and Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan that included mutual recognition and expanded trade. He now has his eye on the big prize: Saudi Arabia.

But Arab-Israeli relations have long been contested. In the 1949 UN General Assembly vote on Israel’s admission, all Arab and Muslim countries except Turkiye (which abstained) voted against recognizing the state of Israel. Thirty-two mostly Arab and Muslim countries, including some of its closest neighbors, still either don’t recognize Israel or have no diplomatic relations with it.

Despite decades of hostility, Trump persuaded Israel and some of these countries to support his Gaza plan with the promise of future benefits from normalization and trade. But there is still a gaping chasm between Israel and these Arab and Muslim countries over Palestine. They say they will not recognize Israel unless Israel recognizes Palestine, with full sovereignty over East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But the foundational basis of Netanyahu’s Likud Party is its plan for a Greater Israel, to be formed by annexing all of occupied Palestine “between the sea and the Jordan.” And on October 22, during Vice President Vance’s visit to Israel, the Knesset voted in favor of annexing the West Bank.

Trump unveiled his Gaza plan at the very end of the UN General Assembly’s annual high-level meeting in New York, where many world leaders spoke out for much stronger international action against Israel. The New York Declaration, which 142 countries voted for, was the result of a conference in July led by France and Saudi Arabia that promised “concrete, timebound, coordinated action” to enforce a ruling by the international Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2024 that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is illegal and must be ended “as quickly as possible.”

Trump’s initiative temporarily upstaged and marginalized calls for further action at the UN. But on October 22nd, the ICJ issued a new ruling strongly condemning Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, and ruling that, as an occupying power, Israel must ensure that the “basic needs” of the population are met, including food, water, fuel, shelter and medicine. The court also ruled that Israel must permit UN staff working for UNRWA to do their work in Gaza, after Israel provided no evidence to the court for its claim that UN staff were members of Hamas or took part in its October 2023 incursion into Israel.

In the wake of the ICJ decision, Norway said it would introduce a resolution in the UN General Assembly to enforce the Court’s directives, including ensuring the full amount of aid reaches Gaza. Humanitarian advocates hope that this resolution will be introduced in an Emergency Special Session under the “Uniting For Peace” option, enabling the UN to deliver the “concrete, timebound, coordinated action” it promised in July—potentially including sanctions such as an arms embargo and targeted trade and investment measures that should take effect within days if Israel continues to block aid.

Trump plainly intended his plan to close the book on Israel’s crimes—and on U.S. complicity—and to inaugurate a new phase: normalization of the occupation and Israel’s diplomatic rehabilitation. Yet even before the ICJ condemned Israel’s starvation policy, people worldwide were already mobilizing, urging their governments not to let Israel off the hook.

In Europe, momentum for accountability continues to build. As the British parliament debates a new pensions law, an amendment has been submitted to divest local government pension funds from companies that are complicit in the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. Many local councils in the U.K. have already passed individual ordinances to do this, but the amendment to the pensions law would force all of them to divest the $16 billion that their pension funds still have invested in those firms.

In September, the European Union (EU) announced plans to suspend its 25-year-old free trade agreement with Israel and impose sanctions on extremist Israeli cabinet members and settler leaders. On October 20th, it “paused” these steps in response to Trump’s plan, but EU leaders immediately faced strong push-back on that decision.

Over 400 former senior diplomats and officials signed a statement that the EU must take robust action “against spoilers and extremists” who would jeopardize “the establishment of a future Palestinian state,” noting that Trump’s plan only vaguely addressed that goal. International lawyers advised EU leaders that EU policy must comply with the 2024 ICJ ruling that the Israeli occupation is illegal and must be ended as quickly as possible.

Individual European countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain, already ban imports from illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine, and Ireland is currently debating a similar trade ban in its Occupied Territories Bill, which should get a final vote by January. The original bill would only affect trade in goods, but activists want trade in services included in the ban, while powerful business interests, including U.S. tech firms with European headquarters in Ireland, are lobbying to kill the bill altogether. It should help that Ireland’s newly elected president, Catherine Connolly, is a strong supporter of Palestine.

In stark contrast to much of the world, which is still grappling with the contradictions of Trump’s Gaza plan and Israel’s ongoing unlawful occupation, U.S. officials are already trying to turn the page—moving to fortify and expand Washington’s military alliance with Israel.

This alliance is renewed and updated every ten years in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two governments, which would normally be negotiated in 2026, before the previous MOU expires in 2028.

There’s already a bipartisan bill in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (S.554) to initiate this process, titled “United States-Israel Defense Partnership Act of 2025,” authorizing joint projects with Israel under categories like “countering unmanned systems… anti-tunnel cooperation…(and) war reserves stockpile authority.”

Conspicuously absent from this policy review is any debate over U.S. complicity in Gaza’s destruction—a debate that should come first and set the terms for any serious re-examination of the U.S.–Israel alliance.

On October 20th, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, released a new report titled “Gaza Genocide: a Collective Crime.” Here is the summary of her report:

“The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel. Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the Palestinians, this live-streamed atrocity has been facilitated through Third States’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection and, in some cases, active participation. It has exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest. The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met and justice is upheld.”

We urge all members of the Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees to read the UN report and to invite UN experts to testify at hearings on U.S. complicity and participation in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Palestine.

To move ahead with consideration of a new MOU or any arms transfers with Israel without first conducting such a serious and objective policy review would only serve to perpetuate the endless wars that all our leaders, including President Trump, keep telling us they want to end.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, November 2022.  Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for PEACE, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran:  The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas J.S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on our Hands:  The American Invasion and Destruction of IraqRead other articles by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

Israeli Propaganda: Their Hasbara Instruction Manual


“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” (attributed to Mark Twain)[A misattribution. — DV ed]

Israel’s image is now so badly damaged that it is desperately stepping up its ‘hasbara’ (meaning propaganda and disinformation) programme on all channels, especially social media. In the past they’ve paid an army of students to push their lying texts. Now they’re hiring even more scribblers to poison our media channels.

It’s no surprise that Israel’s lie machine has an instruction manual for those it recruits into its vile business including the stooges they’ve positioned at the heart of all Western governments. This masterpiece on the art of lying is titled The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary. Read it here.

It aims to win over the mass of “persuadables”, primarily in America but also in the UK and elsewhere. The strategy from the start is to isolate democratically-elected Hamas and rob the resistance movement and the Palestinian people of their human rights. This quote at the beginning sets the tone: “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”

Top priority is to demonise Hamas… and this is how they want their stooges to go about it.

• “Clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas. There is an immediate and clear distinction between the empathy Americans feel for the Palestinians and the scorn they direct at Palestinian leadership. Hamas is a terrorist organization – Americans get that already. But if it sounds like you are attacking the Palestinian people (even though they elected Hamas) rather than their leadership, you will lose public support. Right now, many Americans sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians, and that sympathy will increase if you fail to differentiate the people from their leaders.”

• “Draw direct parallels between Israel and America—including the need to defend against terrorism…. The more you focus on the similarities between Israel and America, the more likely you are to win the support of those who are neutral. Indeed, Israel is an important American ally in the war against terrorism, and faces many of the same challenges as America in protecting their citizens.”

Note how Israel’s strategy is almost totally dependent on the false idea that they and America are victims of terror and that all Western nations need to huddle together with Israel and America for mutual protection. But level-headed people are beginning to realise who the terrorists really are. It is surely obvious by now that allowing parallels to be drawn between Israel and America only serves to increase the world’s hatred of America. US citizens are very belatedly waking up to this, as are the British, but many continue to blunder into the trap.

• “Next, inject with ‘core values’ and repeat over and over and over again… The language of Israel is the language of America: ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘security,’ and ‘peace’. These four words are at the core of the American political, economic, social, and cultural systems, and they should be repeated as often as possible because they resonate with virtually every American.”

If so fluent in this splendid language and practised in those core values, why won’t Israel acknowledge their neighbours’ rights to democracy, freedom, security and peace and end their military oppression?

• “A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick—that is just about the time the public will wake up and say ‘Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!’ But don’t confuse messages with facts…. “

Right, never let facts get in the way of a good message! And, as George ‘Dubya’ Bush, 43rd US President, once said: “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” Either he had a copy of the ‘hasbara’ manual at his bedside or he’d been reading the thoughts Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels who said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

• “The fight is over IDEOLOGY, not land; terror, not territory. Thus, you must avoid using Israel’s religious claims to land as a reason why Israel should not give up land. Such claims only make Israel look extremist to people who are not religious Christians or Jews.”

If the fight isn’t about land, why did Israel steal it at gunpoint? And why won’t they give it back when told to repeatedly by the UN? Then there’s the uncontrollable urge to possess the Holy City…

• “The toughest issue to communicate will be the final resolution of Jerusalem. Americans overwhelmingly want Israel to be in charge of the religious holy sites and are frankly afraid of the consequences should Israel turn over control to the Palestinians.”

Fact is, the Old City and East Jerusalem are Palestinian. Nevertheless “Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel,” says prime minister Netanyahu. And Israel is in control right now, preventing Muslims and Christians from outside the City visiting their holy places. No way can Israel be trusted.

The UN’s 1947 partition plan decreed that Jerusalem should become a corpus separatum under international administration. It is unlikely that the UN would wish to see its resolutions torn up or international law re-written for Israel’s sole benefit or to suit America’s misinformed opinion.

The ‘hasbara’ instruction manual also says:

• “Many on the left see an Israel v. Palestinian crisis where Israel is Goliath and the Palestinians are David. It is critical that they understand that this is an Arab-Israeli crisis and that the force undermining peace is Iran and their proxies Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. You must not call Hamas just Hamas. Call them what they are: Iran-backed Hamas. Indeed, when they know that Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah, they are much more supportive of Israel.”

So, by the same token, I’ll call that racist regime what it really is: US-backed Israel. The plight of the Palestinians under US-backed Israel’s heel was of international concern long before Hamas appeared on the scene. Iran’s support for Hamas is difficult to quantify and probably less than we think. In any case it is peanuts compared to America’s support for Israel.

Hamas, as most people know, is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and was founded in 1987 during the first Intifada. Hezbollah came into being in 1982 in response to US-backed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. So the territorial ambitions of US-backed Israel provoked the rise of both. US-backed Israel’s problems are therefore entirely self-inflicted.

The lie machine’s propaganda manual is a toxic document oozing poison. It shows better than anything else why the Israeli regime never wants peace and is therefore no partner for peace, and can never, never, never be trusted. It follows that neither can the US.

Stuart Littlewood, after working on jet fighters in the RAF, became an industrial marketing specialist. He served as a Cambridgeshire county councillor and a member of the Police Authority, produced two photo-documentary books including Radio Free Palestine (with foreword by Jeff Halper), and has contributed to online news and opinion publications over many years. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.

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