If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
–Hannah Arendt
The foundation of the State of Israel is based on lies, and its very existence depends on yet more lies. The country uses every opportunity to remind the world that it’s the only democracy in the Middle East. That, of course, is a damned lie.
In truth, Israel is a fascist ethno-state, carved out of the expulsion and ethnic cleansing in 1948 of large numbers of incumbent Palestinians. It’s as democratic as apartheid South Africa was. Indeed, successive Israeli politicians and their wealthy foreign backers perfected the abhorrent racist system which would have made SA’s apartheid-era rulers blush with pride.
While South Africa’s system of racial superiority and prejudiced separate development ended in 1994, Israel, which implemented apartheid at the same time, has managed to sustain it for over a quarter of a century. The preservation of such a heinous system over a prolonged period requires true believers, and Israel no doubt has a plentiful supply, both among its citizenry and abroad.
In creating true believers locally, Israel implemented a racist education system which, according to Nurit Peled-Elhanan, philologist and professor of language and education at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, depicts Arabs as “refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists.” In her books, Palestine In Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, and Holocaust Education and the Semiotics of Othering in Israeli Schoolbooks, Nurit claims that the Palestinian curriculum is highly censored and the the history of their struggle since the Nakba (ethnic cleansing of 1948) is forbidden.
Nurit further claims that the Israeli education system creates a permanent victim mentality and climate of constant fear amongst the citizens. Learners are taught to condone the massacres of Palestinians by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) while glorifying their military exploits. These measures further lay the platform for young men and women to be drafted into compulsory military service and, by extension, conflict.
Israel has also established a multi-million dollar propaganda network abroad through lobby groups such as AIPAC in the US while also manipulating their mainstream media. This much is acknowledged by the CIA, which approved a document for release in 2004 compiled by a Senator entitled Israel’s Relentless Propaganda Machine. Israel’s spokespersons and ambassadors in other countries are consummate liars whose primary function appears to be to cover up their frequent atrocities.
Bewilderingly, Israel managed to get away with much of their lies for around 75 years. The world seemed blissfully unaware of the extent of Israel’s depravity until October 7th, 2023. Independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone framed the awakening thus in one of her regular newsletters:
One thing October 7 did accomplish was getting Israel and its allies to show the world their true face. Getting them to stand before all of humanity to say, “If you resist us, we’ll kill your babies. We’ll deliberately shoot your kids in the head. We’ll massacre medical workers. We’ll systematically destroy all your hospitals. We’ll rape you and torture you as a matter of policy. We’ll lay siege to the entire civilian population. We’ll make your entire land uninhabitable and then we’ll kick you all out and take it for ourselves. We’ll assassinate all your journalists and block foreign journalists from entry so that nobody can see what we’re doing to you. We’ll lie about all of these things the entire time, and you’ll know we’re lying, and we’ll know you know we’re lying, and you’ll know we know you know we’re lying. And we’ll get away with it anyway, because we hold all the cards
After October 7, the lies came thick and fast to legitimize their genocidal response to the Hamas attack inside Israel. The atrocities committed by the IDF since then are so numerous that it would have taken me a long time to compile them. Fortunately, they were summarized, together with some made-up stories by Israel meant as projection, by someone on Facebook in a mock post. If you have been following the genocide in Gaza, some, if not all of these will be familiar:
… ambulance workers, Shifa hospital, flour massacre, beheaded babies, Hamad hospital, Hind Rajab, the ‘terror LIST’ (days of the week), World Central Kitchen workers, babies in ovens, white phosphorus, deliberately starving Gazans, Sinwar surrounding himself with 20 hostages in a tunnel, gassing hostages, Ahli hospital, killing women & children with white flags, mass r@ping Palestinians, non-existent tunnels under graveyards, Nasir hospital, Husam Abu Safia, mass graves, snipers targeting kids in the head, providing protection to criminal gangs to loot aid, wiping out Gaza, who refused/collapsed the ceasefire, blowing up Gazans fleeing south, Kamal Adwan hospital, claiming dead Gazan children are dolls, creating ‘safe zones’, the generals plan, how many Hamas militants we killed, Red Crescent taking part in Oct 7, calling killed journalists Hamas ‘militants’, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, the Indonesian hospital, UNRWA, al-Awda hospital, killing women sheltering at a church, bombing the church, destroying every single Gazan university, the Turkish cancer hospital, Hamas hiding giant stockpiles of fuel in Rafah, finding active smuggling tunnels in Rafah, hostages returning pregnant, who killed Yossi Sharabi, Itai Svirsky, Nik Beizer, Ron Sherman, Elia Toledano…
The most recent atrocity involved the killing of 15 aid workers in Gaza, who were then buried in a mass grave in a sloppy attempt to cover it up. Unsurprisingly, Israel’s response was to lie rather unconvincingly when the bodies were discovered. Their claim that the ambulances approached their soldiers without lights and “moving suspiciously in their direction” were subsequently refuted when a cell phone with video evidence was recovered from one of the assassinated aid workers.
David Mencer, the Israeli spokesperson who replaced the despicable Eylon Levy, whose lies started to become rather too obvious, was confronted by Sky News host Mark Austin to explain the killings and cover-up. True to form, Mencer lied outrageously, deflected and evaded answering with increasing comical apprehension. Unfortunately, as with most mainstream media hosts, his questioning was unforceful because of the lingering threat of being labelled antisemitic.
There is now a familiar pattern to Israel’s lying. One involves threatening, and the other involves using projection to evade or deflect. Israel has so successfully weaponized antisemitism that they have the entirety of mainstream media quaking at the threat of being labelled. Any criticism of Israel or its functionaries will immediately be labelled as antisemitic. It has also become customary to direct accusations against Hamas whenever they need to justify an atrocity or deny a human rights violation as a means to project blame away from themselves.
While Israel routinely refuses to allow any independent investigations of their atrocities and war crimes, there is a familiar promise to investigate itself. Laura Kuenssberg of the independent Normal Island News publication hilariously framed this propensity below:
By now, I hope a clearer picture is emerging of Israel as a rogue nation. A nation that lies with impunity to justify its killing with impunity.
lenny unencumbered 