Is Everything About Israel Fake?
Or is this Another Sneaky Attempt at Delegitimization by a Freedom-Hating Jew-Hater
I came across one of the most disingenuous essays I’ve ever read, by someone with many social media followers. Her lies and misinformation made me feel sick, so I’m going to explain every one of her attempts at dehumanizing Jews.
Wondering who she’ll go after next? Hint: She hates America too!
Let’s call her “Jew Hater,” or J.H. for short. I have 12 points to make, corresponding to the 12 Tribes of Israel that settled in the land of Israel many centuries before Islam was invented and before groups of itinerant Arabs made their way from around the Middle East to where jobs were being offered by the Jews rebuilding what the British mandate referred to as “Palestine.”
1. J.H. claims that Israel is a “completely synthetic nation created without any regard for the organic sociopolitical movements of the land and its people, slapped rootless atop an ancient pre-existing civilization with deep roots.”
Are you referring to the itinerant Arabs whose last names are based on cities in Syria and elsewhere around the Middle East, that coalesced into a people because after they left the new state of Israel, they weren’t allowed to be citizens in any of the other 22 Arab countries nearby? And about those Jews; did you know that Jesus was a Jew born in Bethlehem who gave his sermon at the site of the Jewish Temple (long before Islam)? Are you aware that Jews continuously lived on the land despite expulsions and murderous pogroms (Greeks, Romans, Arab conquest, etc)? There were always many peoples living in the Land of Israel (renamed as Palestina by the Romans). I think modern-day Palestinians deserve to live in peace and dignity, sharing the land of Israel including Judea and Samaria, but the idea of their descent from ancient peoples has not been historically proven by archeology, artifacts, written history, or any other metric.
2. J.H. claims, in quotes, that “According to Torah Law, entering the Temple Mount area is strictly forbidden due to the holiness of the site.”
How much Torah has J.H. studied? Jews are enjoined not to enter churches or mosques, but there is nothing in the Torah that mentions the Temple Mount (aka the Al Aksa Mosque), because Islam didn’t exist until the 7th century, and the Mosque had not yet been built on top of the Jewish Temple (Placing Mosques on top of Jewish and Christian holy sites was a common Arab practice during and after the Arab Conquest). The government sign requesting that Jews do not enter the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is out of respect for Islam. Shouldn’t we all be respectful of other religions, J.H.?
3. J.H. has a lot to say about Itamar Ben Gvir. I don’t like him either. There are extremists on both sides, but far-right politician Ben-Gvir has been justly excoriated (and will be voted out at some point because Israel is a parliamentory democracy) for trying to stoke religious tensions by encouraging militant Zionists to pray on the Temple Mount — known to Muslims as Al-Aqsa. (Hamas leaders do not get voted out). Although the site of the Temple in Jerusalem was the center of Jewish worship, it’s destruction by Romans in 70 CE forced Judaism to reconfigure. Instead of the ancient rites of sacrificing animals, Jews are enjoined to study Torah. The surviving Western Wall of that 2nd Temple (the first one was destroyed in 586 BCE (before the common era) is still considered a holy site to Jews, and praying at that Wall is an ancient custom that goes back many centuries before the advent of Islam. Jew-Haters cannot lie our history away no matter how many followers they have!
4. J.H. writes, “Israel is so fake that Zionists artificially resurrected a dead language in order for its people to have a common “native” tongue for them to speak, so that they could all LARP (live action roleplay) as indigenous middle easterners together in their phony, synthetic country.”
This false statement is another attempt at delegitimization of Jews and Israel. The Torah is written in Hebrew, the Talmud is in Hebrew and Aramaic, the language of scholars and academics was always Hebrew, and the language of our prayers has been Hebrew for several thousand years. Bringing the language back to life along with the state of Israel should be considered a miracle for all indigenous peoples who were attacked, destroyed, or scattered from their lands. Are there any other people whose cultural background is up for reinvention by a bunch of ignorant youngsters? Does J.H. have some new stories about American Indians? Australian Aboriginals? African Americans? Who else is a target for her venom? What starts with the Jews doesn’t end with the Jews.
5. J.H. claims that “Israel has no real culture of its own; it’s all a mixture of (A) organic Jewish culture brought in from other parts of the world by the Jewish diaspora, (B) culture that was stolen from Palestinians (see “Israeli food”), and
the culture of indoctrinated genocidal hatred that is interwoven with the fabric of modern Zionism. The way Israel has become a Mecca of electronic dance music points clearly to an aching cultural void that its people are trying desperately to fill with empty synthetic pop fluff.”
Although I dislike electronic dance music and agree about the synthetic pop fluff , Israel is a democracy! Those kids won’t be beheaded for listening to music that the leaders don’t like. Also, Israeli food is a mix of European, Middle Eastern, and African recipes and customs that Jews brought from those countries from which they either escaped or were expelled. The culture is a mix of similar elements; for example, Jews lived in Iraq since the first expulsion from Israel in 586 BCE — thousands of years later in 1948, when they were expelled from Iraq with nothing but the shirts on their backs, Jews brought their traditions with them. When they make tahini, they are not trying to copy anyone except their own great grandmothers, going back generations!
6. J.H. says, “Even international support for Israel is fake, manufactured astroturf that has to be enforced from the top down, because it would never organically occur to anyone that Israel is something that should be supported.”
What J.H. and her followers don’t understand (perhaps because they do not know what the world learned from the Holocaust - it wasn’t just 6 million Jews who died because of Nazi hatred — 50 to 85 MILLION people died. As I’ve already mentioned, what starts with the Jews does not end with the Jews. The Jew- haters of today need to learn more about real history to understand why the democratic, free world supports Israel. The autocratic, communist, and Jihadi world seems to prefer genocidal terrorists.
Isn’t all this hate getting boring?
7. J.H. says, “The influential Israel lobby is used to push pro-Israel foreign policy in powerful western governments like Washington and London.
Like many Jew haters before her, J.H. is very upset about AIPAC — which provides U.S. lawmakers with a fact-based education about what is happening in Israel and the Middle East. U.S. lawmakers also learn about what is happening in the anti-democratic world of Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea, and the world of Islamist terror groups like Isis, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah. Since the anti-freedom/anti-democracy and other groups do a lot of lying and propaganda, and don’t seem to care much about the freedoms we value in the United States, lawmakers can’t count on their information.
8. J.H. shows her true colors in this gem: “The Israel lobby exists with the full consent of the western imperial war machine and its secretive intelligence cartel, because western military support for Israel is also phony and fraudulent. The western empire whose strategic interests directly benefit from violence and radicalism in the middle east pretends it’s constantly expanding its military presence in the region in order to promote stability and protect an important ally, but in reality this military presence simply allows for greater control over crucial resource-rich territories whose populations would otherwise unite to form a powerful bloc acting in their own interests. The Israel lobby is a self-funding consent manufacturer which helps the empire do what it already wants to do.”
So, what we learn here is that J.H. doesn’t only hate Jews and Israel — she loathes and opposes the United States of America.
Is J.H. hoping for the overthrow of both Israel and the U.S.? Those are also Hizbollah and Hamas’s goals, along with their SUGAR DADDY, Iran.
Good thing this is a free country, and J.H. can say whatever she wants. I wonder if she’d prefer to wear a burka, live in one of the jihadi-run countries, stay at home unless a male relative accompanies her, and give up all of her freedom. If she stays in the west, she can still write nasty essays about democracies that annoy her, but if she moves to, say, Syria, she can live her dream.
9. J.H. goes on to excoriate the media (as if the media is biased towards Israel), celebrities (as if everything Roger Waters and the Hadad sisters say is fine, but anyone who supports Israel is faking it). She mentions the “western empire” which seem to bother her because of “wealthy people whose wealth is premised upon the imperial status quo.”
10. J.H. says, “For years Israel has been pioneering the use of social media trolls to swarm Israel’s critics and promote agendas like undermining the BDS movement. After the beginning of the Gaza onslaught Israel spent millions on PR spin via advertising on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, and The New York Times has just confirmed earlier reports that Israel has been targeting US lawmakers with fake social media accounts to influence their policymaking on Israel.”
She uses lots of links to mostly kooky sources — let’s look at AP NEWS or Reuters about the fake Palestinian stories of death and destruction, the pictures of supposed corpses checking their phones, the anti-Israel vitriol, the inflated numbers of dead, and the continuing fake stories of malnutrition and starving in Gaza.
11. J.H. says, “In truth, nobody really organically supports Israel.”
Yeah, they do. They support Israel because it is the only democracy in the Middle East, because it shares liberal values, women have autonomy, it is the only country in the Middle East where it’s safe to be homosexual, and let’s not forget the huge number Israeli innovations in science, technology, agriculture, medical research, and a huge list of other disciplines. I don’t think J.H. spoke to a single Arab citizen of Israel; the doctors, lawyers, scholars, writers, or politicians who are grateful to live in a democracy (although Israel has work to do about making its Arab population more comfortable).
12. J.H. writes that, “Israel is not a country, it’s like a fake movie set version of a country.” That would be like me saying that you are not a person, J.H., but a fake movie version of an evil person, and you get to decide, no matter where you live, about who gets to live and who gets to be slaughtered by barbarous terrorists who want all the land of Israel to be Jew-free. You might not be a thinking person at all — you could be getting paid to spread these lies.
J.H. might be a real person, or she might be a BOT, but it doesn’t matter. Even Bots can absorb facts about the Middle East and its history. But it takees a human to know about hate.
