Israel’s government will do and say anything to cover its atrocities
How Israel used strategic public relations communication to veil its atrocities and instead sell itself falsely as a benevolent Democracy that is the victim of blood-lusting anti-semitic Arabs.
By Ray Hanania
Israel’s government will do anything to distract the world from its human rights violations and its contempt for the International Rule of Law, including to lie. And Israeli officials lie often. IN fact, while the mainstream American news media tends to focus on the President Donald j. Trump’s veracity or his own “lies,” they seem content to close their eyes to Israel’s lies. That’s amazing in that Trump is the President of the United States representing one of the world’s oldest Democracies and Israel is a foreign country with a twisted compromised form of Democracy that relies of Apartheid policies and racism to separate one population from another.
Israel’s government didn’t just start its policy of lying now. It ha been doing it from the start. And anyone who challenges its mendacities is denounced as an “anti-Semite.” When someone calls you a name in response to a factual challenge of your policies, and they can’t defend their actions against the accusations, they almost always turn to name calling, bullying and libel.
Highlights of Israel’s lies include the orchestrated re-engineering of the truth of its founding in 1948. Israel did that by hiring one of the world’s best publicists, Edward Gottlieb with the mission to commission an author to tell Israel’s story in a manner that was so compelling that it would sway Americans and people in the English-speaking West not only to support Israel’s illegal actions but to also disparage and destroy the integrity of its victims, the Palestinians and the Arab World.
Gottlieb hired Leon Uris, a rabid pro-Zionist fanatic who had a talent for writing. Uris wrote the fiction novel “Exodus” which was published in 1958. A novel by its very description is a collection of fiction, falsities woven into a compelling but untrue story. Sometimes, novels take facts and build lies around them. No one takes a novel as a dissertation of truth or a historical fact, but that is exactly what happened with American audiences. They accepted the lies in Exodus as the historical fact ands those lies have remained as the foundation of Israel’s overall strategy of lies that continues until this day.
Poster for the movie Exodus, which defined American support for Israel. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
Uris’ novel “Exodus” was then converted into a movie of the same name starring popular Jewish American actor Paul Newman whose role won the hearts and minds of the Western world and in the process embedded the book and movie’s lies into historical “truth.”
It was the most glaring example of the modern-day use of the old Nazi propaganda strategy of creating the “Big Lie” to confront criticism and re-enforce public support.
Israel was able to do this because it had already begun a campaign to enlist its supporters who worked in the mainstream news media to build a foundation of slander and libel and defamation against the Arabs and the Palestinians. If you can make someone look evil, no one will care if you brutalize, oppress or even murder the “evil-doers.” This is done against millions of innocent people who are demonized by Israel’s strategy causing the world to be unconcerned about their plight.
One of the most vicious pro-Israel journalists was Freda Kirchwey, who rose to become the publisher of The Nation magazine, the media leader of Israel’s propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s. Kirchwey didn’t hesitate to lie about everything including twisting historical facts to demonize the Palestinians while suppressing historical facts that indicted Israel’s pre-state and post-state war crimes.
Ironically, the Arab World allowed Israel to act this way and construct a “house of lies” that became the accepted historical narrative of Israel’s foundation by failing to engage in a public relations campaign of their own to convey accurate facts and information to the same target audience of mainstream English-speaking audiences in America and in Europe. Had they done so effectively, Israel would not have become a state and Palestine would be a true Democracy where Jews, Christians and Muslims genuinely enjoy equal rights and Democracy.
To reinforce these lies, Israel takes the process one step further creating controversies and accelerating their attacks and demonization of the Arab World and the Palestinians.
Recently, it was announced that Israel would file a lawsuit against seven Arab World countries to demand $250 billion in compensation for the alleged suffering of 850,000 Jews who Israel asserts were forced to flee their homes and lands in Arab countries. What Israel is not saying is that all of these Jews were enticed, invited and even paid to leave their homes and lands to resettle inside Israel. None of the Jews were persecuted or forced to leave.
Why make this false assertion? It reinforces the image that Israel has constructed of th eArabs being vicious anti-Semites and haters. And, it also has a political aspect to confront and neutralize the legitimate claims by 750,000 Palestinians who were forced their homes by Israeli terrorist organizations like the Irgun, Stern Gang, Haganah and Palmach and made to leave the new state of Palestine.
Palestine was nearly 70 percent non-Jewish when Israel was founded. And although the United Nations, at the direction of America and the West, created a partition plan that created an overlapping checkerboard of six areas off Palestine with three of the areas encircling as much as possible the largest population concentrations of Jews who had immigrated into Palestine during the decade before, calling it a “Jewish State,” that “Jewish State” still was only 50 percent Jewish. Half the population of the partitioned “Jewish State” was non-Jewish. In contrast, the areas set aside for the Arabs in Palestine, 3 overlapping areas, was more than 90 percent non-Jewish.
Israel’s leaders intentionally decided to religiously and ethnically cleanse the new “Jewish State” of its non-Jewish population.
But Israel didn’t stop there. The Israeli terrorist groups like the Irgun, Stern Gang, Haganah and Palmach attacked and targeted key areas of the proposed “Arab State” taking more than half of that land to incorporate into its own state. And that meant also confronting the dilemma that if there was no population shift in 1948, the new state of Israel would be majority non-Jewish. So they ethnically and religiously cleansed those areas, too.
Many Israeli leaders like the late terrorist David Ben Gurion admitted in his latter years that they did in fact launch military campaigns to expel non-Jews from Israel. It was always Ben Gurion’s intent and he expressed it repeatedly beginning before the military creation of the state of Israel.
Why haven’t the Arabs taken the Palestinian grievances to the International Criminal Court (ICC) sooner? Because they have been controlled and influenced by the Western military imperialists and many of the Arab World governments owe their very existence to the West. Even till today, many Arab countries continue to receive funding to buy off their silence or inaction.
You can read more about all this in two columns I have written this week, one for the Arab News Newspaper in Riyadh Saudi Arabia, and one I have written for the Middle East Monitor in London. The Arab News newspaper is one of the Middle East’s most reputable journalistic publication and most popular English Language newspaper, while Middle East Monitor is one of the most prestigious online news websites in Europe.
Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.
Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992 at the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Sun-Times. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published “The National Arab American Times” newspaper (2004-2007).
Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.
Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club “Peter Lisagor Awards” for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named “Best Ethnic American Columnist” by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.
His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.
Hanania is the US Special Correspondent for the Arab News Newspaper, covering Middle East and Arab American issues. He writes for the Southwest News newspaper group writing on mainstream American issues.
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