When Israel became a legal nation, it was repeatedly attacked by Arabs, who eventually realized that their only hope of eliminating the State of Israel was to begin waging their biased war of words. They are winning. They learned their goose step lessons well.
British public commentator Melanie Phillips wrote: “For decades, the ‘Palestinians’ promoted the big lie – [that] they are the indigenous people of the land, Jews were the colonizers who deprived them of their rights, Israelis continue to oppress and practice ‘genocide’ against them… The big lie about Israel was created in the 1960s when ‘Palestinian’ terrorist leader Yasser Arafat made common cause with the Soviet Union to rewrite history, demonize the Jewish state, subvert the West by twisting its collective mind and destroying its moral compass. This was laid out by General Pacepa, former head of Romania’s foreign intelligence service…The chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, told him, ‘We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.’ This mind-bending has resulted in Israel’s demonization in the West.”
In 2022, Ben Cohen, senior correspondent of The Algemeiner, wrote: “Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas studied in the Soviet Union, where he was awarded a doctorate for a dissertation falsely alleging that the Zionist movement was just as culpable as the Nazi regime for the Holocaust during World War II.”
The totality of the failure of collective American Jewish organizations to get even basic facts about Israel printed by mainstream media, or disseminated on campuses, or to the average American, is astounding. I can’t think of a better time to revisit the words of wisdom attributed to Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” While the world has always been ready to jump in on Jew hatred, the difference today is that in addition to Jews now being attacked on our streets and at pro-Israel rallies, anti-Zionism, anti-Israel, anti-Jew, and vicious blood libel lies are part of the accepted narrative, echoed by world leaders and by the highly educated to the under-educated, who view themselves as “humanitarians.” What comes next, after you are a “Zionist, racist, genocidal ethnic cleanser, apartheid Jew”? You tell me.
A wake-up call for Israel: Get a PR firm already
This is a wake-up call for Israel to finally do what it should have been doing since becoming a nation. I love Israel. But Israel needs to put a hefty down payment on a public relations firm, enlist Jews worldwide to put aside their differences and collaborate on getting facts and basic truths out via a PR firm dedicated solely to this purpose. This has nothing to do with Israel’s policies. This is about refuting inaccurate smears, biased, sloppy “reporting,” rewriting and erasing us from the history of demonizing Jews and Israel into the subhuman.
People have an average attention span of 30 seconds. We need to flood social media, campuses, media offenders’ offices with short, easy-to-digest myths vs. facts. For example, “How can Israel be apartheid if Arabs are elected to its Parliament, the Knesset?” “The head of Israel’s Bank Leumi is an Arab.”
When I inform my non-Jewish friends about how many times the “Palestinian” Arabs refused generous peace offers; never made any counter offers for peace; Abbas stating they will never accept a “Zionist entity” with any boundaries; genocidal, Nazi speech exposed on Palestinian Media Watch; and images of their children in summer camps holding guns, learning how to kill more “evil” Jews, they are shocked and appalled. Since when is exposing Jew hate speech…hate speech? It is the antithesis. It is precisely what should have happened in 1930s Germany. But did not.
We need to part the Red Sea. We need to ensure that future generations will be able to wear a Star of David without fear. We need to be as relentless as our enemies, proactive vs. merely reactive. We need to spread the truth and beauty of Israel. Before it really, really, really is too late.■
The writer is a published commentator in Jewish and mainstream newspapers, and lecturer on strategies for combating media bias, antisemitism, and BDS. She resides in Arizona.