A few weeks ago, I saw the film September 5 about the deadly attack on Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics.
It resonated because it highlighted the gulf between the public reactions to that atrocity and to 7 October when Palestinian terrorists slaughtered, mutilated, raped and burned-alive some 1,200 Israeli citizens – mostly non-combatants, including babies, infants, pensioners and women – and abduced some 230 more.
In 1972 – ignoring the street mobs in Damascus, Tripoli, etc – so few people supported Palestinian terrorists, that they would have probably fitted inside a London phone box. The overriding public reaction was abhorrence for the terrorists and sympathy for Israel.
Flash forward to 7 October 2023 and we saw a very different public reaction. Despite, in the intervening 51 years, Israel signing (and honouring) peace deals, handing back territory (including Gaza) and giving autonomy to the Palestinian Authority, an alarmingly high number of people (including UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez) seemed to feel that Palestinian terrorists were somehow “justified” in slaughtering, butchering, raping and kidnapping citizens of a sovereign nation. Israel was condemned for defending itself and accused of “genocide” for attempting to eradicate the terrorist threat – despite terrorist leaders openly declaring their intention to repeat the savagery.
So what changed between 5 September 1972 and 7 October 2023 to cause this abhorrent, inhumane reaction and a terrifying resurgence in antisemitism?
A large number of people – including some quite intelligent ones, and some Jews – have been persuaded to believe a flimsy, Soviet-fabricated narrative that would be obviously fake to anyone who did even the slightest historical research, and also persuaded to believe that Palestinians are victims of Jews even though Palestinians have been slaughtering Israeli non-combatants – and diaspora Jews – since long before they had the “justification” of “Occupation,” “Settlers” or Bibi Netanyahu.
Of course Palestinians are victims – of regional geo-politics, theo-politics, Muslim imperialism. Just not of Jews.
What changed between 5 September 1972 and 7 October 2023 to cause this abhorrent, inhumane reaction and a terrifying resurgence in antisemitism?
And then, of course, there’s media – notably, the BBC and the Guardian – which has promoted the Palestinian narrative, inflamed Israel hate and driven an upsurge in Jew-hate – and not just in the UK, but around the globe – by consistently reporting the conflict in ways that minimise (or ignore entirely) threat and harm to Israel, while amplifying threat and harm to Palestinians.
This may happen because the myths and fairytales have made them “sympathetic” to the “poor Palestinians” or because they are actively hostile, but whatever the motivation, the bias – in particular at those twin bastions of middle class morality – has been instrumental in rekindling the always-smouldering embers of Jew-hate.
In the belly of the beast: Israeli captive Arbel Yehoud, 29, who had been held hostage by Hamas in Gaza since October 7, 2023, is escorted by Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters as she is handed over to the Red Cross in Khan Younis
So what can we do to counter this tsunami of disinformation that is having tangible consequences – for young British Jews in universities and for British Jews of all ages everywhere else.
An alphabet soup of worthy and wonderful communal organisations – CAA, CST, BoD – have all been doing a wonderful job but individually. Our community now needs to unite to refute the lies and libels and most importantly, to counter the ever-expanding media bias.
Most urgently, we need to forget differences – left, right, orthodox, progressive. We need to put aside ideological differences or differences of degree; our views of Bibi, or of “settlers” and concentrate on the immutable truths which are that Israel is a legitimate nation; that Jews did not steal anybody’s land and that virtually every hostile act Israel has committed since its establishment has been in response to terrorism or existential threat. In short, in defence of its right to exist.
And the way to do it is with an advertising campaign. Because if we buy space, airtime or billboards we can bypass the filter of a biased media. We can state empirical truths without fear of them being cut, edited, truncated or turned into a negative sound-bite.
This campaign would neither praise nor denigrate the government; it would not make controversial claims, infer, imply, suggest or offer opinions. It would rely on hard facts which prove that Israel did not “steal” a Muslim land; that Jews have had a continuous presence in their own land for thousands of years; that more Jews were forced to leave Arab lands in 1948, than Palestinian Arabs left Palestine; that “Yahudi”– Jews – have been the real victims for 77 years (of Arab imperialism, Muslim expansionism, terrorism and Islamic/Islamist racism).
The campaign must put those facts (and others) on TV screens, in newspapers and magazines, on websites, on station platforms, in tube carriages, alongside escalators, on hoardings and billboards and on the sides of buses across the UK – and perhaps across American and European cities, too. It has to reproduce text from censuses and population statistics in six-foot high letters.
It must reproduce maps showing that Israel is not some vast empire but a nation so tiny you can drive it north to south, coast to eastern border in under seven hours without breaking the speed limit. It has to try to show that though it has had to defend itself – often forcefully – Israel is not the aggressor. Ideally it should try to find a way to show the truth of Golda Meir’s words on ending the Middle East “conflict”: that if the Arabs laid down their arms, there would be no more wars, but if Israel laid down its arms, there would be no more Israel.
We’ve faced a tsunami of disinformation, and now it’s time for the deluded “believers” – the paid and unpaid Iranian stooges – to face a tsunami of facts that refute their lies and libels.
Our community has the financial resources and an insane amount of creative genius. We need to harness both and unite to push back this tsunami of disinformation before it sweeps us all away.
We just need the will to do it.