I Know Why They’re Lying

They are lying.  They are lying all the time, and about pretty much everything.  It’s way too much to be accidental.  And we can’t just write it off as ignorance.  There’s a reason they’re doing this.

They cry genocide when Israel’s actions aren’t even close to the legal definition of genocide.  In fact, Israel does more to avoid civilian casualties than any other nation, and it has achieved the lowest civilian to combatant casualty ratio in the history of modern urban warfare.  The population of Gaza has actually grown since October 7, not fallen.  And the number of babies born in Gaza since October 7 exceeds the total number of people Hamas claims have been killed.  Still, they cry genocide.

They cry apartheid when Israel is the only nation in the Middle East that treats minority citizens as equals, granting them all the same rights as Jewish citizens.  Roughly 20% of Israeli citizens are Muslim Arabs.  They serve in the military, the government, the judiciary, the police, and every industry.  Christians cannot celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, because Palestinians will not tolerate it.  But they can and do practice their faith freely in Israel, as do Muslims, Druze, and others.

They say Jews are not indigenous to Israel but, instead, are land-stealing colonizers.  But there are countless historical documents and artifacts proving Jews inhabited this land for thousands of years before the also well-documented Arab conquest of the region in the 7^th century CE.  Even so, they claim Palestinians inhabited the land originally, which is absurd.  Arabs derive their name from their homeland, Arabia, just as Jews derive their name from their homeland, Judea.

They even claim Jesus, Mary, and Moses were Palestinians.  What could be more ridiculous?  The fact that all three were Jews is well documented in the Bible and in historical documents and artifacts that existed centuries before the birth of Islam.  Arabs did not conquer and colonize the region until more than 600 years after Jesus lived and roughly 2,000 years after Moses lived.  Even so, they lie about this.

They cry famine when there is no famine in Gaza.  Not a single Palestinian in Gaza has died of starvation.  Still, they beg the world to do something about Israel preventing desperately needed food from reaching civilians in Gaza.  They leave out the fact that Hamas steals food aid in order to sell it to finance their terrorism.  Sufficient food gets to the people of Gaza, though they must pay Hamas for it.  Even though it has never in history been the responsibility of the nation fighting back against its attackers to feed and protect its attackers’ citizens, that is what they call on the world to demand of Israel.

They lie about the Nakba, claiming Israel brutally expelled hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians from their homes and villages in 1948.  But there were multiple causes of the Palestinian exodus, including the commands of Arab leaders directing local Palestinian Arabs to leave and return after the Arab armies had slaughtered the Jews.  Yet, they insist that Israel is the sole villain of this conflict’s origin story and demand that every one of the 6,000,000 descendants of the 700,000 people who left has an inalienable ‘right’ to return and claim some portion of the land of Israel.

They lie, too, about the many peace negotiations since 1948.  While rejecting proposal after proposal from Israel, the US, the UN, and others, they claim it is Israel that doesn’t want peace.  While attacking Israel over and over, they claim they are the victims of Israel’s aggression.  In fact, there has never been a peace proposal from the Palestinian side that did not directly or indirectly require the elimination of Israel.  Still, they lie that it is Israel who refuses peace.

They lie by rewriting Wikipedia pages to distort and delete Jewish history, and to vilify Israel.  They fill it with ahistorical nonsense like claiming Hamas has been victorious in every conflict with Israel.  Just this week, the Wikipedia page related to Muslim migrations to Palestine was deleted in its entirety, no doubt in support of their lie that Palestinians are indigenous to the land of Israel.  And they modify pages to deceive readers into believing that Zionism is inherently a Nazi-like evil rather than merely the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

They lie by claiming terrorists are journalists or medics.  They put “Press” vests on combatants and mark “Press” on their combat vehicles.  They use hospitals as military bases (which is a war crime), then cry “war crime!” when Israel engages Hamas fighters there (which is not a war crime).  They make baseless claims of highly specific casualty figures in an active urban war zone where no one could possibly know the number of dead.  They do not distinguish between combatant deaths and civilian deaths but absurdly imply that every death in Gaza is a civilian death perpetrated by Israel.

And there’s so much more.  They produce videos where actors who are very much alive pretend to be dead bodies.  They apply make-up to children to make them appear wounded.  These fake videos are so common that observers refer to the cottage industry as Gazawood and Pallywood.  When their rockets misfire and kill their own people, as was the case with Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s rocket that hit the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, they immediately declare false casualty numbers and claim the Israelis did it.  When anything bad happens, even when Turkish forces invade Syria, they claim Israel was behind it.  Even the most absurd lies are commonplace, for example their breathless claim earlier this year that IDF military dogs were being used to rape elderly Palestinian women.

It is a deluge of lies.  But why exactly is that?  There are four reasons, so let’s go through them.

Would they like people to believe these false things?  Yes.  I suppose it’s a victory if even some small number of ill-informed, gullible people are duped into believing that Israeli military dogs were raping Palestinian babushkas.  It feeds their desired narrative that Israel is evil, cruel, and an enemy of humanity.  This is a pasta strategy.  Throw a whole bunch of it at the wall and hope a little bit sticks.

Would they like it if people didn’t know what to believe, particularly those who aren’t invested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so they’ll just tune out?  Yes.  It keeps them out of the fight or perhaps does more than that.  As Hannah Arendt wrote, “And a people that can no longer 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.”

Would they like to antagonize Jews?  Absolutely.  These are antisemites.  They hate Jews.  They clearly take pleasure in antagonizing Jews.  The obvious proof of this is that events related to the State of Israel, thousands of miles from most Western nations, immediately triggered mass protests and attacks on Jews across the world.  Certainly, an American college student in California or a 13 year-old girl in France or an octogenarian in Brooklyn aren’t responsible for Israel’s actions just because they share the same religion as three quarters of Israel’s population, right?

But these aren’t the only or even the main factors.  There’s a big one and we need to help the world understand it.  The principal reason they lie is because they’re wrong about everything.

They can’t win any argument with facts because the facts are that Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people and Jews have lived there continuously for thousands of years.  The facts are that the Babylonians forced many Jews from their homeland in the 6^th century BCE, and that is why some Jews lived elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.  The facts are that the Romans forced many Jews from their homeland in the 2^nd century CE, and that is why some Jews lived in Europe.  The facts are that Muslim Arabs only came to the land of Israel in the 7^th century CE, and then by conquest and colonization.  The facts are that the mythology of a Nakba where Jews expelled and stole the land of Palestinian Arabs is a wild distortion of the reality that many Arab landowners willingly sold their land to Jews and most who left in 1948 left voluntarily, both at the urging of Arab leaders and in fear of the dangers of war, a war that the Arabs started.  The facts are that Muslims ethnically cleansed effectively all Jews from the Middle East and North Africa in the 20^th century, while Israel built a thriving, multi-ethnic democracy that affords citizenship and equal rights to some two million Muslim Arabs.  The facts are that every one of the many conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians, including the 1948 war, was started by Palestinians and neighboring Arab nations.  The facts are that every Palestinian leader from Al-Husseini to Azzam Pasha to Yasser Arafat to Yahya Sinwar has chosen the path of violence and never peace and, in doing so, has brought their people nothing but misery and death.

They can’t win any argument that’s about right versus wrong.  Refusing to accept any peace that doesn’t include the destruction and elimination of Israel is not moral.  Indoctrinating your own children in a dishonest, hateful ideology that compels them to martyr themselves killing Jews is not moral.  Using civilians as human shields by locating military bases and ammunition stores in hospitals, schools, and residential areas is not moral.  Digging up the pipes that bring fresh water to your civilian population and using them instead to make rockets to fire at the Israeli civilian population is not moral.  Executing your own people for speaking out against you, or for taking food aid you’ve stolen, or just for being gay is not moral.  Intentionally butchering Israeli civilians year after year and decade after decade is not moral.  Kidnapping children, torturing civilians, and raping women is not resistance.  It is immoral barbarism.

So, here they are.  The facts are against them.  The history is against them.  Morality is against them.  What’s left?  Only lying.