Unpacking the Anti Israel Gish Gallop. Part 1, 2

Part 1: Introduction

When Israel’s detractors present their arguments, a significant amount of utopian language comes into play. Palestinians are associated with all the virtues — justice, righteousness, steadfastness, equality. Israel, on the other hand, is associated with all the vices — apartheid, oppression, fascism, and genocide. Stepping back, this black-and-white thinking suggests that we are not dealing with a political debate so much as a quasi-religious narrative, one that frames the conflict as a cosmic battle between good and evil.

Indeed, much of the criticism of Israel is not actually about Israel’s specific political or military decisions. You may superficially be discussing war, immigration policy, settler violence, or Netanyahu, but the conclusion of these arguments always seems to follow the same inevitable path: a utopian future without Israel.

The fundamental premise of such criticism is not about improving Israel but about eliminating it. The assumption being that simply removing the “bad” state will automatically bring justice. This means the debate is not really about what Israel does — it is about what Israel is. A Jewish state. The goal of this kind of criticism is the end of that Jewish state.

The problem with this line of thinking is that if the answer to all of Israel’s problems is simply the dissolution of Israel, then we are not discussing problems we genuinely want to solve. This is not how real-world issues are addressed. Consider the high levels of gun violence in the United States — would the logical solution be to dissolve the United States altogether? That conclusion doesn’t follow. It’s a non sequitur. And, of course, it is worse than that. If you believe that solving the world’s problems requires getting rid of the Jewish state, you are dangerously close to believing that solving the world’s problems requires getting rid of the Jews.

Many in the Arab world see Israel as a colonial entity, akin to French rule in Algeria — where the settlers eventually left after enough pressure and violence. But Israel’s potential disintegration would be entirely different from traditional decolonization projects. When we in the West talk about a state “collapsing,” we might think of rising crime or a descent into authoritarianism. But Israel’s collapse would, at best, resemble Syria’s civil war and, at worst, Poland in 1942. Some may argue that if Israel disappeared, something better would emerge in its place. But how? Outside the realm of fantasy, how would a utopia arise in the Middle East after Israel’s destruction?

This vast web of criticism rarely discusses realistic solutions to real-world problems or acknowledges what a Middle East without Israel would actually look like. This essay will explore some of the most common talking points of the Israel-critical industrial complex and why the region would be better off abandoning these narratives altogether, even in progressive circles.

Part 2. The Gish Gallop

Can you write an anti-Israel news article that would be published in the future? Of course you could — it’s easy. Simply follow the template, pepper it with mentions of apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and perhaps add a comparison to the Nazis. This formula always works. Somewhere in the article, leave a blank section to insert the latest event, and voilà — you have a ready-made article for publication in six months or a year, hell, even five years!

Isn’t this odd? The ability to predict future coverage of Israel suggests something unusual. How is this even possible? Before answering that, let’s examine how this propaganda operates.

Nearly all critical articles about Israel share a common feature: they overload their readers with emotionally charged terms, bombarding them with accusations that create an impression of hysteria. Einat Wilf calls this the “poster strategy” because the ideas are simple enough to fit on a protest sign: Israel and Zionism equals racism, Israel and Zionism equals colonialism, Israel and Zionism equals genocide. A particularly revealing example is a protest poster depicting a Star of David being thrown in the trash — a modern echo of the ancient trope that Jews are the trash of the world, and without them, the world would be pure.

Overwhelm and Subdue

“Quantity has a quality all its own,” Stalin is claimed to have said. This describes mass tactics, where sheer volume becomes an advantage in war, meat wave tactics come to mind. This is the essence of the Gish Gallop. Eugenie Scott, a science educator, coined the term “Gish Gallop” in 1994 to describe how Christian fundamentalists defend creationism: they flood discussions with a rapid-fire sequence of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, making it impossible to respond to each point.

The Gish Gallop is about how an argument is made, not what is being said. The volume of claims — each requiring a lengthy rebuttal — drowns out reasoned debate and pressures the audience into drawing conclusions about smoke and about fire. For example, even if one rejects the genocide accusation, the apartheid charge might seem reasonable. But this is a misunderstanding. This is not a discussion — it’s a smear campaign. Each claim — apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing — deserves to be analyzed individually for its merits. That is precisely what the Gish Gallop strategy seeks to prevent.

Anyone who has debated with staunch Israel critics knows that distancing oneself from Netanyahu or a particular military action is never enough. That’s because their position is not about specific policies or events — it is about the supposed inherent evil of Israel itself. The only acceptable answer is that Israel is an abomination, built on wickedness, and should cease to exist.

The Gish Gallop is less a debate than a meta-debate. The underlying question being addressed is not about any given Israeli policy but about Israel’s fundamental legitimacy: Has Israel crossed the moral threshold where the Zionist project must end? The only acceptable answer is “yes.” Any other conclusion is apostacy.

The Unique Evil of the Israel of Imagination

No other country is subjected to this form of scrutiny. Should Germany exist after the Holocaust? Should Syria exist after Assad’s rampages? Should Pakistan exist after the violence of Partition? No one poses these questions.

Personally, I think tax havens bring shame to the civilized world, a place for stealing money from the common good. Perhaps I should launch a campaign against Monaco — it’s nothing but a nest of tax dodgers. Come to think of it, should Bermuda exist? All shell companies and offshore banking. Nope, gotta go! Of course, this is absurd. I am in no position to make this claim, however much I dislike the policy of a state. A state’s right to exist is not contingent upon the morality of its leaders.

The Gish Gallop attempts to smuggle this campaign through the backdoor. By likening Israel to apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany, it implies that Israel must be dismantled. Not any particular government but the very existence of the state itself.

Israel’s Actual Uniqueness

Israel is not unique in facing existential threats. Other nations — Ukraine, Taiwan, Kosovo — also contend with adversaries who deny their right to exist. But even among these, Israel stands apart. In most of these cases, the aggressors view their targets as wayward brothers. Putin sees Ukrainians as misguided Russians. His invasion seeks to forcibly reabsorb Ukraine into a greater Russian identity, into Ruski Mir. Since Russia already occupies parts of Ukraine, we know what it looks like, We know it brings war crimes, stealing children, rapes, and oppression. But as bad as all this is, if you keep your head down in Donbas and don’t publicly claim to be something as absurd as being a Ukrainian, you’ll probably be able to keep working at your old job and go on with your life.

This is not how the Islamic Republic of Iran views Israel. Granted, there are similarities with  Russian imperialism, because Israel stands in the way of their imperial dreams. The difference is that they also frequently call Israel a cancer, a disease, the small devil against America’s big devil. This is not how Putin speaks about Ukraine, but it is exactly how the Nazis spoke about the Jews.

An occupation of Israel by its enemies would not be something ordinary Jews survive. It would look like October 7 on an unimaginably larger scale. Hamas even held a conference in 2021 where they stipulated that all Jews should be cleansed from the country, except for those who various experts in different fields would force to stay as slaves to help build the new Caliphate of Palestine.

The Destruction of Context

The most insidious aspect of the Gish Gallop is how it erases context. There should of course be a place to discuss all issues, the war in Gaza and Lebanon, settlements, Israeli control of the West Bank, the policy towards Gaza or the War of Indipendence/Nakba, or any other hot button issue. But the Gish Gallop destroys the context, and piles arguments on arguments instead of treating each discussion with the seriousness it deserves. In this reading, the only thing that matters is Israel’s supposed inherent evil. Everything else that points to Israeli vulnerability — the hostility of its neighbors, the genocidal rhetoric from Tehran, the slaughter of Israeli civilians — is ignored by this strategy. The fantasy of a peaceful, just, free Palestine just around the corner is simply too enticing for millions of people all over the world.

But mass belief does not equal truth. As my teacher used to say, “Billions of flies can’t be wrong — eat shit.”