THE BLATANT FAILURE OF ISRAELI-US PROPAGANDA

 

©Wendell Griffen, 2024

January 3, 2024

Little Rock, Arkansas

 

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have killed close to 22,000 people in Gaza. Most of them were women and children. The death toll includes teachers, health workers, humanitarian aid workers, artists, and more than 90 journalists.

Since October 7, 2023, the IDF have wounded more than 50,000 people in Gaza. Most of them are women and children.

Since October 7, 2023, the IDF have dropped more bombs on Gaza, an area about the size of Washington, DC, than the United States dropped in a year during its war in Afghanistan. Houses of worship, schools, universities, hospitals, and United Nations refugee camps have been bombed.

The United States supplied the bombs, artillery shells, and other materiel used by the IDF in Gaza. The United States vetoed resolutions introduced in the United Nations Security Council that called for a bilateral ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid to Gaza. Pro-Zionist Jewish and Christian congregations and religious leaders have cheered the Israeli war effort in Gaza, calling it necessary to vindicate the almost 1,300 Israelis killed on October 7 by Hamas fighters from Gaza. U.S. media outlets questioned casualty assessments by humanitarian organizations in Gaza, including reports issued by United Nations relief groups, but broadcast Israeli assessments about casualties without scrutiny.

The world is not fooled.

The world has watched Israel engage in a deliberate strategy to depopulate Gaza of its indigenous population. For almost three months, the world has seen IDF warplanes destroy places where civilians huddled for shelter across Gaza.

IDF tanks have attacked unarmed civilians. IDF snipers have murdered women and children as they left religious services. IDF soldiers have murdered Israeli hostages who waved white flags in Gaza.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Forces have joined Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank to attack Palestinian homes, farms, and neighborhoods. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed. A greater number have been detained without charges. Homes have been demolished. Palestinian olive growers and shepherds have been attacked.

These developments are the latest grim results of more than a century of Zionist ideology on the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Theodor Herzl’s vision in 1897 of establishing an ethnic homeland for Jews was embraced by Jewish survivors of European pogroms, ghettos, physical, social, political, religious, and economic discrimination, and the murderous Nazi regime. After Britain allowed thousands of those survivors to settle in Palestine, the Zionist faction unilaterally renamed Palestine Israel on May 15, 1948, and declared it a Jewish homeland.

Zionist Jews drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, neighborhoods, and farms. Those displaced Palestinians fled to Gaza. Following the Israeli preemptive Six-Day War of 1967, Israel began its military occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, supported by U.S. and British military and commercial power.

From before the creation of the State of Israel until now, Zionist ideology falsely characterized Palestinians as aliens in the land their ancestors lived in – alongside a Jewish minority – for centuries before Jews fleeing European antisemitism settled in Palestine. For generations, Zionist ideology, buttressed by U.S. and British military, intelligence, and corporate media operations, powered Israeli-U.S. propaganda efforts to falsely depict Palestinians as aliens, unhealthy, and dangers to Jews.

Israel is not the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid because Palestinians pose a threat to Jews. It is the largest recipient of U.S. aid because Zionist Jews turned Theodor Herzl’s 1897 vision of a Jewish homeland into an ethnic empire. Benjamin Netanyahu and every other Israeli Prime Minister is a Zionist. Joe Biden and every other U.S. President beginning with Harry Truman, is a Zionist.

Until now, prophetic discernment about that history and the impact of pro-Zionist ideology suffered from post-Holocaust guilt about U.S. and Western European refusal to grant asylum to Jews who suffered antisemitism, population displacement, and genocide during the first third of the 20^th Century. Zionist Christian notions of theology, “chosen-ness,” evangelism, and sacralized manifest destiny combined with post-Holocaust guilt to blind the eyes, close the ears, and silence the tongues of religious and other influencers about Israeli-U.S. tyranny toward Palestinians.

But the Zionist propaganda campaign is failing. Arab journalists are risking their lives to show unarmed Palestinians being massacred by the fourth largest military in the world (the IDF) with weapons furnished and funded by the biggest arms dealer in the world (the U.S.). The prophetic impact of live footage of bombed, shot, murdered, wounded, starving, decomposing, and psychologically traumatized Palestinian men, women, children, and the rubble of demolished buildings in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem overwhelms the propaganda.

Hence, the world knows that Israel is the genocidal result of Zionist ideology. Its murderous, land-stealing, settler-colonizing, and anti-Palestinian racism mimics apartheid regimes in South Africa and the United States. More people realize that equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism (hatred of Jews) is a sham. Denouncing Zionism, like denouncing Ku Klux Klan ideology, is a sign of moral, intellectual, and rhetorical clarity and candor. The racism and white supremacy that permeates the 75-year history of Israeli-Zionist manifest destiny, settler colonizing, and imperialism merits condemnation, not protection, let alone praise.

Israeli-U.S. propaganda only works when people cannot see and know the truth. At last – no thanks to mainstream media, politicians, theologians, and other thought leaders – the world knows that Israel and the U.S. are liars about the Israeli regime’s Zionist bigotry against Palestinians.

When will we summon the courage, will, and decency to stop the Zionist -inspired apartheid, lies, genocide, land theft, settler colonizing, terrorism, and other crimes against our suffering Palestinian neighbors?