Debunking Israeli Hasbara

By Khalid Amayreh

In a much-appreciated effort aimed at highlighting and exposing Israeli racism and terrorism against the Palestinian people, many university campuses around the world are marking Israel’s apartheid week.Activities include lectures, demonstrations, films and other multi-media events as well as cultural performances and hearing testimonies from human rights activists and Palestinian victims of Israeli apartheid.

Speakers from many countries, especially occupied Palestine, will describe the deepening persecution of Palestinians which in many aspects has surpassed the worst measures ever adopted against the black majority by the defunct South African apartheid regime.

It is hoped that these events will encourage and generate more opposition to the criminal Israeli regime, especially in light of Israel’s murderous onslaught against the Gaza Strip last year when the Israeli army, air force and navy ganged up on the nearly totally defenseless inhabitants of the coastal enclave, mercilessly killing and maiming thousands of innocent civilians and destroying the bulk of the region’s civilian infrastructure.

Exposing Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity should therefore be viewed as an essential component in the enduring Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice. It is also a pre-requisite for undermining the mendacious Israeli narrative, notoriously based on lies, half-truths and distortion of history.

Ultimately, the Palestinians and their allies and supporters can’t expose Israeli criminality without first defeating Israeli hasbara efforts. However, if we succeed in exposing Israel for what it really is, namely a criminal state that thrives on terror, theft and lies, as well as practicing ethnic cleansing and even genocide, we will be able to make a significant achievement which could signal the beginning of a strategic retreat of the Zionist scheme.

However, in order to go about achieving this task, we have to observe a number of principles that would help us avoid unnecessary mistakes and blunders.

First, we should maintain a continually-updated data bank containing a comprehensive and cohesive body of information pertaining to Israeli criminality and racism, including the Zionist state’s routine violation of human rights of non-Jews. This digitalized data bank is indispensable for fighting a successful battle for the hearts and minds of the world. Needless to say, this data bank should contain accurate statistical information about such topics as the number of civilians murdered by Israel, the number of homes demolished by the Israeli army, and the number of families ethnically cleansed by the Zionist state. It should also contain detailed information on the Jewish settlement expansion activities, the confiscated land, the annexation wall, as well as the organized pogroms and attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians by Nazi-like Jewish settlers.

Second, we should have detailed data on the increasingly rampant anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Jewish racism in Israel, which in many respects resembles the anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda in Germany in the early and mid 1930s which eventually led to the mass murder of millions of people by the Nazis during World War II.

The Israeli media often publishes criminally racist remarks by Jewish religious and political leaders brazenly advocating mass murder of Palestinians. Such quotes, now readily available via the internet, can be used as an effective tool to expose the general Israeli discourse before the court of international public opinion. Needless to say, such quotes are neither anecdotal nor coming from marginal figures, and one would not really exaggerate much by saying that these poisoned views have come to represent a sizeable plurality if not an outright majority in the Zionist state.

Third, We should not hesitate to make comparisons between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and what Nazi Germany did to Jews and non-Jews in the course of the Second World War. True, such comparisons would initially raise eyebrows in many quarters, especially in North America and Western Europe. However, as people get themselves emancipated from the stranglehold of Zionist propaganda by way of accessing irrefutable evidence pertaining to Israeli criminality and depravity, which is readily available, the raised eyebrows will eventually disappear as honest people would have no choice but to call the spade a spade, even when seen in Jewish hands.

In the final analysis, any group of people, including Jews, when behaving and acting like Nazis, should be compared with the Nazis. And Israel has been and is behaving like Nazis as we saw recently in Gaza when the Israeli army created firestorms over blockaded territory and exterminated hundreds of innocent people often by bombing their homes as they slept therein.

Fourth, in exposing Israeli criminality, we must always make meticulous efforts to deprive Israel of any opportunity to exploit unintended remarks or slips of the tongue to accuse us of indulging in anti-Semitism.

We must therefore make it abundantly clear that we are against anti-Semitism as much as we are against Zionism, and that we are struggling against Zionist Jews not because they are Jewish but rather because they are oppressors and murderers.

This is probably one of the most effective ways of thwarting Israeli attempts to lump anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in one category.

Israeli apologists and hasbara doctors would get mad at you, they would even go hysterical, as did former Israeli official Ra’anan Geisen recently during a debate with Professor Norman Finkelstein.

Maintain your calm, and don’t be intimidated by vociferous tactics and ravings. Then start refuting and debunking their arguments point by point, and never be tempted to fall into the trap of their distraction tactics.

They would invoke all types of diversionary arguments, such as gratifying themselves with talks about the number of Israeli Noble Prize laureates and Israeli achievements in science and technology. They would even invoke other atypical issues for the purpose of creating confusion.

You can retort briefly to these arguments by saying that while scientific achievements are important, pursuing justice and human decency is much more important. Remind your audience that the Nazis, too, had made strident steps in the fields of science and technology but that didn’t prevent them from committing some of the most horrible crimes under the sun.

They would repeat the claim that Zionists were only “returning” to their original homeland. Try to respond to such disinformation by asking a simple question like: “would you give up your home if someone came to you and told you that the home belonged to his ancestors 2000 or 3000 years ago? Through this very logical argument, you should be able to explain that the creation of Israel was an act of rape from the very inception and that it would remain an act of rape until the end of time.

Try to convince the audience that a country that builds hundreds of settlements on occupied land and transfers hundreds of thousands of its citizens to live on land that doesn’t belong to them doesn’t really want peace.

In fact, pro-Palestinian activism must get organized as much as possible, especially with the issue of countering Zionist propaganda. Hence, the proposed data bank should be constantly fed with every conceivable Zionist argument covering all aspects of the Palestinian plight, coupled with the best refutation. Luckily, a huge body of information is already available through the internet, which can tremendously facilitate this task.

Finally, it is important to make it amply clear that the cause of justice and freedom in occupied Palestine is not really about Palestinian nationalism, although a certain element of that dimension is always present.

The Palestinian struggle for justice and peace is undoubtedly the epicenter and ultimate test for humanity’s struggle for a future of peace and justice.

Hence, our message to the world should be that every decent and honest man and woman in this world should get involved in the efforts to isolate Zionism at every level. Zionism is a cancer upon the conscience of humanity and would eradicate us if we don’t eradicate it.