4 LIES about Israel: Jonah Platt Debunks the Core Pillars of Antizionist Propaganda

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Everything they told you about Israel is a lie.

No, seriously By the end of this video, you'll be clear on what the core anti-Zionist libels are, how they work, and why they're bullshit.

Let's do this.

First, we need to understand how libels work.

Libels succeed in part because they are based on bits and pieces of truth that are then distorted, misrepresented, and mashed together with blatant falsehoods until you've got a repeatable, unbeatable slogan that eschews reality and nuance for stupefying simplicity.

That tiny kernel of something true is critical because it's what provides the libel with its sheen of authenticity.

It's like if I gave you a point and you mixed it up with a bunch of other points and then flattened them all into a line.

Yes, my point is technically in there somewhere, but all you see is a line, and at that point, my point is besides the point.

You get the point.

Libels are also inversion, meaning not only is Israel not guilty of them, but the Arab enemies who invented them are.

Thus, libels serve the dual function of operating not only as a demonizing attack on Jews, but as a distraction that dupes the dupable into overlooking the actual evil being perpetrated upon Jews by their very accusers.

F'd up, right?

Libels also make for terrific slogans because they're easily repeated and function according to Brandolini's law, AKA the bullshit asymmetry principle.

Simply put, it's much easier to say something misleading, lazy, or wrong than it is to carefully dismantle it with facts, context, and precision.

This is why libels are so effective and spread so easily.

They beat lengthy explanations, they travel faster than corrections, and those of us trying to debunk them can appear defensive, while nonsense looks confident.

Throw in the availability heuristic, what's loudest and easiest to recall seems most true, and a dash of inattention blindness, missing complexity that isn't framed for you, and you've got yourself a solid foundation for a hate movement.

All right, on to the libels.

First up, alphabetically at least, apartheid.

Hard T, by the way.

The term comes to us from sunny South Africa, where you had a systemic, intentional, and permanent domination of one racial group over another, codified through law, policy, and state power, with the retention of the subordinate group necessary for the system benefiting the dominant group to continue functioning.

It's a bit of a mouthful, but that is the legal criteria.

Now, I've found that when people accuse Israel of apartheid or of being an apartheid state, they either don't fully understand the actual specifics of the term, don't know anything about life on the ground in Israel, and/or don't even know which part of the land from the river to the sea they're actually talking about.

That land can be broken up into three distinct territories: Israel, Gaza, and the area west of the Jordan River known as the West Bank or Judea and Samaria, or most commonly, the occupied West Bank.

But it all depends on who you ask Anyone who has spent ten seconds in Israel proper knows the accusation of apartheid there is absolutely ridiculous, as it's one of the most racially diverse places on planet Earth.

More than twenty percent of the country is not Jewish.

Everybody comes from everywhere, and everyone shares the same civil rights under the law.

Everyone can vote, everyone can run for government, everyone can litigate in the same courts.

The inclusion of Arab minorities is just that, inclusion, for those seeking to live in their ancestral home, or economic opportunity, or democracy, or LGBTQ rights, all of which are quite the opposite of a system built to retain Arabs as a labor class in order for Israeli society to function.

Now, here's the kernel of truth.

There are indeed instances of structural discrimination and inequality in the country.

Why?

Because it's a country with multiple ethnic groups living in it, and like many such countries, America, India, France, Japan, Estonia, Malaysia, they've got issues.

Yet, only Israel faces this constant barrage of apartheid accusations.

Hmm, I wonder what could be different about that one Jewish country surrounded by fifty-seven Arab countries.

Which brings us to the inversion.

It is the Arab countries all across the Middle East and North Africa who have most closely resembled apartheid.

Although, to be fair, they haven't technically checked the box either.

But what they have done is suppress and segregate Jews as dhimmis for centuries, and ethnically cleansed nearly a million Jews out of their centuries-old communities through legal and economic strangulation, seizing of assets, denationalization, and good old-fashioned violence, reducing the Jewish presence in the area by ninety-nine percent.

But you don't hear them talk about that on TikTok, do you?

Gaza doesn't even resemble apartheid, as before the war, there wasn't a single Jew to be found in the territory at all since Israel unilaterally disengaged in 2005.

Hard to argue you have two sets of laws for two peoples when there's only one group of people even allowed inside.

You could talk about blockades, you can talk about airspace, you could talk about whatever you want, but you can't talk about apartheid, because it flat out doesn't apply.

As for the West Bank, that's a whole different can of worms.

The Oslo Accords split the territory into three administrative zones that were meant to be temporary, and technically still are, but here we are 30 years later.

Area A, which is administered and secured by the Palestinian Authority, includes the major cities like Ramallah and Nablus, where most Palestinians live.

Area B, which is administered by the PA and secured by Israel, contains the smaller cities and villages where the next big chunk of Palestinians live.

Area C is where Israel has full civil and military control, and where most Israeli settlers live, alongside less than 5% of the Palestinian population.

It is in Area C where Israelis live under Israeli civil law and Palestinians live under Israeli military law.

This is the part that most closely resembles one of the elements of apartheid: two laws for two people.

But again, and this is precisely how libels work, it is distinctly not apartheid, according to the very clear legal parameters of the term.

The Israeli forces are not the state government, because the West Bank is not part of the State of Israel.

The dual legal systems are not due to racial differences or a desire to retain Palestinians as a permanent labor force, but because Israeli settlers are civilians of the occupying power and Palestinians are not.

As with Gaza, there are plenty of issues we could talk about with this setup, but apartheid isn't one of them.

And because we're constantly blasted with the vilifying shortcut libel, we never get to talk meaningfully about what's actually happening.

Instead, we're just trapped in the, "It is." "No, it isn't," binary that entrenches opposition, demonizes Israel exclusively, gets everybody nowhere fast.

Next libel up, white European colonizer.

Three bad words in a row.

This one's by far the easiest to debunk, because it's so ludicrously untrue Let's start with white.

First of all, Jews aren't white.

We're not technically a race at all, as we precede and exceed this Western social construct.

Moreover, the majority of Israel's population doesn't even present as white.

These are people from Ethiopia, Morocco, Yemen, Algeria, Asia, South America, all over the globe.

Anyone who has spent five minutes on the Tel Aviv tayalet knows this very well.

As we just established, modern-day Israelis came from all over, not just from Europe, and there have been Jews living in the land continuously for centuries well before it became a state.

And of course, Jews are not from Europe.

Jews are from Judea, which is modern-day Israel.

You cannot colonize a place you are from.

There is no other land to which Jews as a collective are connected.

Every Muslim site in the land is literally built on top of a Jewish one.

A state founded by an indigenous people who either already lived there or were returning from exile without a mother empire, mostly fleeing as refugees for survival, does not meet the definition of settler colonialism by any stretch of the imagination.

Arabs, on the other hand, are from Arabia, which I don't need to tell you, is not in Israel.

There's a reason there are 57 Muslim-majority countries across Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

That's some damn effective colonizing.

And there's a second layer of inversion here because this particular libel allows white Westerners to scratch the itch of their massive white guilt, taking out their own shame on those pesky Jews thousands of miles away.

These lost leftists have been tricked into believing that they are personally responsible for the American colonialism of ages past, for slavery, for things not even their great-great-great-grandparents were even alive for.

Even white-presenting Jews whose families came here as destitute Yiddish-speaking immigrants a hundred years ago feel they're responsible for stuff that happened in a country their families weren't even living in.

This is why the progressive response to white guilt is never more than performative, because it's not a genuine, internally motivated guilt.

It is an external guilt thrust upon them, meant to satisfy somebody else's gaze.

So even if they wanna do the right thing in the eyes of their peers, unconsciously, there's only so far they're willing to go.

This is how you end up with millions of hypocrites who call Israelis white European colonizers who should return stolen land while they are, in fact, the white European colonizers who live on stolen land.

As for the kernel of truth, it's honestly a stretch.

But sure, about half of the Jews present when Israel became a state in 1948 were from Europe.

Okay.

Not only is Israel not a colonizing entity, it actually represents the most successful decolonization movement ever, a return to sovereignty for an indigenous people who'd been deprived of it for thousands of years Our next libel is a more recent addition to the canon, a social media darling gracing the comments section of every Jewish account from bubbies to bagel shops.

I'm speaking, of course, of baby killer.

Jarring even to say.

This time, I wanna start with the kernel of truth, because this one is critical to acknowledge.

As is tragically the case with every single army in human history, some soldiers lose their way in the fog of war, and whether out of vengeance, or immaturity, or exhaustion, or hunger for power, or darkness, atrocities are committed.

I am sure there has been more than one innocent child killed by a rogue Israeli soldier during this war.

I don't know how many or under what circumstance, but I am sure, as I would be in any war, that the number is more than zero, and anyone who commits such an unforgivable crime should be punished on Earth and in heaven.

There has been no way to forensically verify any of the accusations that have come out of Gaza, but probability alone leads me to believe that at least one of them is true.

Maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20, maybe it's 50, and if you wanna talk about those incidents, fine, let's talk about 'em.

But to categorize as baby killers the entire 400,000-person IDF, or the entire population of Israel, or any Israel-supporting random Jew anywhere on Earth, is a purposefully disingenuous punch below the belt meant solely to demonize and ostracize Jews I'm gonna describe two cultures side by side.

You tell me what you think is more likely to be baby killers.

One teaches their youth that the greatest aim in life is to die in the killing of their enemies.

The other teaches that the goal of life is to make the world a better place.

One encourages their youth to blow themselves up in order to murder innocent people.

The other is willing to release literally thousands of enemy prisoners to save a single life.

One withholds aid from its own people so it can sell it to them for a profit.

The other has likely facilitated the transfer of more aid to an enemy population during active combat than any army in modern history.

One hides its weapons in children's bedrooms, hospitals, and kindergartens.

The other coordinates access to hundreds of thousands of polio vaccines for the very children they're accused of targeting.

One army exists for the sole purpose of killing their enemies.

The other, seventy-five percent of which are reservists in their 30s and 40s who left their regular-ass jobs and spouses and children for this, exists solely for the purpose of defending their own people.

But let's not beat around the bush.

If we're talking killing kids as a matter of policy, one side actually does that.

Hamas wages war by hiding themselves and hostages and weapons among and directly underneath civilian populations.

The entire aim of Hamas military strategy is for their own civilians to be killed.

They attack Israel, draw their fire, hide, force civilians to remain in place, and wait for them to die.

They have five hundred miles of underground shelter, enough to safeguard every child in Gaza and then some, except they don't because they don't want to.

They want the kids to die.

Why?

So Israel will look bad, and people will call them baby killers.

And on October seventh, Hamas butchered every single baby they came across, in their cribs, in their mother's arms, in their mother's bellies, in cold blood.

The Palestinians are the actual baby killers as a matter of deliberate strategy The very horror they accuse Jews of, they get away with.

And the denial of this horrific truth is what makes this particular libel especially painful.

Now we're down to the big libel, a libel so big, so pervasive, so perverse, and so destructive, it gets a monologue all to itself.

This libel is the number one excuse people give as to why it's entirely appropriate to treat Jews like crap at any time, in any circumstance, and feel good about themselves while doing it.

I'm speaking, of course, of gen***de.

As in, "That's what you get when you commit gen***de," or, "Have you tried not supporting gen***de?" Or, "You're complicit in gen***de." Or, "You can't represent me in politics if you can't call it a gen***de." Or, "I'm not anti-Jew, I'm just anti-gen***de." It is far and away the most commonly used, most successful weapon anti-Zionists have in their gleeful arsenal to exclude and remove Jews from society, and Israel, the Jew of countries, from the society of nations.

Gen***de is a term literally invented to describe what happened when six million Jews were systematically exterminated from the Earth.

How's that for inversion?

That gen***de was, of course, perpetrated by the Nazis and their eager collaborators all over Europe, as well as the highest-ranking Muslim official in Palestine, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who lived in Berlin, recruited Muslims to the Nazi cause, and whose role in executing the Final Solution was described during the Nuremberg trials as not insignificant.

How's that for inversion?

I'm gonna get into the nitty-gritty, but let's do the common sense version first.

Why does anyone who thinks the Gaza war is a gen***de think it's a gen***de?

Because someone told them it was.

That's it.

Hearsay from supposedly reputable sources, not by analyzing evidence against the legal definition of the term.

Someone, or many someones, simply told them it was a gen***de, and they said, "Okay." How do I know it's not a gen***de?

The opposite.

From the evidence, the actions, and weighing those against the word's definition.

In many ways, the dichotomy is as simple as that.

Who did they hear it from?

The closed loop of anti-Zionist gen***de libel spreaders, anti-Israel faux progressive social media accounts, podcasters, legacy news media, cable news pundits, pro-terrorist Arab media, UN officials, academics, human rights organizations, tokenized anti-Zionist Jews, and Hollywood celebrities.

Here's how the loop works.

Hamas, backed by Iran, Qatar, and other interested regional parties, manufactures and introduces a lie.

Your former friend, who now accuses you of supporting gen***de, first heard the lie confirmed from her friends in pottery class, who heard it from their teacher, who saw it on a random movie actor's Instagram, who heard it on a podcast that cited a TikTok video, that cited a Jewish anti-Zionist group, who cited a group of gen***de experts, who cited a UN report, which cited an Amnesty International report, which cited a different UN report, which cited a BBC report, which cited UNRWA, which cited the Gaza Ministry of Health, AKA Hamas.

Rinse and repeat.

If it sounds ridiculous, it's because it is.

Remember the Jeremiah effect, folks.

Successful mass manipulation looks like masses of people being manipulated while you look on from a distance in dismay Every party in the loop deserves their own debunking monologue, but for now, I'll give you some quick facts about a few.

Let's look at human rights orgs like Amnesty International first.

Amnesty's Middle East Twitter account, their secretary general account, and UK campaigns manager's account tweeted a combined two hundred fourteen times about the war in Gaza.

Eighty-seven percent of these were about Israeli wrongdoing or Palestinian suffering.

The number of tweets calling for the release of the Israeli hostages was three.

The number condemning Hamas for war crimes, one.

Neither the Amnesty main account nor Mena account posted a single tweet exclusively focused on Israeli victims or an unqualified condemnation of the October seventh massacre.

Human rights?

More like anyone but Jew-man rights.

Am I right?

Anybody?

How about the UN?

The organization whose Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs said Hamas is not a terrorist group, whose General Assembly levied seventeen resolutions against Israel in twenty twenty-four, and only seven against every other country in the world combined.

The organization who pushed out their own special advisor on the prevention of gen***de for refusing to call the war a gen***de.

That's the UN.

How about experts like the International Association of Gen***de Scholars?

Well, turns out anyone can join the International Association of Gen***de Scholars for thirty dollars, which many people did, including Cookie Monster, Emperor Palpatine, and this dog.

Oh, and the studies the association cited in their gen***de resolution, written by, you guessed it, human rights organizations like Amnesty International and B'Tselem, the token Jewish anti-Zionist organization, both of whom literally redefined the term gen***de, sidestepping its established legal definition in order to find Israel guilty of it.

Look this up.

B'Tselem literally used a, quote, broader analytical framework than the legal definition.

Hey, at least the Jewish libel spreaders admit it.

And don't even get me started on ignorant American leftists citing Al Jazeera, a Qatari-backed terrorist news platform so obvious in its extremist propaganda that it has been banned for inciting violence in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, UAE, Bahrain, and the West Bank.

Too extreme for the Palestinian Authority, just right for your yoga instructor That is far from a comprehensive overview, but let's now turn to Israel.

As I said, Israel's innocent of gen***de, not because I want them to be, but because they didn't do the things that one has to do in order to be guilty of gen***de.

It's an incredibly high legal bar, and for good reason, because the crime is so serious.

Let's go common sense first again, and then I'll get technical.

You don't completely sabotage your own element of surprise by warning civilians of your approach with millions of leaflets, individual texts, telephone calls, roof knocks, and interrupted TV broadcasts because you're trying to commit gen***de.

You don't move on foot, building to building, room to room, risking IEDs, snipers, booby traps, and gunfire to your own precious young men and women for two years because you're attempting a gen***de.

You don't coordinate access to hundreds of thousands of polio vaccines for children when you're attempting to gen***de them.

You don't provide humanitarian corridors, millions of tons of aid, or negotiate ceasefire agreements when you're attempting a gen***de.

You certainly don't negotiate ceasefire agreements when you're the victim of a gen***de.

You know what the Jewish birth rate was during the Holocaust?

Zero.

Statistically, zero births.

Why?

Because in a gen***de, pregnant women and babies are slaughtered, and there isn't exactly privacy to get it on when you're hiding under a staircase or sharing a room with 20 sick people in a ghetto or being gassed to death in a mobile killing van pumped full of carbon monoxide.

Do you know what the estimated birth rate in Gaza was in early twenty twenty-five during the height of the supposed gen***de?

A hundred and thirty babies every day.

Lower than usual, sure, but not zero.

Lower means war.

Zero means gen***de About the highest estimate you'll find for the death toll in Gaza is somewhere around 100K.

That's the highest, even beyond what Hamas itself has reported.

Let's say it's true.

Then let's subtract natural deaths, which according to pre-war rates, would be around 16K over two years.

So now we're at 84K.

Then let's also subtract terrorist deaths, which at their absolute most conservative estimate is around 15% of the civilian count, so 12,600, which when subtracted, gets us to 71,400.

Still, a higher number than even Hamas' count.

A horrible and sickening number that should never have happened, but stay with me.

It's estimated Israel dropped 70,000 metric tons of bombs on Gaza, which means that for a military supposedly engaged in a strategy of human elimination in a densely packed urban territory, whose leaders denied civilians access to underground shelters, and whose neighbor Egypt denied sanctuary for refugees.

For every 2,200 pounds of bombs Israel dropped, roughly one civilian was killed.

Twenty-two hundred pounds of bombs, one death.

Take the players out of it.

Is that what a gen***de perpetrated by the most precise military in the world would look like?

Now, let's get into the legal jargon.

The 1948 Gen***de Convention, convened, of course, after the gen***de of the Jews, established gen***de as intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group through one of five specific acts: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, or forcibly transferring children.

This is what most anti-Zionists who think they have a grasp of gen***de law will cite.

What they don't tell you on TikTok is that this definition has been refined through decades of cases at the International Court of Justice, because, as you might have surmised, that definition is super broad and basically encompasses anything.

The anti-Israel argument you'll hear the most is how the legal definition requires only that a population be targeted in part, which to the anti-Zionist means that any amount of Gazan deaths constitutes gen***de if the intent is there.

And they'll point to that closed information loop or violent rhetoric from some rabid Israeli government official as proof of that intent.

This explanation ignores what is known as the only reasonable inference standard.

For the intent to be proven as gen***de, it must be the only reasonable explanation.

It cannot be a reasonable explanation.

It must be the only explanation.

Call me crazy, but having your sovereign territory invaded, 250 of your citizens kidnapped, and 1,200 of them murdered in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust seems to me like a decently plausible reason why the Israeli military might have stepped foot in Gaza at that particular time after twenty years of disengagement.

It also sounds like an actual attempt at gen***de, which brings our inversion count to three.

The second important idea to grasp is that it's not enough to target just a part of the group.

It must be a substantial part.

Again, that makes sense.

During the Holocaust, 40% of all Jews on Earth were annihilated.

During the Rwandan gen***de, 70% of all Tutsis were slaughtered in just 100 days.

During the Armenian gen***de, roughly 55% of all Armenians were murdered.

During the Gaza War, according to the high numbers we used earlier, the civilian death toll is around 2% of the population of Gaza, or about 0.5% of all Palestinians on Earth.

40%, 70%, 55%, less than 1%.

I wouldn't qualify that as substantial unless we're changing the definition of that word, too Courts have also determined that it is not in fact enough to create conditions that could lead to a group's destruction.

It must be the sole intent of the creation of those conditions.

So while Israel absolutely bungled a lot of how they handled the aid situation, the fact that they also delivered more aid to an enemy during wartime than any military ever, and the legitimacy of their goal in trying to stop Hamas from stealing and selling aid certainly disqualifies any notion of sole intent.

The specific way in which the word gen***de is weaponized against Jews also reveals its true motive, to punish and other Jews for the crime of being Jews.

Any display of Jew hate at any time, at any level is justified because gen***de, and because you, random Jewish person, committed it by proxy.

Unless you have publicly excised from your Jewish identity the completely natural connection to the world's only Jewish state, where the majority of Jews live, around which our calendar, holidays, customs, and liturgy revolve, and is the only place on Earth to which Jews are indigenous and collectively connected, you committed gen***de.

This collective guilt for a crime against humanity that didn't even occur does not exist for any other people on Earth, even those who did commit gen***de.

It is an entirely disingenuous framing that cannot withstand even the slightest bit of moral scrutiny.

Jews are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, whether real or imaginary, any more than the Western bigots leveling these accusations are responsible for the actions of their governments.

It's all one big hypocritical shit sandwich.

And lastly, let's address the ongoing gen***de claim.

You got some folks who claim gen***de's been occurring for decades, some who claimed it began the day after October seventh, some who claimed it at other various points throughout the war, and others who claim it still despite the war's official end.

This discrepancy alone speaks to the illegitimacy of the claim.

You cannot name another gen***de in history with no clear starting point or end point.

Rwanda, the Holocaust, Armenia, Bosnia, Srebrenica, Cambodia, even slow burners like Darfur.

These all have some kind of temporal boundaries.

Not Israel.

Why?

Because it's a libel, a purposeful distortion of an ongoing conflict between two parties, punctuated by acute moments of warfare.

As for ongoing, according to Hamas' numbers, around five hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israeli strikes over the past several months since the October ceasefire.

That number would equate to an average of about four deaths per week.

If four deaths a week is an ongoing gen***de, how can the word have any meaning?

Any number of people dying over any length of time is unequivocally not what gen***de is meant to define.

This is also part of why the libel is so successful, because it is macabre to discuss death counts as a means of defense.

You cannot possibly be seen as compassionate or innocent while talking about death counts to someone who already thinks you support gen***de.

Being the person who says, "Actually, only half that many civilians died," isn't gonna convince anyone you don't support gen***de, and isn't gonna win anybody over.

Because remember, the real goal is just to other Jews, and a person who sounds as if they're defending innocent people dying is easy to excommunicate.

And you know what really sucks?

These self-righteous, uninformed people who bury their heads in the sand about the reality of this horrific situation are the ones actually directly complicit in the deaths of the Palestinian civilians they pretend to care about.

By buying the Hamas propaganda and aiming their fury instead at the Jews, they enable jihadist terrorists to continue terrorizing Palestinians and Israelis alike, ensuring that innocent people will continue to die.

Just as civilians provide the physical cover, Westerners provide the narrative cover that allows Hamas to continue its campaign of death in the region.

That's the worst inversion of all.

Y'all, I know this shit is tiring.

Imagine how long this took me to write.

That's the bullshit asymmetry principle.

They toss out a single word, I have to write 3,000 just to disprove it.

Do I think any of the people who most need to hear this will?

No.

Do I think it would make a difference if they did?

Probably not.

But I hope that for those of you who've had doubts, those of you surrounded by that closed information loop or connected to people inside it, that this will have laid your doubts to rest.

So what can we do about it?

Fight back.

They have terrorist propaganda on their side.

We have truth.

They've never even had to argue the point, because everyone around them affirms them in their belief without considering it critically.

They don't even realize their entire point of view is based solely on stuff someone else told them secondhand.

They've never tried to corroborate it or had to prove it.

So make them, based on evidence, based on case law, not based on something someone else said.

At the very least, take courage from this mega monologue, and don't be afraid to tell them they're wrong, and that no amount of libel is gonna change that.

They're ignorant.

They've been manipulated, not you.

You've got this thing right.

So as crappy as libels feel, you can at least feel good about that.