Monologue Transcript
Anti-Jew Libels DECONSTRUCTED - Jonah Platt Debunks 4 Lies About Israel & The Jewish People (Part 1)
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 issues reality and nuance.
For stupefy 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 flatten 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 duplicable into overlooking the actual evil being perpetrated
upon Jews by their very accusers.
Effed up.
Right?
Libels also make for terrific slogans because they're easily repeated and
function according to Brandi'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.
Alright, onto the Libels.
Debunking the Apartheid Accusation
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 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 10 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 20% 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 L-G-B-T-Q 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 57 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 dims 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 99%.
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
'cause 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 Nalu, 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 an 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.
The White European Colonizer Myth
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 erase 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 ette 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 effect of 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.
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.
The Truth About "Baby Killer" Libels
Our next libel is a more recent edition to the Cannon.
A social media darling gracing the comment 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 at a 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 want to 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 culture side by side.
You tell me what you think is more likely.
To be baby killers.
One teaches their youth that the greatest 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 75% of which are reservists in their thirties and forties who left
their regular ass jobs and spouses and children for this exist 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 500 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 7th, 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.
That's it for part one of Deconstructing anti-Zionist Libels.
Next week I'll wrap things up with the final two, including the big libel,
so hit that subscribe button to make sure you don't miss it, and I'll see you right back here for part two.