Israeli PR (hasbara) has been doomed for decades, ever since the Colombia University Journalism School abandoned objective reporting to train new journalists in the model of subjective story-telling. Marry the crafting of subjective interpretation of the news to trendy intersectionality and one has the perfect recipe for journalists’ self-serving bias and distortion.
Nevertheless, embattled Jewish Israelis were bound to bump up against legitimate buyers’ resistance in the arena of public opinion, owing to the spiritual principle of middah k’neged middah (measure for measure) or “what goes around, comes around”—karma, if you prefer.
If Jewish Israelis are telling lies—and these are titanic, cosmic lies—then we can only expect that others will tell lies about us. However infuriating it may be for nine-tenths of the world to parrot the idea that the gentlest, most merciful nation on earth is deliberately starving Gazan children or committing Palestinian Arab genocide, those lies are ludicrous yet trivial compared to the consequential lies we are telling.
In the Jewish judicial principle of measure for measure, how we behave toward others (including God) is how we ourselves will be treated—to gain the opportunity to glimpse in the mirror of our own painful experiences what we must fix within ourselves. We must ask ourselves, why would the whole world be falsely accusing us of starving Gazans, based on repeated, fictitious photo evidence, while the only residents there actually being starved are our precious hostages, including Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski, who Hamas proudly flaunts in shocking, heartbreaking footage--evidence that no one takes notice of? Although it is tempting to assume that we are being victimized as a nation for no reason other than spiteful antisemitism, I believe there is something more fundamental at play which empowers us to fix our fate.
With first-world leaders calling to reward Palestinian Arab terrorists with a state on biblical Jewish land, citing the aforementioned blood libels, like so many bullies beating up the vulnerable kid in the schoolyard, doesn’t it seem like something perverse, if not otherworldly, is going on?
I submit that our pervere persecution will not cease until we start admitting and living by the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. When we do that, we will find that everything will change for the better. Eventually, fruitless hasbara (PR) will be one less line item in the annual Israeli government budget.
Here are Ten Lies we Jewish Israelis are telling the world by how we live our lives:
- 1. The Torah is a collection of myths written by humans, for there is no supreme God who covenanted with us at Sinai some 3,340 years ago, to serve Him until the end of time.
- 2. The Jews are a people like any other with no special spiritual responsibility for the world; the moral malaise into which the world has sunk has nothing to do with us.
- 3. The commandments of the Torah are optional for the Jews.
- 4. Judaism is denominational; versions of Judaism abolishing the commandments have as much validity as any other.
- 5. Patrilineal descent is sufficient to confer one’s Judaism upon a natural-born son or daughter.
- 6. Conversion to Judaism without accepting lifelong Torah observance is valid.
- 7. Jews may legitimately live outside the Land of Israel solely to benefit from a higher standard of living, comfort, convenience, and luxury.
- 8. The Land of Israel is not intrinsically holy and imposes no unique spiritual obligations on its residents, Jewish or non-Jewish.
- 9. A Torah-observant Jew in Israel may conduct his or her life without sharing the burdens of fellow Jews, in wartime and peacetime; that is, a Jew in Israel is solely responsible for his or her own, rather than for the fate of our brothers and sisters and the nation as a whole.
- 10. Israel can win a spiritual war solely with soldiers, machine guns, fighter jets, drones, tanks, bombs, and nuclear arms.
When we Israeli Jews start embodying the truth to ourselves and others by upholding the opposite of these falsehoods in how we live our lives, we will find the entire decent world standing up to defend us, on the road to declaring us priests in our own peaceful Promised Land. It’s the only remedy for our national plight we haven’t yet tried.
Living by eternal Torah truth according to the covenant we undertook at Sinai offers karmic freedom from the worldwide libel we presently suffer, and it’s entirely in our hands. Maybe this is what God is softly whispering in our ears amidst the deafening global slander.
Amanda Chaitt, an American-Israeli writer, welcomes visitors at www.antisemitismanswers.com