Perhaps the most striking aspect of the global propaganda campaign to demonize Israel is how openly and brazenly Israel’s supposed critics change the meaning of words in order to find Israel guilty.
In the 18 years between the 2005 Gaza Disengagement and the October 7 massacre in 2023, NGOs and international organizations crafted a fiction that Israel still occupied Gaza and was therefore responsible for everything that happened in Gaza despite not having a single soldier or even citizen in the entire enclave except for those held hostage by Hamas. The very meaning of the word "occupation" was changed to no longer involve military or administrative control. It was the world’s first and only “occupation” in which the supposed "occupier" had zero power over the supposedly "occupied".
It was a definition created solely to be used against Israel, never to be used again. Its purpose was to absolve Hamas and the people Gaza of all responsibility for their refusal to do anything constructive after Israel left Gaza, to build a bustling economy and show that a Palestinian Arab state could be at all viable. Instead, Hamas stole the aid that was sent into Gaza over the years, using it to build a vast tunnel network longer than the London Underground, digging up water pipes to convert into rockets, and keeping the people poor to justify their genocidal ambitions.
October 7 could never have happened had there been a real occupation of Gaza in the months and years leading up to the massacre. Two years later, Israel’s critics fail to see the irony in Israel now considering the takeover of a territory it has been falsely accused of occupying for 20 years.
Israel’s critics have also sought to change the definition of genocide to find Israel guilty. In its December 2024 report accusing Israel of genocide, Amnesty International actually complained that the real and long-established definition of genocide used by the International Court of Justice is “overly cramped,” even as it rewrote history and pretended Hamas did not exist to try to twist reality until Israel was guilty.
The Irish government, likewise, has openly called for a new definition of genocide solely to find Israel guilty. Also in December 2024, Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin announced that “Ireland will be asking the ICJ to broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of genocide by a State. We are concerned that a very narrow interpretation of what constitutes genocide leads to a culture of impunity in which the protection of civilians is minimised.”
In May of this year, he again stated that "We're hoping that we will broaden the criteria by which genocide is judged by the Geneva Convention.”
While Israel’s critics seek to broaden the definition of genocide to include any action to combat Hamas terrorists, they seek to narrow the definition of genocide when mass murder is committed against Jews. By pretending that Hamas is not a genocidal terrorist organization, that the genocidal actions of October 7 never happened, and by justifying Hamas’s crimes against humanity, they set a standard for the genocide of Jews that even the Nazi Holocaust would fail to meet, because by their standard there is no scenario in which the deliberate mass murder of Jews solely because they are Jews could ever be a genocide.
In this way, the accusation of genocide against Israel is itself genocidal. That is why it is made unironically by antisemites who in the same breath call for a real genocide with slogans like “From the River to the Sea.”
The propaganda strategy used against Israel has from the beginning been the implementation of Joseph Goebbel’s “big lie.” Make the lie so big and repeat it often enough and people will start to believe it no matter how much it contradicts reality. This has been the heart of the campaign to claim Israel has caused mass starvation in Gaza. The UN-linked Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) recently released a report claiming a “worst-case scenario” of famine in Gaza, even as it changed the very standards by which it judges famine.
The IPC reduced the malnutrition threshold for children from 30% to 15%, meaning that a famine could be declared at half the percentage at which it would be declared anywhere else in the world. It also relied on mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) measurements rather than more reliable methods of measuring famine.
Sometimes, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. With so many NGOs, countries, media organizations, and the UN desperate to prove that Israel has been starving Gaza children, there should be many real photographs of starving children, and yet to date there has not been a single photograph that was not misleading, either because it was of a child who suffers from a terrible disease rather than starvation, because it was staged, or because it was not even taken in Gaza. If a real photograph existed, the New York Times would have run it on the front page by now, and the UN and anti-Israel NGOs like Amnesty would be absolutely giddy to have something real to use against Israel for once.
While the starvation lie is made against Israel, the world ignores the real starvation being inflicted on the hostages held by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The recent videos of two hostages reduced to skin and bones seem to have finally woken the Red Cross up to the fact that there are Israeli hostages in Gaza, 22 months too late. It remains to be seen if any action will follow. Meanwhile, the plight of the hostages continues to be ignored by everyone else, buried by the New York Times and treated as a non-issue by those nations that have vowed to recognize a Palestinian Arab state at any cost, especially if that cost is Jewish lives.
The ability of antisemites to make up lies about Israel is limitless. From claims of hundreds of thousands of deaths based solely on the wishes of the authors in publications such as The Lancet to faked x-rays of children supposedly shot by IDF forces, the war on truth is endless. Worse, these lies are uncritically repeated by a media that has been desperate for any story that makes Israel look bad, no matter how untrue.
The BBC, the Guardian, and the New York Times have cried wolf over and over again for decades, from the fake Jenin massacre of 2002 to the lie that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Hospital in 2023. And yet they never learn. When it comes to Israel, they are incapable of acting like journalists or with basic journalistic standards and ethics. Every lie is believed, and the truth is repressed.
In their war on truth, anti-Israel activists love to tie every movie or tv show to supposed Israeli evil. They did this with the new Superman movie, deliberately misinterpreting a conflict that most resembles the Russian war on Ukraine as Israel invading Gaza, and they did this with season 2 of Star Wars: Andor and what happened on the planet of Ghorman.
And yet, the words spoken by rebel leader and Imperial Senator Mon Mothma in response to the Ghorman massacre apply precisely to those who seek to rally anything and everything to the cause of destroying the 10 million citizens of Israel: “The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.”
Does that not apply to organizations and countries that knowingly change the very meaning of words to use them as a weapon? Does it not apply to newspapers that run front-page stories of fake starvation and bury stories of real starvation?
Does that not apply to people who make threats against the screening of the videos of the October 7 massacre that were filmed by the Hamas terrorists themselves, because the public knowing the truth about the atrocities Hamas committed is a threat to their own genocidal worldview?
The death of truth has left Western societies vulnerable to monsters. It has left Jewish communities vulnerable to violence committed on behalf of a genocidal death cult. It has led world leaders to embrace a country as fake as Narnia and to reward a terrorist organization that is as genocidal as Hitler. It has led to the dismissal and ignoring of the real starvation and the real plight of the hostages.
When any person, organization, or country is willing to lie on behalf of a group as evil and as genocidal as Hamas, truth itself dies, and the deaths of innocent people soon follow.