/ world today news/ On Saturday, November 11, Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari said at a press conference that Israel killed a “terrorist” who prevented the evacuation of 1,000 civilians from Al-Shifa Hospital.
The accusations didn’t make much sense. Even by the standards of Israeli propaganda, falsifying such information without providing context or evidence further contributes to the deterioration of Israel’s credibility in the international media and its image around the world.
Just a day earlier, CNN quoted an unnamed US official as saying in a diplomatic cable: “We have a lot to lose on the information battlefield.”
The diplomat was referring to the reputation of the US in the Middle East, indeed the whole world, which is in a sorry state today due to the US’s blind support for Israel.
Reversed roles
This trust deficit is visible in Israel itself. According to various opinion polls, not only Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is losing the trust of Israelis, but also the entire Israeli political elite.
A common joke among Palestinians these days is that Israeli leaders are emulating Arab leaders from previous Arab-Israeli wars, talking about false victories and unfounded successes on the military front.
For example, when Israel quickly pushed back the Arab army on all fronts in June 1967, with the full support of the United States and the West, the leaders of the Arab armies, of course, announced on the radio that they were at the “gates of Tel Aviv.”
The fortunes seem to have turned. Abu Obeida and Abu Hamza, military representatives of the Al-Qassam Brigades and the Al-Quds Brigades respectively, provide very detailed accounts of the nature of the battle and the losses of the advancing Israeli forces in their regular and long-awaited statements.
The Israeli military, on the other hand, talks about imminent victories, the killing of anonymous “terrorists” and the destruction of countless tunnels without providing any evidence. The only “evidence” provided is deliberate attacks on hospitals, schools and civilian buildings.
So while Abu Obeida’s statements are almost always followed by well-produced videos documenting the systematic destruction of Israeli tanks, there is no such documentation to support the Israeli military’s statements.
Beyond the battlefield
But the question of Israel’s reliability, or rather the lack of trust in it, does not arise only on the battlefield.
Since the first day of the war, Palestinian doctors, civil defense officials, journalists, bloggers and even ordinary people have been filming or recording all of Israel’s war crimes throughout the besieged Gaza Strip. And despite the Israeli army’s ongoing internet and electricity blackouts in Gaza, Palestinians have been able to track all aspects of Israel’s ongoing genocide.
The accuracy of the Palestinian narrative forced even US officials who initially doubted the Palestinian data to eventually admit that the Palestinians were ultimately telling the truth.
Barbara Leaf, assistant secretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs, told the US House of Representatives on November 9 that the number of people killed by Israel during the war was probably “higher than announced”.
Indeed, Israel is losing credibility every day, to such an extent that Israel’s initial lies about what happened on October 7th ended up being disastrous for Israel’s overall image and credibility on the international stage.
Rape, Islamic State and My Struggle.
In the euphoria of demonizing Palestinian resistance as a means of justifying Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Israeli government and military, and then journalists and even ordinary people, were drawn into an unprecedented campaign to portray Palestinians as ‘human-like’ animals’ – in the words of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant.
Hours after the events and before the investigation began, Netanyahu spoke of “beheaded babies” allegedly mutilated by the Resistance. Gallant claimed that “young girls were brutally raped”, even former chief military rabbi Israel Weiss stated that he “saw a pregnant woman with her stomach ripped open and a baby cut open”.
Even the so-called “moderate” president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, made strange statements on November 12. Asked about Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, Herzog said the book “My Struggle”, written by Adolf Hitler in 1925, was found in a “nursery room”. in northern Gaza.
And, of course, there were repeated references to Islamic State flags being, for some reason, flown by Hamas fighters when they entered southern Israel on October 7, among other tidbits. The fact that the Islamic State is a sworn enemy of Hamas and that the Palestinian movement has done everything possible to eliminate any possibility of the Islamic State taking root in the besieged Gaza Strip seemed to have nothing to do with Israel’s inconsistent propaganda.
As one might expect, the Israeli, American and European media have repeated the claim of a link between Hamas and the Islamic State without rational discussion or minimal fact-checking.
But over time, the Israeli lies could no longer withstand the pressure of the truth coming out of Gaza, documenting every atrocity and every battle and washing away all the fabricated Israeli accusations.
The turning point in the ongoing series of Israeli lies may have been the attack on Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on October 17. While many sadly accepted and still defend the Israeli lie that the hospital was hit by a Resistance missile, the bloody nature of the massacre that left hundreds dead was a wake-up call for many.
One of the many questions that have arisen since the hospital massacre is this: If Israel was truly honest in its version of events regarding what happened at the hospital, why did it bomb every other hospital in Gaza and continue to do so for weeks?
Israel’s “Hasbara” has been canceled
There are reasons why Israeli propaganda is no longer able to effectively influence public opinion, even if the mainstream media continues to side with Israel, including when the latter commits genocide.
First, the Palestinians and their supporters were able to “undo” Israel through social media, which for the first time suppressed the organized propaganda campaigns often conducted on behalf of Israel in the mainstream media.
An analysis of online content on popular social networks was done by the Israeli influencer marketing platform Humanz. A study published in November acknowledged that “while 7.39 billion posts with pro-Israel tags were posted on Instagram and TikTok last month, 109.61 billion posts with pro-Palestinian tags were posted on the platforms during the same period.” This means, according to the company, that pro-Palestinian views are 15 times more popular than pro-Israel ones.
Second, independent media, Palestinian and otherwise, have offered alternatives to those seeking a different version of events than the one unfolding in Gaza.
Just one independent Palestinian journalist from Gaza, Motaz Azaiza, managed to attract more than 14 million Instagram followers in one month with his on-the-ground reporting.
Third, the “surprise attack” of October 7 deprived Israel of the initiative not only in terms of the war itself, but also in justifying the war. Indeed, their genocidal war on Gaza has no specific goals, but neither has a specific media campaign to defend or justify those vague goals. As a result, Israeli media discourse appears inconsistent, haphazard, and sometimes even self-destructive.
Finally, the brutality of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. If we compare the lies of the Israeli media with the horrific crimes that Israel has committed in Gaza, we will not find any plausible logic that could convincingly justify the slaughter, displacement, starvation and genocide of defenseless peoples.
Never has Israeli propaganda failed so spectacularly, and the mainstream media failed to protect Israel from the world’s anger—indeed, seething hatred—against Israel’s appalling apartheid regime. The fallout from all of this will certainly affect how history remembers Israel’s war on Gaza, which left tens of thousands of innocent civilians dead and wounded.
An entire generation, if not more, has already formed a perception of Israel as a genocidal regime,” and no future lies, Hollywood movies, or glossy magazine reports will be able to soften that perception.
More importantly, this new perception is likely to force people to reexamine not only their views of Israel’s present and future, but also of its past—the very foundation of the Zionist regime, which itself is based on nothing but lies.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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