Conspiracy Theories About Israel Do Not Come From the Fringes
The pogrom in Israel on 7 October 2023 that slaughtered 1,200 people—the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—committed by the various Palestinian units of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), most identifiably HAMAS, included the large-scale rape of civilians, the taking of 240-plus hostages, and the public declaration, “We will do this again and again”. Israel’s defensive operation to recover the hostages and eliminate HAMAS’ ability to control the Gaza Strip, removing the base it could use to repeat the pogrom, might seem reasonable—a just and inevitable response that would be expected of any State in similar circumstances. But when Jews are involved, reason quits the equation for a staggering number of people.
A DISINFORMATION ECOSYSTEM
Since 7 October, a whole alternative narrative has been spun that shifts responsibility for events in former Mandate Palestine onto Israel, and, while there is no shortage of fringe lunatics disseminating this madness online, the sources of this disinformation that matter most are actors and institutions we are taught to think of as the most credible: “human rights” activists, “humanitarian” NGOs, the United Nations, the custodians of “international law”, the international media, academia, think tanks, and Western governments.
The central claim of this alternative narrative is that Israel’s declared war aims are a ruse. One version of this, currently being waged as political warfare in the international courts, posits that Jerusalem’s stated intentions are a cover for “genocide” in Gaza. A more “respectable” version is that the war is being continued needlessly to keep Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in office, a conspiracy theory voiced by no less a figure than President Joe Biden.
The major problem for the alternative narrative is the 7 October pogrom that began the war. The ways around this are legion.
Some justify what happened. Sometimes this is forthright, as with The Washington Post editor who said this was decolonisation in action. More frequent is an attempt to “contextualise” Operation AL-AQSA FLOOD, as the HAMAS-led invasion is referred to by its perpetrators, presenting it as a response to long-running Israeli oppression, and, therefore, a legitimate act of “resistance”, rather than an expression of genocidal antisemitism. This perspective has become widespread, especially on Western campuses, and has even motivated theatrical suicides.
Another approach is to simply deny HAMAS committed atrocities on 7 October. Around 90% of Palestinian Arabs hold to this view, and it has spread to the West. A particular point of denialism has been HAMAS’ use of rape as a weapon of war and once again this has not been confined to the fringes. Two weeks ago, the London Times published an article that, in the style of “sophisticated” Holocaust-deniers like David Irving, conceded there had been sexual violence by HAMAS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the other IRGC units on 7 October, but minimised the scale and cast doubt on whether the leadership had ordered it.
Another form of denialism came in HAMAS’ first reaction: the group claimed any Israeli civilian deaths on 7 October were caused by Gazan civilians who followed the terrorists into Israel—an astonishingly cynical statement for those who believe Israel’s purpose is war on Gaza’s civilians—and Israel implementing the “Hannibal Directive”, a supposed Israel Defence Forces (IDF) policy of killing Israelis rather than allowing them to be taken captive. HAMAS itself has since discarded this narrative, but a lie being too absurd for HAMAS does not mean it is too absurd for the United Nations. Last week, the U.N. gave its support to the obscene lie that Israelis killed themselves on 7 October. The implication of the “Hannibal Directive” conspiracy theories is that the Israelis were responsible for 7 October and used it as a “pretext” to get on with their “genocide” in Gaza. A similar theme occurs when the Israeli intelligence failures before 7 October are used to “prove” Israel “let it happen”.
These theories are, of course, adopted in varying combinations and to varying degrees, and there are many others besides. That said, not even the deranged corners of the Internet could outdo the United Nations. Admitting that HAMAS raped Israeli women on 7 October, the U.N. contended that this had “resulted in a sense of emasculation among Israeli men on a national scale”, which meant the IDF did not go into Gaza to prevent such things happening ever again and recover the hostages who are still being raped, but to “rebuild Israeli national masculinity through aggression”. It is an important reminder that however low the United Nations has gone, where Israel is concerned it can always get worse.
The crucial point about these entities—the “human rights” activists, “humanitarian” NGOs, the U.N., “international law” guardians, the press, academia, think tanks, and to an uncomfortable extent Western governments—is that they are less independent sources of reinforcing evidence, and more like one ecosystem with multiple points of emission. The boundaries between all of these groups are fluid: they are deeply connected by social networks, the same people move back and forth between the sectors, and the organisations themselves have indistinct roles. Journalists frequently play the part of activists, activists get quoted as academics, radical academics become international lawyers, and so on.
This ecosystem is warped even further by the inclusion of information streams polluted by HAMAS/IRGC. The Islamic Revolution that took over Iran in 1979 and replicated itself in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza is totalitarian: every aspect of the society under its rule is controlled from the top. The media is tightly controlled. NGOs are terrorised. Universities are subject to “Cultural Revolution”-style purges. The IRGC uses hospitals as command centres and moves its weapons and fighters in ambulances. All of this has been understood by those who wish to understand it for decades. Yet the press, NGOs, and international institutions continue to quote “government” officials, “journalists”, and medical staff in Gaza as if they are not agents or hostages of the terrorists who rule the Strip.
A CASE STUDY OF THE DISINFORMATION ECOSYSTEM
The U.N. transmogrifying dubious press articles into primary research and thence into “facts” is an important part of how this ecosystem works. Likewise the credulous repetition of UNRWA claims that schools and hospitals used as operational bases by HAMAS and PIJ are civilian sites. But for a microcosm of the organic synergy of the thing, one can scarcely do better than the reaction to Israel rescuing four hostages from the Nuseirat “refugee camp” in Gaza on 8 June.
Within a very short amount of time, HAMAS was claiming—through its “health ministry”—that 274 Palestinian civilians had been killed and 700 wounded in the Israeli operation, unverified figures duly repeated by all the leading media outlets, sometimes with disclaimers about the source, and sometimes not. HAMAS’ history of inflating and fabricating this kind of data was unmentioned, nor did anyone seem to have space to note the inherent implausibility of being able to arrive at such a precise figure so quickly when it took Israel—a high-functioning State whose officials were not operating in a warzone—several weeks to confirm the casualty count from 7 October. (Of all the issues addressed here, the Palestinian fatality count remains the most individually significant because of its importance to HAMAS’ war strategy. I have written about this before and will return to it soon.)
Next, “human rights” groups claimed the IDF had entered a private Arab home in Nuseirat and “executed” a “doctor” and a “journalist”. After that, the “humanitarian” NGOs whirred into action, quoting HAMAS’ casualty figures, and adding “harrowing testimony” from local medical officials. United Nations “experts” condemned the rescue operation as “outrageous” and the “umpteenth massacre” by Israel, while giving sly credence to the conspiracy theories circulating online that American soldiers were involved in the mission. Finally, the “international law” scholars, one of them until recently a “human rights” activist, entered the fray to say that the operation was illegal and in fact constituted the war crime of “perfidy”. The impression left was that HAMAS had been quite responsibly holding the Israeli hostages and then the IDF had “treacherously”, as the U.N. “experts” put it, appeared from nowhere to carry out a racist rampage against innocent Arabs in a “refugee camp”.
The story of the “doctor” and “journalist” killed by Israel transpired to be a reference to Ahmad al-Jamal, who was an imam as well as a physician, and his son, Abdullah al-Jamal. As Abdullah was writing out his articles for HAMAS’ Palestine Now, the U.S.-based Palestine Chronicle, and other outlets, he and his father were holding three Israeli men as hostages in their home, which also contained Abdullah’s wife and three children. Just around the corner, the Abu Nar family was holding the other Israeli hostage rescued on 8 June, Ms. Noa Argamani.
The initial reportage about the Jamals is perhaps the most instructive aspect of this episode. For nine months, there has been an attempt to portray Israel as deliberately targeting doctors and particularly journalists in Gaza, evidence of cruelty and genocidal intent, so it has been said. What Nuseirat shows is that this story is largely being published upside-down: the notable aspect is that many in the civilian professions in Gaza are instrumentalised as extensions of the HAMAS regime and its war—yet another very grave HAMAS war crime that endangers Palestinians. The highly public nature of the Nuseirat case and the revelations since might make this better known. (The point has been made before by those who did any digging, but few listened—not least because the investigators were often Jews, and there is a sinister and quite widespread assumption Jews cannot be trusted over Israel.)
The IDF infiltrated Nuseirat, which is a town not a tented refugee camp, disguised as Palestinian Arabs to pin down the exact location of the hostages. This was the source of the complaints about “perfidy” and it is ridiculous, one of many blatant misuses of “international law” even on its own terms against Israel. Likewise, the firefight that erupted because HAMAS had stored hostages in a densely-packed civilian area near a busy market and tried to murder the hostages as the IDF operation began was so reckless that even locals who had been at risk in the crossfire blamed HAMAS, a dose of the reality of this war that wholly eludes the international “human rights” set and the United Nations.
AN OLD PROBLEM
That Western and Westernised elites who staff international institutions and NGOs should struggle to deal with Jews without conspiracy theories is not surprising. Antisemitism is the most ancient hatred in Christendom and it is not a “normal” ethnic prejudice. In structure, antisemitism is a conspiracy theory, one that assigns a cosmic evil to the Jews—the belief that Jews are the barrier to goodness (or progress) and the orchestrating hand behind everything negative that befalls humanity, including the attacks upon Jews. As the ur-explanation, most other conspiracy theories tend to veer into antisemitism eventually, and it gives antisemitism an obsessive quality: everyone will have an example of a person, uninterested in Palestine before 7 October, who now posts dozens of times a day on the subject and has started introducing an Israeli dimension to their analysis of completely unrelated subjects.
Antisemitism is also notable for its enduring appeal to the educated—as with conspiracy theories generally, it takes a certain amount of education to understand and keep track of—and the steadfastly idealistic, thus it has always disproportionately concentrated among the cutting edge of the intellectual elites. Here, the protean nature of antisemitism comes into play. Antisemitism eternally portrays Jews as demonic enemies of the society’s highest ideals, engaged in the worst crimes imaginable, and antisemites are, therefore, always convinced of their righteousness in combatting a malevolent enemy that is at once immensely powerful and unseen by most. But as ideals shift, so does the formulation of the Jewish threat: originally described in religious terms, later the language of Science was adopted. The Nazi experience helped push antisemitism into the mainstream of Arab society, but in Christendom it made all things associated with Nazism—above all racism—the cardinal sins. Accordingly, antisemitism since then has taken on the political valence of “anti-Zionism” that portrays Jews as racists and Nazis.1
The Nazi belief right down to the end that they were the victims of Jewish aggression might seem absurd, but just look where we are now. The movement advocating the dismantling of the lone Jewish State spans the globe, includes many of the most prestigious and influential institutions, has major if not majority support in the political and cultural spheres, utterly dominates international organisations—and yet speaks as if it is a persecuted David confronting an Israeli Goliath. At the level of policy, the basic operating paradigm of the “international community” towards the Middle East is that all regional problems can be solved or seriously ameliorated if Israel makes concessions. This worldview, wherein the Jews are the primary source of trouble, has survived Lebanon collapsing into internal strife, the carnage of the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq conquering Kuwait, the “Arab spring” and Syria’s war, Iran colonising half the region, and so much else besides. Making HAMAS’ 7 October pogrom and the war it spawned Israel’s fault was child’s play by comparison.
NOTES
The main source and sponsor of this latest form of antisemitism was the Soviet Union. Soviet influence in the Middle East eroded overt expressions of sympathy for the Third Reich so that, from the 1970s onwards, even in the Arab world there has been some effort to express antisemitism in “anti-Zionist” terms.
It seems unbelievable that fringe beliefs have gone mainstream but they have. Very discouraging.