Time for Israel to be held accountable for its lies and trickery

By DAOUD KUTTAB

Wars are known to encompass the absence of truth and the presence of trickery. Israel has proven this theory to a high degree. Nothing we are hearing or seeing from the Israelis is anywhere close to the truth. In almost every statement and every claim or defense, it is easy to notice lies, distortions and attempts at obfuscation. Unfortunately, this bad propaganda habit, or what Israelis call “hasbara,” is now being used to even larger degrees in the US, as the pro-Israeli lobby is filling the airwaves, social media and even the halls of Congress with clear lies.

One congresswoman claimed intifada means the genocide of Jews. Students at prestigious universities are claiming, without any proof, that their lives are endangered by fabricated terrorist Hamas supporters, who also happen to be their colleagues and some of them even Jewish colleagues.

The claims are often made by third parties, like the American Jewish billionaire Bill Ackman, both to steer the media and to bully college administrations into crushing the new pro-Palestinian narrative that has started to trend in America’s most prestigious higher education schools.

One of the biggest lies that has been repeated ad nauseum on US campuses actually originated from a pro-Israeli protester, who made it to goad university administrations to attempt to suppress pro-Palestinian protesters. The student at Northeastern University repeated the phrase “kill the Jews,” giving the impression that this was the slogan of opponents of the Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

Going back to a 1990 massacre at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, video footage exposed the Israeli fabrications regarding this incident, in which 17 Palestinians were killed and not a single Israeli was even injured. An investigation by the late Mike Wallace of CBS’ “60 Minutes” revealed this lie and the media manipulation. At the time, I worked with Wallace and his producer Barry Lando to meticulously review and debunk the Israeli lies. Lando would later recall the incident, saying: “What we found was that the official Israeli version put out by (Benjamin) Netanyahu was, as the Palestinians had charged, a total fabrication. There was no other way to describe it.”

Israelis, led by the chief liar and obfuscator Prime Minister Netanyahu, are today going wild again, creating total fictions and then moving their troops to follow up on these lies. The lies started from Day 1, when Israel claimed its revenge war was a war of self-defense. Then there were the preposterous lies about beheaded children burned in stoves and mass cases of rape. All these claims have been absolutely proven to be untrue, yet they have been repeated so many times, including by the White House, that fact-checkers have largely given up on even checking the lies of the Israeli PM and his well-paid propagandists in Israel, the US and the rest of the world.

Similarly, Israel has launched unsubstantiated and coordinated efforts to delegitimize the UN’s leading refugee aid organization for Palestinians, UNRWA. And in 2016, a Palestinian aid worker, Mohammed El-Halabi, who ran the World Vision International humanitarian project in Gaza, was arrested and charged with transferring $50 million in aid to Hamas. Not only is that much more than the entire budget of the US-based Christian charity, but in court Israel failed to produce a single document to prove this preposterous claim.

While the truth is always the first victim of war and trickery is the fuel of armed conflict, it is amazing how a small country can continue to fool and trick the world’s most powerful country, which also happens to be its major (and sometimes only) enabler. Israel now claims that it was blindsided by this week’s Hamas deal and that the agreement approved by the Palestinian movement was different to the one Tel Aviv had approved. This seems rather wild, since the three-phase ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement was worked out personally by America’s top spy, Bill Burns, who heads the CIA. Perhaps Israel would have been less surprised by the details had they not recalled their negotiators from Cairo.

Instead of dealing with their own mistakes and the absence of their negotiating team, Israel tricked their own best ally and threw an egg in the face of Burns by launching a ground attack against Rafah.

While we will not know for a while what went on in the private conversations between top Israeli and US officials, it is highly unlikely that anyone in Washington had any idea that Israel would break its own promises to President Joe Biden to refrain from launching a ground war on Rafah until and unless they could be sure that civilian lives were spared its usage of American-made bombs and ammunition. The fact that Washington last week suspended a shipment of ammunition, according to Axios, appears to show displeasure (too little and way too late) by the Biden administration.

Israel’s takeover of the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing violates agreements with Egypt and the Palestinian government, as well as its reported commitments to Biden. The Camp David Accords and the subsequent amendments declared the entire area between the Palestinians in Gaza and the Egyptians in Sinai to be a demilitarized zone. After 2005, when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, Egypt became the only party allowed to deploy a limited number of soldiers near the Philadelphi Corridor.

Israel’s lies and trickery have worked for years, but it is clear that their continuation will have a lasting effect on world leaders’ relations with Israel and will certainly affect US-Israeli relations. Unless there is serious accountability for these lies and tricks, the region and the world will never be able to enjoy the peace and freedom they desire.

*Daoud Kuttab, an award-winning Palestinian journalist and a director of Community Media Network, is a former professor at Princeton University and the founder and former director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al-Quds University in Ramallah. X: @daoudkuttab