The Distortion of Truth

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The other day I was sitting in my kitchen with a friend when he spotted a fridge magnet that had been pushed down the side of the dishwasher. It was intentionally pushed — by me — because I didn’t want anyone to see it.

When I saw him go to have a look at whatever it was he’d spotted, I murmured, “Oh, you saw it,” upon which he sat back down. “Did you see what it was?” I asked him. “No,” he replied, and so I began to explain.

It’s a fridge magnet my daughter brought home in the shape of…

At which point my friend’s brain was filling in the blank as he tried to work out what I might have been trying to hide from visitors. His first guess — Israel.

I laughed. Of course he got it wrong.

It was actually in the shape of male genitalia and not really something I care to have on display in my kitchen. Hence being shoved out of sight.

But I can completely understand why he might have jumped to the conclusion that anything I might hide from visiting eyes would be something that gives away my position on Israel. Seeing what we are currently seeing in the world at large, we don’t share this information freely.

And yet, once my initial amusement had passed it was replaced by indignance. I assumed he was insinuating that my reason for hiding it would be that I am ashamed, and yet I have no shame whatsoever about my beliefs or conviction in the rights of Jews to live free in our indigenous homeland.

In fact, I’d be far more ashamed to be someone who swallows Islamist propaganda whole and sees Israel as the bad guy while the Palestinians are merely innocent victims. But that’s another story.

The fact that one’s views on Israel can potentially rule how one is treated in a society thousands of miles away from it is the real story. How Palestine and “its evil oppressor” Israel have become the centre of everything is astounding — in every progressive left wing space it shows up.

Like in a little local craft hub mostly frequented by women over 60, for instance, where my friend hosts sessions on spinning flax into thread. She invited me to drop in to say hi to her one day, so I swung by to drink tea. It’s simply a nice community craft space. What could go wrong?

While she was busy with people visiting, I browsed the wall display. And there it was — Gaza.

It was a project to make puppets for children in Gaza. Oh that’s sweet, I thought on first glance. But then I looked closer.

The flagship puppet was made from a keffiyeh.

Now, for clarity, I have no issue with a Palestinian wearing a keffiyeh. I do, however, have a problem with people in the west buying keffiyehs from an opportunistic Amazon seller via Ali Baba, and using them for political posturing and virtue signalling. Have whatever political views you like but at least be authentic.

I also have an issue with every aspect of our lives being turned into a political statement. A political statement that most know almost nothing about beyond the regurgitated Hamas propaganda that is spewed all over our media.

Beside this poster was a book called Gaza Girl with a photo of a watermelon on the cover. I took a look inside. Filled with emotive language that describes the injustice this girl has been subjected to — yet no naming of the perpetrator. Of course, it is intentionally leaving that open to interpretation, but the rhetoric has already made its interpretation.

The unspoken rules of this society right now are very clear. Ideological conformity is being demanded and there is no escaping the inferno if you dare to visibly step outside of that.

The recent commotion following Boy George releasing a pro-Israel song perfectly encapsulated what happens when you loudly defy that ideological conformity.

We can say we care about Palestinians all we like, but unless we say in the same breath that we hate Israel then we will have failed the test. It’s not about acknowledging the dire humanitarian situation for many, many Gazans right now, it’s about calling Israel’s actions a genocide. It’s not about calling out the government to do more to protect the innocent civilians in Gaza and the West Bank/Judea and Samaria, it about declaring that Israel has forfeited its right to exist as an independent state.

These are the rules of society. They go so deep that they govern whether or not someone will vote for the most capable person in the room to be Prime Minister. Many who have traditionally voted Labour are threatening Andy Burnham that he must recognise the “Gaza genocide” or “we’ll vote Green”, ignoring all the terrifyingly destructive signs of the Green Party because… well, Israel. It’s the centre of everything!

Meanwhile the Greens are lapping up the opportunity to gain more votes by playing to the whims of the Israel-haters. Bugger facts, it’s about making the voters happy! An example that has been at the forefront of recent news is the decision to un-twin Hackney with Haifa. Hackney mayor, Zoe Garbett (or Goebbels as I think is more appropriate), wrote a letter to the mayor of Haifa, giving him the deadline of October 7th to respond. She later apologised, calling the action “insensitive”.

But let’s be more honest — she probably simply followed advice from someone else to give that date. She probably didn’t spend any time thinking about the significance of it, just as she won’t have spent any time considering what people on both sides of the green lines in Israel-Palestine are feeling. She probably hasn’t a clue what the real significance of being twinned with a city like Haifa is if you take away the Palestinian Jihadi propaganda.

In other words, she hasn’t thought. She follows the rote and that’s it. She’s been taught how to speak and what to say. She dyes her bangs to signal her solidarity with the woke pink-hair crew. And the Green Party applauds her as if she achieved all of this herself.

Spoiler: she didn’t. Florit Shoihet chased her down to ask her what her problem was with Haifa. It was evident she knew next to nothing about the city.

What do the Greens have against Haifa?
The Green’s hollow campaign against Haifa, a unique example of coexistence in the Middle East, wins them voters and a…open.substack.com

These rules of progressive society govern everything that surrounds us too, like whether or not they can be friends with you. Or if me having a fridge magnet shaped like Israel will tell someone that I am actually a genocidal Nazi.

We’re so obsessed with this topic that we barely notice the rising threat of Islamist violence. Except to acknowledge that it’s obviously the fault of the Jews.

People are confused when they meet me and discover my “dark side”. Initially they will see me and I look like someone who supports left wing causes. They talk to me and that perception becomes all the more grounded. I believe in peace, justice, human rights; I talk with compassion and knowledge about many of the global crises we are facing. But then they discover I am Jewish, hold Israeli nationality, and am unequivocally pro-Israel. Not pro the current Israeli government, not pro Jewish extremism, but very pro the rights of Israelis to live in peace in the homeland that is now theirs, however much people dispute the legitimacy of how that was established, and a proponent of enabling Palestinians to live a prosperous and fulfilling life — which in my books means the end of all violence. How they go about it is their business; we can’t force those still living in 7th century conquest mentality to change their ways but I do know that there are many well-educated Palestinians who understand that violence (what many refer to as resistance) is not the way forward.

The confusion is in the realisation that I don’t hate all Palestinians. That I have compassion for innocent lives whatever the colour of their skin or the religion they were born into. And yet, I maintain my identity as nothing separate from Israeli Jews living in Israel, and although I will never argue with people about the disinformation they come out with, I will say enough to ensure they realise that I am vastly better informed than they are. The simple reason being that I go searching for information about every aspect of the conflict, both historical and current, while the vast majority of British society simply hear the news, or read a social media post, and walk away with the conclusions those articles or posts were designed to make them draw.

For a while, I did remain quiet about my identity and political views. I was too angry and everything triggered me. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of how I felt or who I was but that I knew I wouldn’t do any favours to myself or the argument I wish to prove. I would likely come across as aggressively hostile rather than composed and able to rise above the ugly spread of Jew hate.

But I don’t care about that anymore. I’m willing to mock the ignorance of the masses — not to play down the dangers, which really are frightening, but to hopefully gradually enable people to see how they were sucked in by propaganda.

That may sound a little hopeful, but as the truth gradually comes out about the many “journalists” killed by Israel that turned out to be members of terror groups, and eye-witness accounts of hospitals being used as military bases and weapons caches, people may start to realise the Jews weren’t so evil after all. As we see the numbers of innocent civilians killed begin the fall, the failure of the list of dead to increase since the ceasefire, and the real data behind the humanitarian aid Israel facilitated to send into Gaza, and the likelihood that the ICJ will find it impossible to condemn Israel of the crime of genocide, a different story will have to emerge. People will need to understand what their own minds were led to believe and why.

Again, perhaps I am being optimistic, but there are signs. British PM Andy Burnham’s refusal to “recognise the genocide”, though obviously seen by the pro-Pally movement as him being puppeteered by “the Jewish lobby”, is significant when he has played hard to win votes by making Palestine a central topic of British policy, despite British government decisions having no impact on Israel’s actions whatsoever. He’s intelligent, and therefore understands that making a legal judgement before the formal legal conclusions have been drawn is nothing more than political posturing. He may be posturing in other ways, but they don’t have legal ramifications like the genocide libel does. It may also be that he is simply aware that the bottom is falling out of the genocide accusation, and that the legal case is crumbling. Who knows…

What I do know is that the distortion of truth will continue for a long time to come. Yet, as it does, the gap between rational argument and unhinged characters spitting venom will become wider and wider, the difference starker, and regular people who have swallowed everything they have been fed until now with no agenda of their own will see it for what it is. A massive psy-op of which they became both a victim and a potential tool.

I also believe that Israel has its own work to do too. But its fate is not be dependent on the ignorance and toxicity of the west. Change and healing could happen, as long as Israeli society can be strong enough against the extremism that is trying to kill it from within.

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