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Hasbara

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Richard Smith gets a haircut in Jerusalem on his first trip to Palestine, 2019.

“In Hebron, I saw what to me looked like two Americans coming towards us, but they were escorted by four or five Israeli soldiers with rifles. And I was hoping to have a conversation with them. But before I got too close– the rifle kind of came out, to push me away, when it was clearly evident that I’m a tourist. It was an unnecessary reaction. Because I wasn’t at all threatening. But these were American dignitaries, and I think it was part of the deal. To illustrate this is a dangerous place. ‘Okay, we’ll take you to Hebron, but you need to have a five-soldier escort.’ That’s the narrative that is played up. Our security is paramount no matter what happens.”

Pro-Palestinian mural at Carnegie Mellon University

The Israel Fellow for Carnegie Mellon Hillel flew into a rage when two Muslim student leaders refused to endorse a propaganda-filled “fact finding” trip to Israel. They say the fellow’s response serves as a microcosm of Zionist behavior and attitudes.

The US press is finally making room for Palestinian voices, with a stunning op-ed by Refaat Alareer in the NYT about how it feels to be pounded by missiles in Gaza. And Rula Jebreal tells MSNBC that Palestinians inside Israel experience “Trumpism on steroids.” But Israel supporters fight back, with Bari Weiss saying that killing innocent children is the price of having a state.

The New York Times runs “hasbara” or Israeli propaganda about coexistence in Haifa, including humans with wild boars. But Alice Rothchild writes that boars are actually a tool of occupation: Jewish settlements outside Nablus frequently blocked access to the local villages, burned their farms and olive trees, and raised wild pigs that they released into Palestinian farms.

"Fauda" Season 3. Promotional image from Netflix.

Following Gilad Shalit’s capture in 2006, Israel bombed Gaza’s infrastructure and killed nearly 200 people. But the Netflix show “Fauda” adheres to the liberal Zionist ideology so it retells the story to show the the Israeli commandos shed little blood, and the Hamas mastermind is a sellout. And memo to the producers– Palestinians only say “habibi” as a same-sex greeting.

A hasbarist argues there’s nothing wrong in the killing of Eyad al-Halaq. Palestinians may “ask to become Israel’s ‘blacks’,” Nave Dromi says, but we won’t let them be equal citizens. In fact the history of nationalism is the history of racist distinctions, and persecution, that the world has been seeking to outlaw since WW II.