Perspective: Israel no longer faces an existential threat. Palestinians do | CJ Werleman

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You don’t need to scratch too far below the surface to unpack Israel’s propaganda machine-generated peccadilloes, but the jig is almost up.

Times of Ahmad | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: Middle East Eye
By CJ Werleman | September 1, 2016

All nation-states invest heavily in spin, persuasion, and propaganda. Each a core component of effective statecraft, but no one country has been more successful in convincing the world of its sympathetic narrative than the apartheid state of Israel.

Since the creation of the Zionist state in 1948, pro-Israel propaganda has convinced the West that it’s the only democracy in the Middle East. It’s not. Israel is a racist ethnocracy with theocratic tendencies; it has claimed it is the United States’ closest ally, when in reality the National Security Agency identified Israel as the US’s number one espionage threat, not to mention the country attacked a US navy ship – killing 34 American sailors, and has successfully carried forth the myth that its violence merely constitutes self-defence.

My personal favorite hasbara talking point, however, is the one that posits the Palestinians as psychopathic employers of human shields, despite the fact that Amnesty International finds no evidence of such a heinous claim, and despite the fact Israel’s very own High Court found the IDF used Palestinians as human shields more than 1,000 times in the period 2000-2005 alone.

You don’t need to scratch too far below the surface to unpack Israel’s propaganda machine-generated peccadilloes, but the jig is almost up. One by one, critics of Israel’s systematic efforts to conceal and obfuscate its occupation, colonisation, and apartheid system, have pulled back the curtain and revealed the magician behind it.

But one powerful and persistent lie remains. It’s the one lie that has done more than any other to protect Israel’s international law and human rights busting violations. It’s the lie that presents Israel as a state under permanent siege from maniacal, anti-Semitic, neighbouring Arab governments.

You see, if Israel is facing a permanent “existential threat” as it claims, then one can only be sympathetic to Israel’s efforts to do what it must to defend itself in such a crisis. I mean political orthodoxy has it that security trumps politics, and when the threat to security is existential, conventional wisdom asserts civil liberties must be sacrificed in the pursuit of self-defence.

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