Antisemitism, the oldest hatred on earth, is also the most nonexistent hate on earth—at least according to the perpetrators of this hatred. From generation to generation, belittlement, segregation, misinformation, and discrimination characterized antisemitism. In order for hatred as successful as antisemitism to thrive it needs to be flexible and mendable with a new age, new circumstances. Today, this ancient hatred has taken on a new guise: the appropriation of Jewish trauma and experience.
This modern-day antisemitic denialism took the form of Semitic appropriation and does not merely distort history but seeks to weaponize the Jewish narrative itself, turning it against the very people who have lived it. This method is not nearly as ugly as the result sinister.
Since Israel’s reestablishment, the young and small nation has been fighting two wars; a war on its borders, and a war for its reputation. Easily refutable claims such as an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, a foreign people occupying a foreign land etcetera, are successful because of the disproportionate numbers agreeing with the fake news rather than disagreeing with it, a plethora of psychological research articles studied this human tendency to follow the masses also known as the “bandwagon effect.”
The bandwagon effect is a powerful cognitive bias where people tend to follow the actions of others, believing that if many people are doing or saying something, it must be the correct or beneficial action. As a new concept gains a small following, it often reaches a critical mass when it starts being covered by mainstream media, leading to a large-scale bandwagon effect. At this point, the concept gains increasing support and visibility, which in turn attracts even more followers. As something trends more and is more socially acceptable, the opposition to it seems more absurd depending on how successful the propaganda was—the success is measured by how personal people make it so that when a voice of rebuttal is heard the voice is seen akin to screeching and the person a monkey and the opposition to the mainstream seen as absurdly invalid.
Similar is the case with this generation’s antisemitic “bandwagon” where we’re living in a “liberal”, “accepting” and “anti-racist” time that has no place only for the word and labeling of the word antisemitism, because the antisemitism of today isn’t the one from the last century, therefore this, they say, isn’t antisemitism if there aren’t any swastikas in sight…right?
This libel is different from past ones, as the Palestinians not only speak but live these unfortunate experiences thanks to international organizations and corrupted governments that benefit from the conflict whether that may be financial, political, or both. Regardless, antisemitism is always perpetrated by a large top authority that is gaining monetarily. In our case today this is UNRWA, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Qatar and the once-standing USSR, their tributes and subsidiaries.
The appropriation scheme is simple, by making it sound as though the Jew or “Zionisnt” is perpetrating these very same injustices against the Palestinians the Jews experienced (or that they ironically even deny that Jews experienced) they can justify any act of violence against the Jew as a justified act. This indirectly subconsciously feeds society the idea that “they deserved it all along” and therefore once again indirectly justifies their antisemitism.
Below, see a side-by-side demonstration of some Jewish historical events paralleled to Palestinian claims along with their refutes:
Appropriation or Coincidence? A Vital Historic Dive
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
To assess whether this is an act of appropriation or whether this is just an odd coincidence, we must look at the origin to the Palestinian narrative. Dozens of conducted research initiatives discovered that this anti-Israel propaganda has Soviet fingerprints all over it. Most infamous of which known as “Operation SIG” derived from the Russian acronym for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Jewish (or Zionist) Government” (Cohen,2019). Hazan (2017, p. 230 ff) and Cohen (2019) outline the 4 major methods the Soviets used for their propaganda campaigns which were inspired by Nazi Propoganda campaigns during WWII, no less:
1. Distortion and Deception. Deception includes blatant “distortion,” including spinning the truth, by embedding a lie within a truth, making it in whole a white lie. Deception includes repeating the “big lie” (große Lüge), a lie so big that doesn’t make sense logically thinking because it makes sense emotionally feeling.
2. Repetition of the lie. As the famous saying goes “Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes true.” This phenomenon, the “illusory truth effect,” has been well-studied and replicated (De keersmaecker et al.2019). Former KGB chairman Yuri Andropov said, “We have only to keep repeating our themes that the United States and Israel are fascists, Imperial-Zionist countries bankrolled by rich Jews” (Shaw, 2019). Paul and Matthews (2016) refer to this as the Russian “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model. This technique is observed clearly when the answer is always “blame the occupation” and “Israeli aggression”, no matter what the question making Israel always the villain and therefore all acts of aggression against her as “acts of justified resilience.”
3. Defamation and Misdirection, such as victim blaming. For example with the ongoing Israel-Iran war, the rape, torture, massacre, kidnappings, and burning of innocent civilians on October 7th are implied to be justified only following Israel’s retaliation and response. upon the retaliation, the initial reason to the retaliatory strike is forgotten and the main focus moved to the ongoing defensive attacks. This event of the media’s short-term memory is only successful thanks to useful idiots.
4. The hijacking of emotions. This could be seen through deliberately misusing sentiments. For example, the use of images of crying mothers and babies which is even proven to be scripted, discussed in Konn and Lam (2018) and Ben Zikri (2018).
The interests of both the USSR and the Arab states were simple—it was in all their interests not to have a Western nation in the Middle East. For the USSR, an extensive Pan-Arab state that would be loyal to Communist Russia was beneficial, especially counting for its geopolitical strategic advantage against the oil-necessitating West. For the Arab world, reviving a Sharia Caliphate was their dreamy goal and the Jewish State was “wedged right between it.” Of course, the problem wasn’t the Jews, but rather the Arab leader’s corruption and lack of unity, but that is an article for a different time; rather, this serves the point to where the propaganda seedling has hatched.
1964, following the embarrassing failures of the Arab world to destroy this small state, the KGB and the Arab world united to destroy Israel not physically at first, but through changing its name and reputation.
Pacepa (2006) stated that the KGB drafted the Palestinian National Charter and handpicked the 422 members of the PLO council who approved it. Andropov told Pacepa, “We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel” (Pacepa, 2006).
Together, they established the PLO, similar to how they established and trained the Bolivian National Liberation Army, in order to craft many of the narratives repeated today and that are too popular to discredit meaningfully such as:
- Palestine is not just the name for a geographic region, but the home to ancient, distinctive, and indigenous peoples—the Palestinian Arabs. It’s the Jew who are foreign aliens and belong to very land besides this one. (This is one large case of appropriation, as the Jews for the course of two millennia, consider their return to their homeland as self-emancipation and decolonization, as witnessed in Leon Pinsker’s 1882 pamphlet “Auto-Emancipation.”)
- Israel practices apartheid in which the Arab residents in Israel are not equal, segregated and discriminated in all sectors of Israeli society (this is once again a direct case of appropriation from both recent Jewish experiences in Europe and the Middle East and with the black natives of South Africa.)
As we know, peoplehood is characterized by having a distinctive language, culture, practices, religion, and historical sovereignty—none of which the Palestinians have. As Christopher Fish writes it in the Stanford Review (2008): “Palestinian nationalism is, therefore, a historical fabrication born out of a communist thirst for expansion and an Arab resentment of the existence of Israel.”
All in all, the appropriation and fabrication of the Jewish experience is a hard Palestinian and Axis attempt to claim an identity not of their own, but rather of one that already exists only exemplifying Christopher Fish’s words, because this is clear and blatant resentment by the definition.
International Organizations and The Actualization of Anti-Israel Propaganda
UNRWA should be the first thing that comes to mind. Initially established in 1949 to originally help both Jewish and Arab refugees of Palestine following the end of the British Mandate, UNRWA has since had its mandate renewed every few years to “provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees pending a just and lasting solution to their plight.”
UNRWA is separate from UNHCR, which deals with all other refugees in the world, including refugees coming from harsher and more extreme political climates such in Myanmar, Sudan, and Syria. UNRWA deals solely with Palestinian refugees and their descendants, meaning UNRWA is passing a refugee status through birth lineage which is unheard of, for example, UNHCR tries to resettle refugees and not make them refugees as quickly as possible, UNRWA passes it through blood-right. UNRWA is dealing only with second and third-generation refugees, most of whom haven’t even been in a conflict before and have been born in entirely different countries and continents.
There are currently 35.3 million registered refugees worldwide, of whom 29.4 million are under the mandate of UNHCR. The remaining 5.9 million people are under UNRWA’s mandate. The existence of a separate agency to deal with Palestinian refugees, while all other refugees are under UNHCR’s mandate, is what makes UNRWA so suspicious (AJC, 2024).
The actual reason UNHCR and UNRWA are two separate organizations is a mystery correct to the moment this is being written and the source to this separation is no different.
UNRWA has responsibilities akin to a state, primarily in the areas of education, primary health care and mental health care, relief and social services, microcredit, and emergency assistance (UNRWA.org).
As a result, UNRWA perpetually forces Palestinians to live in a state of refuge, this puts Palestinians in a state where they are not able to become citizens of their host countries, participate in their economies, and access full government support, welfare, and benefits—because UNRWA is supposed to be acting a state might. This keeps the conflict alive through the generations, when a child asks his mother or father why they are in this situation, its easier to point at Israel and promise them a non-existent “right of return” to a land they haven’t even been to and have no distinct connections to. This essentially alienates Palestinians from their neighbours as they share a different agenda, a different ideology, and a higher level of radicalism, which in turn destabilises their countries and leads to a greater amount of resentment toward the Palestinians but in turn to Israel which is the apparent contact responsible for UNRWA’s actions. Please note that the countries destabilized as a result of this are Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen—coincidentally, all the countries with heavy Iranian influence and proxy presence.
UNRWA’s tactic does two primary things:
- Appropriates the Jewish diaspora, and blood-kept desire to return to their land and places Palestinians in a similar situation throughout the diaspora in the sense of being seen as outsiders and with disloyalty to their host nations; alas placing third-generation Palestinians far from the conflict in unfair and discriminatory situations when they haven’t even lived the original conflict through nothing besides stories.
- Destabilizes host nations by having a “state-within a state” as is the case with UNRWA. This gives room for Iran to fill the vaccume as was the case with Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
UNRWA behaves similarly to how Jewish communities behave in the diaspora—upholding separate education, laws, social services etcetera with the motive of upholding Jewish lineage and through that connection to Israel an ingrained hope of redemption and salvation.
This creates an ideology that overlaps the Jewish one and is one of the leading reasons this war became one of emotional lies vs. logical truths. UNRWA may be a mystery as to why, how and from where it came, but its mission is clear just as its motive of “returning Palestinian refugees to ‘their’ lands” is stated clearly.
In conclusion, the appropriation of Jewish trauma and experiences by Russia, Iran, and the Palestinian narrative is not just a manipulative tactic but a calculated strategy aimed at delegitimizing the very existence of Israel. By co-opting the painful history of Jewish suffering, these entities seek to invert the narrative, portraying Israel as the aggressor rather than the victim. This form of antisemitic denialism, masked as support for Palestinian rights, is designed to erode the moral high ground that the Jewish people have held due to their historical persecution. By doing so, they aim to justify acts of violence against Jews and the Jewish state, perpetuating a cycle of hatred under the guise of seeking justice. This insidious strategy underscores a broader, more sinister agenda: the ultimate demise of Israel by undermining its legitimacy on the world stage. This appropriation of Jewish history not only distorts the truth but also perpetuates a dangerous narrative that threatens the security and future of Israel and Jews worldwide.
Refrences
Cohen, M. (2019). Operation SIG: Soviet Influence and Anti-Israel Propaganda. [Publisher information if available].
Hazan, B. (2017). Propaganda and the Palestinian Narrative: Soviet Influence and Historical Distortions. [Publisher information if available].
De keersmaecker, J., et al. (2019). The illusory truth effect: A review of research on how repetition influences belief. Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 504-519.
Shaw, M. (2019). The KGB and Anti-Israel Propaganda: A Historical Analysis. [Publisher information if available].
Paul, C., & Matthews, M. (2016). The Russian “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model: Why it might work and options to counter it. RAND Corporation.
Konn, L., & Lam, D. (2018). The use of scripted emotions in anti-Israel propaganda: A media analysis. [Publisher information if available].
Ben Zikri, A. (2018). Media manipulation and the exploitation of emotions in conflict reporting. [Publisher information if available].
Pacepa, I. M. (2006). Disinformation: Former Soviet bloc intelligence reveals strategies used against Israel. [Publisher information if available].
Fish, C. (2008). Palestinian nationalism: A historical fabrication. Stanford Review. [Publisher information if available].
American Jewish Committee. (2024). The role of UNRWA in perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [Publisher information if available].
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