by Amarjit Singh Dulat via RT
Amarjit Singh Dulat is a former head of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India’s external intelligence agency. After retirement, he was appointed adviser on Kashmir in the Prime Minister’s Office and served there from January 2001 to May 2004. He authored several books, including “Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years”, published in 2015.

Every Palestinian killed by the IDF is a martyr to rile up the Arab world

Not since the founding of Israel in 1948 had Tel Aviv suffered as audacious an assault on its soil as the one carried out by the Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas on October 7, which was more shocking than the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
The fact that Hamas had planned such a massive assault by land, sea and air and managed to avoid detection points to a massive intelligence failure by Israel.

Hamas appeared to have better knowledge about goings-on inside the country than the famed Israeli intelligence agency Mossad did about what was happening in Gaza. Israel’s Prime Minister, “Mr. Security” Benjamin Netanyahu, has certainly suffered a blow from which he may not be able to recover in the long run.

When Netanyahu came to power for the third time last December with the support of the country’s right-wing parties, both serving and retired Israeli Army generals expressed apprehension that such a coalition could lead to civil war in the country. That has not happened so far, but the division and months of protests against Netanyahu’s policies certainly emboldened Hamas to carry out its lightning strikes.

The very fact that Israel had to formally declare war was a morale booster for Hamas, which has been at war with the Jewish state ever since its inception when the first intifada, or Palestinian uprising, started in Gaza in December 1987. The world may be shocked by the unspeakable cruelty of the October attack by Hamas, but the Palestinian group is most likely proud of its accomplishment.

The fact that thousands of Palestinian civilians have lost their lives in the conflict probably doesn’t worry Hamas too much. They are likely to be declared martyrs – and when you are prepared to die for your cause, you are automatically bigger than your enemy. As of now, Palestinian authorities say they’ve lost count of the dead, but it’s above the 11,000 mark, of which well over half are believed to be women and children.

Efraim Halevy, whose career as the ninth Mossad director stretched from 1998 to 2002, urged caution as Israel stepped out to destroy Hamas. He warned that while Israel was entering a heightened state of emergency, the reservists were within their rights to refuse to serve in protest against PM Netanyahu’s planned judicial reforms.

Halevy, who was a confidant of the assassinated Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin and played a key role in the Israel-Jordan peace treaty in October 1994, has always been in favor of negotiating with Hamas. He has consistently maintained that Hamas could neither be demolished nor wished away. Halevy, a nephew of the 20th century philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), refused to accept Netanyahu as the leader of the country. Israel’s security chiefs also realize that destroying Hamas is beyond their abilities. As Israeli journalist and author Gideon Levy said, violence will never end Israeli problems.

Not much is known about the internal workings of Hamas, which remains extremely secretive. What is known, however, is that its goals are retaliation against Israel and its punishment, as well as the freeing of Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails. However, one of the key objectives of the October Hamas attack was the scuttling of the Abraham Accords, diplomatic normalization roadmaps signed between Israel and the Arab world in 2020 and brokered by the US.

Palestine remains a key sensitive issue in the Arab world. Even before the October 7 attacks and the ongoing retaliation, hostilities had been growing between Israel and the West Bank, particularly at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, where Palestinians are regularly assaulted and mistreated by the Israeli security forces. Issues like the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces have kept widespread resentment simmering.

The Arab countries immediately banded together following Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. Even Queen Rania of Jordan has accused the West of war crimes. The conflict has also brought together Muslims elsewhere in the world. Hamas takes pride in representing the Palestinian cause and considers itself as a growing power in the Arab world.

During his whirlwind trip to Israel soon after the start of the war, US President Joe Biden appealed to the Israelis not to be “consumed” by rage in response to the attack by Hamas. Even if this never translated into him making any attempt to restrain Israel’s actions, the US president knows what he is talking about. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which turned out to be massive blunders. More than 30,000 US troops took their own lives after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, over three times the number killed in battle.

The social wreckage caused by the wars the US fought after 9/11 led to the rise of President Donald Trump in 2016. An extended conflict in the Middle East may help him return to power in next year’s US presidential elections.

The current Israel-Hamas war has all the makings of such a long-term conflict – or a new, long-term stage of a conflict that has been simmering and flaring up for decades. In the past few weeks, Israel has claimed the killing of three Hamas commanders. In Afghanistan, too, the West kept claiming that it had killed Taliban commanders but fresh faces kept emerging. The US went into Afghanistan in 2001 with the goal of toppling the Taliban, but when they left 20 years later, the Taliban took power, more powerful than ever. Hamas, too, may end up more powerful 20 years from now.

Political issues cannot be swept under the carpet and must be dealt with politically. Governments around the world proclaim that they will never negotiate with evil. And yet they always have and always will, most of all Israel. No conflict, however bloody, ancient or difficult, is unstable.

Most recently, Israel and Hamas have struck a hostage release agreement, under which 50 people abducted during the October 7 attack will be released during a four-day humanitarian pause.

Key to that deal was the mediation by Qatar, an ally of the US and in a sense, the conscience-keeper of the Arab world. In the past, Doha had worked out the deal with the Taliban and helped US forces move out of Afghanistan before the Taliban arrived. More recently, Qatar was instrumental in a prisoner swap between the US and Iran.

After the four-day pause, the IDF has vowed to continue its attacks on Gaza, but if a longer-term peace deal is to be achieved, Qatar is likely going to play a vital role in it.

The US has always supported Israel, but has no great respect for PM Netanyahu. Biden has been disappointed that Netanyahu went back on the 1993 Oslo Accords and reneged on the two-state formula to resolve the Palestinian issue. Today, the Oslo Accords are long dead and may no longer be relevant.

The great Palestinian thinker, Edward Said (1935-2003) always saw the fate of Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine inextricably linked. We need to listen to Said today.

by Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo via Antiwar

On Saturday, November 11, Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari claimed in a press conference that Israel had killed a “terrorist” who had prevented 1,000 civilians from escaping the Shifa Hospital.

The allegations made little sense. Even by the standards of Israeli propaganda, falsifying such a piece of information while providing no context and no evidence, further contributes to the deteriorating credibility of Israel in international media and image worldwide.

Just one day earlier, an unnamed US official was cited by CNN as saying, in a diplomatic cable, “we are losing badly on the messaging battlespace”.

The diplomat was referring to American reputation in the Middle East – in fact, worldwide – which now lies in tatters due to blind American support for Israel.

Roles Reversed

This credibility deficit can be witnessed in Israel itself. Not only is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu losing credibility among Israelis, according to various public opinion polls, but the entire Israeli political establishment seems to be losing the trust of ordinary Israelis as well.

A common joke among Palestinians these days is that Israeli leaders are emulating Arab leaders in previous Arab-Israeli wars, in terms of language, phony victories and unsubstantiated gains on the military front.

For example, while Israel was quickly pushing Arab militaries back on all fronts in June 1967, with full US-Western backing, of course, the leadership of Arab armies were declaring through radio that they had arrived at the “gates of Tel Aviv”.

Fortunes seem to have been reversed. Abu Obeida and Abu Hamza, military spokesmen for the Al-Qassam Brigades and the Al-Quds Brigades respectively, provide very careful accounts of the nature of the battle and the losses of advancing Israeli military forces in their regular, much-anticipated statements.

The Israeli military, on the other hand, speaks of impending victories, killing of unnamed “terrorists” and destruction of countless tunnels, while rarely providing any evidence. The only “evidence” provided is the intentional targeting of hospitals, schools and civilian homes.

And, while Abu Obeida’s statements are almost always followed by well-produced videos, documenting the systematic destruction of Israeli tanks, no such documentation substantiates Israeli military claims.

Beyond the Battlefield

But the issue of Israeli credibility, or rather, the lack of credibility, is not only taking place on the battlefield.

From the first day of the war, Palestinian doctors, civil defense workers, journalists, bloggers and even ordinary people filmed or recorded every Israeli war crime anywhere and everywhere in the besieged Strip. And, despite the continuous shutting down of the internet and electricity in Gaza by the Israeli military, somehow, Palestinians kept track of every aspect of the ongoing Israeli genocide.

The precision of the Palestinian narrative even forced US officials, who initially doubted Palestinian numbers, to finally admit that Palestinians were telling the truth, after all.

Barbara Leaf, assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, told a US House panel on November 9 that those killed by Israel in the war are likely “higher than is being cited.”

Indeed, every day, Israel loses credibility to the point that the initial Israeli lies of what had taken place on October 7, eventually proved disastrous to Israel’s overall image and credibility on the international stage.

Rape, ISIS, and Mein Kampf

In the euphoria of demonizing the Palestinian Resistance – as a way to justify Israel’s forthcoming genocide in Gaza – the Israeli government and military, then journalists and even ordinary people, were all recruited in an unprecedented hasbara campaign aimed at painting Palestinians as “human animals” – per the words of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Within hours of the events and, before any investigation was conducted, Netanyahu spoke of “decapitated babies”, supposedly mutilated at the hands of the Resistance; Gallant claimed that “young girls were raped violently”; even former military chief rabbi, Israel Weiss, said he had “seen a pregnant woman with her belly torn open and the baby cut out.”

Even the supposedly ‘moderate’ Israeli President Isaac Herzog made ludicrous statements on the BBC on November 12. When asked about Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, Herzog claimed that the book Mein Kampf, written by Adolf Hitler in 1925, was found “in a children’s living room” in northern Gaza.

And, of course, there were the repeated references to the ISIS flags that, for some reason, were carried by Hamas fighters as they entered southern Israel on October 7, among other fairy tales.

The fact that ISIS is a sworn enemy of Hamas and that the Palestinian Movement has done everything in its power to eradicate any possibility for ISIS to extend its roots in the besieged Gaza Strip seemed irrelevant to Israel’s unhinged propaganda.

Expectedly, Israeli, US and European media repeated the claim of the Hamas-ISIS connection, with no rational discussion or the minimally-required fact-checking.

But, with time, Israeli lies were no longer able to withstand the pressure of the truth emanating from Gaza, documenting every atrocity and every battle, and obfuscating any drummed-up Israeli allegations.

Perhaps, the turning point of the relentless series of Israeli lies was the attackon the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City on October 17. Though many adopted, and still, sadly, defend the Israeli lie – that a Resistance rocket fell on the hospital – the sheer bloodiness of that massacre, which killed hundreds, was, for many, a wake-up call.

One of the many questions that arose following the Baptist Hospital massacre is: If Israel was, indeed, honest about its version of events regarding what took place at the hospital, why did it bomb every other hospital in Gaza and continues to do so for weeks?

Israeli Hasbara Canceled

There are reasons why Israeli propaganda is no longer able to effectively influence public opinion even though mainstream media continues to side with Israel, even when the latter is committing a genocide.

Firstly, is that Palestinians and their supporters have managed to ‘cancel’ Israel using social media which, for the first time, overwhelmed the organized propaganda campaigns often engineered on behalf of Israel in corporate media.

An analysis of online content on popular social media platforms was conducted by the Israeli influencer marketing platform, Humanz. The study,published in November, admitted that “while 7.39 billion posts with pro-Israeli tags were published on Instagram and TikTok last month, in the same period 109.61 billion posts with pro-Palestinian tags were published on the platforms.” This, according to the company, means that pro-Palestinian views are 15 times more popular than pro-Israeli views.

Secondly, independent media, Palestinian and others, offered alternatives to those seeking a different version of events to what is taking place in Gaza.

A single Palestinian freelance journalist in Gaza, Motaz Azaiza, has managed to acquire more than 14 million followers on Instagram over the course of a single month because of his reporting from the ground.

Thirdly, the ‘surprise attack’ of October 7 has deprived Israel of the initiative, not only regarding the war itself, but also the justification for the war. Indeed, their genocidal war on Gaza has no specific objectives, but also has no precise media campaign to defend or rationalize these unspecified objectives. Therefore, the Israeli media narrative appears disconnected, haphazard and, at times, even self-damaging.

And, finally, the sheer brutality of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. If one is to juxtapose Israeli media lies with the horrific Israeli crimes committed in Gaza, one would find no plausible logic that could convincingly justify mass murder, displacement, starvation and genocide of a defenseless population.

Never has Israeli propaganda failed so astoundingly and never has the mainstream media failed to shield Israel from the global anger – in fact, seething hatred – for Israel’s ugly apartheid regime. The repercussions of all of this will most certainly impact the way that history will remember the Israeli war on Gaza, which has, so far, killed, and wounded tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

A whole generation, if not more, has already built a perception of Israel as a genocidal regime and no number of future lies, Hollywood movies or Maxim Magazine spreads will ever lessen that in any way.

More importantly, this new perception is likely to compel people, not only to re-examine their views of Israel’s present and future, but of the past as well – the very foundation of the Zionist regime, itself predicated on nothing but lies.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. His other books include My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the managing editor of The Palestine Chronicle. Her articles appeared in many online newspapers and academic journals. She holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature and specializes in audio-visual and journalism translation.

ROARING WITH LAUGHTER AS MINARET TUMBLES TO GROUND (00:08): Israeli sappers scream like hyenas while they blast mosque to RUINS in unverified vid above.

Latest act of IDF barbarism as Israeli soldiers love to chuck flashbangs into mosques during prayers – when they’re not demolishing places of prayer in brutal airstrikes…

Edward Bernays, nephew of Austrian Jew Sigmund Freud, who died in Cambridge in 1995, is called one of the fathers of PR and a practicing propagandist. He was a man of mean intellect and talent.

Here are some clippings – quotes from his public speeches on propaganda. Plus some small “reflections on the margins.” 

1. “The best defense against propaganda is more propaganda.”

️️It is basically unrealistic to fight enemy propaganda with arguments of logic.

2. “What we think of as reason is simply a cocktail of inherited prejudices, symbols, clichés and formulations that our leaders have indoctrinated us with.”

️ ️ It actually shows a person’s indoctrination affiliation.

3. “Purposeful and reasonable manipulation of public opinion is the basis of a democratic system.”

️ ️ “Democracy” of those who have the resources to carry out their manipulation policy.

4. “We consider as propaganda the preaching of views we do not like. The preaching of views we like, we call education.”

️ ️ As the Covid Scamdemic showed, most of the “educated” fell for the manipulation. Schools are indoctrination institutions. The higher the schooling level the more indoctrinated.

5. “Propaganda will live forever.”

️ ️ Not really. You can fool me once, you can fool me twice but you can’t fool all the people all the time. No, you can’t.



“WHERE IS THE DEMOCRACY” (00:04) cries the Palestinian girl who’s lost her parents, brother, and sister in Israel’s savage bombardment of Gaza Strip – she addresses entire world in emotional cry for help as she can’t bear witnessing any more suffering, stating “we are exhausted” (00:19).

Girl’s tragic story repeated all across Gaza Strip as over 13,000 Palestinians (as of Nov. 19) were brutally murdered by Israeli attacks since the start of war. — Where is the world?!

Nov 16, 2023 Rabbi speaking up for Gaza at Boston rally.

Rabbi Yitzchock Deutsch from Neturei Karta International speaking at a rally for Gaza on November 12, 2023 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Turkiye is initiating the creation of mechanisms to verify whether Israel has nuclear weapons, this must be done before it is too late, Turkish President Erdogan said.

“Israel is not part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and therefore it is not bound by its rules. But there is an option where member states can ask the International Atomic Energy Agency to create an inspection mechanism for the sake of nuclear security. We will mobilize this work right now,” Erdogan said on a flight home from Berlin.

Rabbi Elhannan Beck: I am a seventh generation Palestinian. My mother used to tell me that she remembers us living with our Palestinian neighbors in a great relationship. We used to babysit each other’s children. On Jewish holidays, they would bring the children to the Muslim neighbors. On Muslim holidays the kids would go to the Jewish neighbors. We had no problems. ( note: you’re describing present-day Russia)

 The problem here is not religion, it’s occupation. The killing. Taking the land from the people. That’s the problem. Palestinians don’t hate Jews. They hate the occupiers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Jew, a Frenchman, an Englishman. It doesn’t matter. They will also hate the Japanese who will come to the holy land and invade it. And the same thing will happen here in England if someone comes and takes it. The Zionists say, “Do you see anti-Semitism?”. It’s not true. And we need to draw attention to it. The problem is not religion, it’s occupation.

GRIEF STRICKEN, SMALL GIRL paces through Gaza hospital, clothes still in tatters and covered in dust, in search of family, not yet comprehending they’re all dead from Israeli airstrikes (first video).

Coming to terms with the horrible news, she is awash in mournful horror as she verbalizes heartbroken confusion as how Gaza could be hated and bombed so mercilessly (00:23, second video).