An alternative universe

Israel’s elimination last weekend of Abu Obeida, the spokesman of Hamas’s military wing, was a far more significant development than many at first realised.

Abu Obeida wasn’t a mere propaganda chief. According to Doron Kadosh, the military correspondent of Israel Army Radio, this key terrorist mastermind had built a propaganda and psychological warfare apparatus consisting of no fewer than 1,500 operatives.

Every Hamas brigade and division had one of his senior representatives overseeing propaganda efforts, and a “propaganda command center” staffed with video editors produced propaganda videos.

More remarkably still, said Kadosh, no military action by Hamas in recent years had taken place without a structured combat protocol and approval of Abu Obaida’s propaganda plans.

He had developed a psychological warfare plan to prevent the Israel Defence Forces from entering Gaza City, focusing on how to halt tanks and armoured personnel carriers using psychological and influence operations aimed at the Israeli government. “He planned to do this through psychological terror operations involving hostages,” said Kadosh.

Abu Obeida was a key player in Hamas’s war against Israel because the manipulation of the Israeli and Western mind through propaganda and “psy-ops” is a critical weapon against the Jewish state.

The claims that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and starving its civilians are an essential element of that manipulation.

These claims are, of course, utterly ludicrous. Israel has allowed more than 2 million tons of food into Gaza.

Even according to the distorted Hamas casualty figures, the 65,000 Gazans said to have been killed in this war of self-defence out of an estimated total of 2.1 million comes nowhere near the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Nevertheless, headlines screamed across Western media last Monday that a resolution passed by 86% of the International Association of Genocide Scholars declared Israel’s actions in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide.

Melanie O’Brien, the IAGS president and a professor of international law at the University of Western Australia, said the resolution was “a definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies that what is going on the ground in Gaza is genocide.”

But only 28% of members took part in that vote. According to a dissident member of this body, Sara Brown, the so-called “expert” sources cited in support of the resolution included virulently anti-Israel organisations and individuals.

These included Amnesty International (which actually reworded the international definition of genocide to support its claims against Israel) and Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, whom the U.S. State Department condemned in June for “unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel and the West.”

The scholars’ arguments were shoddy in the extreme. They committed the howler of claiming that the International Court of Justice had said there was a “plausible” claim of genocide in Gaza, which is blatantly untrue. The ICJ had said instead that the Palestinians “plausibly” had rights to protection under the Genocide Convention.

The IAGS scholars had assumed preposterously that no combatants had been harmed in the war. They had ignored Israel’s unprecedented measures to avoid civilian casualties wherever possible. They had ignored the way Hamas had deeply embedded its military infrastructure among Gaza’s civilian population. And they were accusing Israel falsely of the very crime of which it was the victim.

This grotesque inversion in accusing Israel of genocide has been deployed for decades by the Palestinian Arabs as a way of delegitimising Israel and thus gaining international support for its destruction.

It’s a psy-ops tactic that’s straight out of the old Soviet playbook—accuse your victims falsely of the crime you are committing against them, which allows you to claim that your own murderous acts are justified resistance against your victims’ fictional aggression.

Hamas ruthlessly deploys this tactic to conceal its own actual genocidal behaviour, which it unashamedly proclaims, but which is brushed aside because the term “genocide” is being used to demonise Israel’s attempt to defend itself.

This infernal tactic has been ramped up during the current war because Hamas and its Iranian patron have understood that the West no longer has the intellectual wherewithal to recognize as a lie the accusation against Israel of genocide.

The reason is the prevalent orthodoxy that there’s no such thing as absolute truth, only dominant narratives. These are only permitted to groups said to be of oppressed and powerless victims.

Jews are deemed to be powerful, so they aren’t allowed any dominant narratives. And there’s a determination to deny the Jews their unique historic experience as victims in order to inflate that status for today’s self-designated “powerless” minority groups.

This relativising process has corrupted Holocaust memorialization and education, much of which now holds that there have been many holocausts and there was nothing special about the Jews as victims of the Nazis.

The key feature of the Nazi Holocaust—the intention to exterminate not just Jews as people but as a people and wipe them off the face of the earth—has been denied. Instead, the Holocaust has come to mean merely the intentional killing of a lot of people.

The same thing has happened to genocide, the term invented by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin after World War II to describe the intentional eradication of an entire people.

Today’s anti-Zionists have shifted this definition to encompass occupation, Israeli sovereignty or even Zionism itself.

In a remarkable series of posts on X, Adam Louis-Klein, a Ph.D. student in anthropology who researches antisemitism, Zionism and Jewish peoplehood, has shredded the prevalent thinking of academics in “genocide studies.”

They openly argue, he writes, that the legal definition of genocide needs to be discarded, stretched or reinterpreted—because they know it doesn’t apply to Israel and they aim to turn it into a weapon to use against the Jewish state alone.

Louis-Klein quotes Dirk Moses, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, who has argued that when non-state actors commit what he calls “subaltern [lower rank] genocide” they aren’t committing a crime but engaging in a necessary and justified act of resistance. In other words, genocide from the right direction is righteous.

Moses has argued that the distinction between war and genocide is irrelevant because motivation isn’t important. “What does it matter to civilians if they’re killed by violence with genocidal or military intent?” he wrote.

This reasoning is morally bankrupt. Without intent, there can be no moral distinction between right and wrong, aggressor and victim. The absence of intent enables those defending themselves against genocide to be blamed for killing their attackers—precisely the obscene inversion the genocide scholars have achieved with Israel and Hamas.

As Louis-Klein has observed, genocide has thus been deployed not to prevent atrocities but to authorise them.

These genocide scholars have no more intellectual authority than a pack of snake-oil salesmen—in fact, rather less, since anyone can join the IAGS for a fee which can be as low as $30 and with no background checks being made. Members include human-rights activists, students, policymakers, artists and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

No media outlets that ran with the screaming “genocide scholars say Israel guilty of genocide” headlines bothered to check the credibility of these “leading scholars” and their claims.

It’s the same reason they eagerly swallow the poisonous lies of Al Jazeera’s terrorist “journalists,” or Hamas-compromised U.N. officials, or Gaza’s Hamas “health ministry.” They want to believe the narrative of murderous Israelis and innocent Palestinian victims.

The result is an alternative information universe of fake news, fake journalists, fake famine, fake genocide and fake genocide “scholars,” all pushing the narrative of fake Palestinians and fake Israeli war crimes—to create a fake Palestine state to destroy Israel, the real nation state of the real Jewish people and the lonely citadel of truth in a world of lies.