Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1999, pages 43-44

Special Report

Israel’s Cult of Disinformation and the Complications of Basing a Policy Upon a Foundation of Lies

By Andrew I. Killgore

“It is...hard to give up a home and a life built from scratch in a sparsely populated wilderness....”—Deborah Sontag, New York Times, April 14, 1999

“The art of telling a sustained lie requires a great deal of daily practice.” —Fyodor Dostoevsky

The slogan of the Zionist movement was “the land without people—for the people without land.” Written a hundred years ago (1901) by Israel Zangwill, it pretended Palestine had no people. It was promoted so credibly that some Jewish immigrants to Palestine were astonished when they first encountered the Palestinians already living there.

After 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes and their lands by Israel in 1948 and 1949 (and another 300,000 in 1967), Israel claimed that Arab leaders had told the Palestinians to leave to avoid injury in the fighting to drive out the Jews. Records of broadcasts during the period show that the exact opposite is true. The only advice Palestinians received from Arab leaders was not to abandon their homes and lands.

In the 1980s a writer named Joan Peters wrote a variation-on-a-theme book, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine. Tacitly conceding (but only tacitly) that there were, after all, Palestinians in Palestine, Peters claimed that large numbers of them had arrived only during the British Mandate period (1918-1948) to batten on the riches brought to the country by Jewish settlers. Although her book received extensive publicity and was widely reviewed in the American media, the chorus of charges that it was highly misleading and based upon selective scholarship received no attention at all except in specialized publications like this one.

In the words quoted above from The New York Times, journalist Deborah Sontag describes a Jewish settler on Syria’s Golan Heights who may have to leave if Israel evacuates the area in some future deal with Syria. The description of Golan as a “sparsely populated wilderness” before Israel seized it in 1967 is misleading, to put it charitably. In fact the Golan was a well-settled farming area not far from the Syrian capital, Damascus, and had a population of 153,000, before Israeli forces occupied it in 1967 and subsequently destroyed the principal town, Kuneitra, before withdrawing. The late Israeli Gen. Moshe Dayan was recently quoted as saying that Israel grabbed the Golan because Israeli farmers wanted the land.

The recurring empty lands disinformation wins top prize in any contest.

The claim that Palestine was an empty land was equally false. In 1901 the population was 480,000. It is false as well that Palestinian leaders in 1948-1949 advised Palestinians to leave. To the contrary, Irish journalist Erskine Childers wrote a book based on records of radio broadcasts from the Middle East at the time in question and found that Palestinians were being urged not to leave.

The assertion that Palestinians were recent arrivals in Palestine as claimed by Joan Peters is false as well. Besides, Jewish settlers in Palestine were not rich, but so desperately poor that they were constantly appealing for help from Baron Edmonde de Rothschild, of the French branch of the great Jewish banking family.

Zionist/Israeli disinformation about Palestine and Palestinians is such a part of the “culture” that it has achieved cult status. Thus it is natural for a Deborah Sontag blithely to apply the “empty land” thesis to the Golan Heights. Demonstrating that the myth has nine lives, Ms. Sontag could even be the granddaughter of people not yet born in 1901 when Zangwill began the myth.

The recurring empty lands disinformation wins top prize in any contest. It set the pattern for what Georgetown University emeritus Prof. Hisham Sharabi calls “a verbal paradigm” practiced by Israel and its supporters: mental compartmentalization and a refusal to employ or even listen to words that conflict with a basic theme. The case for a presidential pardon for spy-for-Israel Jonathan Jay Pollard exactly fits this definition.

Pollard Fits the Bill

Pollard only spied for an ally, Israel, it is claimed. He only took secrets about the Arabs which Israel needed for its defense and which the United States should have freely given to Israel in the first place. Furthermore, Israel would return to the U.S. everything Pollard had taken.

Such Israeli statements about Pollard and their amplification by those in the U.S. media who take their cues from Israel are lies and disinformation compounded. The “ally” claim was meant to imply that the stolen documents stayed safely in Israeli hands. There is evidence demonstrating, instead, that Pollard’s thefts reached Soviet hands, probably in exchange for release of Soviet Jews, and very likely got some U.S. intelligence agents in the Soviet Union killed.

Some of Pollard’s “take” could only have been of interest to Moscow, such as the location of U.S. defense installations and “sources and methods” of our intelligence, which are the subject of former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s still classified angry letter to the sentencing judge urging maximum punishment.

Israel’s promise to return the stolen material was a false promise. If it had been carried out (and it was not), the documents would have demonstrated that some of the material stolen could only have been meant for Moscow, the apartheid government of South Africa and other countries from which the Israeli government was seeking favors at the time.

Equally damning, it probably would have proved that Pollard could not have stolen such highly classified material without the help of a high-level, still unidentified “Mr. X” inside the U.S. government. It was he who provided descriptions of the documents to be ordered from Naval intelligence libraries by Pollard who, as a mid-level counter-intelligence analyst, would not have had direct access to those descriptions.

June 8, 1967 was a clear, bright day with a large American flag flying on the USS Liberty, an intelligence-gathering U.S. Navy vessel cruising in international Mediterranean waters well off Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, which had just been seized by Israeli forces during the Six-Day War of 1967. Israeli planes and torpedo boats attacked the Liberty, killing 34 Americans and wounding 171.

Calling the attack “a tragic accident,” Israeli spokesmen said the Liberty was mistaken for the Egyptian ship El Quseir, used for transporting cavalry horses, although the two vessels didn’t look at all alike. Among several compelling reasons for regarding the Israeli government’s claim as false is that its lobby in Washington, DC has successfully fought off for 30 years public demands for a thorough congressional investigation, which would clear Israel’s name if the attack had really been accidental.

A “simpler” kind of Israeli disinformation consists of flat assertions that are endlessly repeated but never analyzed. The verbal paradigm is fully at work here. Take, for example, the mantra that Israel is America’s “only reliable Middle Eastern ally,” as demonstrated by the closely parallel U.S. and Israeli voting records at the United Nations on matters relating to the Middle East. The record is there so, standing by itself, the claim seems to make sense.

But the reality is that the remarkable voting symmetry at the United Nations results solely from the fact that most of the Middle East-related votes are on resolutions condemning Israeli actions against the Palestinians in defiance of international law, or Israeli unwillingness to sign non-proliferation and other international initiatives. The sad fact is that the United States always supports Israel at the U.N., however ridiculous it makes “the world’s only remaining superpower” look internationally, and however inconsistent such support is with U.S. policy in other parts of the world.

A recent General Assembly vote condemning Israel over Palestine found only Israel, the U.S., the Marshall Islands and Micronesia (both of which are dependent upon the U.S. Congress for budgetary support) opposing the resolution. All the rest of the U.N.’s 185 members supported the resolution, abstained or were absent. The U.S. vote-with-Israel-at-all-costs policy subjects us both to ridicule and to the now nearly universal resentment that has led directly to international terrorism directed against Americans abroad.

The disinformation requirements of “Palestine-was-empty” were complex because the Palestinian refugees were all too evident. (Then, as now, Palestinian Arabs in the world outnumber Israelis.) Thus lies were invented such as the statement by the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that the Palestinians “did not exist,” or Peters formulation that they were recent arrivals, or the long-standing hoax that the Palestinians had conveniently left their homes and lands at the request of their leaders.

The new and equally convenient myth, in light of possible upcoming negotiations, that the nearby Golan Heights was a “wilderness,” as claimed by the Israelis quoted by Sontag, is just a variation on a theme designed to minimize Israel’s guilt in “settling” an area by driving out a larger population.

Simple Disinformation

The Syria-was-guilty-of-aggression-from-the-Golan-Heights theme is one of the best examples of simple Israeli disinformation. Although it has been so frequently disproven, nevertheless the false claim continues to be repeated, and those who do so just ignore all the contradictory evidence.

Everyone has heard the Israeli claims that Syrians regularly fired down from the heights on Israeli farmers below. Each time Israel reported such acts of Syrian “aggression,” the reports were carried in the U.S. media. Yet when U.N. observers investigated each such clash, they reported that Israelis had provoked them. The U.N. findings, however, were ignored by the Israeli and American media.

More recently a long-ignored statement by former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan that Israel had provoked “every one” of the Syrian-Israeli exchanges found its way into the U.S. media, but even that seems to have done little more than temporarily quell the myth.

Wartime disinformation is disavowed after the “usefulness” of secrecy has gone. The World War II “man who never was” is a famous case in point. A man drowns, British intelligence dresses him in a Royal Navy commander’s uniform, puts false “plans” for a massive Allied landing in his jacket pocket, and leaves the body on a beach in Spain as if it had washed up from a sunken allied ship or submarine.

The Franco government’s intelligence finds the waterlogged “plans” (but not too waterlogged to be deciphered), turns them over to the Germans and Hitler is convinced the Allies will land at Calais, France to liberate Europe from the Nazis. German generals suspect a trick but Hitler was so convinced that Calais was the place that he concentrated German defenses there rather than at Normandy, where the landings actually occurred. Thus history was changed. If the Germans had concentrated their defensive forces at Normandy, the Allies might have failed.

The advantage of the disinformation-based “verbal paradigm” is that its adherents never have to consider the opposite side of an issue, thus evading any introspection about responsibility for lending their support to evil. If “ethnically cleansing” the Palestinians from their land in 1948-1949—and deliberately killing enough women and children in the process to make sure the cleansing works—would be considered evil by most people, Israeli disinformation cultists and their American supporters avoid the issue because it is never acknowledged. And if the deeds are not acknowledged, they don’t have to be justified.

The disadvantage is that, unlike wartime disinformation which is acknowledged when the war is over, Israeli disinformation cannot be disavowed because the crime it covers continues. There is no turning back. When a lie is exposed, it is not acknowledged but only elaborated with new variations on a theme which can be advanced more rapidly than they can be disproved.

One consequence of Israeli disinformation cultism is that non-cultists cannot be permitted in Middle East-related policymaking positions at the State Department and the White House. It would be just too jarring for the president or the secretary of state to hear words or policy recommendations based upon Middle Eastern realities rather than “accepted” norms that no one with first-hand experience with the Middle East really believes.

That is the only possible explanation for the reality that not a single Arab American or Muslim American can presently be found in any of the Middle East policymaking positions dealing with Israel and Palestine. Even more astonishing is the fact that, so far as this writer can determine, at present there is not a single top official dealing with this sensitive issue in either the White House or the State Department who is not of Jewish background.

How complicated things become when policy is based upon an original lie, and the myriad variations on a theme needed to buttress that lie.

But, as quoted at the beginning of this article, Fyodor Dostoevsky said it best, even before the Zionists began constructing the shaky tower of elaborate lies upon which current U.S. Middle East policy is based.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.