Israel apologists use language the same way malignant narcissists do. It’s never to communicate or connect or find out what’s true, it’s always to manipulate and get things they want.

Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

 

Israel apologists use language the same way malignant narcissists do. It’s never to communicate or connect or find out what’s true, it’s always to manipulate and get things they want.

Not one person sincerely believes Israel isn’t starving Gaza. Everyone knows it is, including the people who are saying it isn’t. They’re just throwing a bunch of language at it in an effort to keep the west supporting Israel’s genocide.

Israel’s official Twitter account is currently trying to claim that a photo of a dead skeletal man proves people are sharing disinformation about Israel, because it turns out the man had diabetes. Back in December 2023, Human Rights Watch published an article titled “Gaza Blockade Puts People with Diabetes at Risk.” It’s a well-documented fact that the first people to die in a famine are always small children and people with health problems, and yet the main hasbara arguments today are “Why is it always the children dying and not the healthy adults?” and “This person already had health problems!” 

 

Just this morning I had someone on Twitter show me pictures which they claimed proves Gaza is not currently starving, and the pictures were from the West Bank.

Before that another hasbarist responded to footage I shared of far right Israelis blocking aid trucks into Gaza saying, “the trucks have been stopped because they are full of weapons heading to Hamas.” When I called him out for lying he said “why not? you all take AI produced photos and videos and run on the narrative that they are real.” Neither of these statements are true. He knew he was lying, and he didn’t care.

These are just some things I saw this morning before coffee.

They do this all the time. They lie and lie and lie and lie and lie. They are not normal people. They do not use language the same way normal people do.

Which should come as no surprise to anyone. If you’d support a genocide, of course you’d be willing to lie in order to justify it. If your moral line isn’t drawn before genocide, of course it’s not going to be drawn before lying either.

Another, more heartening, thing I saw on Twitter today was Israel apologists talking to each other about how their PR is failing and the media aren’t helping them.

“Israel needs a PR Iron Dome. It’s a matter of national security,” tweeted one.

“Our Hasbara isn’t working,” responded another. “We sit in a bubble of confirmation bias preaching to each other about things we know already. We’re not spreading the truth and we’re not coming up with any solutions to it. We really suck at this and we’re being too stupid to see our way out of it.”

“I have been saying they need a new army unit dedicated to just this (and combatting misinformation and disinformation),” said someone else.

In a separate conversation I saw another hasbarist admonishing his peers to “stop saying Israel is doing bad PR” and calling on Jewish billionaires to start paying influencers to promote Israeli information interests.

I find all this both encouraging and hilarious. They’re losing control of the narrative, and they know it.

 

My favorite is the “we need a PR Iron Dome” one, because what could that possibly look like that Israel doesn’t already have? Lobby groups? Think tanks? Paid influencers? Online shills? A wildly sympathetic and some would say sycophantic mainstream press? How much more narrative control could Israel and its supporters possibly have?

And how revealing is it that simply ending the genocide never at any time enters the conversation? The world hates Israel because Israel is committing genocide, but they never see that as the problem — they see bad PR about the genocide as the problem. The problem isn’t that we’re doing genocide, the problem is that we’re not using the right words to explain why the genocide is good.

Again, these are not normal people. There’s got to be something seriously wrong with you as a person to keep supporting Israel in the year 2025.

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