In 2022, Ben Cohen, senior correspondent of The Algemeiner, wrote: “Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas studied in the Soviet Union, where he was awarded a doctorate for a dissertation falsely alleging that the Zionist movement was just as culpable as the Nazi regime for the Holocaust during World War II.”
The totality of the failure of collective American Jewish organizations to get even basic facts about Israel printed by mainstream media, or disseminated on campuses, or to the average American, is astounding. I can’t think of a better time to revisit the words of wisdom attributed to Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” While the world has always been ready to jump in on Jew hatred, the difference today is that in addition to Jews now being attacked on our streets and at pro-Israel rallies, anti-Zionism, anti-Israel, anti-Jew, and vicious blood libel lies are part of the accepted narrative, echoed by world leaders and by the highly educated to the under-educated, who view themselves as “humanitarians.” What comes next, after you are a “Zionist, racist, genocidal ethnic cleanser, apartheid Jew”? You tell me.
This is a wake-up call for Israel to finally do what it should have been doing since becoming a nation. I love Israel. But Israel needs to put a hefty down payment on a public relations firm, enlist Jews worldwide to put aside their differences and collaborate on getting facts and basic truths out via a PR firm dedicated solely to this purpose. This has nothing to do with Israel’s policies. This is about refuting inaccurate smears, biased, sloppy “reporting,” rewriting and erasing us from the history of demonizing Jews and Israel into the subhuman.
People have an average attention span of 30 seconds. We need to flood social media, campuses, media offenders’ offices with short, easy-to-digest myths vs. facts. For example, “How can Israel be apartheid if Arabs are elected to its Parliament, the Knesset?” “The head of Israel’s Bank Leumi is an Arab.”
When I inform my non-Jewish friends about how many times the “Palestinian” Arabs refused generous peace offers; never made any counter offers for peace; Abbas stating they will never accept a “Zionist entity” with any boundaries; genocidal, Nazi speech exposed on Palestinian Media Watch; and images of their children in summer camps holding guns, learning how to kill more “evil” Jews, they are shocked and appalled. Since when is exposing Jew hate speech…hate speech? It is the antithesis. It is precisely what should have happened in 1930s Germany. But did not.
We need to part the Red Sea. We need to ensure that future generations will be able to wear a Star of David without fear. We need to be as relentless as our enemies, proactive vs. merely reactive. We need to spread the truth and beauty of Israel. Before it really, really, really is too late.■
The writer is a published commentator in Jewish and mainstream newspapers, and lecturer on strategies for combating media bias, antisemitism, and BDS. She resides in Arizona.
