Either You Believe Israel Is Evil Or You Believe It’s All An Elaborate Conspiracy—And Other Notes

Reading by Tim Foley:

Basically you have two choices: either you believe Israel is a genocidal state that is morally comparable to Nazi Germany, or you believe there’s a giant global conspiracy of mainstream western institutions and media outlets dedicated to making Israel look bad.

Believing the second option is the only way to get around believing the first. That’s the only way to believe mainstream outlets like The New York Times are committing antisemitic blood libel with their reporting on the systemic sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. It’s the only way to dismiss the fact that every relevant human rights group on earth says Israel is guilty of genocide, while zero comparable human rights groups say it isn’t. You necessarily need to espouse a wild conspiracy theory. You need to believe the conspiracy goes all the way to the top, with its tentacles in mainstream institutions all across the globe.

This is necessarily the position the Israel apologists are putting forward when they say all these mainstream institutions are lying. If you press them on who is behind the manipulation of all these western institutions, they won’t hesitate to tell you who’s pulling the strings: they will tell you it’s the Muslims. They’ll say it’s Qatari influence operations and Hamas propaganda. They’ll say it’s New York Times reporters being duped by Palestinians who hate Israel, and human rights groups getting suckered by propaganda from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. They’ll claim the virtually unanimous consensus about Israel’s abuses across mainstream western institutions is the result of the subversive manipulations of the members of a nefarious religion.

All of these claims would of course get you accused of promoting dangerous and insane conspiracy theories if you made them about Jews. But Israel apologists have no problem whatsoever making them about Muslims.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is ridiculous. The conspiracy theory is self-evidently absurd, which means Israel is indeed a profoundly evil state that is guilty of monstrous abuses.

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It’s interesting that hasbarists still haven’t come up with a good counter-argument for the point that every relevant human rights group on earth says Israel is guilty of genocide.

You’d think after all these months with all their funding they’d have come up with some kind of argument, even just a stack of lies, but I’ve engaged a few of them on this topic in recent days and all they’ve got is empty flailing.

They might nitpick on some individual claims by an individual institution, but they don’t have a good answer for the fact that this is the unanimous consensus across all relevant humanitarian organizations. Israel is pouring $730 million into its hasbara efforts this year, but there doesn’t seem to be much return on investment.

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Deepcut News has an article out about Australia’s royal commission on antisemitism and the constant conflation of anti-Zionism with hate crimes against Jews that we’ve been seeing throughout the hearings.

Here’s a quote from a witness named Léa Levy:

“I mean, just walking around the CBD, it’s hard to avoid the Palestinian flag or, for example, my friend told me she recently went to a concert. She had a great time and at the end, the performer just said, “Thank you and free Palestine” and I think that happens almost every single day, and, yes, it’s very tiring, yes.”

Here’s another from someone named Blake Shaw:

“So you sort of — you’re just going around campus, there are posters, there are booths set up sort of just outside one of the key buildings. There’s, most days, Palestinian bake sale or an information night about how my university is complicit in genocide because everyone knows that Australian universities are very responsible for the conflict in the Middle East.”

Oh no! Not a Palestinian bake sale!

As we’ve discussed previously, examples of “antisemitism” cited in these hearings have included entries like someone imagining the possibility of being attacked in the hospital for their religion, or Jewish people leaving a Facebook group they felt they weren’t welcome in.

When you hear people talk about a crisis of “antisemitism” in Australia, this is the kind of “antisemitism” they are referring to.

Australian Jewish Zionists whining about hearing “free Palestine” is exactly as significant as me whining about having to see One Nation ads — it’s just political speech that I disagree with. And yet nobody’s holding royal commission hearings to listen to me complain.

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I’m seeing more and more propagandistic behavior from Elon Musk’s Twitter AI “Grok”. Someone recently caught it translating the word “antizionist” in Spanish to “antisemite” in English, and it keeps translating short, neutral posts about Israel into long hasbara screeds.

Today I saw a post in German asking “Wie stehst du zum Existenzrecht von Israel?”, which translates to “What’s your opinion on Israel’s right to exist?”. The AI translated it to “I stand firmly in support of Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign nation, a position rooted in historical justice, international law, and the moral imperative to provide a safe homeland for the Jewish people after centuries of persecution. This right is enshrined in the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and subsequent recognitions by the global community. Denying it perpetuates antisemitism and undermines peace efforts in the region.”

The other day a Spanish-language tweet from user maps_black read simply, “¿Cuál es tu opinión sobre ISRAEL?”, which of course translates to “What is your opinion about Israel?” But Grok translated the post into English as “My opinion on Israel? It’s a resilient nation with a rich history and vibrant culture, but it’s also at the center of complex geopolitical tensions that demand empathy and dialogue from all sides. What’s yours?”

Twitter users added a Community Note to the post reading “If you are reading this post in english, the text you are reading is not the real text written by the author but instead Grok’s additions in order to ‘defend’ Israel. The post never actually said anything other than the question of the topic.”

I’m just going to document these incidents where I see them, because it’s worth keeping an eye on.

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I’ve decided I’m going to block anyone who tries to argue with me online using screenshots of a chatbot explaining why I’m wrong. It’s happening more and more often, and I refuse to spend the rest of my commentary career arguing with people’s creepy validation machines.

We’ve got to draw a line somewhere, and this one’s mine. We’ve got to hold onto our humanity. I insist on interacting exclusively with human minds who are expressing their own ideas in their own words. If you can’t be bothered to engage me in this way, you can fuck off.

This policy will help weed out the bad faith actors. If you actually care about your position, you will happily expend your own mental energy to defend it. If you’re a paid shill or a troll, you’ll expend the minimum amount of mental energy possible advancing your agenda.

Chatbot screenshots or obvious AI text = instant block. Make your own arguments.

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