Lies, Lies & More Lies
In our world, truth means nothing
(If you’ve received this article by email, please click on the title to read the latest version. I often continue to edit and correct typos after publishing the first version).
If it wasn’t disrespectful to all those killed, displaced, harmed and traumatised, I would say that the biggest casualty in our shockingly bad world is the truth.
According to a Yediot Ahronot (YNet) newsflash from today (my translation from Hebrew) :
US Intelligence Chief Aligns with Trump: “Iran is Weeks to Months Away from a Bomb”
The head of US National Intelligence Services, Tulsi Gabbard, published a post on X claiming that her statements regarding Iran’s progress toward a bomb were “taken out of context” by the media - and that she sees eye to eye with President Donald Trump regarding the fact that Iran is “weeks to months” away from this. This comes after it was reported this week on CNN that American intelligence estimates “not only is Iran not actively pursuing nuclear weapons, it is also up to three years away from the capability to produce one and being able to deliver it to its target”—an assessment that Trump has repeatedly claimed since then is incorrect.
Never mind that affairs of state are run on social media and no one even bats an eyelid anymore—it’s clear that the truth is arbitrary. Just like in ancient Rome, the bullies in power and their coterie of parasitical profiteers decide what the ‘truth’ is. Initially, US intelligence agencies said that Iran was nowhere near developing a bomb and that if it were working on one, it would take Iran years to complete it:
Lie #1: Iran is Weeks Away from Building a Nuclear Bomb
Then—echoing Israel—Trump invented the story that Iran is only weeks away from developing a bomb, completely contradicting his own intelligence agencies.
Lie #2: Israel Fears Iran’s Nuclear Programme Because It Threatens Israel
But the focus on Iran’s nuclear programme is itself a deception. Iran’s nuclear programme has nothing to do with Israel’s extreme violence against the country, or its desperate attempts to drag the US and its allies into an all-out war. Israel doesn’t actually fear an Iranian nuclear programme1. That’s a lie that successive Israeli governments have peddled to keep playing the victim so they can get the billions of dollars, endless supply of arms and diplomatic cover they need. Israel does fear Iran, but not because of its nuclear programme. Iran has been the only significant player on the world stage that’s named Zionism for the settler-colonial programme it is, and that's repeatedly called Israel out on its plan to eliminate all Palestinian presence from historic Palestine.
Lie #3: Opposition to Settler-Colonialism Equals Calls for Israel's Destruction
Israel has long spun opposition to its settler-colonialism as calls for its destruction. Fraudulent systems do have their own an internal logic. Here’s the twisted logic behind Israel’s fear of anyone who names and calls out its Zionist settler-colonialism:
• Jews are always in danger living among non-Jews. The only safe place for Jews is in Israel.
• Therefore if Jews are to survive, Israel must always be there to act as a safe haven when the next holocaust happens.
• But Israel’s survival is not enough. It must be run by Jews, and be exclusively Jewish. If Jews are not safe with non-Jews, Jews must always be the absolute majority in Israel.
As Ilan Pappé and many others have argued, the narrative on antisemitism is misleading:
“There are anti-Semites in the world, no doubt. People who hate Jews because they are Jews,” he pointed out, highlighting: “But Israel likes to say that anybody who is against Zionism or even criticizes Israel is also anti-Semitic. That is not true.”
“So, I'm not sure there is a rise of anti-Semitism,” he stated. “I think there is a rise of people who are very angry with what Israel is doing.” (https://tinyurl.ee/ItYzc)
Israel didn’t manage to get rid of all the Palestinians in 1948, so ever since then, it’s been working towards the 'final solution' to its ‘Palestinian problem’. This worldview creates a twisted logic that justifies everything Israel does.
Lie #4: Supporting Palestinians Means Hating Jews
The equation is simple. If an exclusively Jewish state is vital for Jewish survival, and if achieving it requires all the Palestinians to disappear, then by definition anyone who criticises Israel’s settler-colonialism wants all Jews to die. Or an even more simplified version: if you support the Palestinians, you hate Jews.
Israel believes that the continued presence of Palestinians anywhere in the territory of historic Palestine, and the existence of a Jewish state are mutually exclusive. And this is true if you are racist. You cannot have a racially pure state if there’s more than one race present in it.
Lie #5: Jewishness Is a Race
The idea that Jews constitute a race is ludicrous and glaringly false, yet Israel depends on this fiction to legitimise its settler-colonial project. If Jews are a race, then Palestinians are a different race—and therefore have no place in a ‘Jewish’ state.
Since Iran has been the only significant world player that named Israel’s settler-colonialism and called Israel out on its treatment of Palestinians and its plan to eliminate them, based on Israel’s equation, Iran hates Jews and wants them all to die. In Israel’s worldview, this makes Iran no different from the Nazis.
Lie #6: Israel's Violence Against Palestinians is Self-Defence
Meanwhile, the fact that Israel wants all Palestinians to die or otherwise disappear isn’t seen as evil by Israel itself, or the rest of the world, because ‘self-defence’ isn't evil, it’s a necessity. But Israel’s systematic elimination of Palestinians isn’t self-defence—it’s the continuation of a settler-colonial project conceived by the Zionist movement in the late 19th century, launched in 1948, and pursued ever since. Israel’s aggression toward Iran isn’t about security—it’s about maintaining the psychological scaffolding that allows genocide to be reframed as ‘self-defence’.
The lies and deceit are piling up so high—where do you even begin to dismantle this mountain?
Israel Represents a Failure of Humanity
Israel is predatory—what else would you call a settler-coloniser?—and like all predators, it’s opportunistic. Israel’s countless policies to push forward the elimination of Palestinians have fluctuated over the past seventy-seven years, depending on the international mood and on trends in global politics. Whatever Israel has been doing, its drive to complete its settler-colonial project has never wavered. All of Israel’s actions, including this attack on Iran have always been in line with its fanatic, quasi-religious goal of getting rid of all the Palestinians.
But to achieve economic, military and diplomatic support, Israel has had to gaslight the world, and lie about its true ambition. Whilst world leaders and ordinary people alike could see what Israel has been doing, the world has continued to enable Israel. One of the most obvious reasons for this is that world leaders have not exactly been exemplary people who have upheld truth or justice within their own countries. Israel isn’t an evil that exists in a vacuum while outside of Israel everything is healthy and virtuous. The only way a psychopathic and deranged entity like Israel can exist and achieve its goals is in a context of an equally deranged world. If most societies were based on truth, justice and humanity, Israel’s settler-colonialism wouldn’t last, let alone march forward towards completion, while exacting such a high cost from millions of people. Just as Trump is the inevitable product of American society—the embodiment of its true character—Israel is the inevitable product of our primitive, predatory world. This is not an excuse for Israel (an explanation is never an excuse), but I believe that something like Israel could not possibly exist in a healthy and moral world. Israel represents a failure of humanity.
A relational environment filled with layers of lies and gaslighting is called ‘crazy-making’ in family therapy. In his research into schizophrenia seven decades ago, Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘double bind’. He argued that deceitful environments, where those in charge do one thing and say another can trigger schizophrenia. His research has been largely abandoned because its implications are too threatening to existing power structures.
We cannot make sense of reality and feel oriented in it when our lived experience tells us one thing, but those in power tell us another—or rather lie or gaslight us to the point where we begin to question our sanity. Creating this intricate web of lies is deliberate. When people are forced to question their reality, they become so consumed with trying to work out what’s true that they have no energy left to challenge the system producing the lies. It’s a perfect form of social control—keep people confused and doubting themselves, and they’ll never mount any real opposition.
There have been plenty of stories in the West about religious oppression in Iran and the status of women there. It would be interesting to see what Western media reports when, in the not-too-distant future, Israel itself turns into a religious state. I have not seen one story in our press about the fact that there are places in Israel where bus drivers still force women to sit at the back of buses so as not to offend religious men, despite Israel’s Supreme Court’s ban on the practice. Either way, the nature of the Iranian state is not the reason that it is now bombed indiscriminately by Israel with direct US assistance. That’s a lie too.
Iran has never posed an existential threat to Israel. For more information please watch today’s interview with Emeritus Prof. Avi Shlaim. I can’t recommend it enough.
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"Israel represents a failure of humanity." Never was a statement more true. Conversely though the conflict has taught me much about Palestinians which I was sadly and unforgivably ignorant of before. Their stoicism, decency, humanity, dignity and above all bravery are a lesson to us all.
Thank you, Avigail. That old question remains still to be answered: “What then must we do?”