The events of this past week have highlighted once again the power of the anti-Israel hoax. A claim intending to prove something about Israeli policy is revealed to be false, but not before it mobilizes concerted global action against the Jewish state and is then defended on the grounds of Truthiness: the belief that something is true because of preexisting biases, even when it is directly contradicted by the facts.
Those of us who live in reality have seen the same thing happen over and over again. One relevant example of many is Jenin, the subject of similar press coverage back in 2002 during the intifada (which progressives want to globalize). It’s worth taking a quick walk down memory lane.
In April 2002, after enduring a three-month campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, the IDF went into the place from which many of those bombings sprang: the West Bank city of Jenin. Today, Jenin is a hotbed of foreign-backed terror and the single greatest threat to the Palestinian Authority’s rule. During the intifada, it was not a threat to the Palestinian government but a weapon of it.
Israel’s operation in Jenin required house-to-house urban warfare, and the propaganda machine was cranked up and ready with a framing that caught on immediately: The Jenin Massacre. One Palestinian leader at first suggested there were thousands of casualties. Eventually he settled on 500. The real number turned out to be about 50, most of whom were combatants. Israel lost 23 soldiers. As the late, great Charles Krauthammer noted at the time:
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