How to Respond to Lies and Misinformation About Israel: Dr. Zachary Foster

Part 6

Welcome to Part 6 of “How to Respond to Lies and Misinformation About Israel.” Full series here.

In case you’re wondering, I do not deliberately seek out any of the material that I respond to in this series. They just sort of find me, just as the algorithm intends. From what I’ve seen, there’s enough anti-Israel tripe out there for this series of mine to continue indefinitely.

For this installment, I bring you Zachary Foster, PhD. A self-identified “historian of Palestine,” Zach received his PhD from an American douchebag factory known as Princeton University. It’s an Ivy League institution that allows this sort of “scholarship” within its Near Eastern Cultures department, meaning that doctoral students are paid and fully funded to push out this sophistry. Sit with that for a moment.

Our man Zach has made a name for himself with his online ‘Zionism 101’ course, where he spreads ahistorical nonsense to audiences around the world. When I first became aware of it, I toyed with the possibility of enrolling as an infiltrator and then leaking the materials to Zionist social media influencers. But there was a barrier: the course costs $99 (marked down from $119 for whatever reason). The truth is I would need to be paid at least that much to sit through this garbage over paying for it myself, so I took a pass.

Here’s the outline of the course content (I’m just copying and pasting from Zach’s site):

A course on the history of Zionism in 4 lectures by Dr. Zachary Foster. The lectures will cover the origins of the Zionist movement to the present. This is a history of Zionism that Zionists do not want you to know about. The goal of the course is to understand:

• How Zionism spread from Christians to Jews in the 19th century

• Why antisemites and imperialists embraced Zionism

• What Zionist leaders thought about non-Europeans and Mizrahi Jews

• How Zionists sought to establish a Jewish state in an Arab country?

• The 3 strategies of Zionism: Purchase, Conquest and Expropriation

• The core principles of the Zionist movement, including the preference for state-building before Jew saving.

• How Israel Judaized the country through expulsion, land confiscation & settlement

• How Zionism was not just an ideology & a historical movement but also an ongoing process referring to the maintenance, development and expansion of Jewish settlement in Israel and Palestine.

• How to be a more effective advocate for equal rights and rule of law

The course includes

• 5+ hours of content divided into 4 lectures.

• PDFs of the slides accompanying each lecture, with full sourcing for all material presented.

• Invitations to interactive “Ask Me Anythings” with Dr. Foster held ~monthly for all current and past students.

A portion of the course fees are donated to genocide survivors in Gaza and to our writers in Gaza.

I so, so wanted to attend an “Ask Me Anything” to ask Zach how many Jews have offered to punch him in the face for spreading ignorance at this level. I just won’t pay $99 to do it. Oh well.

“The history of Zionism that Zionists don’t want you to know about”—why even bother continuing? Would you enroll in an American History 101 course that begins with “American history that American historians don’t want you to know about”? This isn’t ‘Zionism 101,’ it’s Anti-Zionism 101, or maybe just As a Jew Stupidity 101.

Since I didn’t enroll I can’t claim deep knowledge of the material, however the documents he has made public I wouldn’t exactly consider new or revelatory information. On his primary sources page, he attempts to “prove” Palestinian indigeneity using documents written in Arabic that say ‘Palestine’ on them.

It’s like watching a 5 year-old thinking he’s solving his first Encyclopedia Brown mystery, but instead it’s a grown man with a PhD. After all, if a newspaper called La Palestine existed in the early 1900s, it proves without a shadow of doubt that there were actual Palestinians there before any of the evil Zionists ever arrived! WOW. Imagine how much his mind will be blown when he finds out that ‘Palestinian’ was the term used to refer to the Jews of Palestine during the British Mandate period.

Here we have our man Zach appearing on a podcast called “Cool World.” Hosted by an over-fed and under-informed lady who proudly sports a Noam Chomsky poster as her background, the program claims to be offering “intellectual self-defense”…against what, exactly? Facts?

Here’s what he has to say about the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, where he uses

Benny Morris

to support his points:

“In 1948 the Zionist militias…they expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. […] And then of course they tried to return home, but they were not allowed back. […] In the 7 years after the war from 1949 to 1956, the Israeli military slaughtered between 2700 and and 5000 unarmed Palestinians —these are Benny Morris’s figures. [Goes off about how Morris “isn’t exactly an anti-Zionist historian”]. They slaughtered Palestinians trying to return to their homes at the end of the war. Why? Because Zionism isn’t about Palestinians, it’s about building a Jewish state, to ensure Jewish security and Jewish prosperity. So why allow Palestinians back to their homes? Because they’re the wrong ethnicity, they’re the wrong religion!”

Which must explain why 2 million Arabs live in Israel today as full Israeli citizens— clearly because none of their ancestors were allowed to live in Israel after that war.

He then goes off on a tangent about how the phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land” represents a global Jewish supremacist conspiracy theory. Truly top-notch (by which I mean “QAnon-level stupid”) analysis right there.

Here’s a genuine question that perhaps my readers can help answer: why has Benny Morris become the darling of the anti-Israel lunatics? I would characterize him as a liberal Zionist—emphasis on the “Zionist” part. I like his work, but it seems like every time one of these anti-Israel losers wants to appear intelligent, they bring him up. Benny, if you’re reading this: please consider telling these people once and for all to fuck right off. Each time they mention you, it diminishes the value of your work. Thx.

Zach needs to stop marketing himself as a purveyor of knowledge on Zionism. He is an anti-Zionist. That is of course his choice and I do not respect it, but he’s in no way, shape, or form an authority on a nationalist movement that he by his own admission abhors. He’s a guru on Palestinianism, and you can learn more about that here.

So that raises the question of why Zach can’t instead market himself as offering a class on Palestinianism, which would more accurately reflect the course material. After all, Palestine is what he claims as his area of expertise. Could that be because the term ‘Zionism,’ the way the term has been bastardized by bad actors like him, and the emotional charge that it carries are the most straight-forward ways to profit from this popular brand of misinformation?

Who really cares about actual Palestinians, anyway? No Jews, no news—and definitely no charging $99 for a course.

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Thanks for reading! If you made it this far, I have a small ask. The work of exposing lies and misinformation takes a lot of time and effort. I make all content of this series free so that as many people as possible can have access during these tough times in our war for truth. If you find my work informative and wish to support it, please consider either a paid subscription (link above) or a one-time donation (link below).