How to Respond to Lies and Misinformation SPECIAL EDITION: Dr. Zachary Foster's 'Zionism 101' Course

Breaking down the sophistry

Welcome to this special edition of my How to Respond to Lies and Misinformation About Israel series, where I provide a thorough takedown of Dr. Foster’s (known as Zach from now on because I find dignifying him with the Dr title offensive) ‘Zionism 101’ course. It’s really a course Palestinianism, but it’s titled ‘Zionism’ because the instructor is a grifter.

As I stated previously in my original article on Dr. Zachary Foster, a self-described “historian of Palestine,” there was no way in hell that I would shell out $99 of my own shekels for his course. Shortly after the article posted, one of my subscribers (who wishes to remain anonymous) offered to sponsor me for the course specifically for the purpose of exposing Zach’s next-level bullshit here on Substack. The sponsor had no influence over the content of this piece; he simply told me to purchase the course and then respond to it in my own words. I gladly accepted that offer.

Before I begin, I want to be clear about what $99 of my sponsor’s hard-earned money got me. Each one of these chapters comes with its own separate Zoom-recorded lecture of Zach flapping his trap as he goes through each slide:

1. PowerPoint presentation on ‘Zionism Before WWI’

2. PowerPoint presentation on ‘Zionism 1914 - 1948

3. PowerPoint presentation on ‘Israel, 1948-1993’

4. PowerPoint presentation on ‘Israel, 1993-present’

Do you think that’s worth $99? Well, let’s see.

Zach’s course starts in the 19th century, and generally that’s a fine place to begin when speaking about the development of modern Zionism. But here is literally where he starts—this is the first slide of the entire course:

Why start a course on the Jewish state with what Christians, the purveyors of antisemitism throughout Europe at the time, thought of the concept? “Palestine” didn’t belong to the Jews—it never belonged to the Jews—because “Palestine” is never mentioned in the Bible once. There is a reason that the Jews are called the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible and why the New Testament cites Jesus’s birthplace as Judea. The land wasn’t called ‘Palestine’ until 130 CE—any idea why? So right there, Zach is taking us down a peculiar path.

Rather than go lesson-by-lesson or lecture-by-lecture, which would bore my readers to tears, I am going to divide Zach’s sinister deception into their own categories, and use examples of how he manipulates information. Here we go:

Trick #1: Presenting Zionists/Jews as uniquely sinful while whitewashing the sins of Arabs

Unfortunately for Zach, he often employs this method while also presenting information that suggests that the Jews may have acted reasonably. As is customary nowadays, Zach attempts to take us down the road to Jewish “colonialism,” like here:

So I will credit Zach for accurately portraying the following: the Jews bought all of the land that they inhabited in Ottoman-controlled Palestine. As in, the Jews never “stole” any land from Arabs at any point before 1948 (more on that in the next slide). The new Jewish owners who bought the land from Arab landlords (who most likely lived far away from Palestine) evicted some of the tenants after the purchase. If someone buys the house I’m renting and then I receive an eviction notice from the new owner after the sale (which is not an uncommon situation, even today), does that give me the right to commit violence against the new owner?

I want you to pay special attention to Zach’s constant repetition of the words “violence broke out.” He employs this phrase repeatedly to describe Arab violence against Jews as a way to avoid assigning responsibility to the actual perpetrators.

Here is another example of this trick in the slide on the 1947 Partition Plan, the Arabs’ rejection of which started the Israeli-Arab War of 1948 (also what Palestinians refer to as the ‘Nakba’):

I’m not sure it was possible to include so much misinformation in a single slide, but he managed to. Let’s take it bullet by bullet:

• Under the original UN plan, Jews would receive 56% of Palestine, and Arabs 42%—and this conveniently leaves out that the Arabs would also receive the entirety of what is now the country of Jordan in addition to 42% of what we now know as Israel. The Arab state would be 99% Arab—meaning no Jews would be living there—while the Jewish state would be almost half Arab, meaning that the Jews were open to sharing the land. What does that tell you?

• So according to Zach, the Jews accepted the plan as a sinister act of “territorial expansion” (despite the fact that 42% of it would be inhabited by Arabs), and the Arabs rejected the plan as “anti-democratic and unjust”…why? Let’s try this: the Jews accepted the partition plan. The Arabs rejected the plan and started violently attacking the Jews literally the next day (“violence broke out”).

• Back to the concept of “stealing land.” If a group of people starts a war, loses the war, and then loses some land as a result, does that mean that the winning side “stole” it from them? Well, we can return to that thought further down the line, in 1967:

Known properly as the Six Day War, it involved the IDF fighting off the militaries of three different nations (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) and ended with the Israeli military capturing Gaza (returned to ‘Palestine’ in 2005), the Sinai (returned to Egypt in 1979), the Golan Heights, and Judea/Samaria (aka the West Bank). The “capture” of the Old City as depicted in the photo was the result of King Hussain’s Jordanian royal forces, who previously controlled that territory, being on the losing side of the war. That is not the same as Israel “conquering” it.

It’s important to note: the eastern expansion beyond the Green Line to what we now refer to as the “occupied territories” starts at East Jerusalem (where the Western Wall is located). Here’s a little fact that Zach conveniently leaves out: when Jordanian forces controlled that area, they banned Jews from entry to these holy sites. The conclusion of the Six Day War meant that Jews could visit the Western Wall for the first time in hundreds of years. Could that be one of the reasons that the Israelis may have been happy about that outcome, as depicted in the photo?

Now, why would Moshe Dayan, while overseeing the capture of these territories, hesitate to absorb the hundreds of thousands of Arabs living in those territories into Israel? Could it be because 1) most of the Arabs living in those territories didn’t want to be considered part of a Jewish state and were openly hostile to that idea; 2) that decision would result in Israel becoming majority non-Jewish, thus undermining the state’s goals; or 3) all of the above?

The entire world knows that there are real issues that arose from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Certainly, things could have been handled differently since (on both sides). But Zach doesn’t delve into any of that nuance; the implication is simply that the Zionists “conquered” it for no discernable reason (like being surrounded by multiple hostile enemy countries that provoked the war).

Trick #2: Disregarding, dismissing, or misrepresenting key facts about Zionism

Part of Zach’s M.O. is that he will list a rather mundane fact (with an accurate date and historical actor), and then attempt to twist that fact to suit his agenda. Because if Herzl didn’t mention the Dreyfus Affair—literally the signal event that motivated the creation of his Zionist movement—in his diary, it must mean that the Dreyfus Affair isn’t really as important as the Zionists make it out to be. And if Herzl didn’t really think much of the Dreyfus Affair and the Zionists insist on exaggerating its importance, then…

Do you see how this logic leads us down the road to QAnon-level conspiracy theory stupidity? It’s not always very obvious, and for someone who doesn’t have a grasp on this rather complicated history, it’s easy to fall into the trap he’s set. Don’t be the person who falls for it.

Here we have an example of how awful the Zionists were during the British Mandate period:

Wow, wine-growers referring to themselves as “colonists” in their ad for locally manufactured wine in the colonial entity known as British Mandate Palestine—that is just so damning. Despite his Ivy League pedigree, Zach doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a colonist and a colonialist. A colonist builds a colony, making the land useful by farming and harvesting it (by growing grapes for wine in this case), while a colonialist tries to subjugate people and establish his rule.

You know what? I bet the Zionists were just cultivating the wine in an attempt to get their Arab neighbors drunk, thus making the wine a weapon of war. I’m sure the Zionists were actually behind the pogroms in Ukraine too, if you look at that situation more closely.

Sarcasm aside, there’s an important fact to remember: during this period, it was the British who determined immigration policies in Palestine, not the Jews living there. Not allowing in the Jewish victims of pogroms in Eastern Europe was indeed a colonial decision—by the British.

Zach then wraps up his pre-World War II lecture with a diatribe about how victimized the British—the actual colonizers in that period—were at the hands of the Jews:

“They”—that would be the Irgun forces—bombed the King David Hotel, which was a was a British military base and thus a valid military target. As controversial as they may have been, they were military actions preceding Israel’s War of Independence, carried out by forces that eventually assimilated into what we now know as the IDF. Knowledgeable minds can debate the merits of what the Irgun did—certainly the Haganah, a less radical military force, spoke openly against the King David Hotel attack (a fact that is omitted here). But “terrorism”? Seriously?

Here is the twisted irony in all of this: the Irgun’s actions are a true representation of a people going after an actual colonizing force in pursuit of building a state of their own. They were actively fighting for their independence, not just killing people for the sake of killing them. The hilarious part is that what I just described is actually what Zach and his friends attribute to Hamas!

Trick #3: Misrepresenting current demographic trends in Israel/Palestine

Let’s start with the first bullet, which is completely false and non-sensical.

Jaffa is a city within the Green Line, so all Arabs who live there have Israeli citizenship. Currently, there are 16,000 Arabs and 35,000 Jews living there, making it approx. 1/3 Arab and 2/3 Jewish. That is the definition of a mixed city.

So what exactly would the “Hebronization” of Jaffa entail? That the Muslims drive out their Jewish and Christian neighbors with violence, as they tried to do in Hebron circa 1929? That Jaffa is no longer considered part of Israel proper and thus the Arabs there wouldn’t be eligible for Israeli citizenship? I guess to Zach, “doing Zionism” is just a glib way of saying that if Israelis do it, it’s bad. Since he brings up Hebron here, let’s take a closer look at that:

In the 1920s, around the time of the 1929 Hebron Massacre (the facts of which Zach conveniently leaves out in Lecture 2, which covers pre-WWII), Hebron was a genuinely mixed city (not unlike Jaffa today) where Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived more or less side-by-side. After the massacre in 1929, the surviving Jews left completely and did not repopulate the area until after the Six Day War. Now governed by the current Oslo Accords, the city has 200,000 Palestinians along with a whopping 1000 Jews in the area overseen by the IDF. Why don’t we compare that current ratio to Jaffa’s?

And who could possibly “force” a woman to give birth? I guess Zionists somehow possess the special power of making someone stay pregnant past her due date or deciding when a baby is born. WTF?

CLOSING MESSAGE TO ANYONE WHO BOUGHT THIS “COURSE”:

This is not a course on Zionism. It’s just next-level misinformation being sold to a gullible public in need of a cause. It’s not even a course that promotes any type of real activism, just sophistry shrouded in some partial facts and dates. What’s most unfortunate is that it’s coming from an As a Jew with a PhD in Asshole Palestinian Studies from an Ivy League university, but I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at that today.

Other than my sponsor, I have no idea how many others have actually paid for it. But if you’re one of the ones who has, I beg you to educate your ignorance. This article is merely a preview. Do not feel guilty about being taken in by this idiot; it’s not entirely your fault. But it is your responsibility to unlearn what people like Zach have tried to indoctrinate you with. If you bought it, you are no more than a number being used to promote a toxic agenda.

It is all within your power to figure out what’s true. Stop allowing yourself to be used.

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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 or a one-time donation. Links below: