How to Respond to Lies and Misinformation About Israel: Jewish Guy From Indiana Finds the "West Bank of the Gaza Strip" Absurd

Part 5

Full series here

Welcome to Part 5 of “How to Respond to Lies and Misinformation About Israel,” a series designed to provide the language to combat toxic and hateful rhetoric from anti-Israel influencers.

For this installment, I bring you a random Jewish guy from Indiana (the video doesn’t provide his actual name and I don’t care to know it) who has everything about Israel all figured out based on what he’s read in Haaretz. He’s a common As a Jew, but since his empty words have become so widespread throughout anti-Israel circles, it’s important to call them out. Shoutout to my friend and fellow writer

Sally Prag

for sending me the video. Let’s take it from the top:

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A post shared by @palestinianvideos

“So my grandfather was a hardcore Zionist. Used to say shit like, ‘Arabs are just mad they can’t even grow a dandelion in the desert, and we turned it into a technological powerhouse.’ He also lived through World War II, so he saw what happened to the Jewish people first hand when they weren’t armed, when they didn’t have a standing army, so understanding the context of his Zionism—harder to blame him.”

Given that this article is a takedown, the following statement may shock some: this intro is actually a pretty strong way to start a conversation on modern Zionism. The part about Jews lacking arms and a military until Israel’s establishment is absolutely a topic worth exploring, and it’s not talked about enough in the wider context of both Jewish and Middle Eastern history. He could have led us down a good path here. Unfortunately, he chooses instead to take a sharp turn at Dumbassville, which starts here:

“But in 2025, seeing Jewish people fully support the state of Israel, an apartheid state who’s committing ethnic cleansing and genocide—LIKE, DOCUMENTED, RIGHT?—there’s no hiding from it. I mean, “Haaretz,” an ISRAELI newspaper, talks about soldiers’ experiences going into Gaza and indiscriminately killing, indiscriminately abusing women and children, and doing so with impunity, and you’re supporting this?!”

I have heard Haaretz, yes, an Israeli newspaper, trotted out so many times by the anti-Israel mob, it’s almost become comical. Here’s why:

• Every time Haaretz publishes a “bombshell” article, it goes out to these people like meat to a pack of hungry wolves. The headline then gets repeated over and over and taken horribly out of context to the point that those repeating it just sound like obedient members of a cult. Case in point: the Hannibal directive.

• Haaretz is a known left-wing publication that does critical takes on the IDF and the Israeli government. Regardless of how you feel about their slant, it’s an illustration of Israel’s right to free press. Those journalists can express as much vitriol as they want towards Bibi and their government without any threat to their safety. How many Arab journalists can do similarly for their own leaders? I’ll wait.

• Gideon Levy, perhaps the most internationally well-known Haaretz writer (and by far the most annoying), attempts to represent himself in the American media as having a mainstream journalistic view when he doesn’t. As a result, people like this guy from Indiana use him and others like him as props for their own bullshit agenda.

No one except a psychopath supports the indiscriminate killing or abuse of women and children. So what does that make the Hamas resistance fighters whom he neglected to mention in this video? I seem to recall them doing something that started the war, but I can’t put my finger on what, exactly…

“I know you can fucking read, fellow Jewish people, we are people of the book and we are very literate!”

His entire rant indicates that he hasn’t read any actual books in this subject, and that he is both historically and geographically illiterate.

“We are taught from a very early age to analyze and question everything, including our own religious text.”

Absolutely right, and we’re collectively exercising that skill now with this guy’s dumb manifesto. Thanks for the inspiration, dude.

“We’ve been a people without a state for thousands of years. And by the way, when I say this, it’s not like Israel is just going to cease to exist. Israel has to end the apartheid. South Africa still exists, but they ended the fucking apartheid.”

This line (Israel = South Africa apartheid) has become so commonplace, people have stopped questioning the legitimacy of it. But repeating a lie over and over to the point of exhaustion doesn’t make it true. You can imagine that these people’s minds must be blown when they go to Israel and see all street signs written in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, major cities within the Green Line where up to a third of their populations are Arab, Arab students enrolled in Israeli universities, and Arab women working as physicians at Israeli hospitals. If we want to take this a step further: I have heard other anti-Zionist influencers compare figures like Marwan Barghouti and Mahmoud Abbas to Nelson Mandela. I might argue that such comparisons do a great disservice to Mandela’s legacy, but what do I know, I’m just an evil Zionist.

For sure, there exists social inequality in Israel. It’s an imperfect state with various problems present in any multicultural society. Its problems must be considered in the proper context and proportion, and making false analogies like the one above actually has the effect of distracting from the real issues, thus ensuring that those issues are never addressed fully.

“Israel must grant the right of return to Palestinians, just as they have done to the Jewish people. I as a Jewish man born in the state of Indiana in the United States of America should not have more claim to that land than a fucking Palestinian born in the West Bank of the Gaza Strip. IT’S ABSURD!”

So he prides himself on being a member of a tribe that values literacy and education, yet he’s never bothered to read a book containing a graphic depicting the West Bank and Gaza as two separate places. It’s the intellectual equivalent of declaring that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Gaza. This guy is clearly a top-notch scholar of this subject. He should teach Zionism in Indiana.

“Listen, Jewish people please, ask yourself this and be honest—BE INTELLECTUALLY HONEST—if you learned about the state of Israel and Gaza and the West Bank and didn’t know who were the Jews and who were the Palestinians, I promise you a hundred fucking times and out of a hundred fucking times you would side with the Palestinians. You would RELATE to the Palestinians.”

If I “didn’t know who were the Jews and who were the Palestinians”…when? During the 400 years that the Ottomans oversaw the territory? In British mandate Palestine, when Jews who lived there were referred to as Palestinians and the Muslims referred to as Arabs? In the 1960s, when Arafat declared ‘Palestinian’ a national identity among people with Egypt and Jordan on their birth certificates? What about the wealthy Americans wearing kaffiyehs yelling for an intifada on the streets of major cities? Are they ‘Palestinian’ too, as they claim to be in their chants? I side with them 0% of the time.

Overall, the guy in this video is a prime example of what happens when 1) the bar gets set really low for history education; and 2) parents stop beating their kids. The products of that type of non-confrontational parenting are now adults who possess zero fear or shame about posting ahistorical nonsense to the detriment of their own people. They do, however, provide me with endless opportunities to expose their pathetic arguments for what they are, so thanks I guess?

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