Dear Zionist
I don’t know which sort of Zionist you are. If you sincerely believe everything you say in defense of Israel, you have my sympathy— you’ve been duped by Iraeli hasbara, a Hebrew word for propaganda, just as I was duped when I was a young believer in the Zionist cause.
But if you lie because, like all fanatics, you believe the ends justify the means, you only have my pity— you can’t see that anything you build on lies is doomed to fail.
It’s entirely understandable why people fall for hasbara. In Israel, hasbara is big business. Two years ago, Haaretz reported,
…the Israeli government plans to spend 100 million shekels ($31 million) over the next four years to strengthen positive perception of the country and combat delegitimization discourses on social networks and in global media. Combined with private investment, the budget for the initiative should reach 200 million shekels by 2025.
A year later, Israel’s Finance Ministry boosted the wartime hasbara budget by NIS 63 million ($17 million).
The reason for increasing the budget should be obvious: Israel is finding it harder to lie in the digital age, especially to younger Jews. Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, admitted,
“…we really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem… We’ve been chasing this left-right divide — it’s the wrong game. The…
