Joel Fishman, a historian and fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, spoke to a May 11 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
Hitler accused the Jews of bringing about Germany’s defeat in World War I in an effort to turn public sentiment against the Jews. Therefore, any attack on the Jews was a justifiable act of revenge.
On October 7, 2023, a surprise invasion by the Palestinian Arab terror group Hamas breached Israel’s border, instigating the Israel-Gaza war. The next day, the Palestinian Arab propaganda war against the Jewish state followed, repackaging “the big lie” first used by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 screed Mein Kampf. Hitler argued that a largely uneducated and ill-informed public is more willing “to believe a big lie than a small one.” At that time, as described by University of Maryland emeritus professor of history Jeffrey Herf in his book The Jewish Enemy, Hitler accused the Jews of bringing about Germany’s defeat in World War I in an effort to turn public sentiment against the Jews. Therefore, any attack on the Jews was a justifiable act of revenge.
In the 1930s, English translations of Mein Kampf were carefully edited to remove offensive passages in order to keep the reading public from understanding the threat to the Jews. In the leadup to World War II, the British elite favored appeasement of Germany, but the Arab elite in Mandatory Palestine saw Hitler’s method as a model to emulate. Hitler’s propaganda targeted “the lowest types of mind[s],” bypassing the intellect to play on emotions. To brook any challenge to the big lie, “its method must be one of inspiring fanaticism and occasionally hysteria.” The fact that “in the recent war in Gaza, Israeli soldiers frequently discovered translations in Arabic of Mein Kampf in the homes of local Arabs” accounts for the “cultural heritage” among Gaza’s Arabs.
Paradoxically, the day after Hamas committed the October 7 atrocities and posted videos of the massacre against Israeli civilians as it unfolded in real time, large-scale global demonstrations supporting Hamas’s war against Israel spread rapidly, particularly across university campuses. The raucous demonstrations on October 8 were primed to delegitimize the Jewish state. “The purpose of delegitimization on the international level is to isolate an intended victim from the community of nations as a prelude to bringing about its downfall and even destruction.”
The author of the PLO Covenant, Ahmad Shukeiri, was a Nazi sympathizer and member of the Arab Higher Committee chaired by Haj Amin al-Husseini.
The perpetrator advancing the campaign of delegitimization “endeavors to obliterate the history, national identity, culture, and rights of the other as a sovereign state, particularly the right of self-defense.” By falsely accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, the information war proceeded “to mobilize thousands of fanatical protesters on the basis of a big lie in humanitarian garb.”
Yehoshaphat Harkabi, a former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence unit who produced an edited version of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Covenant, observed that the PLO, the internationally recognized organization established in 1964 to represent the Palestinian Arabs, ascribed to a binary ideology: “the liquidation of Israel or the liquidation of the Palestinian problem as a collective death sentence on the Palestinians as a people.” The PLO was the forerunner of today’s Palestinian Authority (PA), the organization with the same ideology.
Thus, any agreement accepting the existence of Israel “constitutes a total defeat for the Palestinians and national ruin,” thereby ruling out any compromise “on achieving its goal in its entirety.” The author of the PLO Covenant, Ahmad Shukeiri, was a Nazi sympathizer and member of the Arab Higher Committee chaired by Haj Amin al-Husseini. Al-Husseini, who was appointed as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 by the British government, collaborated and met with Hitler in Berlin in 1941, seeking to block Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine and prevent the establishment of a Jewish state.
To understand the ease with which a big lie spreads, the “counterfeit currency” of a lie is easily digested by an ignorant public. The link between education and democracy is in the effect an educated citizenry has on “political processes and institutions.” The requisite foundation to counter the big lies in the body politic is civic education. It is the basic ingredient for sustaining “our freedoms and quality of life” in a democracy.
Ultimately, the most effective weapons against the big lie are “to know our own minds,” challenge the indoctrination, and “stand up for what we believe in”—the truth.
There is a new stage of “insurrection and violence” afoot in the U.S. counterculture where demonstrators do not distinguish between a “protest against government policies and [against] the institutions of government.” Countering the big lie against Israel is made more difficult by a mainstream media that panders to propaganda. Watchdog organizations such as UN Watch vigilantly challenge the false accusations made against Israel in that international body.
The effort to shift public opinion is often a slow and steady process, while the enemies of freedom think in the long-term. The Jewish people can claim credit for contributing to some of civilization’s greatest developments and “should encourage a greater appreciation of the virtue of Judaism and equality under the law.” Since October 7, a new generation has been fighting the kinetic war, in tandem with its intellectuals who are fighting the ideological war. Ultimately, the most effective weapons against the big lie are “to know our own minds,” challenge the indoctrination, and “stand up for what we believe in”—the truth.
