Their goal is never to communicate or to have a conversation, it’s to advance the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state.

Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

 

If you follow me on Twitter you’ve probably seen me engaging with Israel supporters to address their arguments, but please don’t take this as a suggestion that engaging with Israel supporters is a good idea generally. It isn’t.

I engage Zionists online in order to make sure their hasbara damages Israel more than it helps it by using their comments to show everyone that these people always lie about everything, and to familiarize myself with the hasbara talking points of the day so that I can attack them. I do this because I’m a visible figure who writes about this stuff every day for a living, and I’ve found a very energy-efficient strategy for doing so which doesn’t consume too much of my time and focus. For most people there’s no good reason to ever engage these freaks at all.

Israel supporters are never, ever engaging in good faith — at least not the ones you’re likely to encounter in online spaces. Their goal is never to communicate or to have a conversation, it’s to advance the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state. They will say whatever they need to say, and pretend to believe whatever they need to pretend to believe, in order to accomplish this. If you engage them you’re not having a normal conversation with a normal person, you’re having a conversation with a psychological operation aimed at manipulating public perception. You’re dumping your mental and emotional energy into a black hole, and they are happy to have you waste your energy in that way.

You will never change a Zionist’s mind with facts and logic or convince them to reconsider their position using robust argumentation. This is a rare thing to accomplish on any topic because human minds in general tend to bias toward maintaining their preconceived notions, but it’s absolutely unheard of when it comes to Israel’s supporters. They’re not even really listening to you, they’re just machine gunning you with whatever words they think will help improve Israel’s public image and undermine public trust in its critics.

It is very fruitful to engage and educate people who aren’t sure about the genocide in Gaza. It can be fruitful to engage the mainstream liberals who previously defended Biden on Gaza or the Trump voters who are now shaky on the president’s Israel First policies. Any normal person with an open mind can be shown the facts and find their way to a truthful and moral understanding of this issue. But you will never move an Israel supporter no matter what you say, because Israel supporters are not interested in facts or morality like normal people are.

If I think of an interesting point to make in response to an Israel supporter online, I’ll often just make an article out of it rather than wasting it on them. You can do this too; if you come up with something interesting to say to someone who’s defending Israel’s atrocities, just turn it into real content for people who are being real. Make a tweet, a blog post, a video, a zine, an email to your local member — something you can aim in a useful direction rather than a completely useless one.

Israelis and their supporters have a much better understanding of the power of manipulating worldwide public perception than the average person. That’s why they have a special Hebrew word, hasbara, for this manipulation. Their understanding is so acute that Israel’s Foreign Ministry recently changed the name from hasbara to toda’a, because the word hasbara has become too closely associated with genocide propaganda in western minds.

Human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative, so if you can control the narratives which humans are telling about what’s going on in the world, you can control the humans. Skillful manipulators understand that power is the ability to control what happens, but true power is the ability to control what people THINK about what happens. That’s what we are seeing in all the mass-scale psychological manipulation aimed at making it seem like genocide and ethnic cleansing are totally normal and appropriate things to be happening right now.

Luckily there’s only so much manipulation you can use to cover up what people are seeing right in front of their faces. In the short term things look ugly, but in the long term I have a hard time imagining Israel ever recovering from this. All the young people who’ve witnessed history’s first live-streamed genocide are going to be running the world someday, and they are not going to want to have anything to do with the state of Israel.

So anyway, yeah, don’t waste your time and energy engaging Zionists. They don’t care if anything they’re saying is based on truth and morality, and they won’t care if anything you say is based on truth and morality. Block them and use your energy on normal people who actually care about telling the truth and doing the right thing, so we can actually bring a stop to this nightmare.

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