DEBUNK AND DISORDERLY

WONDER HOW A GENERATION CAN GET IT SO WRONG? SOMETIMES IT PAYS TO GO DEEPER AND SEE WHAT THE OTHER SIDE IS “LEARNING.”

These two randos provide a masterclass in junk political science and disinformation.

Normally, I wouldn’t give propagandists like this guy the time of day, but a recent podcast a guy named Zach Foster did is such an archetype of Palestinian propaganda that it opens an opportunity to hit so many birds with just a few stones.

Foster, who has a PhD from Princeton, heads up PalestineNexus.com, which offers two online “courses”: Palestine-Israel 101 and Zionism 101.

This is what makes dismantling his “work” too delicious to avoid.

In a guest appearance on the amusingly but apparently unironically titled Podcast for Intellectual Self Defense, with credulous head-bobbing host Kat Dodds, Foster (with Dodds’ uncritical, ingratiating eagerness luring him deeper into disinformation) lays out what amounts to a pretty effective 101 of the “pro-Palestinian” line.

The problem, as is so often the case, is the “line” is mostly lies.

I made reference to Foster in a recent post about the arrogance of anti-Zionist Jews. I promised I’d take another run at him soon, and here it is.

In a fairly short video, the pair lays out the “pro-Palestinian” narrative, which is almost entirely deracinated from historical reality. If you have any foundational knowledge of the region and its past, this chat provides a magnificent exhibit of how dishonest and outright fraudulent the “pro-Palestinian” case often is, from the most basic facts to the fairytales they extrapolate from their perverted premises.

I will not take the time to debunk every bit of nonsense he (and she) advance in this video, which is, I will admit, a powerful emetic. Suffice to assume that if their lips are moving …

But there is one example Foster uses that stands out not only for its intellectual vacuity but for the depths of moral degeneracy to which anti-Israel “academics” and others will descend.

But first …

Note that the guy has a PhD from Princeton. This, I fear, says more about the state of higher education than it does about him. I appreciate academic activism — I struggle with where the line is, certainly, but I do not believe that professors in the humanities are supposed to have no opinions.

What I do expect from someone with a PhD after their name, however, is some foundational truth, something beyond the sort of deceits you find on the social media feeds of a freshman who has just had his eyes opened to The Truth and is now standing on a street corner hawking the Daily Worker.

As I quoted him in my previous post, Foster tells the host of his upbringing as a Jewish kid and his eventual coming to his senses: “It was that cognitive dissonance … That feeling that, gosh, I feel like I’ve been lied to for so many years.”

Young Zach apparently concluded that his parents, his teachers, his rabbis, everyone around him was part of a big conspiracy to fill his head with lies. Miraculously, he somehow gleaned The Truth that everyone else somehow missed. I guess, like so many folks recently, he “did his own research.”

In the podcast, Foster and Dodds both bandy around the term “Zionist mythmaking,” again apparently absent any irony, given that they are engaged in some pretty outstanding mythmaking of their own.

Then there is the rhetoric.

What is happening, they assert, is an “American-Israeli genocide.” They condemn “Israel’s torture dungeons.” They refer to “Fascist Israelis” and Jews as “Ubermenchen.” (The operationalizing of Nazi imagery against Israelis and Jews is a symptom of a particular form of sadism that permeates the “pro-Palestinian” movement, as I noted recently.)

Like the broader Palestinian narrative, Foster’s story follows the conventional plotline of overwrought language, mistruths, misinformation, disinformation and sadism.

But there is one thing that, amid all this dross, I really want to focus on.

The core tenet of early Zionism was a return to the land in the most literal and figurative senses. The idea was not only that Jews would return to their ancestral lands, but that they would work that land, with their own hands.

Centuries of displacement and uprooting had convinced Jews to invest only in what could be packed up at a moment’s notice. Rent, don’t buy. Trade, don’t farm. Build intellectual riches because that is something that you can always carry with you when the duke tells you to get lost.

As a result, Jews had become a people not only deracinated from the land of Israel but, in a sense, from the land more broadly. Some engaged in small plot farming, but studying, healing and early medicine, textiles, leatherworks, crafting, commerce and trade, among other pursuits, were more common than agriculture. There have been complex conversations (put mildly) around what these roles have meant for Jews through the centuries.

But Zionism imagined a Jewish people redeeming the land of their ancestors and being redeemed by the land. Jews would become one with the land again, not a people removed from the literal earth but developing an integral, symbiotic relationship with it. Many Zionist thinkers imagined the Jews getting their hands dirty and working their bodies as much as they had traditionally worked their minds.

Central to this was the Labor Zionist moral imperative of non-exploitation. The idea of Jews returning to the land but hiring others — Arabs — to do their dirty work was anathema to the visionaries of the movement.

Whether Foster understands this or not is unclear. But here is how he reinterprets that history.

“They had this concept of Jewish labor, Hebrew labor,” he says. “That is to say, we are only willing to employ other Jews. This might remind you of ‘whites only.’ In the case of Israel, it was ‘Jews only.’ But it’s basically the same idea.”

One can only imagine that, if the Zionists had done the opposite, Foster would have complained about that too. If the Jews had come and hired Arabs to till the soil, he would have bemoaned that the Jews were exploiters of cheap labor.

I focus on this one comparatively minor component of the podcast partly because I cannot possibly debunk every single lie. But I do so also to illuminate a larger truth.

The “pro-Palestinian” narrative is not merely intellectually deceitful. It is intensely morally corrupt, and this is an archetypal example.

It takes a point of deep ethical decency — the Zionist determination to get their hands dirty, to work their own land and not exploit Arab laborers — and turns it against them, depicting it as an act of racist exclusion. It turns what was an emphatic intention to not exploit another people and depicts it as a form of racist exclusion. It is about as intellectually dishonest and devious as one can get.

There’s so much more, of course.

“The Zionist project was all about transforming the country from Arab to Jewish,” he says.

No. The Zionist project was about coexistence — something the Palestinian narrative has rejected at every turn, as Foster himself exemplifies.

Of course, he accuses Israelis of “ethnic cleansing.” What sort of activist/academic would he be if he didn’t trot that one out?

“In 1948, they [the Israelis] expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes,” he says, reiterating a core tenet of the mythology.

No. In an Arab-initiated war of annihilation against the Jews, ostensibly on behalf of the Arabs who would come to be called Palestinians, the Jews (incredibly) prevailed. In the process, 750,000 Arabs were displaced. Some left, some were pushed, but every single one of those 750,000 was displaced because of an Arab-initiated war. So that’s on the Arabs. Not the Israelis.

What is also on the Arabs is the even larger number of Jews displaced from their homes across the Middle East and North Africa in the same era — an actual ethnic cleansing that is conveniently and completely ignored in their narrative. Across the Middle East and North Africa, almost a million Jews from Morocco to Iraq were forced (with varying degrees of coercion) to flee. These refugees appear nowhere in the “pro-Palestinian” narrative. (Oh, please, go ahead and prove me wrong. Find some crumb of evidence to dispute my categorical assertion.)

That oversight in the narrative is especially notable given Foster’s fetish for a presumed golden age of Jewish-Muslim amity.

Jews were much better off under Ottoman rule than they were in Europe, he insists. “Jews were flourishing across the Arab world.”

Well, perhaps. Until they weren’t.

It’s hard to take seriously this whole “Jews thrived under the Muslims” motif when he conveniently excludes the ethnic cleansing at the end. Old Yeller is a happy story about a boy and his dog if you turn it off just before the final scene.

Dhimmitude, which is the glorious past to which Foster refers, was a system in which Jews and other minorities were allowed relative peace as long as they knew their place and kept to it. For a guy who has the audacity to accuse Zionists of something akin to a “whites only” policy, his own wistfulness for Jewish subjugation under Muslim rule has about it a whiff of nostalgia for the Plantation South.

I could go on. Dodds, the host, is deserving of a post all her own but I can’t be bothered. She actually urges people to get their information from Instagram and TikTok. The host of something called the “Podcast for Intellectual Self-Defense” literally urges people to ignore legitimate media sources — you know, with reporters and journalistic oversight and baloney like that — and actually use social media as the source for information about Palestine.

Then she backtracks. There are legitimate news sources, she tells us.

She also lists off Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, and 972 as alternative sources of “information,” which is kind of like recommending National Enquirer for your friends who want to know what’s really going on with extraterrestrials and Bigfoot’s love slave.

She triumphantly declares that 80% of Gen Z describe what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide.

Dodds does not seem to understand that this is not a commentary on Israel or Gaza or genocide, but on our education systems, the ignorance of an entire generation and the madness of crowds.

She bleats on about an ideological double standard. Israel is assumed (by Zionist dupes, of course) to have a right to defend itself, but when Palestinians behead a few babies, immolate families alive, rape then kill (or, apparently in some cases, kill then rape) incalculable numbers of Israeli women, kidnap, and mass murder, they get called mean names like “terrorist.”

The injustice.

Devoting this space to debunking the hatred and disinformation from two randos like these might seem like an odd choice for a Saturday when there is so much more to talk about. But even when we are bombarded with maniacal memes and irrational hostility against Jews and Israel everywhere in the world, it is occasionally worth taking a deeper dive into some of the foundational fodder that drives these movements.

For a lot of us, we see what anti-Israel activists are spouting and think, “How could a generation get it so wrong, be so ill-informed and yet so arrogantly confident in their malformed opinions?”

This is an ideal case study. For those who go beyond the memes, this podcast is an example of the kind of jabber upon which they have built a movement.

That is a bad omen for Jews and Israel. But, on a much larger scale, it is a scary proposition for civilization itself. I have written about the horseshoe theory, how the far-left and the far-right are, in many ways, identical in ideology. They are also very similar in strategy.

Forster and Dodds presumably hate Donald Trump and the entire MAGA phenom. But they are mirror images of the strategy of the man and the movement. They just make stuff up, say it categorically like it’s true and accuse the truth-tellers of purveying fake news.

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