The truth is losing. No factual study showing that there was no genocide will help. Neither will a graph based on Hamas’ own list of the dead, not the IDF’s, showing that most of those killed were men of fighting age.
Nor does it seem to matter that credible estimates of those killed in the U.S.-led “war on terror” between 2001 and 2018 found that close to 70% were civilians, while almost no one seriously argued that those wars amounted to genocide.
Israel’s information war is failing because it remains trapped permanently on the defensive
(Photo: Stefano Rellandini / AFP)
None of it will help, because as long as we, myself included, remain busy disproving every lie and accusation, the outcome is predetermined.
A film like NAZA is only one example in a much wider industry of falsehoods. Its title refers not only to the Hebrew abbreviation for collateral damage, but also plainly evokes the word “Nazi.”
They have not only defeated Israel. They have defeated the truth. They have defeated the free world.
This is yet another demonstration that we are living deep inside an age of propaganda and lies. A modern blood libel has been successfully spread because facts no longer matter.
Claims of genocide were already being made roughly a week after October 7. Those making them did not wait for casualty figures. They did not need facts or evidence.
They invented a narrative, and an enormous collection of useful idiots, political activists, journalists, influencers, social-media bullies and people who call themselves researchers, some with Qatari funding and some without, joined in.
Let there be no mistake: innocent people were harmed.
As witnesses in the film themselves say, the IDF attacked military targets in buildings where civilians were also present. International law does not automatically prohibit an attack on a military target because civilians are nearby.
Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that the presence of protected persons may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations. Additional Protocol I also permits attacks on military objectives whose destruction offers a definite military advantage.
But none of that appears in the film, or in the broader narrative surrounding the war.
We are in the age of propaganda.
Yes, innocent civilians were killed. Fewer, I would argue, than in many wars waged by Western militaries in recent decades. But who needs facts when propaganda is enough?
A film such as NAZA is just one entry in a long series of distortions. The real defeat is not merely Israel’s. It is the defeat of truth itself.
The real mistake
There is another point that must be acknowledged, and it may be the central one.
The people driving this industry of falsehood exhaust us with demonstrations, accusations, articles, declarations, performances and films about a genocide that did not happen.
Those who want to present the truth spend their time endlessly rebutting them.
That battle is lost before it begins.
There are many propagandists and relatively few people answering them. The propagandists win.
This does nothing to help Palestinians. It does not advance reconciliation or peace. Quite the opposite. It advances hatred.
It is an own goal by a world that is supposed to be free.
But herd mentality rules. This is the fashion of the moment.
Anyone who produces another film serving Hamas propaganda is not being courageous. They already know they will receive minutes of applause from people who know about this conflict roughly as much as they know about growing lettuce on the moon.
So where is the great failure?
It is that those who support the truth remain on defense instead of going on offense.
The much bigger story is that one branch of radical Islam, backed by Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, has spent decades preaching the murder of Christians, Jews and Hindus.
Its objective is not freedom. It is not liberation. It is not anti-colonialism.
Its objective, as Hamas leaders have said in their own voices, like the leaders of ISIS and other radical Islamist movements, is the conquest of the entire world.
“The goal is not Palestine,” senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar said on the Houthis’ television channel less than a year before October 7. “The goal is the entire 512 million square kilometers of the world.”
That is the ideology voiced by many senior Hamas figures.
They have never hidden it.
And yet in Venice and Hollywood, people applaud those whose ideology, taken seriously, would eventually threaten them as well.
Have you lost your minds?
Instead of helping one of the few countries in the world actually confronting this axis of radicalism, you turn against it.
Stop apologizing
The problem is not only the obscenity of a film like NAZA, whose creators deliberately draw a comparison between Israelis and Germans during the Holocaust.
We have become accustomed to this.
We should not.
The deeper problem is that there is no major film presenting decades of racist and antisemitic indoctrination.
There is no major film showing the construction of Hamas’ terrorist machine.
There is no major film showing the education toward the destruction of unbelievers and the conquest of the world.
And even when such films do exist, they are unlikely to receive the same stages in Venice, Cannes or Hollywood.
Hamas supporters have waved swastika flags. Radical Islamist preachers have invoked Hitler and called for mass killing.
Yet how convenient that they have Israelis in academia, journalism, social media and the cultural world who present the exact opposite picture, while exploiting the fact that Israel is a democracy.
So what should be done?
Enough apologizing.
Enough assuming that disproving each individual lie will solve anything.
It is time to attack.
Take out full-page advertisements in the world’s leading newspapers featuring quotations from Hamas leaders about conquering America and Europe.
Show Hamas supporters waving swastika flags because of their identification with Nazism.
Show the spiritual leaders who called for Hitler’s work to be continued.
In the battle for public consciousness, which is also a battle for truth, disproving falsehoods remains important.
But defense alone changes nothing.
Trying to refute each testimony in NAZA is doomed to fail. It would be a waste of energy. It might even become free publicity for the film.
The gloves should come off.
The truth should be presented for what it is: Hamas, as part of a broader radical Islamist movement that spreads destruction, death and devastation wherever it takes hold, is Nazi in its ideology and conduct.
We have the evidence.
It is time to use it.
One more point.
Yuval Abraham, one of the film’s two creators, is a political partner of Ahmed Alnaouq, a senior figure in what presents itself as a human-rights organization but which I regard as part of Hamas’ propaganda apparatus in Europe.
That is the man. That is the narrative. That is the film.
More on that connection Friday.