Back in 2018, I received an advance review copy of a book titled What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which purports to be a fresh liberty-minded approach to the topic written by Elan Journo, a Senior Fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute, but which instead simply regurgitates all the same old Zionist propaganda that has always been used to try to justify Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
So, I wrote an essay systematically debunking the book’s lies and deceptions, which was lengthy enough that I ended up publishing it as an e-book titled Exposing a Zionist Hoax: How Elan Journo’s ‘What Justice Demands’ Deceives Readers about the Palestine Conflict.
I was able to complete my rebuttal, which runs 147 pages including endnotes, in time to publish it on the very same day What Justice Demands was published.
Here is a perfect example of what I mean when I say that Journo’s book deceives its readers, an excerpt from a section of my book on the 1967 War:
Turning our attention to the “Six Day War” of June 1967, Journo proceeds along familiar lines. “Stepping forward to launch the next battle”, his account begins, “was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the military dictator of Egypt, who took up the challenge of ‘liquidating’ Israel.” Naturally placing sole blame on the Arabs, he briefly summarizes the standard Zionist propaganda version of events: “On the eve of war, Egypt had mobilized its forces and concentrated troops in the Sinai Peninsula, on Israel’s southern border. Egypt also closed the Straits of Tiran, an important shipping route in the Red Sea, to Israeli vessels.”
Advancing his hoax, Journo supports his characterization of Egypt as having intended to launch an invasion of Israel by quoting Nasser as follows—with the ellipses appearing here as in Journo’s rendering:
Recently we felt we are strong enough, that if we were to enter a battle with Israel, with God’s help, we would triumph. On this basis, we decided to take steps. . . . We will operate as one army fighting a single battle for the sake of a common objective—the objective of the Arab nation. . . . The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.
Journo’s deception is easily enough exposed simply by placing these statements back into the context from which he selectively pulled them. First, Journo omits the important context that Israel had already once invaded and occupied Egypt, in 1956. Nasser in fact began the speech with comments about how badly hurt Egypt was by Israel’s aggression eleven years prior, but how the country had worked to become “fully prepared and confident of being able to adopt strong measures if we were to enter the battle with Israel.” That is the missing context necessary to understand the first of the three excerpted quotes Journo provides, about the decision to prepare for hostilities with Israel. So now let’s restore the missing text indicated by Journo’s ellipses (with the restored text in italics and the key missing context in bold):
With regard to military plans, there is complete co-ordination of military action between us and Syria. We will operate as one army fighting a single battle for the sake of a common objective—the objective of the Arab nation. The problem today is not just Israel, but also those behind it. If Israel embarks on an aggression against Syria or Egypt the battle against Israel will be a general one and not confined to one spot on the on the Syrian or Egyptian borders. The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.
Thus, Journo’s supposed proof of Egypt’s intent to initiate a war of aggression against Israel actually shows that Nasser was rather preparing for the possibility of an Israeli attack on Egypt or its ally, Syria. And, indeed, the anticipated Israeli attack was soon enough to come.
There’s much more of this type of debunking in the book, which is available in Kindle edition from Amazon, or purchase a PDF edition directly from me here:
Exposing a Zionist Hoax
In his book What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Elan Journo purports to offer a fresh pro-liberty approach to the subject, but its pages are filled with all the same tired Zionist propaganda that has always been used to justify Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Exposing a Zionist Hoax systematically deconstructs the lying propaganda that
One Lying Zionist Defends Another
Despite having proved my case with clear examples of brazen deception like that one, in response to my book, another Zionist liar named Sheri Oz posted a supposed “review” on her blog Israel Diaries in which she tried vainly to defend Journo’s book as accurate while accusing me of lying.
In fact, though, Oz utterly failed to identify even a single factual or logical error in my book, as I detailed in my July 2018 article “Exposing a Zionist Liar Attempting to Challenge My Book ‘Exposing a Zionist Hoax’“.
To take a primary example, Journo had regurgitated the hoax claim that the Palestinian people were not even commonly known as “Palestinians” until the late 1960s. Feigning objectivity, he first objects to the Zionist talking point that ‘there’s no such thing as the Palestinians”, but then he asserts that “it’s true” that “The Palestinian label was little known and politically dormant for decades until the political-ideological movement associated with it took off in the late 1960s.”
There are two basic claims here: one is that the Palestinian national movement only arose in the 1960s, years after the establishment of Israel in 1948; the other is that the Palestinians were not commonly known as “Palestinians” until that national movement arose.
So, in my book, I documented how the inhabitants of Palestine — both Jew and Arab — were called “Palestinians” during the post-WWI Mandate era and how the Palestinian national movement was alive and well during the war and subsequent British occupation of the formerly Ottoman territory of Palestine.
To that end, I cited the British Peel Commission Report of 1937.
Sheri Oz, to support her position that Journo is correct and I am a liar, stupidly claimed that the word “Palestinians” does not appear in the Peel Commission Report. So I screenshotted an example for her and then provided over twenty additional examples proving my point and proving Oz to be the liar.
Extraordinarily, Oz then posted a second article on her blog still attempting to maintain that Journo’s book is great and mine is the deceitful one. But yet again, she failed to provide any substantive criticisms of my book. Once again, she failed to identify even a single factual or logical error on my part, as I detailed in my August 2018 follow-up article “Exposing a Zionist Deceiver Trying to Challenge My Book ‘Exposing a Zionist Hoax’“.
She did admit that she had been wrong about the Peel Commission Report and that I was correct that it refers to the inhabitants of Palestine as “Palestinians”. But she vainly tried to maintain that I had provided no evidence that the Arab Palestinians had a strong sense of nationalism during the Mandate era.
For example, she claimed that the Peel Commission Report says that the Arabs “never saw themselves as Palestinians” and had no aim of establishing an independent state of Palestine. I showed how nothing resembling her characterization appears on the page she cited. On the contrary, her own citation contradicts her claim. The page she cited actually states that the Arab inhabitants of Palestine viewed Palestine as “their country, their home, the land in which their people for centuries past had lived and left their graves.”
These are illustrative examples of Oz’s best effort to support her position that Journo’s book is factually accurate and I’m the deceiver.
Oz’s 1-Star Review of Exposing a Zionist Hoax
Alas, Zionists like Oz are incapable of being reasoned with, and she leveled an additional attack on me and my book in the customer reviews on Amazon.com. Here is the 1-star review that she left:
When hate makes you keep writing the same things over and over again.
This book is poorly organized, skipping hysterically all over the place in Hammond’s enthusiasm to prove another Zionist a liar. Unfortunately for Hammond, his regurgitated book (in his own words, by repurposing content he had used elsewhere) is nothing more than a poorly contrived vehicle for propaganda. His main thesis appears to be that the Jews stole the land from the Arabs, Arabs who came to be called Palestinians only after divvying up the former Ottoman Empire between the English and the French. These same Arabs only began calling themselves Palestinians after 1967, after Jordan lost its occupation over what they called the West Bank and Egypt lost its occupational control over Gaza. And even then, it took over two decades before the people caught on that they should refer to themselves as Palestinians. Those damn Jews had their land back and so a great strategy was devised to vilify them and work to wrest the land from them again – you know: From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free — in other words, free of us pesky Jews. If you actually fact-check Hammond’s materials you will find that his book is built on a house of cards.
So, to break this down, she starts out by accusing me of “hate”, which is an utterly stupid attempt to equate my criticisms of the Zionist project with anti-Semitism, such as the way she falsely attributes to me the perception of Israelis as being “Those damn Jews” and “pesky Jews”. The characterization of my book as essentially anti-Semitic in nature is simply an illustration of Oz’s own intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice.
Oz criticizes that it is “poorly organized, skipping hysterically all over the place”, which is only a legitimate criticism insofar as my book literally goes point-by-point through Journo’s book to expose his deceptions. So, if my book is all over the place topically, it’s because I was addressing Journo’s arguments in the order he presents them in his book.
Oz claims my book consists of content I’d already published elsewhere, which is false. Obviously, I did cover ground I had covered before in other writings, but this book also gave me the opportunity to get into areas I hadn’t before. Indeed, it is not logically possible for this criticism to be true since I had never written anything else directly addressing the specific claims made in Journo’s book before. An example of the originality of the content in my book is above, from the section of my book on the 1967 War.
Oz contends that my book is “propaganda” as though Journo’s isn’t, and to support that characterization, she says my “main thesis appears to be that the Jews stole the land from the Arabs”. But my main thesis appears in my book’s subtitle: namely, that Journo’s book deceives readers about the conflict, which it does, as I proved on page after page of my rebuttal book.
To that end, I certainly do point out the historical fact that Israel was established by ethnically cleansing most of Palestine’s Arab inhabitants from their homes. So how does Oz deal with that fact in her review? Simple! She repeats the stupidly false claim that “Arabs only began calling themselves Palestinians after 1967”!
Humorously, Oz here manages to accomplish nothing more than to prove her own dishonesty. Setting aside the fact that she is simply regurgitating one of the very claims I thoroughly debunk in my book, her Amazon review is dated July 19, 2018, which was the very same day she published her second blog post admitting that her claim that the word “Palestinians” never appears in the Peel Commission Report!
Talk about chutzpah!
Beyond that, Oz denies that land was stolen from Arabs by Jews by asserting that the Zionists had simply gotten “their land back”. Hence, she asserts that all of the land that became Israel rightfully belonged to Jews. But I debunked that claim, too, in my book, showing how, in fact, by the end of the Mandate, Jews had managed to acquire only about 7% of the land in Palestine and how Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district of Palestine.
In short, Oz’s Amazon review is itself just another Zionist hoax aimed at trying to defend all the hoax Zionist claims that have always been used to try to defend Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
Unfortunately, Oz’s review over the years has been absurdly found “helpful” by many Amazon customers. So, if you haven’t yet read Exposing a Zionist Hoax, I encourage you to purchase a Kindle or PDF edition for a few bucks, read it, and leave your more honest review here on my site and, if you’re a user, at Amazon.
And if you’ve already read it, click here to leave a customer review at Amazon now.
A Second Lame Negative Review
Another supposed “review” preposterously deemed “helpful” by many Amazon customers rated my book two-stars with the characterization of it as “Disappointing, propaganda war genre”. Here is the text of that review, by “JH Raichyk”:
Since Hammond is an excellent writer and thorough in his research, I started out hoping to find a clearer idea of what the future would be in his ideas of ‘good justice’. Sorry to say, the book is not that readable, and the idea that he is so rabid to denounce those he disagrees with has made the reading rather tiresome and not even well researched, except to show that he did read the hoax he is attacking. Page after page of they-said-but-that’s-not-true without other counter data.
But the limit of patience came when I saw his coverage of Lebanon. Total Palestinian deceit. Lebanon in the mid twentieth century was a Christian democracy and the only country that opened its arms to the Palestinians fleeing Israel’s battle for statehood. Wouldn’t any justice require some gratitude, well Hammond does totally obliterate any recognition of what the Moslem people fired up by the Palestinian ‘diseased mind’ did. And within a few years of the arrival of the second flood of Palestinians after the Arab world’s attack on isreal blew up in their faces, the entire Western democracy of Lebanon was a hellhole, as Hammond recognizes but hides the role of the Palestinian hordes that savaged the people of Lebanon, who turned first to Syria for help but saw instead an occupying army, so gradually sought Israeli help, but too late to be interestingly retaining their former future ever again, now just a moslem hellhole. Hammond instead blames the disaster on Israel, barely a paragraph.
That ended any idea I had that his own view was any more reliable, just another blind propaganda book in the propaganda wars of the Zionism-anti-Zionism genre. I do not approve of many ideas of the racism of Israel but they were at least able to maintain their democratic governance and thrive in the midst of an area that seldom thrives and not ever as a democracy. Agree with their daily struggles or not, the reality of concessions to Palestinians destroyed the western, Christian democracy that was Lebanon.. and the rest of the Moslem / Arab world is the real culprit. Clear enough maybe when that comparison is seeable.
So, to break this one down, first, Raichyk claims that I merely make “rabid” counterclaims but don’t substantiate them by citing sources, which is an absurd lie. Everything I wrote in the book is fully referenced, and the endnotes include numerous primary source materials such as the 1937 Peel Commission Report, the 1929 Shaw Commission Report, the 1946 Survey of Palestine, the 1946 Report of the Anglo-American Committee, etc.
Second, Raichyk contends that my books “coverage of Lebanon” is totally deceitful but doesn’t actually specify what I wrote that isn’t true. His complaint is instead that I don’t show “gratitude” to Lebanon for taking in Palestinian refugees, plus he contends that Lebanon became a “moslem hellhole” because of “the Palestinian hordes” and that I falsely blame this outcome on Israel.
One gathers that Raichyk doesn’t much like Arab Muslims, and his criticism of my book reflects the reviewer’s own deep prejudice.
The disingenuousness of this prejudicial criticism is illustrated by looking at each of the 8 instances in my book in which the word “Lebanon” appears in my book. Most of these are not a discussion of Lebanon at all and the country is simply mentioned in passing in some other context, so I’ll start by quickly reviewing those:
- The fourth time “Lebanon” appears in my book is sentence quoted from Journo’s book in he which he notes that Lebanon was among the Arab states involved in the 1948 war.
- The fifth is a mention of how mostly Christian Arabs were expelled from the town of Safad to Lebanon, as I had previously discussed in my 2016 essay “Benny Morris’s Untenable Denial of the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine“, which is also available for purchase as an e-book.
- The sixth is a mention of how the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was based for a time in Lebanon (until Israel’s 1982 invasion).
- The last two mentions of Lebanon relate to Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon and the development of the Israeli military’s “Dahiya Doctrine”, a policy of using deliberately disproportionate force to punish the civilian population — a war crime.
This brings me to the first three instances, which all occur in two consecutive paragraphs where I pointed out how Journo had ridiculously described Beirut as coming to resemble a “post-apocalyptic hellscape” as though this was merely the result of a civil war, and how to sustain that characterization, Journo omits entirely from his account Israel’s devastating 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Similarly, in that part of his book, Journo introduces his readers to Hezbollah while omitting the fact that this organization arose precisely as a result of Israel’s 1982 invasion.
Clearly, when criticizing my “coverage of Lebanon”, Raichyk can only be referring to those two paragraphs of my book, and you can see that this reviewer is therefore tacitly trying to maintain that Journo’s account was honest and it was rather dishonest of me to note that Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon is important context that should not be omitted from the historical record when discussing the devastation of Beirut and the rise of Hezbollah.
It is difficult to imagine a more profoundly stupid criticism of my book, although this clown Raichyk has some tough competition from Ms. Oz.
Leave Your Own Review of Exposing a Zionist Hoax
I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to read this short e-book of mine for yourself and then leave your own review here on my site and over at Amazon.com.
Exposing a Zionist Hoax
In his book What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Elan Journo purports to offer a fresh pro-liberty approach to the subject, but its pages are filled with all the same tired Zionist propaganda that has always been used to justify Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Exposing a Zionist Hoax systematically deconstructs the lying propaganda that
Towards the end of his life, as he watched the occupation of Palestine deepen and expand, the dissident Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz described Israel as “the only totalitarian country in the enlightened world.” He was referring to the way that the Jewish state promoted itself as a beacon of liberal democracy while it imposed a brutal, panopticon-style regime of repression on Palestinians, raiding their homes at night, shuttering their media outlets, and torturing them at will. Today, Israel is projecting this regime outwards, recruiting operatives across the West to eradicate all resistance, even attacking constitutionally protected forms of protest. Like the country it has enlisted to defend, a border-less settler-colony that demands special exemption from international law, the lobby’s mission knows no limits. Where the occupation started is well known, but where will it end?
I’m not sure which is the greater evil: apathy or ignorance. Ignorance is pretty bad enough, but it’s especially bad when it’s willful, when you see the kind of disingenuousness displayed in the reviews of your book. Metallica has a song (“Holier Than Thou”) with the line ‘arrogance and ignorance’ go hand in hand’ and I think that is nowhere more true than in apologists for Israel.
Indeed, in these instances, the ignorance is plainly willful.
You quote Journo claiming that Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran but I can’t find any argument addressing that claim in the book. I searched for “Tiran”, “straits” and “shipping” and the only mention of them was in the section you quote.
I don’t discuss the Straits issue in my book, which focuses just on the claim of an impending military invasion of Israel by Egypt.