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To Solve the Israel-Palestine Conflict, End American Ignorance

To end the Israel-Palestine conflict will require correcting Americans' twisted perceptions -- especially among Christian Zionists.

May 9, 2024

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"March for Israel", Washington DC, November 14, 2023 (Photo by Ted Eytan/Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)

The main obstacle to peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict is the US policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. The ongoing US-supported genocide in Gaza is a case in point.

The mainstream media serve the function of manufacturing consent for this policy, operating within the confines of the narrow range of allowable dissent.

Consequently, most of what people think they know about the conflict just isn’t true.

The ignorance among Americans is partially an understandable consequence of the nature of US policy and the propaganda function of the US media.

The bigger problem is that many Americans are willfully ignorant. They just don’t want to know the truth. This is particularly true among Christian Zionists, who cling to their beliefs about Israel with religious fervor.

A useful example of just how ignorant most Americans are is a recent public opinion survey from the Pew Research Center. As a headline in the Miami Herald reported, “Have more Palestinians or Israelis died in war? Half of Americans don’t know, poll says“.

As the Pew report states (emphasis added),

Most Americans report having strong emotional reactions to the Israel-Hamas war. Yet, for the most part, Americans are not paying very close attention to news about the conflict. One sign of this limited attention is that only about half of U.S. adults can correctly answer a question that tests their factual knowledge by asking whether the number of deaths in the war, so far, is higher among Palestinians or among Israelis. (The correct answer is that the death toll is higher among Palestinians.)

Nearly 1,200 people were killed on October 7, 2023, during the Hamas-led attacks in Israel.

As of May 7, over 34,735 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s savage retaliatory military operation in Gaza, including over 9,500 women and 14,500 children. That is, about 70% of Palestinians killed have been women and children, which reflects the perfectly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment.

It is a military assault on Gaza’s civilian population.

Israel has also been using starvation as a method of warfare, with children dying from hunger and malnutrition. The estimated death toll is conservative, with an estimated 10,000 additional Palestinians missing and presumed buried under the rubble.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has issued a preliminary ruling that Israel’s actions are a plausible genocide. But we can dispense with the “plausible”. We can see for ourselves that what is happening meets the definition of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention, and how it has been conducted with openly genocidal intent among the Israeli leadership.

But a huge proportion of Americans are totally clueless that the government that claims to represent them is supporting a genocide. They don’t even know that far more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis.

Only 52% of respondents correctly answered this question testing the most basic of knowledge about the situation. Among the rest, 34% thought the death toll might be higher among Israelis and 7% felt certain of it; another 7% thought about the same number of Israelis have been killed as Palestinians.

Again, this level of widespread ignorance is partly the fault of the media. As I noted in my article published earlier this week, “How Israel Supported Hamas Against the PLO“:

The New York Times further instructed its reporters to restrict the use of the word “genocide”, along with “slaughter” and “massacre”, on the grounds that these words are “incendiary”. Meanwhile, the New York Times is fine with using the words “slaughter” and “massacre” when referring to Israelis killed by Palestinians. An analysis by The Intercept found that, in the pages of the New York TimesWashington Post, and Los Angeles Times, “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.” In fact, The Intercept found that as the Palestinian death toll climbed, mentions of Palestinians decreased.

Take, for example, how the Times has been covering the protests against US support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza happening on college campuses, which I wrote about yesterday:

Here’s a relevant excerpt from that article:

To take another example from the Times, on May 3, it published an article titled “Attack on U.C.L.A. Encampment Stirs Fears of Clashes Elsewhere“. Once again, the word “genocide” does not appear in the article despite the obviously huge relevance it has as context for understanding the protests.

Instead, the Times says merely that students “are outraged by the deaths of thousands of civilians in Gaza” and calling for a cease-fire (bold emphasis added).

It’s little wonder that nearly half of Americans don’t know that more Palestinians than Israelis have died since October 7 when you have America’s “newspaper of record” so atrociously underreporting the Palestinian death toll.

Students aren’t outraged by the deaths of thousands of civilians. They are outraged by the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.

The Pew survey reveals some additional insights about the nature of Americans’ ignorance about the conflict.

Those who knew the right answer to the question about the death count “tend to express more pro-Palestinian views on certain questions.”

It should come as no surprise to knowledgeable people that ignorance of the topic was greater among those who tended to express a more pro-Israel view.

I’m talking about the type of ignorance like still insisting in the face of an ongoing genocide that “Israel has the most moral army in the world“. I’m talking about outright delusion; complete detachment from reality.

The Pew poll also looked at knowledge by religious affiliation and found that “American Jews (79%), Muslims (71%), atheists (80%) and agnostics (72%) were the most knowledgeable religious groups analyzed on this question.”

So what group is noticeably not represented among people who had at least a basic knowledge of the situation?

Tick tock, tick tock…

Got it yet?

Yeah, that’s right: it’s Christians.

It’s the elephant in the room: Christian Zionism.

People who defend Israel’s genocide are those who are most ignorant of the facts, and standing out amongst the ignorant in particular are Christians.

To solve the Israel-Palestine conflict requires us to overcome the general lack of knowledge and, moreover, to overcome the serious problem of willful ignorance.

To overcome the problem of willful ignorance requires us to somehow get through to Christian Zionists whose basic attitude is “We must support Israel no matter what” and whose confirmation bias prohibits them from even considering any information that does not accord with their predetermined beliefs about the state of Israel.

These are the types who view the establishment of Israel in 1948 — which was accomplished by ethnically cleansing most of the indigenous Arab population from their homes in Palestine — as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. (Never mind what the Bible has to say about it!)

These are the types who believe that the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock must be destroyed and a Jewish Temple rebuilt on the Temple Mount to usher in the war of Armageddon, in order to hasten the return of Jesus to Earth.

So how can we solve this problem? How can we get through to people who tend to be impervious to facts?

I don’t have the answers, but we can start with identifying those who might have a prejudiced view of Palestinians — and Muslim Arabs in general — but who are capable of being reasoned with, and then doing our best to help educate them.

Here is an article you can share that covers the history from ancient times through the British occupation of Palestine:

Here is an interview I did with Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard, providing lots of insights into the nature of modern political Zionism — and why equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is so utterly stupid:

Here’s another interview I did recently in which I discussed the role of Christian Zionism at length:

Those are all recent content. Here’s another highly relevant one from deeper in my archives:

The good news is that public opinion is shifting with younger generations. This is true among young American Jews, as well. Younger people see through the propaganda better than older adults do. They can see for themselves how Israel brutalizes the Palestinians, and they do not support it.

We have a long way to go to achieve the paradigm shift required for a just peace to be realized, but things are moving in the right direction.

And, of course, if you want to help someone get up to speed on the true nature of the conflict, this is the book to give them:

Obstacle to Peace

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$17.99$29.99

Obstacle to Peace shatters mainstream propaganda narratives about the conflict, revealing the true reasons for its persistence and illuminating the path forward to a just resolution. Exclusively when you buy from this website, get a copy of the book signed by Jeremy!

Learn More

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  • USAMNESIA says:

    Thank you for another cogent piece on this ongoing tragedy. Some may be interested in this relevant documentary from six years ago on the manipulation of the American mind(the most powerful occupied territory).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP0-YohJR-g

  • Paulo Pereira says:

    I recently saw a quote by Mark Twain that seems to sum up this situation succinctly: “It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them they’ve been fooled.” Yes, many people are willfully ignorant; they just don’t want to admit they might be wrong. Many seem to think that if the hostages are released that the fighting will stop. They are utterly clueless about the history of the region. Some view Gaza and the West Bank as neighbors of Israel, rather than what they are, an occupied territory. In the worst extreme you have those who harass the protesters and say horrible things to them. These really are divorced from not only reality but also basic decency.

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