The big lie Israel peddles to the world — But the only buyer is Israel
We condemn the great lies of the tyrants of the past in Europe, but we (Israelis) willingly tell ourselves a big lie, spread it and reaffirm it again and again: ‘We are not running an Occupation’
By David Ricci • Translated by Sol Salbe
Last month, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that Israel’s Occupation of the Territories, including the establishment of settlements, violates international law. In response, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that “the Jewish people are not occupiers in their land” and that “ No decision of lies in The Hague will distort this historical truth.”
This response continues to reinforce a “big lie” — a lie so crude that listeners believe it. The person who coined the expression was actually Hitler: “In the Big Lie there is always a certain force of credibility,” he wrote in his book Mein Kampf, “because the masses are the common people … they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. “
Of course, we condemn the big lies told by past dictators in Europe, such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or Franco, and also reject those told today by modern liars like Putin, Orban or Trump, who encouraged his supporters to break into the Capitol building in 2021, claiming that the victory in the presidential election was “stolen” from him.
Nevertheless, many of us in Israel willingly tell ourselves a big lie, spread it to others, and then hear it told again by senior purveyors like Netanyahu, who in this respect is not an inventive thinker trying to create a dangerous community of believers, but a sort of a hitchhiker, jumping on a bandwagon of an existing majority that already believes the lie. This big lie is: We are not running an Occupation.
True, calling what we tell ourselves a “big lie” is an unpleasant way of describing the fact that we don’t want to talk about the harm we’re doing to the Palestinians. But perhaps we should start calling it that in order to shock ourselves in a way that makes us, first, see what we prefer to ignore, and second, address the enormous implications of this disregard for Israel’s national policymaking, and perhaps its fate.
We reaffirm this lie by repeating it over and over again, for example like Netanyahu in response to The Hague; or by ignoring the occupation in public discourse — as if we believe that if we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist.
In 2022, settlers like Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Rothman and Strook anchored the big lie in the government’s guiding principles by stating that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel” — which means that the Territories belong to us by divine decree, so there is no Occupation, no colonialism, no Apartheid, no oppression and, more recently, no war crimes.
Since October 7, the main consequence of our big lie has been the assertion that we are waging an “existential war” against Hamas, a second war of independence against sworn enemies who tried to annihilate us on that horrible Saturday, and will try again if we do not obliterate them completely.
But the truth is that these enemies attacked us in order to put the Occupation that has been going on for 56 years on the global agenda, and we responded not in order to prevent the annihilation of the State of Israel, but to preserve this Occupation.
One consequence of this is that many of us do not understand why we are perceived as pariahs. For example, why are all these students protesting against us? Don’t they understand the facts — that we haven’t done anything wrong (after all, there is no Occupation) and that we are merely exercising our sovereign right to self-defence? After all, even the UN says self-defence is legitimate, right?
What kind of “conflict” do we have with the Palestinians? What have they done to justify the fact that 55 years after the war they watched from the sidelines, we still hold their lands by force, and they have to give us at least some of those lands before we agree to go home?
In this battle between Jerusalem and the rest of the world, we assume that the pro-Palestinian students are mostly stupid and naïve, perhaps even antisemitic. We don’t realise that many of them simply recognise our great national lie as a lie and understand that we are attacking and bombing not in order to continue to exist as a Jewish state, but in order to continue the Occupation.
In other words, we don’t see our own blindness, and conclude that something is probably wrong with these students. This is a classic response of shooting a messenger; In this case, because they imagine something that does not even exist in reality, they hallucinate that there is an Occupation.
Our greatest justification for this is what we call the conflict. If there is no Occupation but there is a “conflict,” we can attribute the results of the Occupation, which may seem offensive to some foreigners, to this “conflict” — in which we are constantly threatened by aggressive Palestinians and must take steps to maintain not the Occupation, but “law and order” in the “Territories.”
But where did this conflict spring from? How did we find a “conflict” in a situation where, in 1967, we went to war against the Jordanian army in the West Bank, won this war, and in the end we stayed, perched on the lands of people who did not fight it against us?
What kind of “conflict” do we have with these people? What have they done to justify the fact that 55 years after the war they watched from the sidelines, we still hold — that is, occupy — their lands by force, so much so that now, since they have somehow “quarrelled” with us, they have to agree to negotiate with us and give us at least some of their land, before we agree to go home?
Because we don’t ask such questions, we are confused when Palestinians refuse to give us any of their land, for example in East Jerusalem. So we frame this fact in our vocabulary and continue, in our view, with “conflict management” — and not with the Occupation, which does not exist at all.
As far as we are concerned, the bottom line is that we are fighting a war that is not actually a “war” but a “policing activity,” like the one used by the British to suppress uprisings during the Mandate period; Which explains, at least to some extent, why our government has so far refused a ceasefire even in return for the return of some or all of the hostages. Wars sometimes end in a ceasefire. Our War of Independence, for example, ended this way in 1949. But in the present case, the government says, the “war” will not stop until we achieve “total victory.”
Even when Biden offers us a map of the two states with which we can get out of this “conflict,” Netanyahu, Galant, Lieberman, Sa’ar, Gantz, and of course Ben-Gvir and Smotrich talk about continuing the ground fighting and bombings, until Hamas can no longer harass us. Or, in other words, until our “deterrent power” grows so much that neither Hamas nor any other group of Palestinian “attackers” can again challenge the Occupation.
For them — and for us as Israelis who sell and buy this lie — this is what gave rise to October 7. Not the existence of the Occupation, but the failure to create enough deterrence to keep Hamas in place. And that, the big liars say, is what we can fix now.
