2024-08-18 06:59:56
The Kalich publishing house could not have chosen a more suitable time for the release of the publication called Mašinérie líži. The book by Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Jemini describes how the Western media and the academic world reimagine the complex reality in the Middle East.
The original appeared seven years ago, but the Czech version is now gaining relevance due to the situation in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s military operation there, responding to last year’s attacks by the Palestinian terrorist movement Hamas, has, after all, several fronts – one on the ground or below it, and another in the media and universities.
Jemini was interested in how many people promote or accept a strongly anti-Israeli view, or rather a strongly critical view of Israel. And that on the basis of demonstrably shifted, manipulated, out of context or outright lied facts. It is of course his point of view, everything he claims, but he substantiates and confronts with facts – documents, quotes or numbers.
He himself tells the story of how he learned from two idealistic American Jewish students that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians”. When asked further about the number of victims, the young women answered without hesitation that it was “millions” and referred to the alleged texts of leading Western experts.
In Central Europe, we exaggerate more soberly, but also in the Czech Republic you can hear, for example, the claim that Israel is responsible for the “hundreds of thousands” of dead in Gaza. The essence of the problem remains: some people want Israel to be as bloody as possible. They therefore do not like to hear that the Palestinian suffering – of course often real – is actually less than they thought.
Popular fighting terms
When did Ben-Dror Jemini decide to write the book? Many years ago, after a lecture in New York, a certain Bob approached him and told him that he had written an op-ed for the New York Times in response to his article. Bob turned out to be Robert Bernstein, the founder of the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch, which is still a vocal critic of Israel.
The author of the book, Ben-Dror Jemini, is a political commentator. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
However, to his surprise, Jemini learned that Bernstein had separated from his child, precisely because of what he said was a politicized distortion of the facts by Human Rights Watch. And he immediately invited Jemini to write a book about how the Western world is mystified when reporting on Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This is how the English-titled book Industry of Lies was created, which Kalich has now published in a translation by Simona Sternová under the title Machinery of Lies: Media, academia and the Israeli-Arab conflict, with a special foreword by the author for Czech readers.
In 22 chapters, Jemini discusses a variety of topics: some familiar and often mentioned, such as the use of popular combative terms and concepts such as ethnic cleansing, genocide, apartheid, colonialism, ethnic nationalism, or Zionism as a supposed incarnation of Nazism. Other times, he touches on less common things, but from the Czech point of view, all the more interesting. For example, “Nakby”, translated as a disaster, i.e. the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs in connection with the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the war that broke out at that time.
Jemini deals with this event in great detail, compares it with other cases, including the expulsion of Germans from Central Europe, and analyzes what, why and how it is highlighted or, conversely, glossed over in Western academic and media debate. It is logical, because the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem is understood by anti-Zionists as the indelible “original sin of Israel”. After all, it is not about criticizing his politics, but about existence itself, the right to it.
Another interesting Jemini topic is the peace proposals that have appeared in recent decades from the Israeli, Arab, or American side. Who came up with them, how realistic were they and why did they fail? An equally remarkable theme is the strange fusion of the souls of a section of the Western progressive left with Islamism. This was strongly demonstrated during the recent protests on the grounds of some American universities – demonstrations perhaps more anti-Israel than pro-Palestinian.
In the spring, the management of Columbia University in the USA called the police on their students who were protesting against the Israeli intervention in the Gaza Strip. | Photo: Reuters
Outraged Levy
The discussion about the role of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz sounds particularly interesting, to whose activities Ben-Dror Jemini – like some former editors – takes a very critical position. Haaretz is indeed a worthy paper, but it plays a different role in Israel than occasional readers in the West give it credit for. They often consider him to be the only critical voice there, or simply use him as the source of all truth.
However, Haarec is a mixture of many things, including proven manipulation of facts in the interest of absurd hypercriticism – at least among some of the editors. References to the opinions of Gideon Levy, a man always prophetically outraged, occasionally appear in the Czech press.
But Levy is a specialist in one act: “After all, I judge that Israel is guilty.” His position can only be understood in the context of the internal Israeli debate, a nuance that many in the West miss. And so they understand the journalist as a kind of oracle, although he is perhaps the only Israeli writing about Palestinian topics who does not know Arabic – while in many other “bad” Israeli media, Arab editors are usually entrusted with these topics.
Ben-Dror Jemini has a clear crush on Levy, but he also repeatedly mentions well-known figures of the anti-Israel discourse. One is the “revisionist historian” Ilan Pappé, who repeatedly visits the Czech Republic with his lectures, where his book was published this year, aptly titled Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Jemini shows how the first of the “revisionists”, the historian Benny Morris, convicted Pappé of manipulations and non-observance of scientific procedures. But in the West, personalities like Pappé enjoy religious attention, because the measure of their scholarship is criticism of Israel, and not of facts.
Furthermore, Jemini deals with serious personalities who, for some reason, feel the need to repeatedly publicly pillory Israel. For example, by political scientist John Mearsheimer, among other things, the author of a successful book about how Israel allegedly manages to manipulate US foreign policy for its own benefit, to the detriment of Americans. Recently, he has been known in our country for other reasons: Mearsheimer is one of the leading proponents of the thesis that the West, not Vladimir Putin, is responsible for the Russian attack on Ukraine.
Pro-Palestinian demonstration on Wenceslas Square in Prague. The illustration photo is from October 2023. | Photo: Honza Mudra
Why should we take author Ben-Dror Jemini seriously? In Israel itself, he is known as a political commentator, in recent years especially for the important daily Jediot Achronot, partly also available online in the English version at Ynetnews.com.
Jemini is not necessarily a supporter of everything Israeli governments do. On the contrary, it would be difficult to find a text in which, for example, he would defend the current cabinet or its chairman, Benjamin Netanyahu. The Machine of Lies is certainly not a scientific publication, rather a moderately apologetic columnist defending Israel. At the same time, he openly names his mistakes and crimes – it would be nice if every similar book was comparably honest.
Cover of the book The Machine of Lies. | Photo: Kalich publishing house
From the point of view of its tone, one more item of the author’s biography is interesting. This year’s 70-year-old was born in Tel Aviv, but his family came from Yemen, so he is a descendant of Jews who were expelled or fled from another Middle Eastern country.
The ancestors of the majority of Israeli Jews come from Iraq, Morocco, Syria or even Yemen, from where they fled to Israel, often wearing only what they were wearing. This gives the West’s popular accusation of Israelis “colonialism” a grotesque flavor – and the calls to “return to Poland” an absurd point.
Significantly, Ben-Dror Jemini did not dedicate his book to anyone close to him, but to rocker Roger Waters, linguist Noam Chomsky, political scientist Norman Finkelstein, journalist Naomi Klein and several others who became famous for their ardent anti-Israel positions. Among them is the prominent American intellectual Judith Butler, who already in 2006 called the Palestinian terrorist movement Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah progressive forces of today’s left, while she considers the attacks of October 7 last year to be armed resistance.
Ben-Dror Jemini expresses the hope that even artistic or intellectual celebrities will read his book, preferably with an open mind. Maybe someone like that can be found here too.
The author is a commentator for Czech Radio Plus.
Video: This was just the first round. A threat to the whole world lurks in the Middle East, says Kalhousová (25 April 2024)
Irena Kalhousová, director of the Herzl Center for Israeli Studies, discussed the situation in the Middle East in the Spotlight program in April. | Video: Team Spotlight