The Big Liars and the Propaganda War Against Israel

… An equation between Israel and Nazism could only be made by “someone who is only totally ignorant of what Nazism was, or was indifferent to it.”

– Foreign Minister Golda Meir in a rebuttal of the Saudi Ambassador, Ahmed Shukeiry, at the United Nations, October 18, 1961.¹

The War of Lies against Israel: The Problem in Historical Perspective

Since the era of World War I, inversion of truth and reality has become a favored method of public persuasion. One of its most frequent expressions has been the accusation that the Jewish people have become the new Nazis, aggressors, and oppressors. Contemporary observers have described this method as the “inversion of reality,” an “intellectual confidence trick,” and “reversal of moral responsibility,” and these accusations have not been refuted; they have gradually gained credence. Since inversion of reality constitutes the basic principle of current anti-Israel propaganda, it is important to understand how it works. This propaganda method is a product of totalitarian regimes, particularly of Nazi Germany. It is totalitarian both in its methods and in the absolute solution it advocates. It emphatically denies Israel’s legitimacy, sovereignty, and right to self-defense. It strives to dominate public spaces (which now include social media) and, through constant social and political intimidation, creates a condition of groupthink supported by the madness of zombies on the streets.

The purpose of this essay is to describe the origins of the Big Lie, its enablers, and, to the extent possible, identify its cultural consequences.

The Big Lie as a Propaganda Method: Its Original Source

If one studies the Big Lie as a weapon of political warfare, it becomes clear that Nazi ideologues perfected it. They openly took pride in this accomplishment and credited the British for showing the way. During the Great War, British propaganda successfully encouraged the desertion of the Central Powers’ troops from the front and demoralized the public at home. Hitler, for his part, emphasized the British use of atrocity propaganda and complained that Imperial Germany never understood the importance of propaganda and those who dealt with it were incompetent.

One tool that the British employed was atrocity propaganda. Their most remarkable accusation was that Imperial Germany created a “cadaver exploitation establishment,” the so-called Kadaververwerkungsanstalt, for the production of soap. British atrocity propaganda had been effective, but after the war, the public felt duped. It left a residue of distrust, betrayal, and a mood of nihilism. This approach worked in the short term but opened a Pandora’s Box.

On the eve of World War II, the memory of atrocity propaganda provided a compelling argument against American intervention on the side of Britain and contributed to the denial of sympathy for Jews in their moment of dire need. In the United States, where isolationist sentiment ran strong, influential politicians accused the British of having “tricked America into war.” Furthermore, in the 1930s, when Nazi Germany began to perpetrate real atrocities, many refused to believe the reports. For example, historian Robert Jan van Pelt reported in The Case for Auschwitz, that:

The American magazine the Christian Century, which in 1944 had still chided American newspapers for giving much attention to the discoveries made by the Soviets in Maidanek—claiming at the time that the “parallel between this story and the ‘corpse factory’ atrocity tale was too striking to be overlooked”—had to (hesitantly) admit in 1945 that it had been wrong, and that the parallel with ‘the cadaver factory story of the last war’ did not hold. ‘The evidence is too conclusive…. The thing is well-nigh incredible. But it happened.’²

After the liberation of the concentration camps, General Dwight D. Eisenhower arranged for visits of American delegations to bear witness to the greatest atrocity of all time.³

Adolf Hitler Advocates the Big Lie

During World War I, the British disseminated propaganda over a limited period but stopped at the conclusion of hostilities. Fearing that Britain’s wartime propaganda machinery would be turned against him, Lloyd George quickly dismantled it.⁴ Nevertheless, World War I paved the way for the rise of totalitarian dictatorship. The wartime experience not only undermined the traditional order in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy but also “hastened the development of the industrial arts, weapons, communications, and management which facilitated the totalitarian thrust.”⁵

According to Adolf Hitler, British propaganda experts produced the original “Big Lie.” In his view, they spread the paranoiac myth that Imperial Germany was the innocent victim of British mendacity. A few citations from Vol. 1, Ch. 6, “War Propaganda,” of Mein Kampf, published in 1925 and 1926, reveal Hitler’s grasp of the method. According to Hitler, the British spread certain lies, particularly the accusation of atrocities, and that “the German enemy” was “the sole guilty party for the outbreak of war.” Later in the same chapter, he commented on its cost-effectiveness and the need for scale. He explained that it was more desirable to tell big lies rather than small ones.

All advertising, whether in business or politics, achieves success through the continuity and sustained uniformity of its application.

Here, too, the example of enemy war propaganda was typical; limited to a few points, devised exclusively for the masses, carried on with indefatigable persistence. Once the basic ideas and methods of execution were recognized as correct, they were applied throughout the whole War without the slightest change. At first, the propaganda’s claims were so impudent that people thought it insane; later, they got on people’s nerves, and in the end, they were believed.

After four and a half years, a revolution broke out in Germany, and its slogans originated in the enemy’s war propaganda.

And in England, they understood one more thing: that this spiritual weapon can succeed only if applied on a tremendous scale, and that success amply covers all costs.⁶

In 1939, Harold Nicolson, a former British diplomat who had once been posted in Germany, wrote a penetrating analysis, Why Britain is at War. In this brief study, he emphasized Hitler’s methods, drawing on passages from Mein Kampf:

… Again, and again does Hitler lay it down that the born leaders of men must be able to tell enormous lies. ‘It is better,’ he says, ‘to stick to an argument even you know it not to be true than to provoke discussion by trying to improve upon it.’ ‘The masses,’ he writes again, ‘will fall victims to a big lie more readily than to a small one, for they themselves only tell small lies, being ashamed to tell big ones. Untruthfulness on a large scale does not occur to them, and they do not believe in the possibility of such amazing impudence, such scandalous falsification, on the part of others.’⁷

It is noteworthy that Hitler recommended sticking to an argument even if one knows it is not true rather than to provoke discussion. That is, one must add the element of stubborn one-sidedness in order to spread a big lie. A dangerous cultural consequence is its cumulative impact, which results in the creation of a totalitarian reality based on a state-sponsored myth.

The Creation of a “Fictional World of Untruth” as a Totalitarian Tool

Having the means to control the total environment, block competing information through the use of terror and coercion, and project their messages both domestically and abroad, the new totalitarian regimes could bend the truth as long as their power held out. Thus, they were able to transform what originally had been a finite moment of untruth into a sustained artificial reality.

Indeed, the Bolsheviks were the first to adopt propaganda in peacetime. Shortly thereafter, Hitler emulated them. E. H. Carr explained that: “The Bolsheviks, when they seized power in Russia, found themselves desperately weak in the ordinary military and economic weapons of international conflict. Their principal strength lay in their influence over opinion in other countries; and it was therefore natural and necessary that they should exploit this weapon to the utmost.” ⁸

Hannah Arendt explained how totalitarian propaganda constructs a competing fictional world of untruth, possessing its own internal logic. Herein, one may identify the big jump from the inversion of the truth to the inversion of reality. Totalitarian propagandists took the idea of the Big Lie and prolonged its duration to create an alternative new reality:

Their art [of the totalitarian leaders] consists in using, and at the same time transcending, the elements of reality, of verifiable experiences, in the chosen fiction, and in generalizing them into regions which then are definitely removed from all possible control by individual experience. With such generalizations, totalitarian propaganda establishes a world fit to compete with the real one, whose main handicap is that it is not logical, consistent, and organized. The consistency of the fiction and the strictness of the organization make it possible for the generalization eventually to survive the explosion of more specific lies….⁹

The spread of lying on a large scale had unintended but destructive cultural consequences. In his famous essay, “The Prevention of Literature” (January 1946), George Orwell argued that totalitarian rule prevented literary creativity even in countries not under its domination: “But to be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes.”¹⁰ He developed this discussion by describing how the totalitarian structure inhibits literary creativity:

… Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure, but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer.¹¹

Thus, the writer or influencer in the service of a totalitarian regime cannot function without compromising his (or her) integrity.

Some Palestinian Lies and Their Cultural Consequences

In a discussion of the Big Lie as part of the Palestinian war against the Jewish State and Jews in general, we have described the method of the Big Lie as a propaganda tool. Following this approach, it is too easy to attach disproportionate weight to the world of untruth and big lies. It is a serious mistake to regard the basic historical facts as the antithesis of a fraudulent narrative. A verifiable fact should be the first premise and baseline. One should begin with the truth and refuse to be ensnared in a web of competing propaganda lies.

We may give two examples: a documented historical fact on the one hand and the calculated use of a Big Lie on the other. For the sake of historical perspective, one would do well to consider Ben Gurion’s first premise, which he described on January 7, 1937, to the Peel Commission:

I say on behalf of the Jews that the Bible is our Mandate, the Bible which was written by us, in our own language, in Hebrew in this very country. That is our Mandate. It is only recognition of this right which was expressed in the Balfour Declaration.¹²

In contrast to Ben Gurion’s clear statement, we have the antithesis of the historical truth, disclosed by Zuhair Muhsen, who was once a leader of the pro-Syrian Al Saika faction, a terrorist organization, and head of the military section and member of the Executive Council of the PLO. He declared in a March 1977 interview, which appeared in the Dutch newspaper, Trouw, that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people.

There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are part of one people, the Arab nation …. Only for political reasons do we carefully emphasize our Palestinian identity. The fact is that it is in the national interest to emphasize the existence of the Palestinians against Zionism. Indeed, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity is only for tactical reasons. The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new means of carrying on the struggle against Israel and for Arab unity… After we have gained our rights to all of Palestine, we must not for a moment postpone the reunification of Jordan and Palestine.¹³

Thomas L. Friedman presented a biographical vignette of Zuhair Muhsen: “A bovine figure with silver hair and a diamond-dripping Syrian wife, Alia, Mohsen was an armchair revolutionary if there ever was one. He was known in Beirut as Mr. Carpet, because of all the Persian carpets he and his men had stolen during the Lebanese civil war. When the rigors of the revolution became too much for him, Mohsen would split to an apartment he kept on the famous La Croisette Promenade in Cannes, probably the most expensive stretch of real estate on the French Riviera.”¹⁴

Zuhair was explicit. His statements support the conclusion that the Jews have a history, while the Arabs in Palestine fabricated a narrative. Here again we may cite one of the vital lessons of Mein Kampf: “Conceal your real intentions; conciliate your strongest opponents by pretending that you are on their side; gradually increase the strength of your position by tactical advances, each one of which is not vital enough to arise serious opposition but the sum of which enormously add to your power; and then, at a given moment, throw down the mask and launch a mass attack upon your enemies.”¹⁵

The Falsification of History as Part of the Big Lie

The Palestinian story has several layers, and one of the most important, which has usually been suppressed, is the collaboration of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, with the Third Reich. Recent scholarship by the Swiss historian, Werner Rings, “names four different forms of collaboration, according to the degree of identification with the ideology of Nazism: tactical, neutral, conditional and unconditional collaboration.”¹⁶ There can be no doubt that Amin al-Husseini was an “unconditional collaborator” on the ideological level and an unequivocal supporter of The Final Solution.

Accordingly, it is important to present the Mufti in his own words. The message of these primary sources is relevant in the light of accusations that the Israelis have become the new Nazis and carry out genocide. For his part, Haj Amin consistently declared that Jews were the common enemy of Islam and of Nazi Germany.¹⁷ He frequently went on tour to encourage the Balkan SS Muslim units, and the Axis radio stations faithfully covered these visits. During his broadcast of January 21, 1944, he proclaimed:

The Reich is fighting against the same enemies who robbed the Moslems of their countries and suppressed their faith in Asia, Africa and Europe…. National Socialist Germany is fighting against world Jewry. The Koran says, “You will find that the Jews are the worst enemies of the Moslems.” There are considerable similarities between Islamic principles and those of National Socialism, namely in the affirmation of struggle and fellowship, in the stress of the leadership idea, in the ideal of order. All this brings our ideologies close together and facilitates cooperation. I am happy to see in this division a visible and practical expression of both ideologies.¹⁸

The following are the Mufti’s words at an official protest rally held in Berlin on November 2, 1943, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration:

… Germany is also fighting against the common enemy who oppressed the Arabs and the Muslims in their respective lands. It understood the Jews perfectly and decided to find a final solution to the Jewish menace, which will contain their mischief in the world.

… Arabs and Muslims! Beware not to lose the opportunity, and do not let the Allied deception distract you from liberating Holy Palestine from colonization and complete Judaization. Do not fear your enemies and their propaganda and keep in mind that you never fought the Jews without their becoming the loser [stormy and long applause]. Allah has determined that there will never be a stable arrangement for the Jews, and that no state should be established for them … I do not have the slightest doubt that we shall succeed in the victory against them, despite the massive help of the cruel allies. Allah helps those to victory who help Him. We will win and liberate our lands from the claws of the Allies.¹⁹

While the misdeeds of the Third Reich have been formally documented, and a representation of war criminals was held accountable in Nuremberg. This did not include Haj Amin. One of the reasons that he escaped accountability was explained in the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question: “After the defeat of the Axis powers, Haj Amin attempted without success to seek refuge in Switzerland but was captured by French troops in Germany; he managed to escape. The French authorities turned a blind eye to his “escape” in order to spite London for its role in making France leave Syria and Lebanon after World War II. So, in April 1946, Haj Amin took refuge in Egypt and was a guest of King Faruq. He made Cairo his headquarters because the British authorities would not allow him to return to Palestine.”²⁰

Thus, a major aspect of the history of the Palestinian Arab movement is the fact that they have refused to come to terms with their own Nazi past. In contrast, a good number of German historians and industrialists ,has in good faith, engaged in this confrontation with the past.

Ahmed Shukairy, Ideologue of the Palestine-Arab Movement

The ideological continuation of the Mufti’s positions may be found in the wisdom of Achmad Shukairy, author of the Palestine Covenant and the first Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. When discussing the characteristics of this movement, one must include the Covenant’s different versions from 1964 onward. It provides a codified statement that embodies its myths and goals. At first, it had little impact, but over time it became the PLO’s credo. The former chief of the Romanian secret service who came over to the West, Ion Mihai Pacepa, disclosed that,

… in 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter—a document which had been drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman.²¹

Ahmad Shukairy (1908-1980) was known for his rhetorical skills, but on the eve of the Six-Day War, on May 22, 1967, went too far when he called on the Arabs “to throw the Jews into the sea.” This outburst discredited the cause of the Palestinian Arabs.

A scholarly reader of the Middle East Forum, using the pen name “Gloria,” wrote that, “After the Six-Day War, realizing the great damage it had done to Arabs, Arab propagandists, including Shukairy himself, tried, somehow to “transform” his statement from the meaning of annihilation (or ‘ethnic cleansing’), but it was too late, the clarity of his authentic genocide message was already publicized.” “Gloria” referred to Shukairy as the “Arab-Nazi mastermind” of “Arab Palestine” by accusing Israel of the crime of the Arabs, that of Nazism. Although Shukairy was the first head of the Palestine Liberation Organization and had drafted the Covenant, he was removed from office because of the embarrassment he had caused. It is also possible to make a reasonable guess as to the identity of “Gloria.” He was, most likely, the late Prof. Barry Rubin, founder and Director of The Global Research in International Affairs Center (GLORIA) at Reichman University in Herzliya. Daniel Pipes, who published the Gloria contribution, described Shukeiry as the “Genocidal pro-Nazi Arab Leader,” and “father of the apartheid slander.”²²

There has been a tendency to underestimate the importance of Shukairy and the pervasiveness of his thought. He was more than an “Arab-Nazi mastermind.” It would be more accurate to view him as the ideologue of the Palestinian Arab cause. Under the British Mandate, Shukairy had been a member of the Arab Higher Committee, which the Mufti of Jerusalem founded in 1936 for the purpose of opposing the compromise of Partition which the Peel Commission proposed. His outlook is reflected in the text of the Palestinian Covenant, in his participation in U.N. debates as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador, and in his general writings.

Once more, we face the Big Lie. The problem here is that Shukairy, who delivered an “authentic genocidal message,” really meant what he said, and the main task of subsequent Palestinian messaging became to cover up their real goal, politicide, the destruction of the State of Israel and its people, and to create a veneer of respectability that would permit the PLO to pass in polite society.

When we examine the basic premise of the Palestinian Arab movement, we should consider the contributions of its leading proponents: Haj Amin al-Husseini, Ahmed Shuqairy, and Yasir Arafat. According to Shukairy, the only way to solve the problem of Israel would be to destroy the Jewish State and drive the Jews out through uncompromising armed struggle.²³

Prof. Yehoshafat Harkabi, head of Israeli military intelligence from 1955-1959, recognized the importance of the Covenant and carefully analyzed its content. He considered the absoluteness of its message was inherently totalitarian:

The Palestinian movement claims absoluteness and “totality”—there is absolute justice in the Palestinian stand in contrast to the absolute injustice of Israel;…Right is on the Palestinian side only; only they are worthy of self-determination; the Israelis are barely human creatures who at most may be tolerated in the Palestinian state as individuals or as a religious community…; the historical link of the Jews with the land of Israel is deceit; the spiritual link as expressed in the centrality of the land of Israel in Judaism is a fraud; international decisions such as the Mandate granted by the League of Nations and the United Nations Partition Resolution are all consigned to nothingness in a cavalier manner.²⁴

The following statement by Yasser Arafat in 1974 during a visit to Venezuela confirms the continuity of the main goal described above:

Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war which will last for generations …. We shall not rest until the day that we return to our home, and until we destroy Israel …. The destruction of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and the guidelines of that struggle have remained firm since the establishment of Fatah in 1965.²⁵

In retrospect, we may be certain that Arafat’s Venezuela statement was intentional. Again, Hannah Arendt contributed an insight with regard to this type of statement, “In order not to overestimate the instances of the propaganda lies one should recall the much more numerous instances in which Hitler was completely sincere and brutally unequivocal in the definition of the movement’s true aims, but they were simply not acknowledged by a public unprepared for such consistency.”²⁶

The First Premise of the Palestinian-Arab Movement as Expressed in Primary Sources

Shukairy serves as the link between Nazi thought and the present. We can learn from his speeches at the United Nations, where he served as the Saudi Ambassador from 1957 to 1962. There, he expressed himself in language that was contemptuous and uncouth. On October 3, 1961, he declared that “Israel’s emergence to independence was not the legitimate establishment of a legitimate state, since Israel was ‘the embodiment of imperialism, the symbol of colonialism, the fruition of capitalism and the author … of anti-Semitism.’” He concluded by denouncing what he termed the United States’ “support for this flagrant injustice called Israel and its treatment as if it were ‘the fiftieth state of the United States.’”²⁷ In the production of propaganda, the technique of ganging epithets together is called “amalgamation,” a method consistent with his accusations of “racism,” “Nazism,” “genocide,” and “apartheid.”²⁸

Generally, we get only one side of the story, but on this occasion, the representative of Israel at the UN, Foreign Minister Golda Meir, was present and answered Shukairy. [She] pointed out that the Arab-Israel conflict was only one source of tension in the area, hostility to Israel being ‘largely a means used by Arab leaders to divert the attention of their peoples from their own unsolved problems and hardships.’ Meir observed that she ‘could not help wondering why he did not worry less about other countries, and worry more about the state of affairs in his own [which at the time was Saudi Arabia].’ ²⁹

During the same year, the Eichmann Trial began on April 11, 1961. The issue of accountability for war crimes was a sensitive matter, and we can understand Shukairy’s accusation against Israel as a form of projection, accusing the “Zionist entity” of Nazi crimes, many of which the Palestinian Arab leadership of the Mandatory era had enthusiastically supported. The unstated motive for his accusations was to divert attention from this collaboration with the Third Reich and to revive their use with renewed emphasis. On October 17, 1961, Shukairy “denied Israel’s right to try Eichmann since Israel was ‘another Eichmann in a State.’”³⁰ Imagine a self-identified Palestinian-Nazi sympathizer accusing the Jewish State of Nazism!

On the following day, October 18, Foreign Minister Meir delivered a vigorous counterattack.

“In reply to Shukairy, the Israeli FM expressed surprise that ‘this vicious speech with its racial incitement … and its outright falsehoods,’ had been allowed to continue unchecked.” She then added that ‘…. An equation between Israel and Nazism could only be made by “someone who is only totally ignorant of what Nazism was, or was indifferent to it.”’ Indeed, she added, Shukairy had once been a member of the Arab Higher Committee [The central political organ of the Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine] whose leader [Haj Amin al-Husseini] had spent the war years in Germany. As for the suggestion for a commission to investigate the conditions of the Israeli Arabs, Mrs. Meir declared that she believed ‘that a rather more urgent investigation would be more appropriate in regard to the question of slavery in Saudi Arabia.’”³¹

For those who are ignorant of history there is hardly an escape from “The Fictional World of Untruth.” We have an ignorant and gullible generation which has become easy prey to Big Lies and evil accusations. The accusation looms in the background, and its only antidote is a strong dose of the historical truth. We still have much to learn from the example of Golda Meir. She understood the challenge and knew how to confront such a misanthrope.

At present, we live with the direct legacy of the Nazi past of the Palestinian Arabs and their sympathizers in the form of a massive antisemitic propaganda attack, particularly the accusation of genocide against Israel which followed the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. The time has come to expose such big lies and challenge “the masses” who “will fall victims to a big lie more readily than to a small one, for they themselves only tell small lies, being ashamed to tell big ones [Mein Kampf].”

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Notes