1. Humans want to see themselves as good, even when they aren’t. Humans will fight you tooth and nail to preserve a flattering self-image they’ve cultivated their entire life and was often handed to them by primary care givers, parents, grandparents, etc. You’re not just facing someone’s interpretation of facts, you’re facing a person’s loyalties to people they love.

Facts can only be accepted if that pleasing self-image is not too threatened. A whole country can become a very substantial anchor in that self-image. Think:

I am good.

Israel is fundamentally important to my individual story.

Israel HAS TO be good.

2. Anything that leads away from Israel doing evil will be embraced uncritically. Any evidence that incriminates and accuses Israel will have to pass a thousand tests.

Example: from the start of Israel’s increasingly savage treatment of Gaza pro-Israelis happily embraced footage of the making of a fictional Lebanese war movie as proof that the carnage in Gaza was being faked. That’s where comments like: ‘In those fake videos you see bleeding children and seconds later they get up and walk away smiling.’ Yes, that happened on the set of a war movie that has nothing to do with Israeli actions in Gaza. For a pro-Israeli this is GOLD. One such video of a Lebanese film set dismisses a hundred thousand videos that show what hell Gaza became.

But… if a video vaguely suggests Hamas shoots Palestinians this is immediately enthusiastically embraced as proof that Hamas systematically kills its own population. No context is asked for. Suddenly no proof is required. Suddenly nobody faked the video. Videos that support their case are real, videos that make their beloved narrative collapse are automatically staged and fake.

Not for one second do they realize that this is how they decide what is real and what is not.

3. Israel and the western mainstream have for decades pushed the idea that Israel has only ever been in defensive wars. Even some Israeli historians have thoroughly debunked this, but if YouTube didn’t exist you would have never heard that the truth is far more nuanced and that some wars were partially defensive, but many actions were only painted as defensive. Again, it’s pointless to tell them this. They accept the version that pleases them and will not spend even two minutes considering that their accepted version could be wrong or incomplete.

4. Are all deniers evil? Many are merely protecting their self-image as a person free of any guilt, but of course in practice it means they do help cover up the systematic terrorizing of Palestinians by a very substantial segment of Israeli citizens and settlers.

5. The entire language employed discussing what’s happened concerning Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and other neighbours makes an accurate discussion nearly impossible. Look at the word ‘settler’ in the previous point. Settler sounds neutral. But in this context there is nothing neutral about it. You could call them ‘illegal settler’, but even that is wrong. You could call them ‘colonist’, but even that is weak. You could call them ‘violent supremacist land thief acting under the guise of religion’, but that is a mouthful. You can call them ‘nazis’, but that’s historically false for several reasons and kinda lazy. We’re not using accurate words. The language used to talk about these issues is heavily influenced by the pro-Israeli camp. That’s slowly changing, but we’re not there yet.

6. But the evidence is so overwhelming! It gets simply impossible to deny! No, it does not. Let’s look at everything that has to happen for a denier of Israeli atrocities to be right:

– hundreds of doctors and medical staff have to be lying when they tell us again and again that the IDF deliberately targets children. The injuries aren’t random, the percentage of children among the victims is highly unusual, there are too many testimonies saying the IDF did it on purpose, even IDF people break ranks and say their colleagues intentionally attacked children. A denier says: all fake. Misinterpretations. At worst collateral damage because of the debunked ‘human shields’ argument.

– Palestinians must be running a Holywood operation dozens of times the size of the actual Holywood if all the videos we see of cut up children are fake or AI. Also: the footage and pictures that exist of killed Palestinian children long before October 7th must also be fake. So Palestinians must have developed highly skilled video studios long before the rise of AI. Israeli court cases of IDF people on trial for brutally murdering Palestinian children must be mistakes and proof that Israel is actually a fantastic country. Let’s forget that it proves at least some murders are real and that the accused almost always walk with no sentence or a very light sentence. There is a clear example of this on my website. See link in the comments.

– Every international body that writes detailed reports on the abuse, rape, violent treatment of detained Palestinians by Israel jailors must all be lies, fabrications, anti-semitic drivel

– even mainstream outlets must at times fall for the fake videos, because a fraction of the carnage in Gaza and elsewhere is shared also by CNN and others. So even staunchly pro-Israeli American media outlets are sometimes duped

– Reports that there were so many dead bodies in Gaza they had to store them in ice cream trucks to keep them from decomposing? All fake. One wonders why us pro-Palestinians aren’t all Stephen King level bestseller authors, since our imagination as to horror is so very boundless

– statements by Israeli official of dealing with ‘human animals’, calls for the harshest responses, celebrities signing bombs sure to be headed towards civilians… All just rhethoric and symbolism in the heat of the moment

This list can go on for several pages. An awful lot has to happen to even deny 50 percent of what people have lived and seen. This must be the largest conspiracy in human history. Why was I never invited to gigantic conference with pro-Palestine muhajdeen like myself to get the detailed memo on keeping all the lies consistent with everyone else’s lies. It’s uncanny how people from all around the world manage to get into Gaza and come out with the same stories. Why is all the creativity in this world on the Palestinian side and so very little of it on the Israeli side? Did the Palestinians enter Israeli heads when they were sleeping and steal their bits of creativity to add to anti-Israeli fabrications?

It’s quite odd how beautiful little Israel with all its vast resources and huge edge in technology can’t seem to get a grip on the stories about Israel.

If none of it is true, and it’s the biggest plume of smoke in history with no fire, then poor little Israel is the victim of the most brilliantly coordinated smear campaign ever engineered by humankind. And this in spite of all western mainstream media underreporting what is happening. Or consistently giving Israel the benefit of doubt with words like ‘alledged’ or ‘video SEEMS to show IDF soldier shooting 7 month old video’ or ‘Israeli settlers APPEAR to set fire to Palestinian homes’.

7. Last point. Should it be a strategic goal of those who oppose the brutalization, dispossession, displacement, dehumanization, murder of Palestinians, Lebanese, etc to somehow corner pro-Israel fans into admitting all these atrocities are indeed taking place?

Do we in the pro-Palestine, pro-humanity camp even have any strategic goal other than with ever more exhaustion sharing Israeli crime, after Israeli crime, after Israeli crime?

It is impossible to convince these people. You’d have to sit with them face to face and you’d have to get to know each other intimately, for months, for years, to make even a small dent in their self-image and world view.

Czech filmmakers tried to convince a small group of fellow Czech citizens to make them see the war in Ukraine the way the Czech filmmakers saw things. They took them to Ukraine, to some of the ‘hottest’ zones. This tactic failed entirely. Nobody changed their mind on anything. Not the filmmakers, not the people volunteering to have their minds changed.

It’s my personal conviction that Israel can at this point only be stopped by overwhelming military opposition to its action, a radical cutting of ties by the west with Israel, a tight blockade of Israel, etc. All impossible unless western populations overthrow their current governments. You’ll agree that this will not happen. Tweets, reports, a doomed flotilla every few months and a few protests don’t get us there.

The other option is that the cost of pursuing the counterproductive project of 100 percent safety for Israel becomes too high, Israeli violence begets too much blowback, too much violence in return and causes a civil war between so called liberal Israelis and the fanatics driven to conquer ever more land, the religious nutcases. But as long as external enemies can be seen as threatening enough no such civil war will erupt. Israeli leaders know they need to cultivate external enemies to counter very dangerous internal divisions.

If we want to help the Palestinians having structurally useless ‘discussions’ with loyalists of Israel are one of the least productive moves we have available. At best they sharpen our arguments, our positions, our motivation, our factual knowledge when we look up stuff to check why those people are wrong. They take up a lot of energy, make you feel like you are arguing with someone who’s decided to switch of his or her brain just to make you sigh in sheer exasperation. They’re an energy sink hole. Maybe do it a couple times to get a feel for what the enemy is thinking, but then pivot to whatever directly benefits Palestinians.

It’s good to do stuff that triggers pro-Israel loyalists. It’s even better to ignore their asinine self-protecting comments. When people comment they crave a reaction, by not giving it you make them feel insignificant and erased. This hurts far more than any insult. An insult still recognizes them as something worthy of a reaction, no reaction says: you are nothing.

Perhaps a human’s biggest fear.

How lovely it would be if we get plant this insidious question in their heads:

‘Will I start mattering if a review my long standing opinions?’

There is a reason why one of the cruelest ways to control a child’s behaviour is to simply… put them in the corner with their back turned towards everyone engaged in other activities.

A child doesn’t deserve that.

Someone who finds time to excuse or deny the level of depravity of the IDF deserve it every second of every day.