By Jamal Kanj

In a previous article I discussed Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s proclivity to deceive, cheat and lie. During my research, however, I came across an article by the Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who had a different take on the issue.

Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2011, Hass argued that “Netanyahu is less of a liar than past Israeli PMs”. She explained that unlike other Israeli prime ministers, Netanyahu “doesn’t bother to cover the gap between words and bulldozers”.

Political Zionism must have anticipated its apparent nemesis, Joseph Goebbels, who said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Culture of lies

It all started with their slogan: “A land without people, for a people without land.”

The unscrupulous Zionist media repeated this myth until it became a reality. To quote another Zionist, Henry Kissinger: ‘It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.”

Creating a new perception, the New Testament, regarded as false by Zionists, became Zionism’s temporal document to fool Christians. God turned into a real estate agent and the Old Testament a property deed to sanctify the appropriation of land and the murder of people.

Shimon Peres

Former Israeli President Shimon Peres, whom I described before as the “king of deception”, once told President John F. Kennedy: “I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first.”

Decades later, Peres clarified that he did not mean to lie to Kennedy, but he couldn’t “deviate from what [Israeli Prime Minister David] Ben Gurion had told Kennedy earlier”. Peres had to lie in order to cover a master lie.

The 1967 war

On another perceived truth, it is incontrovertible that Israel started the 1967 war. However, in any public polling the perception of most Westerners is that Arab armies attacked Israel in 1967.

Golda Meir

In 1969 Golda Meir told the Sunday Times that Palestinians “did not exist”. The Ukrainian-born and Milwaukee-reared Israeli prime minister couldn’t notice the millions of Palestinians who were either refugees or subjugated under her occupation.

Meir must have seriously internalised the big lie that Palestine was “without people”.

Yitzhak Shamir

In 1989 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir lied to President George H.W. Bush on the illegal Jews-only colonies, leading the president to oppose a USD 10 billion loan guarantee to Israel.

Arial Sharon

Israeli Prime Minister Aerial Sharon, whom one of his ministers once said “he sometimes tells the truth by mistake”, deceived the younger, gullible George W. Bush by presenting the evacuation of Jews-only colonies from Gaza as a “painful” sacrifice for peace.

According to his senior adviser, Dov Weissglass, Sharon’s action was intended to freeze the peace process and prevent “the establishment of a Palestinian state, discussion on the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem”.

Weissglass described the disengagement as enough formaldehyde to the international community “so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians”.

Ezer Weizmann

Ezer Weizmann, a former Israeli president and a so-called dove, once explained that security was not an issue if Israel withdrew from the West Bank, but Israel wouldn’t “exist according to the scale, spirit and quality she now embodies”.

Chaim Herzog

In 1972 another Israeli president, Chaim Herzog, said: “I am not prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner.”

Yet, there is a perceived Western belief that Israeli leaders do not oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state. This is despite the fact that no Israeli government has ever identified the exact location or geographic boundaries of the state they profess to accept.

If Pinocchio was a real character, he would have been more likely a card-carrying Zionist and an expert in the Israeli art of confusing perception with reality.

A version of this article was first published by the Gulf Daily News. The version here is published by permission of Jamal Kanj.