“ISRAEL SAYS THANK YOU.” Reads on billboards that the Israeli embassy posted before Christmas in several public places in the Czech Republic. When I saw one of them in Prague 6, I wanted to vomit. The government, which should represent me as a Czech citizen, proudly supports the violence that the Israeli regime perpetrates against the Palestinian population, whose homeland it has occupied for 75 years. The Prime Minister of Czechia, Petr Fiala, stated that our country will be “the voice of Israel in Europe” and plans to continue to support Israeli apartheid with arms supplies, which he would like to increase. As if our Prime Minister was inspired by the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a right-wing idol who supported South African apartheid until the very end of her rule. She then called the leading fighter against apartheid and later President of the Republic of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, a terrorist. Similarly, as the South African apartheid regime could have been grateful to the British government and the BBC, today the Israeli regime can thank not only the Czech government but also Czech Television, the war correspondents, or the “experts” on the so-called Middle East and other prominent figures in determining public discussion. They provide Israel with a valuable service: together, they are successfully spreading Israeli war propaganda and silencing voices that express solidarity with Palestine.

For example, reporter Tereza Šídlová from Seznam zprávy informs us in one of her articles that “the sponsor of Hamas is Iran, whose ally is Russia.” According to Šídlová, who previously served as a press adviser to the Israeli embassy, it is therefore a fight between totalitarianism and democracy, and regardless of whether this “democracy” commits genocide or war crimes, we must support it without hesitation. Similar arguments comparing the Palestinian resistance to the “Russian regime” can also be seen on the pages of Israel's National Security Institute, an influential Tel Aviv think tank that is closely connected to the Israeli military establishment. After all, the National Security Institute received financial support from the European Union as part of the same package as the Israeli arms companies Elbit Systems and Raytheon, without which Israeli apartheid could not continue to commit its crimes.

In the Czech public space, there are many propagandists like Šídlová. For example, a military correspondent Vojtěch Boháč from the server Voxpot brought live reports directly from Israeli military bases. On X, you can read contributions from a journalist of the Czech Television Jakub Szántó, who is not ashamed to directly quote the Israeli army that it regrets the civilian victims it murdered during a recent attack on the Maghazi refugee camp in the middle of the Gaza Strip. Other times, you can ponder together with Szántó over the “bestiality [of] Gaza terrorists from 7/10”. This commentary on a report by the New York Times seemingly fits perfectly into his orientalist dreams of bloodthirsty, lust-driven Arab raiders who want nothing but to brutally attack Jewish women. These notions were not thwarted by the fact that the necessary forensic evidence to support these serious accusations is inexistent and that the Israeli testimonies on which the report heavily relies are untrustworthy. This does not mean that sexual violence did not occur on October 7; only that there is not enough evidence for the claims Szántó is making, the same claims Israel uses to justify the Gaza genocide. This is consistent with the detailed analysis by the Mondoweiss editorial team according to which the New York Times manipulated a family of one of the victims “… in service of Israeli Hasbara to score a journalistic achievement, which in reality is nothing more than a repetition of fake news and government propaganda.” Moreover, feminist organizations have also condemned The New York Times for spreading these unsubstantiated accusations in a petition by the initiative Speak up: “We firmly reject The Times’ discreditable report and its exploitation of women’s bodies and struggles as a means to fabricate assault incidents and push propaganda for an unlawful occupation, thereby abetting the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.”

Szántó and journalists like him can however freely publish their texts and continue to “impartially” observe the ongoing genocide and the murder of their colleagues not only in Gaza, where the Israeli army has already killed over 100 but also in neighboring Lebanon. There, according to the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, they were killed deliberately by Israel.

While the public discourse is dominated by journalists and politicians who uncritically adopt Israeli propaganda, internationally, we are witnessing brutal anti-Palestinian attacks. During the last one in the United States, three young university students were shot. At the time of the shooting, they were wearing Palestinian scarves and speaking Arabic. One of them will never walk again. At the state level, we are witnessing violent arrests of peace activists in Germany, police occupation of Sonnenallee in Berlin, or stripping Palestinian children born in Belgium of their Belgian citizenship. In many European countries, and especially in Czechia, Zionism is perceived as a prerequisite for legitimate participation in public discussion regarding the Israeli invasion of Gaza and its support by our country. Yet it is the state of Israel and its zionist ideology that is responsible for the genocidal violence perpetrated in Gaza, against which the Republic of South Africa has filed a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice.

Zionism: the ideology par excellence

Zionism is the official ideology of the state of Israel, which determines that Jews have the exclusive right to self-determination in the territory of historic Palestine, that is, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In other words, only people of Jewish origin can acquire full rights in Israel and only they have the right to further settle in this territory. Professor Joseph Massad describes how Israel applies this ideological principle in all spheres of state policy in his article Israel’s Right to Be Racist. Massad shows how Israel uses its racist founding ideology at the legislative level and restricts not only the political rights of Palestinian women and men but also their freedom to choose a partner or to regain possession of property that belonged to them before 1948. For example, my grandmother Shefiya was born in Palestine in 1937 but will never see her homeland again due to Israel’s racist law of return. Conversely, an American citizen of Jewish origin born in New York, whose whole family history is connected with this metropolis, can move to Israel very easily. It is important to keep in mind that my grandmother’s story is everything but unique. According to the UN, there are nearly seven million Palestinian refugees whom Israel denies the right to return to their homeland, thus violating General Assembly Resolution 194.

The very existence of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, the Palestinian women and men, is a problem for Israel that can only be solved by ethnic cleansing or genocide. To realize the Zionist project in Palestine, it was necessary to carry out the so-called transfer, the forced expulsion of the indigenous population, to create space for the Jewish majority that took their place. The book Ten Myths About Israel (2017, 2022) by an Israeli historian and professor at the University of Exeter, Ilan Pappé, provides a detailed analysis of the colonization of Palestine. According to him, Israel, like the USA, Australia, or New Zealand, is a state founded on settler colonialism. However, Israel is at an earlier stage of the colonial process and Jewish identity is an integral part of its project. Consequently, due to Zionist ideology, Palestinians do not have the right to exist in the territory where they lived as a nation for generations and which has been associated with the entirety of their national history.

In the Czech political space, Zionism acts as an unspoken, and therefore hardly noticeable, part of the predispositions for participation in public debate. To be an active and influential participant, one must first meet several demands: be anti-communist (because communism is, according to the dominant discourse, a totalitarian ideology equal to Nazism) and support the global hegemonic project led by the government of the USA (because the opposite pole is the terrorist Russian Federation). Last but not least, one must support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state (i.e., be a Zionist), because otherwise, according to the Ministry of the Interior, one might be at risk of committing a criminal offense. If we do not meet these conditions, our arguments, regardless of how elaborate and fact-based they might be, will be swept off the table. Why? Because we have crossed the ideological line set by a Zionormative society, according to which Zionism and the existence of an ethnonational Jewish state have become a generally accepted truth.

Hasbara will explain it to us

For the Israeli state machinery, it is crucial to influence public opinion in countries on which it depends for support. It tries to achieve this through the so-called Hasbara, השברה [hasbara] in Hebrew. Hasbara means explaining and is the main tool of war propaganda directly funded from Israel’s state budget. I constantly encounter the arguments and rhetorical traps that Hasbara creates, such as those that force Palestinians to continually defend their existence. One of them is the racist prejudice that Palestinians around the world are motivated by fanatical hatred of people of Jewish origin in their struggle for liberation. This intentionally misleading idea immediately forces me, as a Palestinian, to switch to a defensive discourse and engage in the argumentative game created by Hasbara. It tries to characterize Israel as a victim and at the same time diverts attention from its role as a colonizer. Thus, Hasbara justifies Israeli crimes against humanity in a way that is acceptable to the inhabitants and voters in NATO states. It draws on racist notions of dark, violent Arab-Muslims combined with an ingrained fear of bloody raids by the original inhabitants of North America against European settlers. It is simply the idea of a clash of civilizations taken to the absurd. For Palestinian voices in the public space, the operation of Hasbara means constant sailing against the current and erasing their experiences from the discourse, which are then replaced by extreme pro-Israeli views, such as those expressed by Rabbi Jerochim, who compares Palestinians to Nazis.

In the Czech Republic, the role of Hasbara is played mainly by public, private, and some independent media, which have thoughtlessly adopted from the Israeli army the theory that Hamas aims to utterly destroy the entire “Western civilization” and attacks not only Jews but also Christians. Yet the myth that the motivation of the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation is anti-Semitism and not the political and national aspirations of an occupied nation is part of a disinformation campaign, as noted by Jewish writer Anna Baltzer. It is Israel who, during the blanket bombing of Gaza, destroyed one of the oldest churches in Palestine, who supports the displacement of Armenian Christians from Jerusalem, and who attacked Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, on Christmas Day. However, you will find no mention of these facts in the Czech outlets that publish, broadcast, or print Israeli propaganda.

What then does the Czech state support by adopting the mechanisms of Hasbara and what do prominent Czech journalists work on to be justified? From October 7 to the end of last year, the Israeli army has already murdered more than 22,000 Palestinians, at least 7,000 are missing under the rubble, over 57,000 are injured, and more than 1.2 million Palestinians have been driven from their homes. This hardly believable statistic according to the UN exceeds all other civilian war victims worldwide over the last four years. There is no doubt that this is a genocide, in part because of repeated statements by Israeli state representatives, members of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), and many commentators in the Israeli media, who openly talk about exterminating the population and levelling Gaza to the ground. Even the new anthem of Israeli pop, Charbu Darbu, which has been at the top of the popularity charts for weeks, literally calls for the killing of Palestinian women and men. Indeed, nothing is as true a sign of a civilized society, which Israel is proudly considered by the West, as the fact that it can readily come up with a catchy soundtrack for the genocide it is committing on the indigenous population of its colonized land.

We have to be braver

According to the UN, Palestinians have the indisputable right to armed struggle against Israeli occupation, even though International Law was created in the context of the dominance of colonial powers. These powers had (and still do have) the goal of reproducing the status quo - that is, primarily to keep their influential positions. Even this legal system considered Zionism to be a form of racism until 1991 and the armed struggle against it a legitimate one. So how is it possible that today, despite the UN resolution, we must broadly condemn the Palestinian resistance?

If our society normalizes the requirement of nonviolent resistance for the occupied Palestinian women and men, we should apply the same principle to the Israeli regime. Imagine that Israel had to refrain from violence and instead of a military invasion and occupation kindly ask the Palestinians to cede more territory. It would probably not find success in this endeavor. However, Zionist colonial ideology holds that the violence of the colonizer is always legitimate and the violence of the colonized is always illegitimate. If we agree to this ideological convention, we condemn Palestinian women and men to annihilation or life under endless occupation and apartheid. By condemning the Palestinian resistance, we self-servingly harm the Palestinian struggle for national and political rights and fall into the trap of Hasbara, which wants to control the narrative.

Professor Norman Finkelstein, who researches Palestinian resistance, refused to condemn the events of October 7, citing the abolitionists of the 19th century in the USA, where slavery was legal at the time. They had a rather surprising reaction to the attacks carried out in 1831 by the enslaved Nat Turner with a group of armed men. Not only did they not condemn Turner, but they also rejected the hypocrites who were silent on and profited from the system of slavery, while they were outraged and demanded harsh punishment when it came to white lives being affected. Racism was behind such hypocrisy at the time, today in similar circumstances, according to Finkelstein, Zionism lies at its core. The complete blockade of Gaza, repeated assaults on it, and the ongoing colonization of Palestinian territories is what paved the road to October 7. Professor Finkelstein also argues that since Israel continues to violate International Law and the human rights of the occupied Palestinians by continuing the occupation, it is Israel that bears responsibility for the abducted Israelis and Israeli civilian victims. Professor Finkelstein should be an inspiration to us, and his unyielding solidarity, maintained even at the cost of losing a job or social standing, an example.

We can fight against Zionormative discourse in only one effective way: opposition to Zionism, and in uncompromising solidarity with the Palestinians. We simply have to be braver: not afraid to call out Israel’s crimes for what they are – colonial violence, and the Palestinian resistance for what it is – a struggle similar to that waged by the indigenous inhabitants of North America against European settlers. Together, we must therefore fight against the culture of silent disagreement and realize that when money from our taxes goes to an arms industry, which materially supports genocide, our silence means complicity. By working to transform the public debate, using the right terms, and especially by elevating Palestinian voices, we prepare the ground for further steps in the fight against the complicity of the Czech state with Israeli crimes. We must move away from the individualistic understanding of this liberation struggle and understand that as long as our society collectively approves of the violence committed against the Palestinians, it will never be just or happy.

Although it may not seem so, Israel is losing its colonial war, both on the information and the military fronts. Far fewer people now believe that Israel is in the right and that Palestinians are crazed terrorists and religious fanatics. Israeli Hasbara has had to adapt to this new situation in recent years. It no longer tries to mainly convince us that Israel is an island of democracy and civilization in the barbaric jungle of Islam. Instead, it claims that the Palestinian nation has no chance of survival and that its liberation struggle is lost. We must not allow Israeli propaganda to break our support for the unalienable right of Palestinian women and men to an equal life and full rights in their country. We must not allow ourselves to be deprived of Gramsci’s optimism of will and only be left with the pessimism of intellect. As the Palestinian revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani, murdered in 1972 along with his seventeen-year-old niece by the Israeli Mossad in Beirut, said, “You may have heard from imperialist propaganda that the Palestinians are exhausted, that they have given up their struggle and that they have been defeated by reactionary Israel. Comrades, do not believe them. There is no end to our struggle.”

Our struggle does not end with this article. Join us on Transmission 4 Palestine, an event we co-organised with Amphibian, nūr prague, Prague Youth & Student Collective for Palestine and Ankali & Planeta Za. This Saturday, 13th of January!