Op-Ed: S.C. Legoni: The anti-Israel narrative is the opposite of the truth
The anti-Israel narrative is not just misleading. It is the opposite of the truth, S.C. Legoni writes.
The anti-Israel narrative is more than just dishonest. It inverts reality altogether.
Recently, pictures of children with birth defects were passed off on social media and in major news outlets as “evidence” that Israel was starving Gazans. In truth, it is Israeli hostages who are being starved. Hamas itself released videos showing emaciated Israelis tortured in Hamas dungeons. The real victims of starvation and abuse are used as props by their tormentors, and the world blames the victims.
But this reversal of fact is not limited to one instance. It is the core mechanism of the entire anti-Israel narrative.
Take the accusation that Jews are colonizers in a foreign land. It’s false. Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel, as confirmed by archeological evidence and genetic studies. Indeed, it is Muslim armies that swept up from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century and colonized the region.
No European empire created the Jewish state. Jews maintained a continuous presence in the land of Israel since ancient times, and many returned to their homeland in the modern era. In contrast, recent Arab settlement accelerated only after Jews began purchasing land legally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
During the Ottoman period, much of the land was underdeveloped and sparsely populated. Mark Twain described the region in his 1869 book Innocents Abroad as a “desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds-a silent mournful expanse....A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action....We never saw a human being on the whole route....There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”
The influx of Muslim laborers came only after Zionists made the land flourish, building cities, draining swamps, and creating economic opportunity.
Another persistent myth suggests that Jews were given someone else’s land as compensation for the Holocaust, despite the fact that the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine recognized the connection of the Jewish people to the land decades before.
In reality, again, it is the reverse. In 1921, Britain gave most of the land originally designated for a Jewish homeland to the Arabs, creating a new country called Trans-Jordan, now Jordan, in order to compensate the Hashemite clan for its expulsion from Arabia.
Later, the 1947 UN Partition Plan attempted to divide, yet again, what remained of the territory, offering the Jews only a sliver of their ancestral land. Even now, countries around the world persist in calling for Israel to cede territory administered under its sovereignty to others who have no historical or legal claim to it.
A growing chorus of propagandists promote an absurd narrative that the Jews of today are somehow not the “real Jews,” despite the fact that they maintained their identity, religion, and connection to the land through centuries of dispersal and persecution. But the mirror, on the other hand, is true. Those now calling themselves “Palestinians” are not “real Palestinians.”
Though undoubtedly people, they are not a people in the national sense: rooted in a distinct culture, language, or history tied to a specific homeland. They trace their roots not to the land of Israel but to the wider Muslim world. Their political identity was invented with the formation, under the tutelage of the KGB, of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, only as a counterpoint to Zionism, and their claims are retroactive constructs, not indigenous truths. Zuheir Muhsein, head of the Military Operations Department of the PLO even admitted in 1977 that “the existence of a separate Palestinian identity is there for tactical reasons.”
Jews are accused of ethnic cleansing when indeed they are the victims of ethnic cleansing. Between the 1940s and 1970s, roughly a million Jews were expelled or forced to flee from Arab and Muslim countries where they had lived for centuries. These Jewish refugees were absorbed by Israel with no international outcry, no refugee camps, and no ongoing UN agencies dedicated to their cause.
The apartheid charge is another deliberate distortion. Israel is a multi-ethnic democracy where Arab citizens vote, serve in parliament, and enjoy full legal rights. The true system of apartheid was imposed on Jews for centuries in Muslim lands, where they were relegated to dhimmi status and subjected to institutional discrimination, forced taxes, and social inferiority under Islamic law.
Another recurring accusation is that Israel deliberately targets innocent civilians. But the truth is that Israeli civilians have been deliberately attacked from Gaza ever since Israel completely withdrew from the strip in 2005. Since that time, Hamas and other terror factions have fired tens of thousands of rockets and mortars into Israeli population centers, aiming not at military installations but at homes, schools, synagogues, and hospitals. These are not accidents or collateral damage. They are the intended targets.
The mask came off entirely on October 7th, 2023 when Hamas Nukhba terrorists stormed across the border in a premeditated campaign of barbarism. But they were not alone. In the hours that followed, hundreds of so-called “Palestinian civilians” also poured into southern Israel.
These were not innocent noncombatants. Many of them took part in the atrocities. Video, testimony, and forensic evidence shows so-called civilians looted homes, burned property, and in some cases participated directly in the rape, torture, kidnapping, and murder of Israeli men, women, and children. The world may pretend these perpetrators were somehow separate from the society that raised them. But the line between terrorist and civilian was obliterated by the Gazans themselves that day.
The accusation that Israel is committing genocide is perhaps the most inflammatory of all — and the most provably false. Since 1948, it is not Jews who have sought to exterminate others, but Arab regimes and terror groups that have repeatedly sought the annihilation of the Jewish state.
On the eve of Israel’s establishment, Arab leaders openly declared their intent to drive the Jews into the sea. In 1947, Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, said that “this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars.” Two decades later, before launching the Six Day War, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser stated that “our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” More recently, Hamas’s founding charter calls explicitly for Israel’s destruction and the annihilation of Jews.
And on October 7th, the world witnessed what such genocidal intent looks like in action. The goal was not territorial dispute. It was genocide.
In each case, the pattern is the same. Those who have been historically oppressed and displaced are cast as the oppressors. Those who colonized are rebranded as victims. This inversion of truth is not accidental. It is a carefully constructed narrative designed to delegitimize Israel’s existence, erase Jewish history, and pave the way for Israel’s destruction. It persists because it is emotionally potent, easy to digest, and rarely challenged.
But it is dangerous. Not just for Israel and Jews, but for those who perpetrate the inversion and for those who buy into it.
Isaiah Chapter 5 warns “woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!…That justify the wicked for a reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him! Therefore, as the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and the flame consumes the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust.”
Nothing consequential can be built on a foundation of lies. No civilization can last when it refuses to embrace virtue over vice. No humanity or meaning can be found in a fog of intentional delusion.
Not knowing the difference between righteousness and malevolence is ignorance. Not bothering to distinguish is folly. But inverting the two is evil itself. And societies that do so decay from within, as we see in the Middle East, now in Europe, and beginning even here. But we still have time to save America.
Don’t give in. Facts still matter. Reality matters. The Jewish people’s connection to the land of Israel is not only spiritual and religious. It is historic, aboriginal, legal, and righteous. The truth is clear for anyone who cares to see it. The anti-Israel narrative is not just misleading. It is the opposite of the truth.
S.C. Legoni is the pseudonym of a writer, international conflict analyst, and amateur theologian.