A KGB operative warned us about the Israel narrative.
A Cold War playbook for distorting reality is now visible in the way Israel is framed and understood.
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This is a guest essay by Ido Singer, the child of a Holocaust survivor who writes the newsletter “When I Should Have Died.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Imagine a group of women, fake scars applied to their faces. They looked in a mirror and saw themselves disfigured.
Then, as they were led out of the room to a job interview, the researchers quietly removed the scars. The women walked in looking exactly as they always had.
They came back reporting massively increased discrimination.
Many of them identified specific comments the interviewer had made that they were certain referenced their disfigurement. Comments the interviewer never made with any such intention. The scar was gone. The wound was not.
That experiment stopped me cold — not because it was surprising, because it named something I had been watching for years without having the right language for it.
If we tell people constantly that they are oppressed, that the deck is stacked against them, that their skin color or their background or their faith makes them automatically disadvantaged, we do not need to oppress them. We just need them to look for it. They will find it everywhere: in neutral faces, in ordinary rooms, in a job interview where nobody is looking at a scar that does not exist.
That is not an accident. That is the point.
In 1984, a former KGB operative named Yuri Bezmenov sat down in front of a camera and explained, in precise detail, how to destroy a free society without firing a single shot. He called it ideological subversion. Four stages: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, normalization.
The first stage, demoralization, takes 15 to 20 years — exactly as long as it takes to educate one generation of students and expose them to the ideology of the subverter without any counterbalancing national values to weigh it against.
The goal of demoralization, Bezmenov explained, is not to convince people of anything. It is to make them incapable of processing reality accurately. Once a person is demoralized, he said, we cannot change their mind even if we expose them to authentic information. They are no longer receiving information. They are receiving confirmation of what they have already been programmed to feel.
He was describing 1984. He was also describing right now.
The demoralization does not require a KGB handler in every classroom. It requires only the adoption of one false idea and the patient installation of that idea into education, media, and culture over decades. Bezmenov’s chosen example was egalitarianism, the legislated insistence that all outcomes must be equal regardless of inputs, but the mechanism works with any false idea sufficiently installed.
The false idea currently running is this: You are a victim. The system is designed against you. Your suffering is not the result of circumstance, choice, or randomness. It is the result of oppression. And your oppressor has a face.
Once that idea is installed, the scar does not need to be real. The person will find it anyway. And they will report, with complete sincerity, that they saw it everywhere they went.
The Palestinian cause is the most successful current deployment of this mechanism in the Western world. I want to be precise here. There are Palestinians who have suffered. Real suffering exists. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is real. These things are not manufactured.
What is manufactured is the frame, which requires that Palestinians be presented as entirely agentless. Incapable of choosing differently, incapable of leadership that serves their people rather than perpetuating their misery, incapable of the kind of decision that Israel’s founders made in 1948 when they accepted partition and built a state, and that Palestinian leadership (back by several Arab states and others) rejected.
The frame requires that every rocket, every tunnel, every massacre, every hostage taken into a civilian home, be explained as the inevitable product of oppression rather than the chosen strategy of an ideology that has explicitly and repeatedly stated it prefers destruction (of the Jewish state) to the welfare of its own people.
To maintain this frame, Israel must be “the Nazi,” the oppressor, the singular cause of everything — not a small country surrounded by nations that have tried to destroy it in every decade of its existence, not a democracy that returned the Sinai to Egypt and withdrew from Gaza and southern Lebanon, not the country that offered a Palestinian state to the Palestinians multiple times (the last serious offer at Camp David in 2000) and was refused again and again. No, Israel must be the explanation for everything, because the frame requires a villain and the frame has already chosen one.
This is not analysis. It is the oldest trick in the political playbook, dressed in the language of human rights.
Bezmenov named the tactic explicitly: The subverter’s goal is to turn a stronger force against itself, to take the West’s genuine commitment to justice, to equality, to the protection of the vulnerable, and use that commitment as the delivery mechanism for the ideology that will destroy it. You do not attack Western values directly. You hijack them. You convince the West that its own existence is the oppression, and then you watch it dismantle itself from the inside.
The Palestinian cause, as deployed in Western universities and streets, is not primarily about Palestinians. It is about the West. It is about installing the oppressor-oppressed framework so thoroughly into an entire generation that they can no longer think outside it. Everything becomes colonialism. Everything becomes apartheid. Everything becomes genocide. The words lose their actual dictionary meanings. The meanings lose their anchor in reality. And the demoralized Westerner walks throughout life, looking for the scar, finding it everywhere, and reporting, with complete sincerity, that they saw it in every face.
I grew up in Tel Aviv. In 1991, I wore a gas mask and sat in a sealed room while Iraqi missiles flew overhead under threats of mustard gas deployed within them. During the Second Intifada, I learned to read a room the way soldiers read terrain. I narrowly missed two suicide bombings. I left in 2003 carrying everything that experience puts in a person’s body and never fully takes out. These experiences are not unique to me. Almost every Israeli had them.
I did not grow up with a theory about victimhood. I grew up with a lesson: Nobody is coming to save me.
That is not bitterness; it is the founding principle of the only functioning Jewish state in human history. For 2,000 years, Jews waited for someone to come. In Alexandria and in Spain and in Poland and in Germany, they waited. The waiting did not go well. The Zionist movement was not primarily a theological project; it was the conclusion of a people who had finally processed the data and understood that agency is not optional; agency is survival. When we have no agency, we have no safety. We are dead.
Israel exists because a few thousand people decided to stop waiting for someone to grant them safety and went to build it themselves. That decision, made under conditions of genuine persecution, genuine displacement, genuine historical trauma, produced a country. It produced the most battle-tested democracy in the world. It produced a population that is, despite everything, among the world’s happiest.
The decision to claim agency, even from the depths of the worst circumstances human beings have produced, produces life. The decision to embrace victimhood, even when the grievance is real, produces dependence, resentment, and a population that is permanently available to be aimed at whatever scapegoat the people running the system have selected this cycle.
The people running the system selected Israel. They always select Israel.
Yuri Bezmenov had a term for the people who carry the ideology without understanding what it is or where it leads: useful idiots. He meant it precisely. They are useful to the subverter. They are idiots about what they are being used for.
He also said something that should be tattooed on the wall of every university in the Western world: When the process is complete, when the new order has been established, the useful idiots are the first to go. The Islamists who overtook Iran in 1979 Iranian Revolution and claimed to be “liberators” had no further use for the protestors. The people who burned the most things down, chanted the loudest, built the most public registries of enemies, were executed quietly or publicly, because a stable authoritarian system cannot tolerate people who have demonstrated they will tear things apart for an idea.
They were never building anything. They were demolishing. And demolishers are only useful until the demolition is done.
In the West, the students in the encampments, the professors who give them cover, the administrators who cannot answer a question about genocide in front of legislators, the Western politicians who chanted river-to-sea from government podiums — none of them are running the system they are building. They are useful right now. They will not be useful later. Bezmenov watched this happen in country after country. He knew exactly how it ends.
Author and political commentator Konstantin Kisin, whom I learned about the scar experiment that I started this essay with, said very plainly: We have to teach young people in particular that they are strong, that they are capable, that they are able to overcome adversity — not that they are victims.
That sentence is the antidote, not the political antidote but the human one.
Because the most powerful thing the system can do to us is convince us, before we have even tried, that the outcome is already determined; that our skin color or our background or our faith or our address has already written the verdict; that the interviewer is already looking at a scar that we cannot see but that everyone else can; that the deck is so stacked, agency is a delusion the powerful tell the weak to keep them compliant.
That is the lie. And it is a lie designed by people who benefit from the paralysis manufactured by self-imposed victimhood.
The obstacle does not determine the outcome. The person does. They can only influence those who are already defeated. They need us defeated before they can use us. But we are not defeated; we have not even started.
The most radical act available to a human being right now is not the encampment or the protest or the hashtag or the boycott. It is accountability.
It is the decision to look at one’s life and ask not who did this to me, but what am I going to do about it. It is the decision to refuse the scar — not because the world is fair. It is not fair. It has never been fair. The Jews who built Israel did not build it because the world was fair. They built it because they had decided, finally and permanently, that waiting for fairness was a strategy that only produced more and more graves.
Yuri Bezmenov said the process of demoralization is irreversible for at least one generation once it takes root. I think he was mostly right, but not entirely, because demoralization operates on a population, and a population is made of individuals. And an individual can wake up.
We wake up the moment we decide that each of our lives is ours — not the system’s, not the oppressor’s, not the algorithm’s, not the professor’s, not the activist’s. Ours.
The scar was never there. They put it there. We looked in the mirror and saw it and walked into the world looking for confirmation. So let’s stop looking for the scar and start building something.
That is what they cannot stop — not the protest, not the petition, not the chant, not the hashtag. They cannot stop the person who decided to build something instead.
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A terrific article by Ido Singer! The Soviet Union is the one who came up with the absurd propaganda that Israel is a white settler colonial state and the Palestinians are poor, helpless colonized people robbed of their ancient homeland. It is propaganda that endures to this day. Nothing can be done to get rid of it accept try to share the facts. This framing has caused so many radicalized westerners especially young people, to see everything having to do with Israel through the lens of colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, you go down the list. But this isn’t the case, the situation is much more complex than that. It also obscures the fact that the real oppressor of the Palestinian people is NOT Israel. It is Fatah, Hamas and the Arab countries. If you’re looking for an apartheid against Palestinians, you’ll find it alright but not in Israel or the West Bank. But rather in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Fatah steal from their own people as do Hamas. Who exactly is the great oppressor of Palestinians here. You want to talk apartheid? Talk to ACTUAL victims of such an oppressive and evil system those black, Coloured and Asian South Africans who lived under the REAL apartheid and whom’s suffering you are trivializing by making that ridiculous comparison.
Genocide? Ethnic Cleansing? Colonialism? The Jewish people ironically enough experienced all those things and the Palestinians never have. On the first point, the Holocaust, that’s all I need to say. On ethnic cleansing that’s literally what almost every country Jews have ever lived in have done to them be of England, France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Sicily, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran all expelled their Jewish populations at some point in history. By the way, this is also what the Jordanians did when they took East Jerusalem in 1948. Colonialism? Well, the Jews were colonial subjects of the Arabs for centuries and by the British Empire for decades. Going back to the apartheid point, Jews and Christians are forbidden to pray at the Temple Mount while Muslims can. Is that not a religious apartheid?
Funny how the Arabs one of the most prolific colonizers in history who conquered and oppressed the Jews, Kurds, Copts, Bedouins, Druze, Maronites, Mandeans, Berbers, Samaritans, and the Persians and who enslaved millions of white Europeans and black Africans are now the one’s crying oppression. Meanwhile, the Jews are the ultimate example of de-colonization and an indigenous people taking back their homeland in action! The Palestinians used this propaganda to try and make Israel look like the bad guys. But all the while they were shooting, stabbing and kidnapping people, massacring civilians, hijacking planes, blowing up buses full of schoolchildren, raping young women at music festivals, looting, sacking and burning civilian homes, and all sorts of other horrors. It doesn’t matter if they are oppressed people or not, that is NOT how you fight for a cause! The Civil Rights Movement in the United States didn’t need to do these things to get civil rights legislation passed and Jim Crow dismantled.