The 'progressive' Left needs Israel to be evil.
From Mossad sharks to “rape dogs,” conspiracy theories about Israelis are migrating from the Middle East into mainstream Western discourse.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Lauren Shaer, a Canadian-Israeli-American who studied Middle East history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The “progressive” Left in the West has defined itself using Israel.
Their relevance depends on a war against Israel — and if the real one ends, they’ll manufacture another one.
Nicholas Kristof, whose opinion piece in the New York Times last week accused Israeli dogs of being trained to rape Palestinian inmates, is copying a Middle Eastern tactic that has worked well in that region — to maintain durable, deeply embedded Jew-hatred in backward societies.
When I first told my Israeli husband about the Kristof opinion claim, he laughed and asked, “Who was it? The Egyptians?”
Israelis are accustomed to the wild and ridiculous smear fantasies that regularly come out of press in the Muslim world. We laugh at them because they’re usually so insane that it’s hard to imagine even a child believing them.
I don’t think many Westerners realize this, but this kind of conspiracy theory — a weirdly large proportion of which involve animals — is actually completely normal in Arab-language press across the Middle East.
I remember about 20-ish years ago, when watching the news in Israel, the presenters snickered as they reported the Saudi headline warning people not to buy melons. Apparently Israel was exporting melons to Arab countries that had been “injected with AIDS.” Then there were the Mossad-trained sharks who were spies and also trained to eat Egyptians. This was seriously reported in Egyptian papers.
The Palestinians have claimed Israel trained wild pigs to make scary noises and dig up Arabs’ trees. This one was a real head-scratcher. Don’t worry, as the Palestine Press Agency explained it, the Jews trained the pigs to distinguish between Arab and Jewish farms, so it makes sense.
Just last week, Fatah (which runs the Palestinian Authority parts of the West Bank) claimed that there are unusually large rats and mice in Gaza, which have been engineered and trained by Israel to attack people. In 2015, Hamas claimed that Israel trained dolphins fitted with cameras to spy on the organization and attack them.
The Palestinians also came up with the Zionist “sex gum” conspiracy in Gaza. It was causing the youth to behave unbecomingly. That’s right, if you caught your teen having sex, the IDF airdropped “sex gum.” What else could possibly explain this shameless immorality?
In 2011, an “Israeli-trained spy vulture” was captured and detained by Saudi Arabia.
Of course there are all the old go-to’s like Jews are behind 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, and every incident of a Quran being burned. There’s even the conspiracy that Jews “spread homosexuality” in order to control the world.
They don’t publish this “news” because it’s true, and it’s certainly not satire. They do it because their Muslim audiences want it to be true. In fact, they need it to be true. One of the most dangerous possibilities in the dysfunctional mess of corruption that is most Arab dictatorships is this: What if the Jews were never the reason for any of it?
It’s not about a crazy story here or there. When an entire society’s self-image is fragile and teetering — for example, when you’ve been raised to believe that the Jew is the lowest form of humanity, and then you start and lose five wars against them — the steady drum beat of blame deflection is how you keep your ego intact. It’s how you reconcile what you think you deserve with a reality that is wanting.
The momentum must be maintained. There needs to be a steady rhythm of “It’s the Jews” — a cadence without enough space in between beats for someone to entertain the thought that God’s promise of your supremacy being unrealized might have something to do with you. No, no — it’s not that. It’s just that, sometimes, Jew things happen to good people.
The wild colorfulness of the stories — all these brilliantly trained animals — is also telling about the egos of the “victims” of these plots. Jews don’t think about Muslims this way; we’re too busy for that. The psychological war is one-sided, which is insulting to the side engaging in it. These crazy stories assign the level of importance to the storyteller he wants. Why would your enemy go to such extreme and elaborate lengths to hurt you? What could be more “cool” than getting your own dedicated department of the Mossad?! (Even if it is a totally weird zoo-like one.)
This is what antisemitism is in most Muslim countries. It’s not just the licensed grievance; it’s affirmation of a war that doesn’t really exist. It’s what’s normal and predictable. It’s not extreme. It’s the train on the tracks that needs to keep going, so these stories keep coming — whether they’re needed to explain something horrible like 9/11 or not. Even if the content is crazy, it’s a kind of norm-setting. It’s virtue signaling that has been going on for over 1,000 years.
We all suffer from the need for stories to follow a certain arc and portray us in a way that affirms our sense of who we are. The story of the progressive Left in the West is being changed. The “Free Palestine” industrial complex is calling the shots. What would they do if the real war ends? Do we honestly think that a ceasefire would mean “Free Palestine” would get to work with Palestinians to create a civil alternative to Hamas, or help de-radicalize young Palestinians so a two-state solution might actually be possible? Are they going to shut up and read a history book?
That’s not what the encampment crowd came for. Their war isn’t over because their war was never about freedom for Palestinians. The Palestinians are just the front line in their war, which is and has always been against Israel. That war can’t end, because then this movement wouldn’t need to exist. They need it to continue.
The New York Times’ campaign against Israel of the last two-and-a-half years has become a drum beat, the train of anti-Israel accusations in steady rhythm, with not enough time between beats to actually analyze claims. The fact-checking standards slowly edging downwards.
Because, why bother? This isn’t about truth anymore. Nicholas Kristof’s opinion piece represents a step-change into a new realm: knowingly publishing unchallenged propaganda.
The rape dog libel is business-as-usual nonsense from Hamas-infiltrated NGO’s in the Middle East. What’s newsworthy is the slithering of these tactics into the Western press. But maybe this was predictable. Every test the Times performed indicated they should keep going.
Falsely claiming Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza — that’s what their readers wanted. Photos falsely claiming a child with severe incurable cerebral palsy was being starved to death by Israel — it’s what their readers wanted. Misapplication of the term genocide, even before it would have been physically possible to determine if it was true, and continuing to hammer on it even after the International Criminal Court prosecutor admits it can’t be sustained — it’s what their readers wanted. False reporting of starvation blamed on Israel — it’s what their readers wanted.
So, why not just take the plunge into complete erasure of journalistic standards when it comes to Israel? The goal isn’t journalism here; it’s maintaining a relevance of the “progressive” movement, whose current form is fueled by obsession with Israel.
The New York Times has made a bet with the Kristof libel: that their readers need this, that they will forgo real journalism in exchange for incitement against Jews, that they’ll sacrifice truth on the altar of the “progressive” movement.
 | A guest post by
|
Lauren, what makes your article so disturbing is not the absurdity of some of these conspiracy theories themselves, but the realization that narratives and accusations once confined mostly to the fringes of Middle Eastern propaganda are increasingly migrating into mainstream Western discourse dressed in more sophisticated language.
And I think your larger point is correct: for parts of the modern progressive movement, Israel has become psychologically and ideologically necessary as a permanent villain. The movement increasingly defines itself morally through opposition to Israel, Zionism, colonialism, “oppression,” and power structures. If the actual conflict ever ended, much of the emotional and ideological energy sustaining these movements would lose its central organizing symbol.
What is especially frightening is how quickly journalistic and intellectual standards seem to collapse once Israel becomes the subject. Claims that would normally require extreme scrutiny suddenly get amplified, repeated, emotionally framed, and circulated before proper verification because they reinforce a narrative audiences already emotionally want to believe.
And honestly, I think one of the deepest problems here is that many people no longer consume information primarily to understand reality. They consume information to reinforce identity, tribe, morality, and emotional belonging. Once that happens, conspiracy theories, distortions, exaggerations, and propaganda become much easier to absorb so long as they flatter the worldview people already want to hold.
Lauren, you just gave the NYT lazy editors (opinion writers) ideas for their next article. We will be looking for their Pulitzer.