Venomous verbiage and outright lies are today’s easiest access weapons of choice targeting the Jewish state.

By Grant Gochin

In an era where truth perishes first in the crucible of ideological warfare, Pallywood – the Palestinian staging of fake injuries, deaths, and atrocities to demonize Israel – alongside the UN, NGOs, and authoritative bodies unleashes a relentless torrent of lies against Israel. These calculated deceptions are intended to delegitimize Israel, ignite global hatred, and erode legitimate and civilized discourse.

Staged videos and genocide smears recycle discredited narratives without consequence; once exposed as frauds, the sources should lose all credibility forever, yet these liars pivot and spew venom anew, without shame. Their masks must be ripped away, and they must be held accountable for the bloodshed fueled by their mendacity.

This media assault constitutes the 8th front in the global war on Jews, battling for truth amid seven physical arenas: Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, West Bank, Syria, Iraq, and Iran – now joined by Türkiye’s severance of ties on August 29, 2025, as declared by Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan. Betrayal extends to proxies like South Africa, whose actions expose deep integration with Iran’s anti-Israel agenda.

STAGING VICTIMHOOD

At the heart of Pallywood lies the staging of phony scenes portraying Israel as a monstrous entity, a deadly tactic designed to fabricate victimhood and spark anti-Jewish violence. Notable examples include Hamas falsely blaming Israel for the Al-Ahli Hospital blast – a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket – exploiting media lags to spread lies.

AP and CNN amplify these falsehoods by parroting Hamas, inflating casualty figures while ignoring terrorism, a bias rooted in antisemitism that has consistently endangered Jews. As a singular example, a recent Facebook video provides visual evidence of Pallywood staging, showing actors simulating child injuries with props, further exposing this manipulative tactic to a gullible global audience.

The world media eagerly consumed and inflated the lies of Green Beret Anthony Aguilar, a former US soldier who claimed to witness Israeli Defense Forces shooting at starving Palestinian crowds at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid hubs. His July 25, 2025, BBC interview alleging “brutality and indiscriminate force” against an “unarmed, starving population” was repeated ad nauseam by outlets like The Guardian and Al Jazeera, despite the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and IDF labeling his claims “categorically false” and citing his termination for misconduct. This fabricated narrative, amplified without scrutiny, morphed into de facto truth, amplifying the demonization of Israel and showcasing media’s willingness to prioritize sensationalism over fact-checking.

Photos of children with genetic disorders have been cynically repurposed by anti-Israel activists and media like Reuters and BBC to portray Israel as starving Gaza’s population. These images, stripped of medical context and circulated widely, exploit viewers’ emotions, turning a medical tragedy into a propaganda tool.

These fabrications thrive as global audiences crave anti-Israel sensationalism over factual reporting, weaponizing manipulation with devastating effect. The Palestinian “lie industry” persistently twists narratives, suppressing the truth. Discredited hoaxes demand permanent banishment, but the perpetrators resurface unaccountably. Today, almost the only reason to check mainstream news is to discern the precise ways people are being deceived.

LAUNDERING LIES

The UN has become a conduit for laundering anti-Israel disinformation, violating its neutrality by endorsing biased Palestinian claims of Gaza famine and genocide – tactics reminiscent of the “big lie” strategy that fuels antisemitism.

In Melanie Phillip’s piece “The Indestructible Myth of Famine in Gaza,” she condemns the blind acceptance of the UN’s genocidal portrayal, arguing it ignores reality. The call to “Dismantle the United Nations” insists that such distortions necessitate a complete overhaul or dissolution.

Western governments recycle these UN-Hamas narratives, vilifying Israelis. Retracted reports and biased sourcing have permanently discredited the UN, yet it persists unabated in its deceitful campaign.

The UN’s declaration of a “man-made famine” in Gaza belies a deeper struggle for narrative control and aid dominance. In May 2024, Israel and the US launched the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) as an alternative to UNRWA, but the UN denounced it as “fake”, refusing cooperation and leaving food trucks stranded. The IPC, meanwhile, tweaked its famine criteria, adopting a MUAC shortcut and halving the child malnutrition threshold from 30% to 15%, a move that eases declarations amid restricted access and which critics attribute to political motives. Recent analysis by Israel’s Foreign Ministry exposes IPC falsifications, including 182 fabricated “virtual deaths”, misuse of prohibited MUAC data, cherry-picking from 7,519 of 15,749 surveyed children, and burying surveys showing no famine -proof of a deliberate agenda to demonize Israel. The UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, falsely claimed 14,000 child deaths in days, retracting the statement after 2.5 million views, though the damage was irreversible. This is a constant strategy to place lies into the public domain and generate hate and outrage against Israel. Facts be damned!

WEAPONISING WORDS

European-funded NGOs amplify fabrications to fuel the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International propagate debunked claims deliberately overlooking rocket attacks and terrorism. Since October 7, they have inverted reality, accusing Israel of genocide to deflect from Hamas atrocities, while organizations like Defense for Children International spread known falsehoods online.

These NGOs weaponize rhetoric for International Criminal Court (ICC) lawfare, slapping apartheid labels via staged incidents and centralizing BDS with “collective punishment” lies, all funded by the EU and private foundations while omitting Israel’s right to self-defense. Phillips condemns this “unprecedented lie campaign demonizing Israel,” urging a robust counter-narrative.

LOADED LANGUAGE

Language is loaded as “genocide” and “starvation” are warped to target Israel. The UN labels Gaza warfare “consistent with genocide”, reinterpreting casualties and aid as extermination while ignoring Hamas’s role in shortages. Human Rights Watch claims “extermination/genocide” via starvation, disregarding deliveries, while Amnesty amends thresholds to fit the “starvation for genocide” narrative.

Despite exposure of the lies, the press persists regardless of the truth. Enough is enough – tear down the edifice of deceit, seize back the narrative, and let unassailable truth reign supreme. We stand at the epicenter of a global pogrom, a sinister transnational resurgence of antisemitism masquerading as righteous justice, twisting historical hatreds into a sanctimonious moral crusade. George Orwell’s most dystopian imagination pales before the orchestrated media war against Israel, a masterclass in manipulation where every lie is polished into propaganda, every distortion weaponized to vilify, and every shred of truth buried beneath a deluge of orchestrated falsehoods.

About the writer:

Grant Arthur Gochin currently serves as the Honorary Consul for the Republic of Togo. He is the Emeritus Special Envoy for Diaspora Affairs for the African Union, which represents the fifty-five African nations, and Emeritus Vice Dean of the Los Angeles Consular Corps, the second largest Consular Corps in the world. Gochin is actively involved in Jewish affairs, focusing on historical justice. He has spent the past twenty five years documenting and restoring signs of Jewish life in Lithuania. He has served as the Chair of the Maceva Project in Lithuania, which mapped / inventoried / documented / restored over fifty abandoned and neglected Jewish cemeteries. Gochin is the author of “Malice, Murder and Manipulation”, published in 2013. His book documents his family history of oppression in Lithuania. He is presently working on a project to expose the current Holocaust revisionism within the Lithuanian government. Professionally, Gochin is a Certified Financial Planner and practices as a Wealth Advisor in California, where he lives with his family. Personal site: https://www.grantgochin.com/

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Gaza  has liberated people across the world to openly express their hate for Jews.

By David E. Kaplan

It sounds disgusting because it is disgusting.

The more pictures and video clips of suffering Gazans flood the media market, the more people across the world feel free – nay I say feel “liberated” – to once again publicly and proudly release their suspended or suppressed hatred of Jews. No longer the type of ‘civilized’, accepted or sanitized antipathy of the 1950s and 1960s that I recall from my native South Africa in the shape of refusing membership to Jews at golf clubs or being called “Hymie” at school.  No, Gaza has now presented a free pass to all across this planet that Jews anywhere are legitimate targets for abuse and very much worse.

The result is they turf you off planes even if you are a group of 50 French Jewish youth movement kids returning home as a Spanish airline saw fit to do; kick you out of restaurants and camp sites, refuse your booking at hotels, spit at you, punch and kick, set fire to you when you are in a synagogue and even shoot you dead as you leave a Jewish event. This is not the Germany of the 1930s but much of the world in 2025 and Gaza opened the floodgates of this ‘liberated’, unabashed hatred! While the verb ‘liberate’  would normally be understood to mean “to free”, here it is a return  to the automatic position of antipathy held over millennia now explosively unleased by Gaza.

The more the people of Gaza appear via the media to be suffering, the freer the people of the world  feel to safely return  to their default position of not only comfortably despising Jews but publicly expressing it – whether verbal or by violence. There is a calibrated correlation. When confronted over their dastardly acts against random Jews whether in Europe, UK, US, Canada or Australia, they respond in amplified verbiage containing the word “GAZA” – as if it’s an obvious satisfactory explanation or accepted legal defense. As he was dragged away after gunning down dead two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, 31-year-old Chicago-born Elias Rodrigues, shouted:

“…I did it for Gaza.”

This is reminiscent of the Middle Ages when killing Jews was not a universally illegal act and was often not punished, and sometimes even encouraged by authorities.  For much of the Middle Ages, the GAZA then was the Black Death, when pogroms against Jews were permitted or even instigated by government officials across Europe.  What has really changed when corruption of the truth back then and corrupting the truth today results in the same  mass hatred leading to persecution of Jews?

Google ‘current rise in antisemitism’  – as I did – and you will be instantly met with endless links  to articles like:

• Gaza conflict leads to rise in antisemitism

• Reflection & Resilience: A Year of Unprecedented Antisemitism

• U.S. Antisemitic Incidents Skyrocketed 360% in Aftermath of Attack in Israel

• Driven by Israel-Gaza War, Antisemitism in U.S. Reached an Unprecedented High in 2023

• Protracted war in Gaza partly to blame for ‘unprecedented’ wave of Australian antisemitic attacks, experts say

• SWC Alarmed by Unprecedented Surge in Anti-Semitic Incidents in Germany

• Huge rise in antisemitic abuse in UK since Hamas attack, says charity

What do all these articles – and can go on and on –  have in common? All record increasing violence against Jews unleashed by the media mania’s contrived coverage of Gaza portraying Israelis as Nazis on a murderous spree of innocent Palestinians.  Intentionally neglected in this narrative is that Israel:

– is engaged in an existential war with an enemy that perpetrated the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

– that this enemy had proudly pledged to repeat such massacres in the future and

– that they are holding hostages in horrendous conditions facing imminent death.

FUELING THE FRENZY

With the mass hysteria against Jews persisting unabated, it does beg the question that if the war in Gaza was suddenly brought to an end, would the incidents of antisemitism commensurately dissipate? Probably because there would be much less visual media coverage which is fueling the frenzy.  But then again, it would only be a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ that some other peg will appear for willing folk to happily hang their antisemitism on.

All this begs the question:

Have we crossed a bridge beyond what Israelis would commonly respond with “Kacha ze” (ככה זה) meaning “This is how it is” or has a threshold been breached where the lives of Jews globally are in mortal danger? Simply put:

Is there today no safe place for Jews anywhere on this planet without the provision of serious security?

A disturbing harbinger is the language of Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, who after accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza said:

“We have no atomic bombs to stop Israel”.

Accusing Israel of a false genocide, the leader of a country that has a notorious history of antisemitism, threatens the Jewish state with a real genocide. The Spanish PM laments, “If only I had an atom bomb.”

The Iberian prime minister’s careful word choice reveals his deep-rooted national inclination – what the Spanish Inquisition did not ultimately achieve – wiping out any trace of Jews!

With the way the world today looks upon Jews is an unsettling reminder why there is not only the need of an Israel but a strong defensible Israel that can safeguard a Jewish future to ensure in the words of Israel’s illustrious late foreign minister, Abba Eban:

“Israel’s future will be longer than its past”

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).