The latest pro-Israel talking point on Gaza is guaranteed to backfire

A Palestinian boy seeks a cooked meal at a charity kitchen in the Mawasi area of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on July 22. Photo by AFP/Getty Images

“Fake starving children.”

Those three words appeared on a screen behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a Sunday press conference. Speaking to international media, Netanyahu compared credible reports of starvation in Gaza to antisemitic tropes, like Jews killing Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes.

“Today, the Jewish state is being maligned in a similar way,” said Netanyahu, claiming that “the three most celebrated photos” of starvation in Gaza, which were displayed behind him, are “all fake.”

In framing horrified onlookers’ concerns as the latest example of a foolish public getting duped by propaganda, Netanyahu and other apologists are embracing an alarming rhetorical strategy, and drawing directly from the playbooks of those who deny the crimes of Oct. 7 and the Holocaust.

By “just asking questions” to create doubt, and suggesting that concerns about the veracity of individual anecdotes should outweigh a mountain of evidence, they’re adopting tactics similar to those long used to dispute the facts of antisemitic atrocities.

Questioning the Holocaust, and Oct. 7

Deniers of Jewish suffering have long manufactured doubt by taking advantage of vulnerabilities in human psychology.

The Nazis were skilled propagandists who not only falsely depicted Jews as sexually violent and greedy, but also curated fake, positive images of Jewish life during the Holocaust to disguise their crimes. Ahead of the International Committee of the Red Cross’ 1944 visit to the Theresienstadt ghetto, for example, prisoners were made to paint houses, plant gardens, and stage social events.

A wary observer might have recognized that a visit facilitated by Hitler’s regime would likely offer a warped view of the truth. But the act of personally seeing that false reality was so powerful that Red Cross employee Maurice Rossel wrote a report that largely accepted the Nazis’ fabrications as fact. Holocaust deniers have pointed to this visit as “proof” that accepted facts like the existence and use of gas chambers during the Shoah are lies.

Deniers also engage in a nefarious tactic known as “just asking questions.” Some of the most famous Holocaust deniers of the 20th century, like the British writer David Irving or the French academic Robert Faurisson, leaned on technical questions — all of which experts do in fact have answers for — to deny the entire Shoah. Irving insisted he was not a denier, but rather a historian who was just asking awkward questions.

For casual observers of history, questions like “if the gas chambers are real, why aren’t there photos of them in operation?” (answer) can be highly effective.

When it comes to the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, deniers have relied on isolated incidents to question broad truths.

For example, in the information fog following the terrorist attack, reports emerged that dozens of babies were killed and some beheaded. In time, it became clear that while a few very young children were killed on Oct. 7, it certainly wasn’t dozens. And while that doesn’t change the fact that Hamas did murder many Israelis, Oct. 7 deniers latched on to the confused initial information to insist that reports of any and all atrocities that day were a sham.

Some claimed the attacks were staged, and that the IDF killed most Israelis, using reporting about isolated cases of potential friendly fire to suggest Israel was responsible for every death. Others used the fact that some isolated accounts of sexual crimes were later debunked to dispute all claims of sexual violence on Oct. 7, even though extensive evidence confirms it took place.

The mixed stories that came out in the first days and weeks after Oct. 7 do not suggest a conspiracy. Instead, they represent the chaos on the ground; how well-meaning people can err in their actions or testimonies amid so much horror; and how it can take time for a clear sense of what happened during an attack to emerge.

Every Israeli, including me, is livid when antisemites use individual errors to deny all Hamas atrocities. Yet many Israelis are engaging in a version of this denialism with Gaza.

How Gaza starvation deniers employ similar tactics

Deniers reject historical facts because those facts are inconvenient to their personal chosen narratives.

The Holocaust is inconvenient to antisemites’ view of Jews as privileged and powerful. Oct. 7 is inconvenient to leftists’ view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a fight for liberation, in which one side is all good and the other is all bad.

Now, many Israelis and supporters of Israel are rejecting the widely documented truth of hunger in Gaza because it is inconvenient to their view of Israel as a fundamentally righteous country.

On social media, accounts like the YouTube channel Traveling Israel, which has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, are posting denialist videos, asking “Where are the starving men and women? If there was actually mass starvation, we would see people of all ages wasting away” — not just children.

In fact, adults are also dying from malnutrition; more than 40% of pregnant and breastfeeding women in Gaza are reported to be severely malnourished. Children may simply be more visible because they are particularly vulnerable to the effects of starvation.

Within Israel, the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 is casting doubt on starvation, referencing open restaurants that are “luxurious and gleaming.”

And Israeli authorities have posted scenes of bread going into ovens, large vats of stew being mixed, crates of abundant produce, and bustling markets in Gaza, commenting: “The food is there. The aid is there.”

All of these cases use individual images to misrepresent the collective picture, in which a third of Gazans are going without food for days at a time, and 96% report having gone to bed hungry multiple times in the past month.

Even when it comes to the “fake starving children” Netanyahu cited, the story is more complicated than he would have us believe. Yes, some of the children whose photos have gone viral have pre-existing conditions, like cystic fibrosis and cerebral palsy. That does not mean that they are not also affected by food scarcity. In the case of the viral, front-page New York Times photo of Muhammad Zakaria Ayoub al-Mutawaq, for example, Netanyahu skirted around the fact that a lack of food and medicine led al-Mutawaq’s health to spiral in recent months.

In these cases, Netanyahu latched on to information that emerged after the initial photos were released to undercut the broader premise of starving children. How is that any different from saying that additional information that came out about specific stories on Oct. 7 somehow calls the vaster atrocity into question?

The future depends on moving past denialism

At the beginning of his Sunday press conference, Netanyahu trotted out a fresh set of false promises: “Our goal is not to occupy Gaza,” he said, before pivoting into his remarks about starvation. “Our goal is to free Gaza.”

Many Israelis see through the mirage of Netanyahu’s lies when it comes to the war. Recent polling from Israel’s Channel 12 finds that nearly three-fourths of Israelis support a deal to end the war in exchange for the hostages.

And yet a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank, also found that nearly 79% of Israelis say they are not troubled by reports of starvation.

A small minority of these Israelis may be untroubled because they simply don’t care what happens to Palestinians. But for many, many more, the clearer explanation for their indifference is that they either believe mass starvation is not really unfolding, or they place the blame for it entirely on Hamas.

Denial has become a balm to the conscience of a war-battered nation still in grief over Oct. 7; still reeling from horrifying hostage videos; still mourning every soldier, often teenagers, sent to die in a war most agree is now senseless.

The country’s empathy may have dwindled from exhaustion. But Israel’s defenders should look to their own revulsion toward Holocaust and Oct 7. deniers to understand what they risk from employing similar tactics.

Skepticism of Oct. 7 by some in the pro-Palestinian camp has made it harder for Israelis and American Jews, including me, to listen with open ears to any of that movement’s claims. It’s easy to imagine that skepticism of hunger in Gaza among Israel’s supporters will make it much harder for others to take our word seriously when we call out credible cases of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias. And there are plenty of cases.

Confronting the truth of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and Israel’s complicity in it, doesn’t mean we can’t also insist that others see Hamas’ depravity.

But how can we expect others to be honest about reality and history if we can’t do the same?