There's Only Us

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

When I was in second grade, the kids in my class got a creative writing assignment that involved the scariest prompt I had ever read.

You wake up in the morning to discover that everyone over the age of 8 was carried away in the night by martians. What happens next? What do you do?

Even all these decades later, I can recall the anxiety this exercise inspired. What would I do? What could I do? A world with all the grownups gone — I could hardly picture anything worse. It was unimaginable and terrifying.

I don’t remember what I wrote. I just remember how I felt. And even though I’m almost 55 now, that feeling often returns, never more so than this past year when it has seemed to me, over and over and over again, that too many people in positions of power could not be less competent or trustworthy.

Yesterday I was leafing through the newest issue of The New Yorker and came to a story about an audio investigator — a job that involves, among other things, assessing the authenticity of videos based on sound analysis. The article opened with these lines:

In January, Al Jazeera English aired a segment with a sound analyst named Lawrence Abu Hamdan. He was asked to assess a video that had gone viral online. In the clip, a woman wearing a hijab claimed to be a nurse at a hospital in Gaza.

I actually looked up from the article and stared straight ahead for a moment, wondering if I could possibly be reading an article that acknowledged the tsunami of fake footage spread by Israel-haters online. The practice is so commonplace that there’s a word for it — Pallywood — and it covers a whole range of fakery.

Sometimes the viral images are AI-generated, like this cherubic three-fingered child holding a pristine five-legged cat, supposedly in the wreckage of Gaza.

Sometimes the images involve an actor like Saleh Aljafarawi, whose presence in manufactured grief-porn photos is so ubiquitous, it inspired an in-depth Tablet article.

Liel Leibovitz wrote:

Here he is, a victim of an Israeli air raid, writhing in pain in a Gaza hospital, his slender frame dotted by wires and electrodes. And there he goes again, a day or two later: He’s a radiologist now, helping a blood-smeared patient into a small MRI machine. Since Oct. 7 he has died on camera—not once but twice—and then, like Lazarus, come back to life. He sired a (fake, plastic) child, then lost it in a bombing; found work as a foreign correspondent; picked up a gun and joined the fighting; laughed joyfully when Jews were slaughtered; wept bitterly when the Jews struck back; discovered his calling as a singer; led us on guided tours of his shelled-out hometown.

Who is he? He is Saleh Aljafarawi, 25, Gazan, Hamas supporter, and professional social media influencer. The genre in which he works is Pallywood, the term coined by scholar Richard Landes to describe a long Palestinian cinematic tradition, in which a wide variety of political parties and terrorist groups create fake dramatic videos and peddle them to sympathetic Western media outlets who pay for these comically obvious fabrications and then cynically or cluelessly present them as indictments of the Jewish state’s cruelty.

And sometimes the heart-rending photos, supposedly of Gazan children, actually hail from unrest in other places, such as Syria or Lebanon.

But these machinations receive scant attention in the U.S. media, outside of Jewish venues.

So when I saw the opening of this New Yorker article — “In the clip, a woman wearing a hijab claimed to be a nurse at a hospital in Gaza” — I experienced a moment of disbelief. Might a magazine that so devoutly hewed to the playbook of the left-leaning American intelligentsia actually acknowledge Pallywood?

I glanced up at the author’s byline. Her name, Doreen St. Felix, didn’t sound Jewish, which made this possibility even less likely. Still, I dared for that split second to hope.

I needn’t have paused. The article went on to tell us:

She said that Hamas was attacking the hospital and ransacking its supplies. The sound of bombs could be heard in the background.

In the Al Jazeera segment, Abu Hamdan explains how he knows the video is bunk: “The way that those explosions resounded were not consistent with the way her voice was resounding in that room and resonating.” He determined that the sound of the explosions had been added on to the video after the fact.

Naturally, a New Yorker article about fake footage presents Hamas as the wrongfully accused party. Poor innocent Hamas, framed by those conniving Jews!

There are never any surprises in the newspaper. There is no deviation from the one singular narrative. Israelis are the region’s evil overlords and Palestinians are their innocent victims.

To peruse any left-leaning outlet that isn’t explicitly Jewish these days is to die a thousand deaths by 10 am.

Last night, I was reading a manuscript by a U.S. intelligence officer, an account of the months since October 7th, and I was struck by this passage:

I pull up the web pages of CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera to catch up on the news. All the major outlets are so singularly focused on Israel’s invasion of Gaza that they’re neglecting to cover the Houthi activity in the Red Sea, the missiles being fired into Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas, or the recent barrage of IRI (Islamic Republic of Iran) on U.S. installations in Iraq and Syria.

Daily I wonder why no one in the president’s administration has made an effort to re-frame this conflict in a way that would more accurately reflect the bigger, truer global picture.

Because of course this is not, first and foremost, a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, or even Israel and Hamas. This is a conflict between a present-day axis of evil — Iran, Russia, North Korea, China, and a range of jihadist proxy militias — and the west. It’s a conflict between liberal, democratic values and murderous, repressive jihadism / autocracy.

How can an existential threat of this magnitude — to the U.S. and other western countries as well as to Israel — go unremarked upon, day in and day out? How can the most elite universities and the worldliest journalists fail to see it? For that matter, how are these same journalists coming like a pack of rabid jackals for Joe Biden and treating Trump like a regular candidate? How can a president as stratospherically successful as Biden be so underrated and unappreciated?

When you think of all he’s done — cut child poverty by 50%, repaired our alliances, put a huge dent in medication costs, invested in clean energy to an unprecedented degree, achieved relief of student debt, and presided over an explosive economy (rock-bottom unemployment rates, a booming stock market, recession averted) among so many other achievements — I’m dumbfounded by the failure of the media to highlight any or all of this even as we’re faced with the looming threat of a fascist takeover.

Now more than ever, I feel that it’s up to us. There are no adults in the room but us. No one will save us but us. We have to organize, we have to write, we have to be vocal, we have to donate and we have to work our asses off.

Let’s fortify ourselves over Shabbat and get back into the ring on Sunday. We have three months and change to save the U.S., Ukraine and the remainder of the west.

I’ll be back with you on Monday. In the meantime, I send you love and strength.

Chazak chazak. Shabbat Shalom.

Am Yisrael Chai.