The Young Benjamin Netanyahu Manipulator of the 1980s

“The illusion of knowledge is deadlier than ignorance. By painting Palestinians as eternal refusers, Netanyahu made the world believe the fiction, and that fiction became more powerful than the truth.” - Stephen Hawking

“The oppressor thrives because he recruits accomplices, sometimes among the oppressed, sometimes among the global audience that swallows his narrative without question.” - Simone de Beauvoir

“Propaganda is the democracy’s bludgeon. Netanyahu wielded it like a hammer, crushing Palestinian grievances beneath the narrative that every demand was a threat.” - Noam Chomsky

“To enslave a people, you first strip their history. By erasing centuries of coexistence under the Ottomans, Netanyahu convinced the world that Muslims, Christians, and Jews were destined to be enemies.” - John Henrik Clarke

Perception manipulation, rather than the truth, is frequently used for survival in Israeli politics. A young Benjamin Netanyahu was an early master of this. When he served as Israel's ambassador to the UN in the 1980s, he painted or negatively stereotyped the Palestinians as a group that denied Israel's right to exist, rather than the Palestinian people fighting for recognition.

This was a deliberate manipulation of the reversal of truth: he portrayed all Christian and Muslim Palestinians as refusal of the Jewish people, then all of the Palestinian complaints would be deemed unfounded and all of their demands would be viewed as threats. In fact, historically during the Ottoman empire, Jewish and Christian and Muslims lived together and respected one another without mass murdering each other.