Netanyahu's hasbara minister says there is no occupied land in Palestine and peddles Zionist mythology. "We haven't stolen anything.... This house is ours by deed."
As awareness of Palestinian dispossession and persecution grows around the world, we keep waiting for a more sophisticated Israeli response to that record.
Now we’ve gotten an answer from the Israeli minister of hasbara, or public diplomacy, Galit Distel Atbaryan, and it’s a rehash of the most Jewish-supremacist tropes of Zionist ideology.
There is no occupation. Jews were here first by biblical “deed” and were thrown off their land. Then by a “miracle” Jewish sovereignty was restored. Palestinians have no right to this land because they’re not an “ancient people.” So anything we do to Palestinians on our land is justified.
Atbaryan, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and former novelist and pundit, made the remarks on Facebook on September 11. (Translated by the Israeli Apartheid account).
Efforts to distract the world’s attention from the “occupied elephant in the room” by talking up Israeli technology have been a failure, Atbaryan said:
“Imagine a pack of thieves invading a home, expelling the family that’s been living there by law and then asking the neighbors to accept it as the most equal pack of thieves in the world because it’s innovative and it invented Waze and the cherry tomato and it holds the coolest gay pride parades in the stolen living room.
No neighbor will feel sympathy for this pack of thieves no matter how successful it is.
This is exactly where Israeli Hasbara has missed the mark time after time – when there’s an inherent moral flaw in our very existence on this land, then it really doesn’t matter how successful we are. A thief is a thief and an occupier is an occupier.
Atbaryan explained how she would take on the occupation frontally, by denying it:
[W]e haven’t stolen anything…. This house is ours by deed.
We were expelled from it by force.
And we have returned to it but almost by miracle…
I will clarify that Palestinian consciousness is a late development and that this is not about an ancient people that lived here as a nation before we came back home.
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