Influence on the Offense

When you read the 5 concepts of changing people’s minds and how to achieve peace, there are 2 major conclusions you can come up with:

1) This conflict is completely wonky, and so many fundamental points have been omitted or whitewashed by heavy marketing and overloaded data;

2) The average Anti-Israel advocate does not care about the Palestinians.

That’s right, they don’t. They care about this dangerous, genocidal idea of Palestinians taking over everything from the river to the sea. They care about this revolution. They care about demonizing Israel, But they don’t care about what happens to the Palestinians.

They don’t care about how the two Palestinian leaderships are between the most oppressive regimes in the world that actually use their own people’s suffering as a marketing tool. They don’t care about the Palestinian financial situation, because clearly, their BDS ideology includes boycotting companies that actually give jobs to the Palestinians.
They most certainly don’t care about the children, elderly, women, and the sick because they are not too concerned that schools, hospitals, and residential areas are being used as bomb storage and launch areas. They also don’t care what would happen to the Palestinians if they actually get their dream and conquer Israel and be ruled by the incredibly oppressive Hamas.

Maybe they hope for a one-state solution, but they are not concerned that it is pretty much a guarantee to ignite a huge deadly civil war. Do you know what also they don’t care about? The world. Because while they have been focused on this conflict that took about 6,000 lives in the 20 years, they ignored China, Syria, and Yemen, with nearly a million deceased or enslaved individuals.

In the end, there is only one conclusion. It seems that Anti-Israel activists do not really care about human rights, and most of them are not really progressive. And this is when things get interesting.

Unfortunately, when it comes to debating Israel, our arguments always flow in a defensive stream. It usually goes in the direction of:

Hater: “Why are you shooting civilians?”

Zionists: “First of all, we are attacking terrorists directly, and we are shooting because we need to defend ourselves from the continuous bombing. If we stop shooting, you will not stop; if you stop, we will.”

Hater: “But you are a colonizer! The Palestinians have the right to defend themselves!”

Zionists: “No! We are not! We have had a continuous presence for 3,300 years, and for 1,300 years, we were the majority. We are the indigenous people.”

And the conversation usually goes in that direction. And don’t get me wrong, these are all great defenses, but you have to be at the top of your game to continuously deflect the criticism.

It was once said: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” This is not about having all the answers – which we certainly do have. It’s about who makes the questions and shows control over the flow of the dialogue. The audience falls for those who show such displays of dominance.

So what if we could turn this around and, for once, put our opponent on the defensive?

Yes. It’s time to play on the offense.

And when I say offensive, I don’t mean criticizing the Palestinians and their leadership because, unfortunately, from what we learned, very few people seem to care about how bad this oppressive regime really is. But when I say offensive, I mean to hurt the credibility of the person who is defending or ignoring the crimes of the Palestinian dictators or at least scaring away neutral learners from humoring anti-Israel ideas.

It’s providing well-backed facts to show that anyone who is taking the anti-Israel side is a hypocritical attacker of human rights, a bigoted anti-Semite, and also someone who doesn’t even care about the Palestinian people.

We have to let them know!

There has never been another time in history when leadership has used human sacrifice, including children, women, and the sick, as a form of marketing. And they are supporting it!

That BDS movement is not just a genocidal movement that wants to push all the Jews to the sea. They have no real concern for the well-being of the Palestinians, and they are promoting it.

There have been more than 5 genocides happening in the last 20 years that are almost completely ignored while these advocates help these war criminals scapegoat Israel.

And the haters are promoting Genocide against the Jews, which any support is guilt by association.

From the years of being an activist, I have seen activists thriving on being called antisemites. Many are very comfortable being called extreme lefties. They feel empowered that someone more to the right of them argues and puts them in some category. Because in their case, if they can show that someone is more right-wing than them, he is less ethical than them, and thus anything insulting that comes from a “bad person” is automatically a compliment.

Yet I have experienced a different reaction when I challenge their progressiveness when the discussion becomes that I’m humanitarian and progressive, and they are not. Oh, the face that they make when I tell them “that they are not progressive at all, they are not concerned about human rights.” It’s so great to finally have self-righteous Anti Semites go on the defensive.

When you tell an extreme lefty that they are not progressive, that they don’t care about human rights, that they are not really CONCERNED ABOUT THE PALESTINIANS, this finally puts them on the defensive. Calling them out for not caring about oppression against the Palestinians, how they don’t care about gay rights and women’s rights or about slavery… Oh, man! That’s fun!

In reality, once you are done explaining the indigenous connection of the Jewish people and defining the conflict components, there shouldn’t be any place for defensiveness but for pure offensive tactics. Call out the credibility of the person for not caring.

If you talk about the Gaza evacuation in August 2005 and they tell you some story about why Israel did it for a selfish reason, or completely undermining it, which unsurprisingly happens often. You tell them that it is because people like them there is no peace.

If they use terms such as pinkwashing, you say, “clearly, you don’t care about gay people because no gay person in the Middle East that actually experienced oppression under this regime would use that term.”

If some extreme members of Black Lives Matters choose to only tackle the Israel issue as their only foreign project, you tell them that they don’t care about black people because in Mauritiana, about 20% of the population that happens to be black (Haritin)are being traded as slaves in modern times.

I don’t believe in insulting and being offensive. I actually always try to keep a smile on my face when I influence or debate. I also don’t believe in getting personal, but this is a unique situation because it might bring your opponent to start soul searching. It will also remove his power of self-righteousness, which I will discuss in the next article. The good news is you are not calling them stupid or assholes. You are challenging whether their stand on this issue fits their general political narrative and aspirations.

So, hopefully, this does not become an all-out insulting match, even if I hate to admit there is something seriously satisfying about this. And as I said in other articles, if you can’t get them to change their minds on Israel, maybe you can at least get them to pay attention to the rest of the world, and for me, that is a win.