Five Days on a Media Junket in Israel: Lies, Half-Truths, and Conspiracy Nonsense

Rabbi Menachem Margolin, founder and chairman of the American Middle East Press Association, which sponsors highly questionable media junkets to Israel. (screenshot)

Israel’s supporters are determined to warp the truth of the ongoing genocide in Gaza – and enlist Western journalists to help them.

By Alexander Willis, Reposted from Drop Site News, Nov. 19, 2024

In late July, I received a peculiar cold email. It was an invitation from the American Middle East Press Association (AMEPA) for an all-expenses-paid tour of Israel, tailored exclusively to members of the U.S. media. As a journalist in Alabama whose job consists primarily of chasing around lawmakers and writing about committee hearings, the offer was certainly outside my wheelhouse. But as someone who has observed Israel’s war in Gaza closely and the Western media’s coverage of the war, I was intrigued, especially since AMEPA’s goal is “to get the truth out there,” according to Kim Kamen, the organization’s chief operating officer. So in September, I took them up on their offer and headed to Israel.

During the five-day trip, we were told that nearly every Palestinian in Gaza shared culpability for the October 7 attack by Hamas. Several of the experts and officials AMEPA introduced us to said that rape and brutal killings are inherent to the Islamic faith and that many United Nations aid workers were terrorists. Some even suggested that the countless videos of Palestinians injured or killed by Israeli bombardment were, in fact, often staged film productions.

AMEPA’s truth, as I discovered, amounts to a version of pure Israeli propaganda far more extreme than anything I could have expected.

Conspiracy Theories

On the evening of September 15, I landed in Tel Aviv. Of the 14 press trip participants, the majority were journalists from the U.S. of both statewide and regional publications, including Sinclair Broadcast Group, Business Insider, and Newsweek, with a handful from European publications. With three other U.S. journalists also attending the trip, I hopped in a cab and soon made our way to the Prima City Hotel, right on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

I had some sense of what I was getting into. AMEPA was founded in 2023 by Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the chairman of the organization’s three-member board and founder of several similar groups in Europe. Margolin has openly defended Israel’s war in Gaza. He has accused the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) of harboring ties to Hamas and claimed that “Israel is going beyond what most militaries do in war to protect the civilian population.”

On the first night of our trip, we huddled in a conference room at the hotel to meet with Nir Natan, the press trip’s coordinator for AMEPA, and Major General Israel Ziv, a regular on Israel’s Keshet 12 television channel, for a geopolitical overview of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, first, one journalist raised an interesting question: Was AMEPA funded in any part by a political party or the Israeli government? (Before asking their question, the reporter requested it “not get reported” by those of us in the group.) “Absolutely not,” Natan said.

Kamen told me that AMEPA had initially been funded largely by European donors. Its board has begun to contribute and several foundations may soon begin donating as well, she said. She compared AMEPA favorably to The Israel Project, a now-defunct organization known for its overtly pro-Israel bias and anti-Iran advocacy.

So perhaps Natan had told us the truth. Yet over the next five days, we heard numerous outright lies and misleading information that seemed to suggest otherwise.

As a case in point, Ziv rebuffed the assertion that Israel had prohibited humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza. “They took over the humanitarian aid because every day now, 200 trucks [are] coming in,” he said. In fact, the world misunderstood the aid situation entirely. “The problem, by the way, in Gaza today— it’s not starvation, it’s the other way around,” he said. “People can die from overeating. Seriously, the amount of food and everything there. And Hamas is taking that over and reselling to the people.”

Ziv made no mention of the fact that, just one day earlier, the Norwegian Refugee Council had published a report showing that Israel had blocked 83% of the food trucks reaching Gaza, allowing only 69 trucks per day, on average, a record low. While Israel has long claimed that Hamas steals humanitarian aid intended for civilians in Gaza, many of whom are starving to death according to research from Oxfam International, its government has yet to produce evidence proving the group has seized any significant portion of aid.

Yet throughout the trip, officials we met with hammered this claim repeatedly. Retired Brigadier General Amir Avivi, who last year advocated for forcibly relocating all Palestinians in Gaza to Egypt, leveled similar accusations. He advocated for the creation of Israeli-controlled areas in Gaza for aid distribution.

Perhaps most striking were the claims that videos of suffering or killed Palestinians had been elaborately staged using actors, prosthetics, and makeup, a supposed ruse Israeli propagandists refer to as “Pallywood,” a portmanteau of Palestine and Hollywood. “The way Hamas make makeup before hosting television crews, [it’s] quite professional, I must admit,” Tal Rabina, strategic director and head of the Israel Office for the European Jewish Association and the owner of a crisis management and lobbying firm in Israel, told us as we rode to Israel’s northern border in a chartered bus.

Rabina was happy to post links to our group’s WhatsApp chat of several alleged instances of Pallywood. “Poliwood,” Rabina wrote, incorrectly, “behind the scenes of what the West sees on television screens.” One such link was to a crudely made TikTok video showing a line of body bags, purportedly Palestinians, with moving bodies inside—the implication being that the deaths were staged. Shared last year by Israel’s official Twitter account, the video is actually from an Egyptian government protest in 2013. The remaining links Rabina shared with us were just as easily debunked.

Rabina also denounced UNRWA employees as terrorists. During dinner one evening, he told us that the UNRWA workers “were very active as terrorist activists” and had taken part in the attacks of October 7. The agency’s “schools and headquarters are not really education systems, but headquarters of the Hamas,” he added.

Islamophobic Lies

Among the most frequent refrains we heard from officials on the trip is that Israelis can’t coexist with Palestinians due to their Islamic faith, a claim that manifested in various ways.

As recently as August, Ayelet Razin Bet Or, former director of the Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women in the Israel Ministry of Social Equality, had served as an active reservist in the Israel Defense Forces, charged with analyzing footage of the October 7 attack to document Hamas’ alleged systemic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. “With all my learning around this, I understood that I need to start learning Islam to understand the base of these manifestations of violence that we see,” Bet Or told us. “In Islam, women are war spoils. Once you take them, they’re your sabiyya. They’re your property. You can do almost anything you want with them,” she claimed. “It’s not even raping them because they’re yours.”

After shooting and killing Israelis, Hamas fighters had then systematically mutilated their bodies, a ritual that could also be attributed to core tenets of Islam, Bet Or asserted. “It has connections to Islam, fact-wise, that you need to be covered in the blood of your victim, of the Jew,” she said. “Killing from afar is not enough, and you see it. You see it in the footage.”

Bet Or’s claim about female captives likely stems from a misreading of verse 33:50 in the Surah Al-Ahzab chapter of the Quran, the central text of Islam, which some scholars have interpreted as permitting the rape of female slaves. Religious texts, of course, often include morally objectionable material: Leviticus 20:13, prominent in both the Christian and Jewish faiths, condemns gay men to death [editor’s note: not all Christian denominations are in agreement on this point] . But scholars dispute the specific mention of female slaves in the Quran, arguing that it is a misinterpretation of its teachings regarding prisoners of war.

Bet Or also disparaged the UN Commission of Inquiry, the UN’s primary investigative body. In March, the commission published a report that found reasonable grounds to support claims of sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas; the report also documented instances of sexual violence perpetrated by Israelis in the illegally occupied West Bank. That included beatings of detainees in their genital areas, along with threats of rape and sexual harassment during house raids and at checkpoints.

“What I’m asking you, as reporters, is please read further when these kind of reports come out and call out this hypocrisy,” she told us. She also recounted anecdotes of unrelated sexual violence perpetrated by Muslims across the world, seemingly an attempt to tie these incidents to Islam. “In France, a Jewish girl was raped by extreme Islamists saying this is how we conquer the country,” she said. “It’s a threat, and this threat needs to be removed.”

Other officials argued that Islam made Palestinians untrustworthy. Michael Milshtein, a 20-year veteran of the Israeli intelligence services, had recently served as the senior advisor to the commander of the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, a government agency that illegally controls everything in the occupied West Bank, from issuing permits to enforcing Israeli government policy. Because Muslims are “encouraged by God to lie to infidels,” the prospect of Israel achieving a ceasefire with Hamas was near impossible, he asserted.

Yet again, AMEPA’s hand-picked experts appeared to misunderstand Islam. The suggestion that lying is inherent to the Islamic faith is a common, easily debunked, racist trope derived from the doctrine of Taqiyya, a practice associated with Shia Islam whereby Muslims may conceal their faith to protect themselves from persecution or harm.

The “Day After”

With a ceasefire in Gaza off the table, Milshtein argued that Israel should pursue what he called “the least-worst idea” once its operations ended: for Israel to take over the strip. He was not the only speaker to share his views on what a “day after” could look like.

Avivi, the far-right retired brigadier general, told us that nothing short of a full, indefinite occupation of Gaza and mandatory reeducation for its people would be acceptable. Irit Lahav, a resident of the Nir Oz kibbutz in south Israel, suggested that the more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza could be forcibly relocated to artificial islands constructed by the United Arab Emirates. She once thought some of those in Gaza were innocent, she said. “Now, I don’t think so.”

This sentiment was shared by a number of those who spoke with us. “Many Israelis before October 7, had an image about a very clear separation or distinction between society and Hamas,” Milshtein said. “Today, we understand that after two decades of radical ideology regime, those two parts were melted.”

The AMEPA experience would not have been complete without a chance for us to meet those working to defend Israel.

On September 18, we traveled to the Haifa Iron Dome missile defense facility in northern Israel to meet three uniformed, M16-toting young soldiers: the American-born Itai and Yell, aged 19 and 20, respectively, and Gabriel, a 22-year-old Israeli native. All three work as interceptors, responsible for operating the missile defense system; Rabina described them as “charming soldiers.” (We were not given their last names due to security concerns.)

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Itai moved to Israel at the age of eight and interviewed for a job with the IDF at 16. For a soldier, he had an unconventional appearance: ear piercings, fingernails painted black and gray, arms covered in video-game- and anime-themed tattoos, and a “broccoli haircut,” sometimes referred to as the “Zoomer perm.”

He believed his passion for video games helped him land a job as an interceptor since he didn’t mind “staring at screens all day,” he said. Serving in the IDF, he said, is “one of the coolest things you can do.”

“A Beautiful Melting Pot”

Upon my return to Alabama, I spoke again with Kim Kamen, who reiterated that AMEPA’s goal is to combat a supposed “anti-Israel sentiment” in the media. But does such a sentiment exist?

In January, The Intercept analyzed media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the first six weeks after October 7. The analysis found that The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, on average, mentioned Israeli deaths 16 times more often than Palestinian deaths. It also noted that terms like “slaughter” and “massacre” were used disproportionately. “Slaughter” had been used to describe Israeli deaths 60 times for every instance of the term being used to describe Palestinian deaths; for “massacre,” the ratio was 125 to 2.

Still, Kamen insisted that a significant share of media coverage exhibited an anti-Israel bias. “There’s a conception that Israel is this white-colonialist nation, and I’m hopeful that when you were there, you were able to see a very different side, that that is not a fair description nor representation of Israel,” she said. “It’s actually a beautiful melting pot of people who come from a variety of other nations.”

In the end, the trip amounted to a barrage of half-truths, disinformation, and one-sided perspectives designed to influence our future coverage of Israel—in that, there was little surprise. Yet the sheer volume of resources and money poured into the effort to bolster Israel’s global image astounded me.

In total, AMEPA paid just under $3,000 for my airfare and lodging. Including food and other expenses, $40,000 would be an extremely conservative estimate for the entire trip. Assuming that investment produces 14 journalists who will go on to publish a career’s-worth of stories painting Israel in the most positive light, one might argue there’s a good return coming.

Given that, however, I don’t anticipate getting invited to any future trips organized by AMEPA.

Alexander Willis is a journalist covering state and federal government. Find more of his works here.

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