In Industry of Lies—first published in Hebrew in 2014, and now available in English—the Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Yemini investigates the vast tangle of widely accepted distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Peter Berkowitz writes in his review:

The lies, [according to Yemini], take several forms. “The insidious lie” is constructed out of half-truths and suppressed information. . . .“Lies of proportion” attach terms denoting thoroughgoing evil—say, “apartheid”—to common forms of discrimination that can and should be corrected within [Israel’s political and legal] system. . . . “Lies based on true stories” present an inflammatory statement or violent action as if it were representative of [Israeli] society as a whole. . . .

Then there is the “the Big Lie,” which distorts reality so grotesquely that ordinary people assume that nobody would have the effrontery to promulgate it if it weren’t true. “The contemporary version of the Big Lie turns Israel, a country that harms innocent bystanders less than any other party to a conflict of similar proportions, into a state that carries out genocide,” writes Yemini. “Meanwhile, terrorists and Hamas members, who publicly announce their intentions to exterminate the Jews, become ‘freedom fighters.’”

In a particularly revelatory chapter, Yemini explores the social and economic well-being of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. “Israel’s control,” Yemini writes, “has not gotten in the way of Palestinian prosperity.” To the contrary, citing an array of charts and graphs covering life expectancy, infant mortality, and education, he shows that “by all objective measures,” Israel’s administration in Gaza, which ended in 2005, and the West Bank, which continues, “only accelerated the rate of development in these areas—despite, not because of, the best efforts of the Palestinian national movement,” placing Palestinians well ahead of the vast majority of Middle Eastern Arabs.

Imagine how much nearer Palestinians might be today to ruling themselves if our progressive media and academy got in the habit of telling the truth about Israel.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.