As a child in the 1960’s I was an avid reader of boy’s comics and the various characters included WW2 heroes spanking the Germans referred to as Huns or Nazis. Clearly this was part of an unsubtle, educational propaganda campaign directed at the nation which had created so much misery for the previous two generations. It would not be until my late teens that the anti-German rhetoric which was by design aimed at a targeted audience was fully eliminated.
In my early twenties my work as an International auditor for a global bank necessitated travelling around Western Europe, Asia and the Middle East and this experience verified that nation state propaganda was a common feature not only within totalitarian dictatorships but within democracies too.
During many visits to our branch in Paris I was struck by how many of my French colleagues and contemporaries, were willing to discuss the wartime experiences of their parents. Each expressed a common theme, a similar tale elaborating on the role their parents played in the French Resistance. I met none who offered up stories of Nazi collaboration driven by antisemitism, fear, pressure or pro-Nazi sympathies. History revealed the eager willing of Parisiennes during WW2 to act with moral indecency and thus I was therefore unconvinced about the different narrative waxed lyrical by those who had been purposely misinformed. The French State had easily forgotten the guilt of its citizens during a post war WW2 active media campaign which sought only to identify national heroism. The French were quite content to adopt the myths as fact paralleling the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the 20th century.
We had several branches in what was then West Germany and I was fortunate enough to work in all for extended periods. The story here from those of my age group was rather different to that of my French colleagues. In Germany admissions of moral indecency morphed into guilt that German youth believed to be beyond redemption. Today Germany having exposed and accepted their guilt publicly display in numerous locations evidence of the horrors their nationals originated. The French still deny their guilt. If you tell lies often enough, they do morph into facts as Goebbels knew.
When totalitarian dictatorships have full control then fear rules all as our staff in Bucharest under Ceausescu fully understood. Anything they wanted to say to me in private had to be done in the lavatories with the taps running to avoid being heard. Often on the way to work they were commandeered to the airport, given a flag to wave in an incoming politician. I was always followed from the Intercontinental Hotel to the office by several plain clothes policeman. After a few weeks we became friends – they liked my Kent cigarettes unavailable in Romania at the time.
My point is that we are all a product of the educational propaganda that has been injected into us. The French educational curriculum totally revised their wartime behavior whereas the Germans totally confronted their immediate past with harsh reality. Those living under Communism treated those from the west with absolute suspicion and feared their masters sufficiently to question or debate alternatives.
From Europe to the Middle East and Asia. I worked in Egypt, the Gulf States, Japan, Indonesia and Malaysia and all this geographical experience was the bedrock of a forty-year senior management career in the International Financial Markets. My responsibilities mainly centered on clients in the Islamic world and this undoubtedly shaped my ideology, increased my geopolitical knowledge and gave me a comprehensive experience open only to a tiny minority of my generation.
Currently being a foreign editor for an esteemed South Asian journal originating from a Muslim country is simply an extension of my work experience, contacts developed and retained friendships.
What has this to do with the Israel Palestinian issue needs further elaboration.
When it comes to national propaganda, the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world have indoctrinated their subjects promoting the rights of the Palestinian cause and demonizing the only Jewish state in the world. Four generations have been raised to detest Israel and by extension the Jewish people. Oil revenues have sponsored, facilitated and ensured that such Nazi style propaganda has found comfort globally. A simple example of this would be the 1960’s Israeli assistance to African countries in the field of agricultural production and water irrigation based on Israel’s technical expertise. By the 1970’s those dual relationships had not only stopped but politically those former pro Israel nations were now voting for every anti-Israeli UN Resolution. A friend had become an enemy driven by the pro-Palestinian Muslim world and the financial incentives derived from oil revenues that ran parallel with the African state’s political metamorphosis. African countries were bribed into adopting the anti-Israeli hysteria and indoctrinated their domestic audience via state-controlled media and the education curriculum.
There is a wind of change as African countries have along with their Arab paymasters via the Abraham Accords determined that Israel is a worthy and economically important friend. Re-education of their populations who have been fed a diet of anti-Israeli propaganda is on their agenda and moving with speed.
However, the propaganda and indoctrination demonizing Israel has been so successful that even those born into Judaism and Zionism are hostile to Israel. Those with a ‘left wing ideology’, which paradoxically is right wing are the first to be given media exposure in the Israel Palestinian debate. The idea of a Jew criticizing Israel is orgasmic to a media itself so professionally incompetent and biased having also believed in the propaganda without fact checking.
Israel and former nation state enemies are on an immutable, upward trajectory of relationship normalization – the UAE, Morocco and Bahrain have signed agreements and trade relations are exceeding all expectations. Sudan has at the time of writing also committed to normalize relations. This is unpalatable to those still dedicated to demonizing Israel and use the excuse that whilst Governments may be on this mutually beneficial path the ‘street’ is still very much anti-Israel. The continuous example used refers to the recent World Cup in Qatar where Israeli nationals were treated poorly and the Moroccan football team displayed a Palestinian flag. These puerile examples are not only unsustainable but expose an ignorance paralleled only by a rabid bias. Trade, economics and tourism are having the most positive impact but there is something else going on which the Dreyfus mob rather like the post war French will not come to terms with. Those Muslim countries who have founded new ties with Israel are also going through a process in their domestic educational systems of deleting fifty years of anti-Israeli propaganda with a new, positive curriculum which is having a dramatic impact. A simple example were the Holocaust memorials hosted in both Bahrain and Morocco let alone the 27 weekly flights between them enhancing the relationships. Tourism in both directions encouraged by trade ties are creating a new positive dynamic.
A very recent article in the Times of Israel by Marcus Sheff exposed the years of Jew hating propaganda indoctrinated into Muhammad Aliwat the Palestinian teenager who tried to murder two Jews. Unfortunately, the Palestinian curriculum funded by the UN still spews Nazi ideology and indeed rewards Jew killings. As Golda Meir stated, there will never be peace between Israel and the Palestinians until the Palestinians learn to love their children more than they are taught to hate the Jews.
Years of hate filled propaganda and indoctrination will take some time to erase but the expediency and commitment being devoted to relationship normalization created by the Abraham Accords is truly a positive development. The Dreyfus mob are squirming in their own excrement.
