Harriet Malinowitz’s Selling Israel examines how Zionist ideology has been promoted through propaganda, history and selective memory, and why separating Judaism from Zionism matters in confronting antisemitism.

Harriet Malinowitz’s _Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara_ provides both the hard facts and historical background necessary to contest Zionism as the best and only way to combat hatred of Jews.

A retired English professor, Malinowitz spent 20 years writing and researching Selling Israel, and the exhaustively detailed result probes the ways Zionist mythology has been packaged to prop up support for the Jewish state.

She starts by introducing the concept of hasbara, which, she writes, can be “bluntly described as propaganda, but in fact comprises a huge network of government ministries, nongovernmental organisations, nonprofit agencies and charities, campus organisations, volunteer groups, watchdog bodies, professional associations, media networks, fundraising operations, and educational programs that aim to fortify a Zionist-defined notion of Jewishness in persons within Israel, the United States, and other countries.”

Malinowitz deconstructs the ways these entities have been used to support Israel as a place essential to Jewish safety and security. But in addition, she includes the country’s foundational reliance on Biblical history, horrific 19th-century Eastern European pogroms, and the Nazi Holocaust to buttress its claims that Israel is a necessary bulwark against anti-semitism.

Let’s start with the Bible. Malinowitz writes that  David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, frequently said that “the bible is our mandate.” Similarly, in 1947  Chaim Weitzman, Israel’s first president, told the United Nations that, “God made a promise: Palestine to the Jews.” Seventy-two years later, in 2019, Danny Danon, Israel’s then-ambassador to the UN, reiterated this message, holding up a Bible and telling his audience that the book is Israel’s “deed” to the land, evidence of an “everlasting covenant” with God.

Logic assumes that this claim has been questioned, but for the most part, it has not been.

And those pesky Palestinians who’d been living on that land?  For years, most Zionists denied their existence and repeatedly stated that the land was both empty of people and non-arable, claims that were easily refuted since European nations had long imported Palestinian barley, sesame, wheat, and Jaffa oranges.

Malinowitz argues that Zionists knew this, but consciously chose to tell a tall tale about “a land without people for a people without land.” This idea was supported by two additional, if contradictory, notions: that the indigenous population of Palestine could be “transferred” to a host of Arab nations and/or that those who remained in Palestine would benefit from  “Zionist accomplishments.”

The fact that many Palestinians saw the situation differently was unsurprising. Indeed, several Jewish writers and theorists had foreseen Palestinian resistance, but they were ignored or condemned as wrongheaded.

Instead, the Jewish National Fund, a group created in 1901 when Zionism was little more than the fledgling dream of a small percentage of world Jewry, began to raise funds to “transfer Palestinian Arabs to Iraq, Syria, and even Transjordan.” Their mission has never wavered, although it has expanded. Among its many efforts, the JNF has solicited donations for community development, with projects to “green the desert” and “drain festering swamps” to make more of the country suitable for farming.

Malinowitz reports that neither effort has panned out as planned. The 1950 draining of Hula Lake, she writes, is just one example. Although drainage was meant to redeem the land for agriculture and turn “water that had been a menace to health into a blessing,” it has instead caused environmental calamity. “Among the casualties in the Hula Valley,” she explains, “were the disappearance of 119 animal species, the extinction of numerous fresh water plant species, the rerouting of migratory birds flying between Europe and Africa, and the unanticipated population explosion of the vole, which rampantly destroyed crops and led many to cease farming there – in turn accelerating soil deterioration.”

And the greening of the desert? The desire to create a “garden oasis” led Israelis to plant Aleppo pine and cypress trees, rather than trees native to the area. These trees have obliterated grasslands. Moreover, since the natural habitat of the Aleppo pine is wetter, “when planted in arid areas they require intense irrigation to facilitate sapling growth and suffer major, irreparable losses during droughts. Yet neither blunder has dissuaded the Jewish National Fund from working to garner support for these projects. What’s more, they continue to raise money to ‘strengthen Israel’s peripheral regions’.”

Educational efforts are, of course, key to these initiatives, both within and outside of Israel. The use and misuse of the Holocaust come into play here. For several decades after World War II, Malinowitz writes that Nazi death camps were rarely invoked because Israeli leaders felt that the annihilation of six million Jews could be read as a sign of weakness, as if the victims had somehow allowed themselves to be led to their deaths, like “lambs to the slaughter.”

This began to change during the 1961 trial of high-ranking Nazi, Adolf Eichmann. As world revulsion to Nazi ideology mounted, Israel’s leaders began an ideological pivot, now arguing that “an armed Jewish state was both essential for preventing an ever-looming second Holocaust and would have mitigated the first one.” Images of gun-toting Israeli soldiers became a source of national – and international – pride that dovetailed with constant rhetoric to dehumanise Palestinians as an unprovoked, menacing threat.

This is where hasbara has been most effective.

Since the 1970s, hasbara has presented Israel as a rugged, innovative, and pioneering nation where queer identity is respected, environmental sustainability is championed, and Jews are able to live in safety, security, and prosperity. That these claims are specious has not mattered to Israel’s supporters, Malinowitz writes. As Gaza is pummelled into oblivion and the West Bank is increasingly occupied by people eager to eliminate every Palestinian person, peace seems less and less possible. It’s both sad and appalling.

Worse, in the more than two years since 7 October, the conflation between Judaism and Zionism has ramped up. Efforts to decouple them remain ongoing, but Selling Israel provides both the hard facts and historical background necessary to contest Zionism as the best and only way to combat hatred of Jews. In parsing Zionism’s 19th-century roots and the heinous pogroms the movement was responding to, Malinowitz has given readers ammunition for fighting anti-Semitic bigotry. It’s a vitally important book.

Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara By Harriet Malinowitz, Olive Branch Press/Interlink Publishing Group.

Thanks to the Indypendent where this review was originally published