It’s stunning how much influence this ideology has had throughout our society’s culture and institutions. It’s almost magical.
Jewish National Fund calendar, 1933-34. (Jewish National Fund/Wikimedia Commons)
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
Reading by Tim Foley
If I spoke critically of something abusive that India was doing in Kashmir, would you expect me to be accused of an anti-Hindu hate crime?
If you criticized an Indian military operation, would you have to preface it with “I don’t hate Hindus or their religion and am not the slightest bit Hinduphobic”?
If there was worldwide opposition to something that Indian military forces were doing, would you expect western governments to start frantically churning out laws to ban that opposition because it was making members of the Hindu community feel unsafe?
Would it ever in your wildest imaginings occur to you that a criticism of the violent actions of the government of India could in any way be interpreted as an attack on the Hindu faith and the membership of that religion?
You can probably see where I’m going with this.
You don’t expect to see criticisms of the state of India framed as an attack on its majority religion because people in your society haven’t been conditioned to have that expectation. But we have been conditioned to have that expectation about Israel.
The association between antisemitism and criticism of the state of Israel isn’t natural. It’s not something that would organically occur to an untrained mind.
If a man who’d never heard of Israel or Palestine were shown footage of the genocide in Gaza, he would reflexively recoil in horror and say what he was looking at was a bad thing.
If somebody then ran up and explained to him that what he just said was actually a hateful act of religious persecution, he would be very surprised and confused because he hadn’t been indoctrinated into making that association, in the same way you haven’t been indoctrinated into associating criticism of the Indian government with an attack on the religion of Hinduism.
It’s a completely counterintuitive association. There’s nothing about it that you could find your way into through your own observation and reasoning. It’s something you’d need to be taught by others. You need it to be explained to you.
That’s the literal translation of the Hebrew word “hasbara”. It means “explaining”. Israel and its supporters have spent decades “explaining” to the world that criticism of the state of Israel is actually a terrible hate crime against Jews and their religion, because otherwise it would never occur to a normal person that that is the case.
It’s actually astonishingly impressive. The political ideology of support for this tiny apartheid state has been so effective at explaining to the world what thoughts they should think about it that those efforts touch all our lives.
It’s so effective that you could be at a social gathering all the way across the sea in the United States and, unless you are very familiar with the people around you, if the subject of Israel comes up, you’ll immediately understand that you could be in for a very uncomfortable evening.
It’s stunning how much influence this ideology has had throughout our society’s culture and institutions. It’s almost magical.
“Using the magic system, Zionism…” says Daniella Weiss, a far-right Israeli settler leader and former mayor of Kedumim, describing how to overcome the “great difficulty” of establishing Zionist colonies in Gaza. In the BBC ‘The Settlers’ documentary, she lays out her vision… pic.twitter.com/Ukn4vaNmKK
— Translating Falasteen (Palestine) (@translatingpal) April 29, 2025
“Using the magic system, Zionism…” says Daniella Weiss, a far-right Israeli settler leader and former mayor of Kedumim, describing how to overcome the “great difficulty” of establishing Zionist colonies in Gaza. In the BBC ‘The Settlers’ documentary, she lays out her vision
There was a segment in last year’s Louis Theroux documentary The Settlers that stuck with me where Israeli settler leader Daniella Weiss refers to Zionism as a “magic system”.
“Jewish settlements in Gaza is a very difficult step that demands a lot of work,” Weiss told Theroux. “You have to influence the leftists, the government, the nations of the world, using the magic system: Zionism.”
It isn’t surprising to learn that Weiss views her operations as a kind of magic. On paper she and her ilk shouldn’t be able to do what they do. Forcefully dropping a foreign ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization and violently hammering it into place against every organic impulse of the region is freakish enough, but then convincing the rest of the world to support this?
To the point that it actually affects our interpersonal relationships and interactions on the other side of the planet?
It shouldn’t work. But it does.
I don’t really know what magic is, but it makes sense that some Zionists would see it that way. Because from the outside looking in all that mass-scale psychosocial manipulation kind of does look like an inexplicable sort of wizardry.
Luckily, the magic seems to be wearing off. The old tricks just aren’t working anymore. Calling someone who criticizes Israel an “antisemite” is widely recognized for the fraudulent manipulation that it is.
Pro-Palestine politicians are winning elections despite highly coordinated smear campaigns saying their candidacy makes Jews feel unsafe. Everyone knows Israel lies about everything all the time. Trust in the media is at an all-time low, while awareness of the pro-Israel bias of the mainstream press is at an all-time high.
People are still showing up for protests and pro-Palestine events. The public is turning against Israel in unprecedented numbers. Nobody’s buying the old song and dance anymore.
Maybe the people are finding a little magic of their own.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from Caitlin’s Newsletter and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
All this is articulated in Pankaj Mishra’s book, ‘The World After Gaza”. A book he wrote out of great sorrow.
He speaks of how, as a child growing up Hindu in India, he was indoctrinated into admiring the Jews, not just by his own family yet also by a great majority of the Hindu community at-large. Much of this having to do as a post-colonial backlash to take back ‘control’ of their own country, narrative, and culture, after the British essentially destroyed it, left a mess they knew would lead to civil unrest among factions, all with the premeditated, full support of the incoming US empire. Same scenario played itself out re: Israel/Palestine when handing over the false narrative of “independence”.
I’d say his perspective is not so much to find blame, as it is a personal essay on grief of the human condition.
An apropos counter-point to this conversation is one of Pankaj’s earlier works: “An End to Suffering: The Buddha in The World”.
Highly recommend both.
Thanks to the U.S. assistance in arming them dealing with a thermonuclear armed Israel has become an enormous blue and white elephant in the room.
The world might consider the obstacle Israel’s current leadership presents to global mutual honest participation in peaceful co-existence.
Within the global realm of the world order one half dozen or more countries are being managed by the equivalent of inmates from mental asylums.
The most recent leader of the free(?) world(?) is the most famous of the lot. Mr. Orange, piloting the Ship of State into a free fall to the bottom. Hate, loathing and discontent are palpable. Law enforcement and politicians working to line up for something resembling a circular firing squad.
What cold go wrong? The Zionist fascist seem so delusional they feel up to the test of battle in the trenches. Problem is they will have someone else take their place! Paid provocateurs. ICE.
BTW I agree with Jerry Alatalo. Currently the NEOCON driven Zionist blood lust reins supreme, this must change, they need to go!
Great Stuff C.J. Unite resist and transcend.
We are victim of our own religion weaponized for occupation with stolen monotheism and our unsavory history based on it and hiding behind a magical history with consequences of our own. We need an end to magical wars with limited hemispherical thinking. We need east and west and north and south hemispherical thinking rather than fighting between left and right hemispheres for dominance.
We need to replicate the Australian narrative that repudiated the “White Australia Policy” and promulgate via constitutional -country/state organs.
Applying the Zionist mantra to our Invasion Day rallies would result in infringing our Constitution rights of free assembly and expression of our collective community views. The populist anti-immigration is also anti-multicultural and an anathema to community harmony.
Your example of India and the Hindu religion is brilliant. It reveals the complete absurdity of conflating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. Yet, I cannot refrain from reminding us that in the U.S. it is considered unpatriotic to criticize the military or certain individuals who have held high office. We are not only not encouraged, we are discouraged from critiquing democracy as structured and practiced in the U.S. Not quite the same. Yet …would it be a stretch to suggest that we are conditioned socially to avoid expressing or seeking to discuss the deep and significant flaws of our government – unless it is Trump and you are not a MAGA. We have long favored the double standard and are adroit at explaining it away.
Americans are second only to Israelis when it comes to being propagandized. A population awash in half-conscious, conditioned assumptions about the military, politics, race, and the United States’ entitled position as ‘the greatest country in the world’, has been a vector for Hasbara manipulation. Thankfully, a general awakening in the West to the evils of Zionism has resulted from the horror of the Gaza holocaust. Israel will never recover from this exposure.
As long as Holocaust survivors and their descendants use WWII as an excuse for murdering Palestinians and stealing their land it will only get worse.
hxxps://www.foxnews.com/world/from-700-murdered-relatives-3-survivors-holocaust-descendant-leads-israeli-forces-after-oct-7-attacks
The “magic” in Zionism in part has to do with the fact that many billionaire Jewish Zionists own or control major media outlets, banks, corporations, Hollywood, and infiltrated governments. The Zionists even have some control over universities. Sadly, Zionism has given Judaism a bad name. “Good Jews” are the ones standing up for the Palestinians by opposing genocide and apartheid. But “good Jews” don’t seem to have the same influence that the Zionist Jews have, and many are afraid to speak out as they will be accused of being “self-hating Jews.”
“If I spoke critically of something abusive that India was doing in Kashmir, would you expect me to be accused of an anti-Hindu hate crime? If you criticized an Indian military operation, would you have to preface it with ‘I don’t hate Hindus or their religion and am not the slightest bit Hinduphobic’? If there was worldwide opposition to something that Indian military forces were doing, would you expect western governments to start frantically churning out laws to ban that opposition because it was making members of the Hindu community feel unsafe?”
If the most radical segments of the Hindutva lobby in the United States who are attempting to adapt hasbara-like tactics to US political discourse end up increasingly getting their way, then yes:
“Attacks on academics are a recurring feature of the assertive Hindu-nationalist agenda, in which any scholarly analysis of ancient Indian history or the roots of Hinduism that challenges the nationalists’ preferred version promptly elicits menacing personal vitriol. Thus the Rutgers professor Audrey Truschke, a specialist in premodern Sanskrit texts and South Asian history, has required armed police protection during lectures and public appearances for fear of animus against her critiques of the nationalist agenda. […] The rise of Hindu-nationalist influence in the United States inevitably invites comparison with the pro-Israel lobby, an acknowledged source of inspiration. As [Suhag] Shukla explained to me, [Mihir] Meghani ‘had already been doing a lot of work with the Jewish community,’ learning from its success in shaping and promoting a favorable narrative.”
Source:
Andrew Cockburn, “The Hindutva Lobby,” Harper’s Magazine, Oct. 7, 2024
Your comment broadens our understanding and awareness. Thank. you! Perhaps there might be an alternative example to suggest?
Regardless of the importance of the content of your comment, and the unfortunate fact that the Hindu’s of India are seeking to learn from the Zionists, Caitlin has provided a framework that can be adjusted in order to expose the absurdity and true motivation of those who hope to silence any and all criticism, no matter how legitimate, of Israel.
One caveat to my own initial point: while it is not entirely inconceivable that the Hindutva lobby in the United States could secure itself a politically and culturally influential position within US society on par with the Zionist lobby (e.g., the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), once complicit in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination as recounted in James Douglass’s “Gandhi and the Unspeakable” (2012), could attain a position equivalent to Betar as an ultranationalist militia operating with virtual impunity on US soil), I do suspect that much of the success of organizations such as AIPAC, JINSA, WINEP, and especially Christians United for Israel (CUFI) is largely due to the unique emotional resonance that support for Israel has among dispensationalist-oriented Christians influenced by Cyrus Scofield and Hal Lindsey’s interpretation of eschatology, which is hard for many other foreign state lobbies to completely replicate, try as they might.
It seems more likely that Hindutva nationalists acting on behalf of a Hindu-majority India’s perceived interests will at best attain roughly the level of success that, e.g., Turkey (Türkiye) has historically had in influencing US political discourse surrounding the Armenian Genocide, or that China has had in opening its market to Hollywood films in exchange for their tacit adherence to Chinese Community Party (CCP) interpretations of the “One China Policy,” mostly avoiding subject matter related to Tibet after the contentious releases of “Seven Years in Tibet” and “Kundun” back in 1997, and so on. That being said, their odds of doing so are additionally complicated by the geopolitical disjuncture between US and Indian government policy objectives at times as a product of India’s “strategic diversification” (Tanvi Madan, “How to Survive in a Multialigned World: The Indian Way of Strategic Diversification,” Foreign Affairs, Dec. 16, 2025), which have historically grown heated enough to lead to explicit nuclear threats and tensions in the case of relations between the respective administrations of Richard Nixon and Indira Gandhi (though in that case under the Indian National Congress rather than Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and/or other Hindutva-aligned factions).
“…while it is not entirely inconceivable that the Hindutva lobby in the United States could secure itself a politically and culturally influential position within US society on par with the Zionist lobby.”
The day that comes to pass, it will mean the racism this nation was founded on has been cast aside. How likely is that to happen? Money, might be able to override their religious differences because none of the christo-fascists are actual believers. But race and dark skin? They’ll never accept that. All the wealthy Zionists in their club are European Ashkenazis.
The reason Hindus have less power in the US is probably because they aren’t white.
Evangelical Christians and Jews base their barbaric behavior on several-thousand-years-old myths that modern humans cannot believe. Bible quotes about g-d wiping out future generations of ‘enemies’ etc are nothing to base a global political system on. Maybe in a few thousand years they will be referred to as “Judeo-Christian Mythology”, like “Greek Mythology”.
I hope the schism between the evangelical heretics and the more contemporary sects removes this brain-dead threat to the planet much sooner, (I am hearing a little noise from the leadership of some churches and synagogues), but it might take a broader shake-up that redistributes the power more evenly across the racial spectrum.
She is a good human being but all anglosaxons fail to understand what it’s all about!It is simply about Anglo-Saxon control of banking! The Jews get the necessary degree of protection and respond by clinging to the Anglo-Saxon masters. It is really that simple and that has been the case for a long time. Zionism was created for that purpose. To isolate the Jews. It happened long before those dates we hear quoted relating to Herzl and Balfour. But anglosaxons never touch it. That cultural group has a huge influence but don’t listen to those who expose it’s unawareness.
One definition of magic could be a marriage of human will and metaphysical ascendance. Or manipulation of people and events without direct physical intervention. The apparent ‘magic’ of Zionism has proven to be of the stage illusion variety. Any awe or sense of the indomitable at witnessing the seemingly impossible vanishes once the machinations of deception are exposed to view. Everyone endowed with a conscience and a modicum of curiosity about the world now sees the Zionist project for what it is. No longer able to engineer majority support, or intimidate contrarians beyond its borders, Israel has lost a vital organ of global manipulation.
If everyone would read this, we would know we must get out from under zionist’s control.
Pastor Chuck Baldwin: “Zionists’ Lust for War is Insatiable.”
what a creative angle! your approach carries magic itself. the kind that helps undo spells.