The Pro Israel Lobby Drowns Out the Voices of the Israeli People and Exploits the Suffering of Hostages and their Families

parsing propaganda from news stories in the western political discourse regarding Israel and Hamas

Washing my brain

Do we have brain-worms?

Yes. The answer is yes. I think we have brain worms.

The political discourse has devolved to such a point that it’s normalised delusion and incentivised deliberate dishonesty. Promoting right wing Israeli nationalism and the Netanyahu agenda rebranded itself as antisemitism education and fighting antisemitism. Since October 7, 2023, fighting antisemitism has become a lucrative business, particularly for North American activists and their NGO comfort animals. Boundless Israel, for example, saw a rise in its revenues and asset holdings.

Self described as U.S.-based researchers of antisemitism, Boundless Israel seeks to identify and disrupt the challenges impeding leaders and organizations from meaningfully educating about Israel, engaging with Israel, and combating Jew-hatred. Boundless Israel envision[s] a vibrant Jewish future that is courageous, deeply knowledgeable, and connected to Israel. Boundless Israel espouses the following values: Unapologetically Zionist. Authentic. Courageous. Honest.

Courageous and Honest. These values stand out for me because I don’t see them reflected in the social media engagement behaviour of their Canadian-American CEO and co-founder Aviva Klompas. Klompas has made the suffering of hostages her main staple in her social content, where she primarily posts provocative stories for the purposes of engagement farming — this is how I found her on X (formerly Twitter), through her engagement farming work using hostage stories for her content, as currency for her own narrative management, which is to take the shade off of Netanyahu and cast Hamas as the block to a deal.

Western Naïveté means we will presume pro Israel influencers have a modicum of ethics and follow the lead of hostages and families when it comes to antisemitism education and supporting the hostages. Yes, we do think everyone is like us, that’s a weakness we are recovering from, well some of us, anyway. Also when we see pro-Israel we presume Israel-based and not Boston, MA-based. All misguided assumptions. October 7th has really highlighted the importance of social media hygiene when it comes to consuming news information. Legacy media in Canada and the US has become overspecialised and has failed to adapt to the changing times. We used to subscribe to a paper, get daily delivery, read the paper and we would watch the evening and nightly news. Now all the papers are owned by a few publishers, we have an all time high mistrust of the media with 24/7 access to streaming information services, and we have to check our own facts + do our own due diligence in parsing the reams of information. Problem is, we still consume information the old analog way.

Enter social media influencers and narrative. Enter the pro-Israel influencers who drown out the voices of the Israeli electorate. For example, Aviva Klompas.

Today when Israel political analysis is all over the Knesset Guards’ beating of hostage families, which you can see below in the clip from GLZRadio, Klompas posts this tweet: Military operations in Gaza could resume in 10 days if no agreement is reached to release more hostages.

Video footage from 3.10.25 :: Once again, shocking images from the Knesset, bereaved families from the October Council [which represents bereaved families of the 7.10 pogrom] on the floor in the Mishkan. This time because there is an instruction not to allow them to enter the guest gallery. This is of course not the first time this has been the case with bereaved families. Shame and disgrace to the Knesset and the chairman who heads it. We have learned nothing. Despair. — Yanir Cozin, diplomatic correspondent at GLZRadio.

Multiple accounts on X formerly Twitter) including Israeli journalist, report that the father of Yarden Buskila, (murdered in Nova), fainted, and the grandfather of Matan Angrest, (who is alive and being held by Hamas), was thrown down the stair, and Jerusalem Post confirms two were injured in the Knesset melee that saw guards beating hostages and possibly gold star families who want answers for the failure of 7.10.

Klompas made sure to post the photos released by the family of Matan Angrest, mentioning that Hamas kidnapped Matan from a tank and dragged him to Gaza for brutal interrogation sessions and Klompas failed to mention that his grandfather was beaten by Knesset guards and fell down some stairs, and that his father urgently wants a deal and expects Netanyahu to do everything he can to facilitate the release of all hostages immediately.

Hasbara accounts promote divisiveness and as a consequence they generate rage and amplify frustration, things which take us further away from peace and closer to what extremists want — a never ending deluge of terror and war games. The tweet below was in response to We Are All Hostages calling out Klompas.

If you want to know what Judenrat is you can read my Holocaust Memorial essay, The Diaspora Jew. At time of writing I thought Kaplan refers to Chaim Kaplan, a Judenrat member who was exterminated with his wife at Treblinka, however it’s come to my attention that it could refer to the Kaplan Force, a group opposed to the Netanyahu regime and their approach to 7.10, they’ve been blamed for the massacre, specifically for contribut[ing] to the Hamas invasion of Oct. 7 in Israel’s southwest region along the Gaza border. This latter insinuation seems fcuking repugnant to me, and it makes the Judenrat slur more horrible. At any rate, the comparison made by the poster on X (Twitter ) reveals a deeply hateful and extreme individual, who makes these comments to Jews who they see as disobedient or traitorous.

Can you see how hostages and their families find themselves caught in the battle between right wing and left wing? Can you see how this facilitates foreign interference?

Boundless Israel CEO Aviva Klompas blocked We Are All Hostages after they called her out for using them to promote a position that’s contrary to position the families espouse and fight for against the Netanyahu government. What happened to the values of Courageous and Honest? Klompas’s behaviour seems to fly in the face of values that Boundless Israel claims to espouse. It’s cowardly and dishonest.

The audio clip above provides the voice of Yehuda Cohen, father of Hamas captive Nimrod Cohen— in a nutshell, it’s the position of hostage families.

Below you can see the way elected representatives of the Knesset treated Yehuda Cohen. Watch the clip from a while back to the end to see the threat made by the extremist Knesset member to Yehuda Cohen … keep spewing your vile words, you’re condemning your son to many more years in Hamas dungeons, screams the Israeli lawmaker at a man whose son is in captivity because of the Israeli government’s failure to protect its citizens from a pogrom.

This is not okay.

Note, I did not find this clip from the Boundless Israel CEO and former speechwriter, Ms Klompas. Nah, Ma Klompas chooses to focus on exploiting hostage suffering and the evil of Hamas, as opposed to focussing on the party responsible for leading and engaging the peace process — Netanyahu and the Israeli regime. When you follow Klompas you get the impression Israel is innocent and Hamas bears the burden of culpability for the way the negotiations were tanking and stalling. Aviva Klompas wants us to believe the hostages remain in captivity because of Hamas, and not because of the failure of the Israeli government to free their people.

The war in Gaza is brutal, tragic, and has no end in sight. But many seem to have forgotten how we got here. It was Hamas that perpetrated the brutal Oct. 7 slaughter of Israelis. It is Hamas that continues to hold Israeli hostages. It is Hamas that uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. — Aviva Klompas, writing in Newsweek on 21.11.24 in response to the ICC warrants for Netanyahu’s arrest.

Klompas has never mentioned the recent exploitative way Netanyahu continued to use the Bibas family as currency for his demented depraved political ambition. The Bibas family did not receive the graphic details about the murders of Shiri and the babies, which the Israeli government published without their knowledge or permission. The family does not want revenge, and resents their exploitation by Netanyahu for his war mongering. After the Israeli government released the cause of death for Ariel and Kfir, Klompas chose to tweet IDF Spokesperson Hagari: Yarden Bibas defended his family with his body. He looked me in the eye and asked that the world know the manner in which his children were murdered.

Rage Bate Motel

Naturally Klompas’s followers took the rage bait, and created a horrific discourse about these lovely babies whose family can see all that’s written about them and never consented to revealing facts they’d never heard. To her credit Klompas reported that the Bibas family wants everyone to refrain from amplifying the horrible details of the deaths of their family members. Damage done, cannot be undone, more rage set into the public discourse, taking us further from peace and healing. After all this, and after repeated pleas from the family to stop using Kfir and Ariel for their vengeance orgy, Klompas chose to amplify Bibi’s expression of vengeance.

Every day Klompas provides followers with a barrage of 7.10 personal tragedies on which they can nurture their hate-on against Hamas and Palestinians by association (there are no civilians in Gaza is the familiar chorus chanted by conservatives) and formulate projections based upon whatever the listed terrorist entity means to them. How quickly does fighting hatred become the inspiration for or ammunition to fueling hate? When we fight a thing we easily become the thing we fight. Stare into the abyss long enough and the abyss stares into you!

In contrast, negotiators work quietly behind the scenes, making connections that will provide the foundation for peaceful coexistence in the Levant region. Gershon Baskin has repeatedly said and written about Netanyahu being an obstacle for the peace the Israeli people need. Pro Israel activists typically loathe Baskin, who was instrumental in the Gilad Shalit deal. It’s all quite manipulative, this so called pro Israel thing. And North American antisemitism education activists seem to be the biggest culprits when it comes to drowning out the voices of the Israeli electorate and most importantly, the hostages, the 7.10 pogrom survivors, and their families.

You can spend just a few moments studying the video messages and analysing the work of the hostage families on their own social media accounts to get a strong sense that the so-called antisemitism educators and fighters of antisemitism are anything but helpful advocates for the victims of the October 7th, 2023 pogrom perpetrated by Hamas and enabled by Netanyahu’s government. Klompas has done this, has taken hostage and hostage family social media content, misrepresented it and then used it to manipulate unsuspecting well meaning westerners who follow her. Most mainstream people don’t monitor Israeli media, they rely on western media or their favourite influencers on X (Twitter).

Compare Klompas’s summary of Yehuda Cohen’s impassioned speech to his son, Nimrod, delivered at the Gaza border, below …

… with the original summary provided in the We Are All Hostages post …

“Nimrod Cohen, this is your dad speaking to you.

We are here, near the border with Gaza, to tell you that we are continuing to fight for you!

I will not stop until you come back home!

We are continuing to fight both for a deal, and against our government, which is delaying the deal!

No excuse will work! We want to bring you home, to bring everyone home, through a deal, and to end this nightmare!!

Nimrod Cohen, this is your dad speaking, I want you to hear me just so you regain your strength, just so you have the strength to continue waiting until we bring you back home!”

Klompas deliberately omitted the words I bolded above. Why?

Those who don’t scan Instagram and who engage solely on X (formerly Twitter) wouldn’t see the plethora of content that hostage families post, to raise awareness of their situation and get the world to apply pressure for a release off all Israeli hostages. I frequent IG and know who has accounts, Emily Damari has her own independent social media presence, for example. Despite that fact, Klompas decided to rip Emily Damari’s post about her surgery and post it as her own content, rather than share the hostage survivor’s own post. I actually fell down the rabbit hole that led me to write this article because I noticed the way Klompas ripped Damari’s social media content, taking liberty to edit with quotes from media stories before posting it as her own pro Israel fighting antisemitism content.

Why? Who steals content from survivors of the 7.10 pogrom for Hasbara content? Not anyone I would call an hero for hate. Also note the ADL seems to have a different definition of advocating for hostages than the hostage families do.

I’ll end this missive by sharing Eli Sharabi’s full interview with Ilana Dayan on Uvda (Keshet 12), Hebrew to English translation by UnxeptableD.

To the hostages and their families — it’s egregious the way the pro Israel cult of influencers has mowed over you and shouted over your voices whilst using your suffering and the murders of the pogrom victims to fight against your own interest, the release of all hostages. Netanyahu’s Machiavellian machinations, his refusal to humble himself before hostage families and survivors of the 7.10 pogrom, his ongoing exploitation of the suffering of the hostages, the inflammatory rhetoric of his crazy goon Ben Gvir — these offenses go largely unnoticed by the Hasbara crowd. North Americans see Hamas and not much else. I’m sorry you got lost in your own story. It’s unacceptable and repugnant.

When we know better than we can do better, and hence I have written this article.