On April 9, Germany defended itself from claims that its arms sales to Israel were playing a role in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Arguing before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), lawyers for Germany maintained that most of the equipment it has supplied since October 7 2023 was non-lethal.

Nicaragua brought this case against Germany at the ICJ as Alain Pellet, a lawyer for Nicaragua, urged judges to order a cessation of German weapons sales to Israel, a request which the court ruled against last week.

Perversely, Germany, Israel’s second-largest arms supplier after the United States, also claimed that it has been one of the largest donors of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.

Germany’s arguments before the ICJ are not only typical of the revolving door of the humanitarian aid/arms sales conundrum involving countries like Italy and the United States, the other two nations supplying Israel with arms, but this manoeuvre reveals the hypocrisy within the international theatre of transnational violence: many countries engage in the sale of arms for wars or genocide in Gaza with one hand, while with the other hand they also engage in what is problematically called “humanitarian aid.” After all, how humanitarian is it to send humanitarian aid for the very murderous theatre that this very same country had a huge role in creating? 

This hypocrisy has not escaped the masses who read headlines of Germany’s and the United States’ arms sales to Israel one day, while the next day Establishment media runs stories titled, “Germany joins calls for Israel to ‘fully explain … mass panic and shooting’ at Gaza aid site.”

Not only is there a dearth of support for Israel on the international stage, but age-old claims previously directed towards critics of Israel’s practices of apartheid and genocide, whereby individuals and even entire nations were branded “anti-semites,” are now quickly falling apart.

No longer do such claims hold water as the historical knee-jerk accusations of anti-semitism have dissolved in light of Israel’s crimes against humanity.

All this, in addition to independent journalism which in recent months has exposed Israel’s propaganda machinery driving its ongoing military aggressions in Gaza and the current starvation of the Palestinian population there.

On April 11, Samantha Power, head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAid), became the first US official to confirm famine in Gaza, while aid workers continue to excoriate continuing lack of help in the region.

Between South Africa’s case brought to the ICJ on December 29 2023, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip” (South Africa v Israel) whose provisional directions were issued on January 26 2024, and Nicaragua’s case against Germany, the world is watching a genocide in real time just as it is following closely the ICJ’s response to the abuses of international law.

However, this shift in how claims of “anti-semitism” are being weaponised against criticism of Israel long predates October 7 2023. It was just one year ago that over 100 organisations urged the United Nations to reject the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of “anti-semitism” which defines anti-semitism as a “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred of Jews.”

Many pro-Israel groups, however, have used the IHRA definition to silence critics of Israel, pretending that any criticism of the state of Israel is necessarily wed to a hatred of Jews.

An expert for the American Jewish Committee who also played a role in the creation of the IHRA definition almost two decades ago, Kenneth Stern, exhorted the American Bar Association last year against adopting the IHRA definition because it has been used as “a blunt instrument to label anyone an anti-semite.”

He went on to warn how “right-wing Jews are weaponising” the IHRA definition to impose speech codes on college campuses, as has been witnessed since October 2023 at Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania.

While stories like the Economist’s December 2023 exposé on how one in five Americans believe the Holocaust is a myth are troubling, such accounts are partnered by Establishment media’s imbalanced coverage of the genocide in Gaza. Late 2023 saw one such media story after another as to a hypothetical or academic anti-semitism in the US or Britain, these stories collectively eliding, even eclipsing, the decimation of Palestinians in Gaza.

The readership and spectatorship of Establishment media, however, have come to see how such stories function as propaganda, narratives created to justify Israel’s violence towards Gazans. As a result, the readership and spectatorship of Establishment media are falling primarily because the masses are seeing the disequilibrium and fundamental dishonesty within Establishment media’s coverage of Israel’s brutalities in Gaza.

After a New York Times story alleged mass rapes in Gaza last autumn, independent journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté of The Grayzone, raised serious issues with the credibility of key sources quoted in the NYT’s report, writing that it was “marred by sensationalism, wild leaps of logic, and an absence of concrete evidence to support its sweeping conclusion.” 

Independent media has been far more balanced in its coverage of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — and readers have taken notice. They observe how stories of anti-semitism dominate Establishment media while in reality, Gazans are living through daily bombardments by a country that has dropped more than 25,000 tonnes of explosives on the Gaza Strip since October 7, the equivalent of two nuclear bombs. 

The older strongholds that major media once enjoyed are now crumbling as independent journalism’s objectivity and excellence is hurting the reputation of larger media empires that have counted on their audience kow-towing to political sping. As Establishment media is slowly crumbling, it is being forced to answer to the very myths it has created, as the Russiagate fiasco has demonstrated. 

These are times of myth-busting and setting the record straight, outside of party politics to a vast degree. One myth heard by those climbing Kilimanjaro for the first time regards an underworld that is uniquely reached through a cave or a hole in the ground on Mount Kilimanjaro. Such myths persisted because there was a vested interest in keeping alive cultural narratives connecting the living with the dead. However, media stories cannot survive as politically motivated lies for very long because the people are able to see the inconsistencies and the lies. We are all able to recognise that accusations of anti-semitism have been used to shut down not only coherent debate on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza but as a cover for genocide.

We are living in an era when independent journalism is having a massive impact on the giants of Establishment media, showing up their stories as bogus, demonstrating the links between deep-state propaganda and major media’s willingness to be the mouthpiece for these lies. As these fake news stories are exposed, the claims of anti-semitism long held as sustainable and valid are vanishing. 

Perhaps there is now hope for a ceasefire and even for Palestinian statehood.