COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
At least 100,000 Australians, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, marched for Gaza across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the pouring rain at a demonstration on Sunday.
It wasn’t that long ago when I sincerely wondered if we’d ever see Assange’s face again, let alone in public, let alone in Sydney, let alone heading up what had to be one of the largest pro-Palestine rallies ever held in Australia.
Dare to be encouraged. The light is breaking through.
Julian Assange & Craig Foster help carry banner & march on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Thank you to them both. Thank you to all who marched, who called for peace & an end to the genocide. The world is watching. #FreePalestine pic.twitter.com/0lDENqnqs4
— stranger (@strangerous10) August 3, 2025
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
The Western political/media class is fuming with outrage about images of Israeli hostages who are severely emaciated, which just says so much about how dehumanised Palestinians are in Western society. Everyone stop caring about hundreds of thousands of starving Palestinians, it turns out two Israeli hostages are starving in the same way for the same reason.
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Israel’s Foreign Ministry has announced that in order to improve “public diplomacy” efforts the term “hasbara” will no longer be used, because people have come to associate it with lies and propaganda.
The Times of Israel reports:
“Long referred to as hasbara, a term used to denote both public relations and propaganda that has been freighted with negative baggage in recent years, the ministry now brands its approach as toda’a — which translates to ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness’ — an apparent shift toward broader, more proactive messaging.”
That “negative baggage” would of course be public disgust at the nonstop deluge of lies that Israel and its apologists have been spouting for two years to justify an act of genocide. Westerners have grown increasingly aware that Israel and its defenders have a special word for their practice of manipulating public narratives about their beloved apartheid state, so they’re changing the word.
Simply stopping the genocide is not considered as an option. Simply ceasing to lie is not considered as an option. They’re just changing the word they use for their lies about their genocide.
This position only makes sense if you believe Israel just spontaneously became bat shit crazy and genocidally evil on October 7 2023. That’s the only way you can see Israel’s depravity as a response to October 7 instead of seeing October 7 as a response to Israeli depravity. https://t.co/yv5FpEAeAJ
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 2, 2025
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One of the reasons Israel’s supporters love to hurl antisemitism accusations at its critics is because it’s a claim that can be made without any evidence whatsoever. It’s not an accusation based on facts, it’s an assertion about someone’s private thoughts and feelings, which are invisible. Support for Israel doesn’t lend itself to arguments based on facts, logic and morality, so they rely heavily on aggressive claims about what’s happening inside other people’s heads which cannot be proved or disproved.
It’s entirely unfalsifiable. I cannot prove that my opposition to an active genocide is not in fact due to an obsessive hatred of a small Abrahamic religion. I cannot unscrew the top of my head and show everyone that I actually just think it’s bad to rain military explosives on top of a giant concentration camp full of children, and am not in fact motivated by a strange medieval urge to persecute Jewish people. So an Israel supporter can freely hurl accusations about what’s going on in my head that I am powerless to disprove.
It’s been a fairly effective weapon over the years. Campus protests have been stomped out, freedom of expression has been crushed, entire political campaigns have been killed dead, all because it’s been normalized to make evidence-free claims about someone’s private thoughts and feelings toward Jews if they suggest that Palestinians deserve human rights.
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A Harvard professor of Jewish studies named Shaul Magid recently shared the following anecdote:
“I once asked someone I casually know, an ardent Zionist, ‘what could Israel do that would cause you not to support it?’. He was silent for a moment before looking at me and said, ‘Nothing.’”
This is horrifying, but facts in evidence indicate that it’s also a very common position among Zionists. If you’re still supporting Israel at this point, there’s probably nothing it could do to lose your support.
Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.
