We shouldn't be surprised about the Zionist regime's lies about Hamas, the democratically elected Palestinian administration that governs Gaza.
If truth be told, international election monitoring bodies described it as one of the freest in the world. Yet the terrorist state of Israel and its allies label Hamas as terrorists to advance a narrative of false reality.
Servile media of the West rush to echo the spin. To them, Palestinians can't do anything right. Yes, we shouldn't be surprised, especially in this day and age when we can witness reality unfolding in front of our very eyes.
Lies are as old as power, the narrative of which crowds out all other stories. Unless it is a stubborn story like the illegal creation of Zionist Israel, the very existence of which was built on a lie: a land without people for a people without land.
Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa calls this "an insidious language of power" in her opinion piece in Al Jazeera. The language of deceit is insidious indeed.
Palestine was never empty. It had a healthy indigenous population, of whom the Jews were a small minority.
According to the 1878 Ottoman registry, there were 403,795 Arab Muslims, 43,659 Arab Christians and only 15,000 Jews. And before the first European settler Jew set foot on Palestine, they were a peaceful community of Arabs and Jews.
But the lie was important to the Zionists and its Western supporters to create, arguably, the world's largest ethnic dispossession in history.
From the beginning of the 20th century, shiploads of illegal settlers began to arrive in Palestine, slowly but surely dispossessing every piece of land that the Arabs owned.
At first, the British limited the illegal migration to 75,000 settlers, but later they left Palestine with the floodgates wide open. The dispossession continues to this very day as the apartheid regime of Israel offers citizenship to Jews from all over the world to join its settler colonial project.
Mind you, none of these illegal settlers have any connection at all to historical Palestine. So don't be surprised by the Israeli military's claim of Hamas' tunnels leading to Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital in a video that has been edited many times.
"What Hamas tunnels?" is the question Norwegian doctor and Palestine advocate Dr Mads Gilbert, who has worked there, is asking. To him, these are baseless claims he has been hearing for 16 years.
There have been countless others. But here is another more recent one. On Nov 5, Israel bombed the al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza purportedly in pursuit of a Hamas commander.
Even if it is true, do you kill 50 women and children to capture or kill one commander? It is like the police bombing a whole residential area to capture or kill a murderer hiding in one of the houses. Insane. This wasn't the only refugee camp they bombed. Days earlier, the Israelis bombed the Jabalia and Bureij refugee camps where 200 Palestinians were estimated to be killed, again mostly women and children. Another Hamas commander hiding there, Tel Aviv? This is premeditated ethnic cleansing. Former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad put it best: it is a method of ethnic cleansing aimed at eradicating the entire Palestinian people. The ideology of a chosen people often does this.
