The longer the war in Gaza lasts and the worse it gets, the more the parallel between Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin becomes apparent. Both have nothing but contempt for their adversaries, who they stigmatize in the most degrading terms.

The Israeli prime minister has no more respect for humanitarian law during conflicts than the Russian president, particularly when it comes to protecting civilians. This exposes them both to prosecution by the International Criminal Court. Both leaders willingly rewrite the history of the Second World War to better equate their enemies with "Nazis" to be ruthlessly eliminated.

Nevertheless, Western opinion seems far more aware of the scale and threat of Russian disinformation campaigns than of the risk posed by comparable operations on behalf of Netanyahu and his government. It's true that pro-Israeli propaganda, referred to under the generic term "hasbara" ("explanation" in Hebrew), was for a long time presented as such before it resorted to more roundabout means.

'Pallywood' and other lies

When Netanyahu returned to the helm of government in December 2022 after a break of a year and a half, he entrusted the information portfolio to one of his Likud loyalists, the combative Galit Distel Atbaryan, who has been qualified as "minister of propaganda" during heated debates in the Knesset. After the terrorist bloodbath of October 7, 2023, Atbaryan – on social media – called for the "erasure of all of Gaza from the face of the Earth," the expulsion of the "monsters" who inhabit it, and the killing of those who refuse to leave, without hesitation.

However, these outrages did not save Atbaryan's job, or even her ministry, which was simply abolished as a result of the propaganda operations now carried out directly by the Israeli army and its very active spokesmen in various foreign languages. The ban on all international press access to the Gaza Strip facilitates campaigns to defame Palestinian sources, to relativize or even contest the terrible human toll of Israeli strikes.

This includes a mythical "Pallywood" – a polemical amalgam of Palestine and Hollywood – being accused of staging the funerals of bombing victims in Gaza and even of providing plastic infants to extras paid to mourn children they never even had. The parallel is striking with the lies spread by the Kremlin when Russia struck a maternity hospital in March 2022 in the besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol.

Such an Israeli campaign reached its climax when President Joe Biden himself added credibility to the fable of the beheading of 40 babies by Hamas in the kibbutz of Kfar Aza (the youngest victim of the killing in this locality was 14 years old).

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