Harriet Malinowitz’s new book, Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara, reveals how Israeli public relations and propaganda were deployed to promote Zionism while concealing the oppression and displacement of Palestinians.
The book addresses a set of urgent and fundamental questions. Malinowitz asks: “How did a small group of Jewish thinkers and activists from Eastern Europe manage to convince Jews worldwide that they were one ‘people’ facing a single shared threat, with one path to salvation and a shared duty to fulfil it? How did they persuade the rest of the world to accept them into the family of nations? And how did they convince everyone, including themselves, that their liberation project was noble and benign, supposedly free of victims or collateral damage?”
These questions lie at the core of Selling Israel. The author not only examines them systematically, but also delves deeply into how hasbara – global propaganda and public relations efforts directed by the Israeli government – strengthened Zionism, minimised the perception of Palestinian suffering, and propagated the false claim that the state founded 78 years ago emerged in “a land without a people”.
Publishers Weekly praised this rigorous work, describing it as “an impressively precise and compelling challenge to entrenched narratives”.
Malinowitz spoke with journalist Eleanor J. Bader shortly after the book’s publication. What follows is their conversation.
Bader: Growing up, did you believe that Israel was necessary for Jewish survival?
Malinowitz: Actually, I was not taught the familiar promotional narrative that Israel was created as a haven for Jews. What I heard instead was that Israel was wonderful simply because everyone there was Jewish – bus drivers, garbage collectors, teachers, bankers, police officers… everyone.
Bader: When did you start doubting that?
Malinowitz: It was a gradual process. I first visited Israel in 1976 with my mother and brother, then returned in 1977 and spent several months in a kibbutz. I visited again in 1982 and 1984.
When I was eight, my aunt moved to Israel and lived there from 1962 to 1969. We exchanged letters filled with details about the kibbutz. My Hebrew teacher would ask me to read these letters aloud in class, smiling the entire time – until one letter ended with my aunt saying that Israel was a wonderful place to visit, but not to live in. Suddenly, the letter was snatched from my hand.
When my aunt returned to the United States, she came with her Iraqi-born husband, who was understandably angry at the discrimination Mizrahi Jews faced under Israel’s Ashkenazi elite. As an economist, he had been held under a glass ceiling at work, and leaving Israel was his chance at liberation.
During my stay at the kibbutz, I noticed Palestinian men working in the fields alongside kibbutz members and international volunteers. But when all of us were called to take a break in the breakfast hut, the Palestinian workers continued labouring without pause. I also met Palestinian merchants in the old Jerusalem souk and drank tea with them. It became clear that the claim I had heard – that everyone in Israel was Jewish – was pure fiction. They told me they were “Israeli Arabs”, though the label had no coherent explanation. I assumed I was simply the only one confused.
When I returned to the United States in 1984, I became involved in solidarity work for Central America. This opened my eyes to international military support structures and the propaganda fed to us as Americans. At the same time, I read Lenni Brenner’s 1983 book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, which exposed Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. That was another shock.
By the time the First Intifada erupted in 1987, I knew enough to support it. But by the Second Intifada in 2002, people had mobile phones, and I could hear gunfire in Jenin through Democracy Now! on the radio. Blogs and mailing lists were sharing new kinds of information. Still, I was naïve enough to be stunned when Israel refused entry to a United Nations fact-finding mission.
That was a real turning point for me.
In 2004, while I was in Australia, I read Ilan Pappé’s A History of Modern Palestine to prepare for a small gathering of journalists, academics, and activists in Sydney where Pappé was the guest of honour. One of the most important insights I gained was that 1948 – not 1967 – is the key to understanding the conflict. Another was that change would not come from within Israel but from Palestinians and their allies abroad. That gathering deeply affected me. When I returned home, I immersed myself in research on Palestine and Zionism and integrated this with my existing research on propaganda. I soon realised I wanted to write a book on Zionism and propaganda, but the project ultimately took twenty years to complete.
Bader: The claim that God promised the land to the Jews is rarely challenged. Why?
Malinowitz: People fear questioning anyone’s religious beliefs, especially when God is invoked. Besides, many people genuinely believe this claim.
Bader: You note that Israelis rarely invoked the Holocaust before the 1960s, because the loss of six million Jews was seen as a mark of weakness. Yet you also say David Ben-Gurion viewed the genocide as a “useful catastrophe”. Can you explain?
Malinowitz: I was shocked by how survivors of the Holocaust were marginalised in early Israel, treated almost as a stain on the nation’s masculine ideals. Later, an ideological transformation occurred. Israeli forces wanted to project an image of strength to the world while also invoking the Holocaust as proof of perpetual victimhood to justify state actions in the name of preventing another genocide. The Holocaust also became a strategic fundraising tool and a means of generating global sympathy whenever politically useful.
Bader: The idea of a unified Jewish people has long been promoted by the Ashkenazi Zionist elite. How did this claim embed itself in public consciousness?
Malinowitz: Zionism emerged as a response to the conditions facing Jews in Eastern and Central Europe in the nineteenth century. The slogan “one Jewish people” served their political project. But Jews outside Europe – including Jews of Arab countries – were absent from this imagination until they were needed to populate the land and expand the state. The idea that Israel represents my will as a Jew is absurd. No one ever asked me what I thought of this project that was supposedly undertaken on my behalf.
There are always people spoken for without permission, ultimately mobilised to serve an agenda. Claiming representation over all Jews and insisting on one homogeneous Jewish nation is pure propaganda. It is reminiscent of white feminism in the 1970s, where a small group appointed themselves representatives of “all women”. The essential question remains: who authorised them?
Bader: What happened to the socialist zeal that energised many early Zionists?
Malinowitz: Until 1977, when Menachem Begin was elected and the Likud Party became a dominant political force, kibbutzim were controlled by Ashkenazim and heavily subsidised by the ruling Labour Party. In truth, kibbutzim were not economically self-sustaining. Their “socialism” was more ideology and lifestyle than economic practice, closer to Zionism than to Marxism. By the 1980s, kibbutzim were forced to shift course to survive, moving from agriculture into industry, tourism, manufacturing, real estate, and technology. The utopian communal ethos simply faded away.
Bader: How was manufactured doubt used to obscure key events like the 1948 Nakba?
Malinowitz: Doubt is a powerful weapon. The tobacco industry pioneered a model later used by Zionists, climate change deniers, Holocaust deniers, Armenian genocide deniers, and others. The tactic involves claiming there are “competing narratives” that must be treated equally, instead of examining which accounts are credible. It took decades to convince the public that smoking causes cancer because tobacco companies countered science with what they called their own “research”, creating confusion that allowed people to believe the matter was unsettled. The same applies to Nakba denial: if Zionists didn’t actually expel Palestinians in 1948, then they bear no responsibility for the refugee crisis – or so the argument goes.
Bader: The idea that Israel is essential for Jewish survival is widely accepted. Why have alternatives to Zionism struggled to gain traction?
Malinowitz: Assimilation was one such alternative chosen by many, but it undermines the Zionist project, so Zionist efforts went into demonising it. European Bundists, meanwhile, advocated fighting all forms of discrimination, supporting labour struggles, combating antisemitism, and rejecting the notion of a separate Jewish state. Their position has always made far more sense to me. Emigration to North America and other countries also offered viable alternatives. There were even cultural Zionists who envisioned Palestine as a refuge without nationalism or a state.
But Bundism never gained mass support in the United States, and its ideas never entrenched themselves the way Zionism did. Instead, Zionism advanced the claim that Israel is the sole answer to antisemitism and the only path to Jewish safety.
Bader: Many myths persist about Israel – from the idea that the land was empty to the slogan that Israelis “made the desert bloom”. How were these ideas normalised?
Malinowitz: Both slogans – “a land without a people for a people without a land” and “made the desert bloom” – are, as anti-Zionist activist Moshe Machover puts it, simple marketing slogans. They are blatant lies, yet they became deeply rooted in public consciousness. It’s similar to the belief that Columbus “discovered” America: you accept it until evidence forces you to confront its absurdity.
I also think slogans like “making the desert bloom” appeal to people because they attribute near-superhuman abilities to Israelis, casting them as miracle workers and elevating their status in popular imagination. And as long as Zionist supporters remain insulated within the logical bubble of organisations like the Jewish National Fund, the World Jewish Congress, Hillel, and Birthright, they receive a powerful reward: an intense sense of belonging and community.
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