So the checks are flying. Larry Ellison’s buying up TikTok, CBS, Paramount – the whole lot – with the stated mission of getting Americans back on the Israel train. The New York Times got caught running what amounted to an internal Hasbara department, complete with Zionist mentors shepherding reporters toward the proper editorial line (and when exposed, the Times basically shrugged and said “Yeah, so?”). Netanyahu’s office dropped $45 million on Google. They’re tweaking ChatGPT algorithms. It’s a full-court press, a shock-and-awe campaign of narrative control that would make any tin-pot ministry of information blush with envy.

The working theory here seems to be that the problem is purely one of PR – that the recent surge in anti-Zionist sentiment is basically a marketing failure caused by all those nasty images coming out of Gaza. Fix the image, control the message, and presto: Americans will go back to seeing Israel as the plucky little democracy in the desert.

There’s just one problem with this theory. It’s completely wrong.

Here’s what the Zionist donor class and their bought-and-paid-for media consultants don’t seem to understand: most people – including most Westerners – have always known the basic story of Israel and Palestine. They know Israel was established through ethnic cleansing. They know Palestinians are refugees because they were driven from their homes. They know who’s David and who’s Goliath in this fight. This isn’t new information that suddenly appeared on TikTok in October 2023. What the genocide in Gaza did was coax people into researching the matter in a way that would clear out the noise that Zionists created to detract from the incriminating core of the issue: that Zionism is a settler colonial project just like any other project based on supremacism and ethnic cleansing.

(Obviously I’m not talking about the subset of the population that’s fine with ethnic cleansing – the folks who think what happened to Native Americans was just the natural order of things. But that’s not most people, despite what you might think from reading the comments section.)

So if people have always basically known the score, why has pro-Palestinian sentiment been relatively muted until recently?

Two words: fear and guilt.

The West’s post-Holocaust guilt toward Jews, combined with the weaponized accusation of antisemitism, kept a lid on this thing for decades. People knew the Palestinians got screwed, but they were terrified of saying so out loud. The social cost was too high. Career-ending. Friendship-ending. The scarlet letter of our time.

But here’s the thing about fear as a control mechanism: once it breaks, it doesn’t come back. And it’s broken now. The spell is lifted. Everyone from college kids to their grandparents has figured out that criticizing Israel’s government isn’t the same thing as hating Jews, and no amount of oligarch money is going to put that genie back in the bottle.

Think about it: When exactly was American media ever pro-Palestinian? Did CNN ever run a Free Gaza telethon? Was MSNBC – liberal, NPR-tote-bag-carrying MSNBC – ever anything but Zionist, just with better table manners about it? The entire mainstream media apparatus has been owned by either Christian Zionists or Jewish Zionists for as long as any of us can remember. And yet here we are, with public opinion on Israel cratering despite complete media saturation.

Why? Because the underlying knowledge was always there. People always knew the basic historical facts – they just weren’t allowed to say them. Once that prohibition lifted, the emperor’s-new-clothes moment was inevitable.

And here’s the kicker: they can’t rewrite history. The origins of Israel, the Nakba, the refugee crisis, the occupation – this is all documented in every serious historical text. It’s not contested among actual scholars. Are they going to memory-hole the entire academic record? Good luck with that.

So what’s left in the playbook? Make Israel look good (tough sell when you’re actively committing what much of the world calls genocide) and make Palestinians look bad (equally tough when the images coming out of Gaza look like something from the Book of Revelation). Resurrect Western guilt toward Jews? Well, they’re not exactly going to stage another Auschwitz, so that well’s run dry. They might pick up a few converts with this stuff, sure. They might also piss off just as many people who resent being propagandized.

I can’t see how this works. I really can’t.

But here’s what I can see it doing: generating despair. And I think that might be the point, especially with how loudly they’re announcing all these media acquisitions. The message isn’t “We’re going to change your mind.” The message is “Resistance is futile. We own everything.”

Don’t buy it. The money’s real, but the power it can purchase is more limited than they want you to think. You can’t buy back people’s fear once they’ve lost it. And you definitely can’t buy back history.