The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States

Here is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depicted in The Occupation of the American Mind: “I think Americans largely get it. They know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.”

The film’s premise is that U.S. attitudes about Palestine and Israel have been shaped by a decades-long propaganda campaign that has framed Israel as the victim, the aggrieved — the good guys — and the Palestinians as terrorists, “irrational Muslim fanatics” — the bad guys. As the film points out, pro-Israeli propaganda in the United States requires widespread amnesia — blotting out the history of early Zionist settlement in a land that at the start of the 20th century was 94 percent Palestinian Arab; the 1948 ethnic cleansing of more than 700,000 Palestinians; the 1967 occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza; Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon; and more.

Israeli propaganda erases history, and it erases land — as the conflict in Palestine-Israel has always been centered on who will control the land. The Occupation of the American Mind helps students recognize how, in the words of Sut Jhally, executive director of the Media Education Foundation, the media and politicians consistently frame “Palestinian resistance as terrorism and Israeli aggression as self-defense.” (Helpfully, the filmmakers make available a transcript of the full film.) [Description by Rethinking Schools.]