GenderIsADrag

The most effective propaganda lies no longer arrives as a slogan. It arrives as a spreadsheet. A politically selected definition becomes a statistic. The statistic is repeated by an NGO. The NGO is cited by the United Nations. The UN citation appears in a government report. Soon it is being used to justify sanctions, boycotts and arrest warrants. By the time the underlying claim is challenged, the conclusion has already hardened into “international consensus". A recent UNICEF-coordinated SMART survey found acute malnutrition among Gaza’s children under five at approximately 0.5 percent - below Gaza’s prewar baseline and below reported rates in Egypt, Jordan and several other countries in the region. The data does not merely disprove the famine narrative: it shows that Gaza’s measured child-malnutrition rate is better than in many neighboring countries. There was never a famine in Gaza. That should provoke a reckoning. Instead, institutions that amplified the famine narrative will probably move quietly to the next accusation. No accountability. No public apology. The problem is not only that there was never a famine in Gaza, but how the claim was manufactured: by ignoring available evidence, including COGAT data and commercial food imports. The initial report relied heavily on children presenting at clinics and nutrition programs - a group inherently more likely to be malnourished than a representative sample of the population. Most importantly, the IPC changed the famine standard to reach its conclusion - just as Amnesty tried to redefine genocide to accuse Israel. In other words, when the available evidence did not fit the desired conclusion, inconvenient evidence was discounted, a high-risk subgroup was treated as representative and a different proxy was accepted. Then the resulting conclusion was presented to the public as settled science. The consequences were not rhetorical. Starvation allegations were central to the ICC prosecutor’s applications against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant and to the warrants issued in November 2024. The narrative that Israel was deliberately starving Gaza - was essential to the case, and that claim fell apart. Will the warrants now be reviewed? This is not an isolated methodological failure. It is a recurring pattern: redefine the terms, select the data that supports the accusation, ignore contradictory evidence, and present the result as an established international fact. The same formula lies behind the “settler violence” narrative. OCHA historically maintained a database of “settler-related violence”. That label was broader than attacks committed by settlers: it included incidents involving settlers as perpetrators or victims, clashes, security-force interventions, trespass claims and other encounters. Yet politicians, journalists and advocacy groups repeatedly converted the category into “settler attacks". Regavim examined OCHA’s underlying spreadsheet covering January 2016 through April 2023. Of 8,332 recorded incidents involving settlers or other Israeli civilians, 6,285 had been classified as incidents affecting Palestinians. Regavim found that the list included Jewish school visits to the Temple Mount, confrontations between Palestinian rioters and Israeli security forces, archaeological tours, land-entry complaints without injury or property damage, traffic accidents and Palestinian terror attacks in which the assailant was neutralized. After removing categories that did not describe physical attacks by settlers against Palestinians, Regavim said only 833 incidents remained - and even among those were clashes, security-force actions and cases in which Palestinians had initiated attacks. The distortion begins even earlier. Palestinian Authority media routinely describe peaceful Jewish visits to religious sites as settlers “storming” or “invading” them. WAFA has used this terminology for supervised Jewish prayer at Joseph’s Tomb and authorized visits to the Temple Mount. In the dataset even an organized hike by Israeli teenagers appeared in a purported settler-violence context after the group was attacked and its escorts responded. Thus a visit to a Jewish holy or archaeological site - including visits involving school-age children - can begin as a Palestinian report of a “settler invasion”, enter an internationally maintained database as a “settler-related incident”, and emerge in Western discourse as proof of an epidemic of violent settler attacks. Real crimes by Israelis do occur - at smaller numbers - and Israel has a duty to investigate and prosecute them - as it does. To preserve the claim that Israel systematically refuses to enforce the law, however, the data must again be manipulated. The same distortion then continues in statistics supposedly proving that Israel’s law-enforcement system does not function. Yesh Din has repeatedly publicized extremely low indictment rates for complaints filed by Palestinians against Israelis, presenting closed investigations as evidence of systemic law-enforcement failure. Those figures have been cited by UN bodies, the US State Department, Freedom House, European institutions, journalists and other NGOs. Unsurprisingly, NGO Monitor’s report, “Yesh Din’s Fuzzy Math”, found the same kind of statistical manipulation -beginning with a fundamentally biased sample. Yesh Din’s figures concerned the selected cases known to or assisted by Yesh Din, not every relevant police investigation. Cases closed because the offender could not be identified or because evidence was insufficient were then used to support a sweeping conclusion about institutional unwillingness to prosecute. NGO Monitor compared Yesh Din’s claimed 7.3 percent indictment rate with Israeli Justice Ministry figures showing an average indictment rate of 22.5 percent in relevant cases during 2013–2016, rising to 38 percent in 2016. It also noted that low indictment rates in hate-crime investigations are common in other democratic countries because identifying an unknown offender and proving motive beyond a reasonable doubt are difficult. Nevertheless, the disputed figures continue to circulate as if they were uncontested national statistics. They are then used to argue that Israel’s courts cannot be trusted, that foreign sanctions are necessary and that international tribunals should override domestic institutions. This matters legally. Under the ICC’s complementarity principle, a case is generally inadmissible when a capable and willing national system is genuinely investigating or prosecuting relevant conduct. Critics therefore have an incentive to portray Israel not merely as imperfect, but as institutionally incapable of justice. Selective NGO statistics become part of the attempt to convert disagreement with Israeli outcomes into proof that Israel has no legitimate legal system at all. This cycle repeats because almost nobody pays a price for getting the story wrong. The famine claim generates front pages, protests and warrants. The correction becomes a footnote. The “settler violence” total generates sanctions and boycotts. The category error is ignored. The low indictment figure generates accusations that Israel practices systematic impunity. The unrepresentative sample continues to appear in international reports years after its limitations have been exposed. By then, the original allegation has acquired institutional armor. One UN body cites another. Governments cite the UN. NGOs cite the governments that cited the NGOs. Circular sourcing creates the appearance of independent confirmation where none exists. This does not harm only Israel. It damages the rule of law by making legal consequences dependent on political narratives rather than reliable evidence. It damages the moral credibility of Western governments that impose sanctions first and examine the data later. It divides societies between people who trust authoritative headlines and people who have inspected the underlying records and know that those headlines omit essential facts. Most dangerously, it teaches activists and political actors that dishonesty works. Selective samples. Altering the proxy. Collapsing different categories into one frightening number. Attaching the logos of respected international institutions. Then invoke “data” and “international law” to silence anyone who asks how the number was produced. International law was created to restrain power through evidence, consistency and due process. When it launders selective advocacy into legal fact - and refuses to correct the record after the claims collapse - it does the opposite. A legal order that demands accountability from everyone except its own institutions is not defending justice. It is turning due process into propaganda.