“I’m in Israel and Palestine [sic] to learn more about what’s happening here so I can speak intelligently about the conflict,” independent journalist and popular podcast host Terrell Jermaine Starr told his 324,000 Twitter followers shortly after disembarking the plane in Tel Aviv on March 16, 2023.
Yet within days of his first-ever trip to Israel and the West Bank, Starr seemingly became a full-blown pro-Palestinian activist, accusing the Jewish state of maintaining a system of “apartheid” and downplaying antisemitism while retweeting some of the most rabid Jew-haters, including Mariam Barghouti, Etan Nechin, and Muhammad Shehada.
What happened to Starr’s promise to be “as responsible and educational as possible”?
A closer examination of the journalist’s incorrect claims on Twitter reveals the possibility that he was duped by radical anti-Israel groups that work to delegitimize the country’s very existence. In this in-depth piece, we will dissect three of the worst lies fed to Terrell Starr by the likes of B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence.
MYTH: ‘Palestinians Are Living Under an Apartheid State’
I’m leaving Israel now. I’ve seen a lot in the past week. Palestinians are living under an apartheid state. I wasn’t emotionally prepared for what I’ve seen. You can’t comprehend what Palestinians are experiencing until you come here and see it for yourself.
— Terrell Jermaine Starr (@terrelljstarr) March 21, 2023
Terrell Starr was introduced to the region by B’Tselem, a Jerusalem-based NGO that receives over half of its funding from (primarily European) governments. In January 2021, B’Tselem published a false report arguing that Israel was no longer a democracy but, rather, an “apartheid regime” devoted to cementing the supremacy of Jews over Palestinians.
Starr admitted to receiving the report, titled “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy From the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid,” as part of this month’s press junket.
Aside from changing the very definition of the word “apartheid,” B’Tselem put Israel in the docket by misconstruing well-established facts. As the Irish actor Rory Cowan wrote in response to Starr’s distressing tweets about Israel: “I visited Gaza and Judea and Samaria (aka West Bank) many times. I visited all over before the intifadas. And I spoke to people from all backgrounds. [I] never saw what Terrell claims.”
Despite B’Tselem’s clearly politicized agenda and instances where it has been caught fabricating events in an effort to demonize Israeli troops and civilians, its “investigations” and statements — often adorned with the European Union logo — have nevertheless been taken at face value by journalists around the globe, with Starr being only the latest reporter to fall prey to B’Tselem’s hostile propaganda campaign.
MYTH: Israel Turned Hebron Into a ‘Segregated’ Ghost Town
Welcome to Hebron. I’m standing on a “sterile street” (that’s official language), where Palestinians cannot walk. Behind me are homes where remaining Palestinians’ doors are welded shut; they have to leave their homes via their roofs to walk unsterile streets. pic.twitter.com/OopTJcEXmp
— Terrell Jermaine Starr (@terrelljstarr) March 23, 2023
During his March 23 visit to the West Bank city of Hebron, Terrell Starr was guided by Breaking the Silence (BtS), another fringe Israeli organization with a history of spreading false and misleading allegations against Israel and its military, usually based on anonymous and unverifiable testimony.
BtS tour participants are shown a very restricted fragment of the old town area, and unfailingly leave Judaism’s second-holiest city under the impression that it is a “ghost town” suffering due to IDF restrictions on movement. In fact, it’s nothing of the sort: Hebron is a bustling, thriving place, and serves as one of the main economic hubs for West Bank Palestinians. It counts 17,000 factories and workshops, four hospitals, three universities, and a 4,000-seat basketball stadium.
The few streets in which Palestinian civilian movement is restricted (in view of ongoing terror threats) comprise less than one percent of the entire city. Meanwhile, Jewish Israelis are explicitly banned from entering the 80% of Hebron that falls under Palestinian Authority (PA) control.
Unfortunately, Starr’s tweets amplify the one-sided narrative that Breaking the Silence sold him. In one post from March 23, he said to have witnessed a Palestinian home that “settlers took… over with IDF support.” The homes in question, however, are Beit Rachel and Beit Leah, two buildings near the Tomb of the Patriarchs that were legally purchased from an Arab family in 2012.
A PA court at the time sentenced the man who reportedly arranged the sale, Muhammad Abu Shahala, to death for the crime of selling property to Jews. Did anyone say apartheid?
MYTH: Israel Is a Racist, Colonial State
I wouldn’t be surprised if Ben-Gvir uses this private militia to attack Arab and Black Israelis first. This is terrifying. https://t.co/nm20hWKY01
— Adrienne Lawrence, Esq. (@AdrienneLaw) March 27, 2023
In addition to charging the Jewish state with “pure racial segregation” because it upholds the mutually-agreed Hebron Protocol, Terrell Starr also retweeted a post implying that Israel’s recently restructured national guard would, for some reason, be deployed to “attack Arab and Black Israelis first.”
The two tweets seemingly seek to frame the Israeli-Arab conflict through the lens of American race relations, echoing attempts by a small subset of antisemitic “social justice” activists to paint Israel as a racist, colonial project. The conflict, however, is neither based on race nor the exploitation of natural resources. It is a centuries (even millennia) old conflict mainly rooted in religion and control over the Holy Land.
Jews, Muslims, and Christians in this region are multi-ethnic and from all races. Israeli policies and security forces distinguish not by skin color or ethnicity but by civic identity i.e. Israeli citizens and non-citizens.
Like every country, Israel struggles with informal societal tensions; between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, between Jews and Israeli Arabs, as well as between secular and religious people. Ethiopian Israelis have also suffered from discrimination. Yet state-sanctioned racism is not only absent, but it is furiously combatted by Israel’s laws — including the semi-constitutional Basic Laws — and judicial system.
Israel’s re-establishment cannot be dismissed as a colonial enterprise since Jews have lived in the Land of Israel for millennia. And those Jews who, more recently, immigrated to what would become the modern State of Israel were actually returning to their roots.
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Starr is planning to return to the region with the purpose of “building Israel and Palestine into [his] core foreign affairs knowledge base” and producing journalistic content on the subject “very soon.”
May we suggest he drop by our Jerusalem office for a more balanced viewpoint?
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