The Ben Gurion Canal was a project conceived in the US in the early 1960s and quickly abandoned, involving the construction of a rival to the Suez Canal, from the Mediterranean at Gaza through to the Gulf of Aqaba at the top of the Red Sea. The level of hare-brained crackpottery involved can be seen from the suggestion that the colossal amount of excavation work required would be facilitated by the use of over 500 nuclear explosions. But - this being Israel, and this being Gaza - the story is loved by conspiracy theorists. The blocking of the Suez Canal in 2021 was seen by some as deliberate, and part of a plot by the West to support this alternative Israeli canal. And now, of course, it's cited as the real reason for Israel's attack on Gaza. Money, hidden Jewish power, shady deals - what more could you want?
Jonas Hessenauer at Fathom:
The unimaginable horror committed by Hamas on 7 October is no longer ‘just’ relativised or celebrated online. The same people, who initially cheered the slaughter of hundreds of innocent Israelis and glorified Islamist terror as a fight for freedom, now believe they can recognise a supposedly long-existing plan behind Israel’s military response to Hamas’ terror. You only have to ‘follow the money’ to discover the truth behind the events, claims an article on the website of the British organisation Middle East Monitor, which has links to Islamists, according to researcher Ehud Rosen. The actions of the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza would by no means be about fighting Hamas because of 7 October, the article implies. Instead, this explanation would allegedly only serve to conceal the actual goals of Israel’s government.
The real objectives of Israel and the USA would be economic in nature: ‘Israel and the United States want the giant amounts of gas in Gaza, and to create a rival to China’s New Silk Road’, said the British-Syrian ‘journalist’ Richard Medhurst in a video that he published on X (formerly known as Twitter) on 27 October, and which has since been viewed over 1.6 million times. In the same clip, he relativises the Holocaust and demonises Israel, when he calls the Gaza Strip a ‘concentration camp run by the Israelis’. Medhurst also claims that the UK, the US, and Israel were responsible for the explosion in the port of Beirut (2020) as well as for blowing up the Nord-Stream-pipelines (2022). He expresses himself openly antisemitic, anti-American, and conspiracist in other videos too. His crude statements would not be so worrying if Medhurst did not reach a certain audience with his video clips. Over 300,000 people follow his account on X alone. On 1 November, he published another video on the alleged economic and geostrategic background of the current conflict. This video has almost reached one million views until now. He claims that Israel and the USA have been planning to build a canal – the ‘Ben Gurion Canal’ – for decades. The Gaza Strip is allegedly to be bombed and the Palestinians expelled in order to build this canal. This ‘is the last piece of the puzzle’, he says. ‘It will cement the American’s and Israel’s control of the world’s most important shipping lane, giving them total control of the maritime trade’.
Which wouldn't matter so much if this wasn't being viewed by hundreds of thousands on social media - mostly youngsters who have no understanding of the history, and just want to see themselves as being clued up and on the right side.
There is a real danger that they will be further radicalised by similar postings on social media if the platforms do not take stronger action against disinformation and antisemitism. Others already seem to have an entrenched antisemitic world view. Richard Medhurst, for example, makes no secret of his beliefs. He explicitly calls for the ‘axis of resistance’, by which he means the Arab states and terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, ‘to expel the American and Israeli colonisers from the Middle East’ – a call for the destruction of the Jewish state. The accompanying video has received over 18,000 likes so far.
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