TextSearch

Jonas Hessenauer is a social scientist and researcher on antisemitism. He is currently working at the Tikvah Institute in Berlin on a study of German press coverage of Israel. On 16 November 2023,...

December / 2023 The ‘Ben Gurion Canal’: A new crazy anti-Israeli conspiracy theory is doing great business on the internet while the social media platforms do nothing by Jonas Hessenauer BACK AUTHOR Jonas Hessenauer Options comment tweet share email print Jonas Hessenauer is a social scientist and researcher on antisemitism. He is currently working at the Tikvah Institute in Berlin on a study of German press coverage of Israel. On 16 November 2023, it was reported that Osama Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ had gone viral on TikTok. In reaction to these reports, TikTok intervened and deleted the clips concerning Bin Laden. However, this did not apply to thousands of other videos and postings that also spread antisemitism, disinformation and conspiracy myths about 7 October and its consequences. In fact, new antisemitic conspiracy myths are currently emerging online. Their establishment can be observed in real time. Yet, the social media platforms do not appear to be able or willing to stop or curb this development. 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’. References to the so called ‘Ben Gurion Canals’ can be found in many social media posts and on numerous websites. Egyptian MP Mostafa Bakry spread the conspiracy myth, as did influencer Celine Lilas Safadi, who currently lives in Dubai, in a video that she posted on 31 October. In it, she claims: ‘Israel wants to seize Gaza, annex the land, and take it over, so they can build their canal through it. And the US, the UK and France are all for that because it’s gonna make them a lot of money at the cost of millions of lives destroyed.’ Safadi’s video went viral. It has been viewed almost ten million times on Instagram and TikTok combined and has received over 500,000 likes in total. In the comments, her conspiracist explanations are almost universally described as eye-opening, instructive, and informative. Unlike Medhurst, who has long attracted attention for his anti-Israeli and terror-relativising statements, Safadi has so far primarily appeared as a model, fashion, and make-up influencer. Since 7 October, her social media posts have been dominated by anti-Israeli conspiracy myths. The myth of the ‘Ben Gurion Canal’ goes back to an idea that was actually discussed in the United States in the 1960s but then very quickly rejected: The construction of a canal that would have connected the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea at Eilat, thus providing an alternative route to the Suez Canal. The concept paper from 1963 was classified for 30 years until it was released to the public in the 1990s. In 2021, it was mentioned again by a few Indian websites and YouTube channels. According t...