Dear friends,
As many of you will know doubt recall, Stand With US, a US based Zionist group which originally started out on US campuses and which works closely with the Israeli government announced that it would be producing a comic book with a "superhero" called "Captain Israel". According to Stand With Us CEO, Roz Rothstein, the comic book was being published because “Israel’s Jewish connection to Israel and the land is always being challenged, [and] we wanted to reestablish our Jewish roots and make sure that everyone understood the history, stuff we know and take for granted and that others try to chip away at.”
The comic book, of course, is part of Israeli and Zionist hasbara efforts which repeats and promotes much of the racist Zionist mythology that Palestine was "a land with out a people for a people without a land". As Mark LeVine, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California at Irvine notes the first edition of the comic book was filled with with historical inaccuracies and Zionist mythology, particularly about the narrative of how Israel was formed. According to the comic, 400 years before the first World War, “…Palestine was an unimportant backwater of the Ottoman Empire, sparsely populated, barren, impoverished.... Until, in the latter half of the 19th century new Jewish immigrants from Europe and Russia... began to repopulate the desolate land, buying it legally from absentee Palestinian landlords." (you can read the first volume of Captain Israel here)
Volume two of Captain Israel reveals even more clearly the hasbara (propaganda) nature of the comic book, Volume two (which you can read in full below) is called "Captain Israel vs BDS", in which Captain Israel combats the BDS "snake". As Jewish American blogger and writer Max Blumenthal has pointed out, one of the most disturbing things about the Stand With Us comic is over use of anti-Semitic tropes in order to supposedly prove that BDS is anti-Semetic.
in solidarity, Kim
Captain Israel vs. BDS
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