‘The Blood Libel Machine’

^“The intended victims of October 7 were not the people in the Gaza periphery,” Gil Hoffman said. “They were the Jews of New York.”

Mr. Hoffman is a Chicago-born journalist (okay, he is from suburban Lincolnwood, Illinois, but that’s close enough) and made aliyah in 1999, when he was 22. He’s got serious credentials — he was the Jerusalem Post’s chief political correspondent, and then he became the executive director of Honest Reporting. He’s now an author, reporter, and all-around fou  nt of deeply sourced information and analysis.

He is not for a fraction of a second disputing the brutal horror of October 7, with its 1,200 butchered victims and 250 hostages, some of whom did not return to Israel alive. But he is saying that despite the glee Hamas took in slaughtering them, its leaders had a goal even beyond that. In a way, they were collateral damage, Mr. Hoffman says in his new book, “The Blood Libel Machine: Exposing the Anti-Israel Hate Network, and How to Fight Back.”

The goal was to goad Israel into actions that could unite much of the world in hatred against it, he wrote, and he’ll talk about this assertion in Caldwell and in Closter next week. (See box.)

“People don’t remember, but before October 7, the Palestinians were struggling to get on the international agenda,” Mr. Hoffman said. “Nobody was talking about them. The Abraham Accords” — the 2020 agreement that was supposed to normalize relations between Israel and some Arab states, with more to follow, should things go well — “were about to move forward. The Biden administration intended to complete an agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia by Super Tuesday.” (That was March 5, 2024, just five months after October 7, when the two major political parties both held primaries that would shape the presidential election coming up that November.) “That was going to be the administration’s big foreign policy accomplishment, and Biden would be able to take it to the election.” It was likely to sway votes.

“I met with Netanyahu’s national security advisor, Tzachi Hanegbi, on Friday, October 6, 2023, at 2 p.m.,” Mr. Hoffman said. “He talked about the different security threats that Israel was facing. At the end, when he got to Hamas, he called them restrained. He said, ‘What they care about is getting more workers from Gaza into Israel.’ Part of the agreement with Saudi Arabia was going to double the number of Gazan workers coming into Israel, which would have revitalized the Gazan economy.

“Of course, that was 180 degrees wrong.”

In fact, Mr. Hoffman said, “Hamas could not have cared less about the people of Gaza.” Dead Gazans would be live propaganda. “Their goal — which the Hamas people admitted in speech after speech, in Arabic, was to get the Palestinian issue back on the agenda, and to stop the Abraham Accords from moving forward.

“And it absolutely worked.”

Hamas’s deadly rampage at the Nova music festival, where they killed 378 people and took 44 others hostage, was a kind of ghastly bonus, Mr. Hoffman said. Hamas didn’t know about it until they stumbled on it. “They were supposed to go to Netivot,” a nearby city, “but the people of Netivot were spared because the fighters passed by the music festival and started raping and killing and kidnapping.

“But remember, their goal was not Nova. It was New York. And the antisemitism that’s spiraling out of control was very much planned, well in advance.

“So while our side was not at all ready as the Tzachi Hanegbi story shows, Hamas was very ready. The anti-Israel groups in America were very ready. They’ve been working on this strategy for 30 years.”

It goes back to the Philadelphia Conference, Mr. Hoffman said. That was the 1993 meeting that Hamas leaders convened in Pennsylvania; we know about it because the FBI wiretapped it. The mission they discussed was to make Hamas appear sympathetic and Israelis monstrous. It seems to have worked.

All this is in “The Blood Libel Machine,” and it is all horrifying. But “I didn’t want the book to be horrifying,” Mr. Hoffman said. “At the end, I give 35 tips that people can use to join the narrative war, fighting for Israel and the Jewish people on mainstream media, social media, and AI platforms. Because I did not want to write a book of gloom and doom. I wanted to write a book that provides hope.”

The gloom and doom part is necessary, he added, because “in order to have hope, you need to be informed.”

To that end, “The Blood Libel Machine” has chapters explaining the history that led up to the conflict, one on why the Israelis were not ready for what happened, and another on why the Palestinians were. There’s a chapter about the media, how it saw October 7, and how it covered it, in Israel, in America, and around the world.

“And there’s a chapter on Qatar.” Why? “Because while there are seven military fronts to the war now, and the octopus head in that war is Iran, in the narrative war it’s Qatar.

“The money came from Qatar. The communications strategy came from Qatar. Al Jazeera comes from Qatar. Al Jazeera is the propaganda tool of a terror-sponsoring regime that pretends it’s CNN and misleads people around the world. It’s very dangerous.

“Qatar has infected the political establishment in America in both parties, and in Israel as well. Their money is very, very dangerous. And I say that as someone who used to be interviewed in Al Jazeera and receive their stipends. I stopped doing that shortly after October 7, when I realized that they were an active player in the conflict.

“And then there’s a chapter about why the American Jewish community wasn’t ready. There’s also a chapter about anti-Israel groups in America, why they were so ready, and how they get their money. And the NGOs here” — in Israel — “and what role they played in the vicious cycle.”

“And there’s a chapter on college campuses, and one on social media.”

Mr. Hoffman has a chapter on the Israeli elections too, although he, like the rest of us, knows more about it now than he did when the book went to press, and what he knows is likely to change between now and when he will speak locally. He has many thoughts and insights on the election and he will discuss them.

“I’ll talk about the efforts to form a government in Israel that will attempt to improve the way we’re fighting the narrative war, and then I’ll speak about that narrative war. And if there is a military escalation, I’ll talk about it.” He will know what he’s talking about. “I served in the spokesmen’s unit in the IDF, and I maintain those connections that can help provide an insider’s look there too,” Mr. Hoffman said.

He writes about the eight categories of media bias that Honest Reporting provides — misleading terminology, unbalanced reporting, disguising opinion as news, not providing context, practicing selective omission, combining or framing actual facts so they lead to false conclusions, distorting facts, and failing to disclose sources, possible conflicts of interest, and other failures of transparency that can turn truth into lies.

So where is the hope?

“People give me hope,” Mr. Hoffman said. “There are people who doubted the TikTok generation. They mock them for having no idealism and no attention span. Yet in Israel, those young people sacrificed themselves in this war — in the loss of life, and so many wounded, and the reservists who have given up their lives for hundreds of days.

“I teach a college course in journalism,” he continued. It’s at the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon LeZion, Israel’s largest college. “I’ve had students repeat the class” because they have to leave it so often, for such large chunks of time, to do their duty as IDF reservists. “There’s a female student, an army medic, who was taking my class for the third time. She’s a hero. She’s seen things that no human being should ever see. And she’s still taking the class, because she has hope for the future.”

There are heroes among Diaspora Jews too, he said. “Young people in America who enlisted voluntarily in the narrative war on Israel on the media battlefield. They also lost friends. They showed a lot of courage, and that’s because they are proud Jews.

“And it’s not only young people. It’s people of all ages.”

Mr. Hoffman has longstanding ties to New Jersey, particularly to MetroWest. He was the New Jersey Jewish News’s Israel correspondent for about 25 years. “I interviewed every New Jersey governor and senator who came to Israel,” he said. Because of the many connections he developed, “I feel very much a part of the community.”

That connection deepened on September 11, 2001. In Israel, “I accompanied a very high-powered mission from MetroWest that was led by Frank Lautenberg, the Democrat who “was not a senator at that time,” Mr. Hoffman said. Mr. Lautenberg’s first time in the Senate was from 1982 to 2001, so he’d been out of office for less than a year. Bret Schundler, a Democrat-turned-Republican who had just ended his tenure as mayor of Jersey City, was the co-leader. Max Kleinman, now the CEO emeritus of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest but then its CEO, also was part of the mission. “All the big names from the federation were here,” Mr. Hoffman said, about 25 people in all.

“They came because Israel was under attack from terror.” It was the height of the Second Intifada. The month before, a suicide bomber had killed 16 people at the Sbarro pizza place in Jerusalem.

The MetroWest contingent was on its way to Ofakim from Kibbutz Erez, Mr. Hoffman said; both Ofakim and Kibbutz Erez are MetroWest sister cities. Ofakim, about 13 miles from the border with Gaza, was a Hamas target on October 7; 48 of its residents were murdered that day. Terrorists tried to invade Erez, which is even closer than Ofakim to Gaza, but its civil defense squad managed to repel them. Only one Erez resident, a member of that security force, was murdered.

But that was on October 7, 2023. We have to go back to September 11, 2001, for this part of the story.

“I was writing for the Jerusalem Post then,” Mr. Hoffman said. “So on my way to meet the delegation, I listened to the radio when they broke into the program and said that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.”

When Mr. Hoffman got to the MetroWest delegation, he had to tell them what had just happened. “Something terrible just happened in New York,” he remembers saying. And then “I got to see a living bridge in action,” he said. The New Jersey delegation had gone to Israel to show solidarity with the Israelis; in Ofakim, when they got the news, “the people there showed solidarity with them.

“And then I ended up leaving, because Frank Lautenberg said he had to get where he could be reached and be updated. He said, ‘I know things that other people don’t know.’ So I had to get back to the King David,” the iconic hotel in Jerusalem, “where he was staying. And there was this other unemployed gentleman who called a press conference that I had to cover. He was named Benjamin Netanyahu, and he had to tell the world that he had predicted September 11.

“The entire way back, I was translating Israeli radio from Hebrew to English for Frank,” Mr. Hoffman said. “And that mission’s plane was the first plane allowed to land in the United States after September 11.

As a result of the attack, Mr. Lautenberg decided to return to the Senate; he was reelected in 2003 and retained his seat until he died in 2013. Mr. Netanyahu was Israel’s prime minister from 1996 to 1999, from 2009 to 2021, and from 2022 until now.

Mr. Hoffman has seen, knows, and has written about many stories. He’ll tell some of them, inevitably tinged with horror but buoyed with hope, at his three stops in New Jersey.

Who: Gil Hoffman

What: Will talk about his book, “The Blood Libel Machine”

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When: Saturday, November 14, at 9 a.m.

Where: At Temple Emanu-El of Closter

Why: As scholar in residence

For more information: Go to tecloster.org

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When: Sunday, November 15, at 7:45 p.m.

Where: Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell

For more information: Call 973-226-3600 or go to Agudath.org