The 12 big mistruths of Israeli diplomacy

The National Press Club should be castigated for amplifying the views of someone who is dangerously presenting factually incorrect material.

The recent address by the Israeli Ambassador Hillel Newman at the National Press Club this week was presented as a statement of fact, but a closer inspection reveals something else entirely: a speech based on selective histories, clear disinformation, misinformation and a stretching of the truth to the point of breakage, and a series of claims that don’t withstand scrutiny when placed against the evidence, carefully constructed to veer criticisms away from the state of Israel.

His most egregious assertion was “there was no genocide in Gaza”, and Newman making this assertion so strongly is deeply misleading and offensive. Amnesty International has concluded that Israel is committing genocide; Human Rights Watch has identified acts of genocide; the United Nations has said Israel’s conduct is consistent with the characteristics of genocide; and the International Court of Justice has found the claim plausible enough to order provisional measures against the state of Israel.

It doesn’t matter that Israel disputes these allegations – which is what we’d expect from the perpetrators of a genocide – there are just too many credible organisations, including several within Israel itself, that have made this determination for it to be so easily dismissed. The other salient point here is that none of the journalists present at the National Press Club questioned him on this claim. None.

The Ambassador’s speech is the consistent message always pushed through by the state of Israel. Israel is right, and everyone is wrong: it’s exceptionalism and supremacy of the worst kind. Historical events were misrepresented, legal issues were selectively applied, and outrageous misrepresentations were presented as settled facts, as determined by the state of Israel. In most cases, Newman’s claims were directly contradicted by the available evidence; in other claims, they relied on rhetoric that stretches far beyond any form of credibility.

When a senior diplomat is given a platform by the National Press Club and presents this type of narrative to a national audience on the national broadcaster, there is an expectation that the information presented is accurate and complete – taking into account that political leaders and their representatives will push boundaries and engage in some hyperbole – but reliable evidence needs to be provided to back up the claims.

In this case, that standard was not met, the Australian public was presented with an endless thrust of pro-Israel and Zionist propaganda, akin to Joseph Goebbels taking the podium in the 1930s and lecturing us all on the virtues of Nazism. The National Press Club should be castigated for amplifying the views of someone who is dangerous and presenting factually incorrect material.

Here is a list of the high-level disinformation that we came across – there were too many other inaccuracies to keep track of, but we’ve kept it to the main points:

The 12 big mistruths

Disinformation 1: “Till today, sadly, the majority of the Arab League and Muslim bloc refuse to recognise Israel in any borders.”

Saying they refuse to recognise Israel “in any borders” ignores two major facts: Egypt and Jordan have long had peace treaties with Israel, and the Abraham Accords added the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, endorsed by the Arab League, explicitly proposed recognition and normal relations with Israel under stated conditions. Saudi Arabia has also publicly said normalisation depends on a Palestinian state, which again contradicts the claim that recognition is rejected “in any borders”.

Disinformation 2: “There is no other country in the Middle East that upholds the same democratic ideals of Australia as Israel does…”

This is presented as a fact, but is a tired and worn-out political slogan. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s current Democracy Index places Israel in the “flawed democracy” category, not some brilliant beacon of democracy. Human Rights Watch has said Israeli authorities are committing crimes of apartheid and persecution; B’Tselem says the regime across the occupied territories it controls is apartheid; Amnesty reached the same conclusion; and the International Court of Justice July 2024 advisory opinion found unlawful occupation and legally significant separation between settlers and Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Disinformation 3: “It [the new death-penalty law] preserves judicial discretion… did not mandate automatic sentencing… allows an appeal… enables also presidency clemency.”

This is one of the strongest factual inaccuracies in the speech. Reporting on the law says the opposite of what he claimed in several crucial respects. The legislation has been widely reported as making the death penalty the default punishment for Palestinians convicted in military courts of certain deadly attacks, with execution within 90 days, and with no meaningful right to pardon/clemency.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the law is discriminatory and inconsistent with Israel’s legal obligations, specifically noting the absence of pardon and due-process problems. Reuters also reported that the law makes execution the default penalty, with only vague “special circumstances” exceptions.

Disinformation 4: “The third largest party in the Knesset is the Arab party…”

This is not correct. It is correct that Arab parties are represented in the Knesset, but they are not the third-largest party – Likud is the largest, Yesh Atid is second, and Shas is third. United Arab List and Hadash-Ta’al both have five seats each out of the 120 seats in the Knesset, well below the third listed party.

Disinformation 5: “What began as graffiti and vandalism tragically escalated to bullets on Bondi Beach.”

This is an unproven and unsubstantiated causal leap, one that was also made by the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal. The Bondi Beach attack was treated by Australian authorities and major reporting outlets as an Islamist/ISIS-inspired antisemitic terror attack. That is not the same as evidence that local graffiti incidents “escalated” into the shooting as part of one continuous chain. He is rhetorically linking separate events, such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge walk in 2025, without demonstrating the causal connection.

Disinformation 6: “Foreign correspondents covering the Middle East typically choose Israel as their base… because they know that Israel is the safest place that allows them to work freely… Israel has never targeted a journalist just for being a journalist.”

This is not supported by the evidence. Israel may well be where many foreign correspondents choose to base themselves – also, because Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza – but the broader claim collapses when you include Gaza and Israeli military actions.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that Israel was responsible for roughly two-thirds of all journalist/media-worker killings in 2025, and regard this as the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists in the world. The International Federation of Journalists lists at least 234 journalists that have been killed by Israel in Gaza. This completely demolishes the Ambassador’s outrageous claim that Israel “never targeted” journalists and it’s just a “campaign against Israel” rhetoric.

Disinformation 7: “The majority of all the journalists, so called journalists that were affected were actually activists diguised as journalists.”

He provides no evidence for this extraordinary claim, and when pressed later he admits: “we have no way of knowing the exact amount of journalists who are 100 per cent journalists, who were killed”. He’s undercut his assertion with his own evidence. You cannot credibly claim a majority are fake journalists and then concede you do not know the actual number of real journalists killed.

Independent monitoring organisations are counting these deaths as journalist and media-worker killings, not dismissing a majority as militants in disguise. The CPJ and IFJ continue to track and investigate these cases and have issued repeated calls for transparent investigations rather than adopting the Israeli government’s broad-brush claim.

Disinformation 8: On the Lebanon strike, he says two of the three were Hezbollah operatives disguised as journalists, and implies the third probably was as well because he was with them.

This is not backed up by the publicly available reporting. CPJ reported that the Israel Defense Forces claimed Ali Hassan Shoaib was a member of Hezbollah’s Radwan Force, but that does not validate the ambassador’s broader attempt to recast the whole incident as a strike on fake journalists. In the transcript itself he concedes they were “not sure” about the third person. That is not a firm evidentiary basis for smearing all three. It does not substantiate the ambassador’s larger claim that the broader journalist death toll is mostly fake, nor does it independently confirm his insinuation about all three victims.

Disinformation 9: “You come to a ratio of one to 1.5… In urban warfare, the ratio is usually one to nine.”

This is a classic talking point, but it is not a settled issue or credible benchmark. There is no single accepted “usual” urban–warfare ratio of 9 civilians to 1 combatant. Broad conflict datasets and humanitarian research put civilian shares much lower than that as a general rule, and urban conflict estimates can vary widely. So his use of “usually one to nine” is misleading, and it is then used to make Gaza look exceptionally restrained by comparison.

There is a key Human Security Report from 2021 that challenges the old myth that 90 per cent of wartime deaths are civilians.

Disinformation 10: “We’ve heard from Iranian experts… they believe it’s not true that the school was attacked… You can’t rely on pictures… What we do know is that United States of America has said it itself that they did not target a school.”

This relates to the girls’ school in southern Iran, where over 168 people, including 110 children, were killed by the United States. It’s misleading because the available reporting is far stronger than he suggests. Reuters has reported that U.S. military investigators believed it was likely that U.S. forces were responsible for the strike on the Iranian girls’ school, and later reported that outdated targeting intelligence may have contributed. So the Ambassador’s attempt to wave this away as unverified imagery and chatter from the diaspora was a dishonest representation of what had already been reported.

Disinformation 11: “There was an investigator on behalf of Australia who was given full access… He was given full access at the time to what they had available…”

This is in relation to the killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, and it is at minimum incomplete and misleading. The key point raised by some journalists in the room was that the investigator Mark Binskin did not get access to the drone audio, and more recent Australian reporting has focussed on that missing evidence. So claiming “full access” while simultaneously acknowledging that he was not given the audio is internally inconsistent. The Ambassador said that was up to the IDF, not him. That is not what most people would understand by “full access”.

Disinformation 12: “There was no genocide in Gaza…”

A number of highly credible organisations and United Nations bodies have concluded that Israel’s conduct in Gaza either amounts to genocide, includes acts of genocide, or is consistent with the characteristics of genocide.

The UN Special Committee said in November 2024 that Israel’s warfare in Gaza was “consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” and later UN reporting referred to the “ongoing genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

The International Court of Justice has not made a final finding that genocide has occurred, but it has found the rights claimed by South Africa under the Genocide Convention is plausible enough to justify provisional measures, including orders that Israel prevent genocidal acts and punish direct and public incitement to genocide.

Amnesty International concluded that “a sufficient basis to conclude that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza,” and describes Israel’s conduct as “ongoing genocide”. Human Rights Watch has reported Israeli authorities are responsible for “acts of genocide” and using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, and said Israeli forces have escalated atrocities including “acts of genocide”. It is misleading for the Ambassador to speak as though the allegation of genocide has been definitively disproven, when it clearly has not.