The fantasy factory: Why people post lies about Israel

Something strange is happening online. “Tel Aviv has been leveled.” “Bib has been killed.” “Chabad orchestrated the war with Iran.” “Israel is destroying Al-Aqsa.” Tens of thousands of posts, millions of views, but it is all total fiction.

Anyone with a passing connection to reality can see these claims for what they are. So why do people post them? More than that, why do so many believe them?

We are, in effect, living on two planets simultaneously. There is the one most of us inhabit, where events unfold with causes, evidence and facts. Then there is the parallel world that exists on X and its neighbors, a place I have started thinking of as Fake-istan.

In Fake-istan, Israel is always wrong, always the aggressor, yet always losing, always exposed, always on the verge of annihilation. The rules of evidence do not apply there. Neither does geography, physics or even basic logic.

What is fascinating—and I mean, genuinely fascinating—is who populates Fake-istan. Pay attention, and you will notice something.

The accounts celebrating fabricated Israeli casualties are very often the same accounts that spent the past two-and-a-half years screaming about Israelis committing an alleged genocide, apparently attempting to kill 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. The people gaining a thrill from their delusion of Israeli civilians being massacred are the same people who claimed to be outraged by Palestinian civilian casualties, whether they are real or not.

That is not a coincidence. It is a window into something much deeper.

The moral energy behind genocide accusations was never primarily about humanitarian concern; after all, the accusations began long before Israel went into Gaza.

Rather, they were about satisfying a pre-existing desire, a need to see Jewish power smashed and Jewish people punished. People who have a bloodlust feel guilty about it, especially since the Holocaust. The easiest solution is to find a way to accuse those hated of crimes that might justify the inner rage of those who feel that bloodlust. When real events did not deliver that satisfaction, fantasy stepped in to fill the gap.

Soviet writer and journalist Vassily Grossman put it plainly: Tell me what they accuse the Jews of, and I will tell you what they themselves are guilty of. British journalist and author Douglas Murray extended the point during an interview he did with Channel 14 news in October of 2024, when he clarified that “the people screaming that Israel committed genocide are the people who want to commit genocide.”

Fake-istan exists to serve that need.

But there are other forces at work, and they are worth naming. The Iranian regime posts fabricated footage of Israeli destruction because propaganda is a weapon, and they are at war. Russia amplifies the same content for different reasons, primarily to sow confusion in the West and erode confidence in American alliances. Qatar, which is no friend of Israel’s, floods the internet via Al Jazeera and its 20 or so affiliated networks with anti-Israel propaganda to spread these lies. These cynical actors know there is a market for this content, and they supply it accordingly.

Then there is the more ordinary human machinery underneath it all. The brain does not easily distinguish between what is real and what is vividly imagined. That is why we cry during movies. That is why a well-produced video of a “destroyed” Tel Aviv can generate genuine emotional responses, even in people who should know better. The human mind is built to respond to images and narrative, not to cross-reference satellite data and dig for facts.

Moreover, humans are social machines. We think, feel and align ourselves into tribes. Someone on the political left today is likely to be so bombarded with this propaganda as to trust the multiple information sources feeding them. Groupthink is a real sociological phenomenon, and thought climates produce thought conformity at scale.

In the past, masses bought blood libels, and legal systems found the collective Jewish community guilty of countless “crimes.” Today’s accusations are no less outrageous, but to one inside the groupthink, they seem believable and real.

Wishful thinking does the rest. When people desperately want something to be true, the threshold for accepting evidence collapses dramatically. Take a grainy video or an AI one, add a dramatic caption or 1,000 retweets, and that is enough. Do that again and again and again, and the mind begins to think that the lie is actually true, no matter how absurd it may be.

What this moment is actually revealing, if we are paying attention, is the emotional architecture of Israel-hatred. This war has stripped away the polite justifications and exposed what lies underneath. Principled opposition to specific policies and humanitarian concerns were never the real impetus for anti-Israel messaging.

The messaging came to fill a need, visceral and unruly, to see Israel fail and Jews suffer. When reality refuses to cooperate, manufacturing a version of events seems to satisfy that craving.

That tells us something important about how to respond. Fact-checking Fake-istan is, to a large extent, a categorical error. The people generating and consuming this content are not primarily operating in the domain of facts. They are operating in the domain of desire.

Understanding that does not make the lies less dangerous. Propaganda shapes public opinion, even when it is obvious propaganda, and the scale of what is being produced is staggering. But it should sharpen our thinking about what we are actually dealing with.

Two planets, one shared sky. The gap between them is not primarily an information problem.

It is a moral one.