Focus on Arts and Ecology

By Caitlin Johnstone, October 18, 2025 

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

In one of the more freakish acts of genocide propaganda we’ve seen in the last two years, the official Twitter account of the Israel Foreign Ministry made a post smearing desperate, starving civilians as cruel savages using the false allegation that they “tore apart” a “whale” that had become “stranded” on the beach.

“Gazans tore apart a stranded whale on the beach. This is cruelty that knows no limits. But we didn’t hear anything about it from Greta PR Thunberg,” the ministry tweeted, with accompanying footage of people using ropes to move the body of a sea creature on the beach.

There’s a lot to unpack about this one, but bear with me, because while this one instance of propaganda wouldn’t even make a Top Ten Thousand list of the most evil things Israel has done, it says so much about the way this genocidal apartheid state dehumanizes the Palestinian people.

A quick glance shows that the animal in the video is not a “whale” at all but a whale shark, easily recognizable by the distinct spots and ridges on its back which no species of whale possesses. Whale sharks are not a type of whale at all, but the world’s largest species of fish, so named only because of their immense size.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry falsely claimed the animal was a “whale” because “starving civilians eat a fish” does not make for good propaganda if you’re trying to frame them as loathsome barbarians.

Whales, unlike fish, can survive for hours or even days if they become stranded on land because they breathe air. The post is crafted to convey the image of a bunch of uncivilized subhumans ripping apart a sentient mammal while still alive in order to pull at the heart strings of western environmentalists.

There is no such thing as a “stranded” fish; there are fish in the water and there are dead fish. The whale shark in the video was dead, and had probably been dead for some time.

To be clear, the Israeli government did not innocently misidentify a species of fish as a whale. The Israeli press had already reported that a whale shark had been butchered for food on the shores of Gaza, after having previously reported on sightings of the animal off Israel’s shores weeks earlier.

They knew it was a dead shark, and they made the cold, calculated decision to circulate the lie that a whale had become beached on Gaza and met an agonizing end at the hands of the locals there.

In a sense this is a distinction without a difference, because only a monster would begrudge starving civilians feeding their children with actual whale meat in desperate times anyway. There is an overwhelming and consistent consensus among humanitarian aid groups that the people of Gaza are being starved by Israel.

But the fact that they’d go out of their way to lie about such a thing in order to make Palestinians look like depraved vermin really illustrates the hateful intensity with which Israel wants to exterminate these people.

I mean, think about it. Firstly, on its face the Israeli government is suggesting that the lives of Palestinians are worth less than the life of a single whale. Just that one fact, all by itself, shows you how low the Israelis rank the value of Palestinian life in the grand order of things.

Then they had to Israelify their position even more by lying about it, falsely claiming that a beached whale was torn apart by primitive sadists who should have instead helped the animal return to sea. An animal that they knew was dead.

Then they Israelified it even further by adding in their freakish obsession with activist Greta Thunberg, who recently confirmed earlier reports that she was tortured and sexually humiliated by Israeli forces after being abducted for trying to bring aid to Gaza.

Then they somehow managed to make it even more Israeli by adding in hypocrisy, accusing the Palestinians of “cruelty that knows no limits” after spending two years inflicting unfathomable suffering upon that population in full view of the entire world.

Imagine surviving two years of genocidal atrocities, starving, watching your children starve, getting hungrier and hungrier and more and more desperate, and then along comes this giant fish that could feed many families.

It would feel like a gift from God. Imagine the elation you would feel.

And then imagine learning that your tormenters had somehow found a way to spin even this miraculous, life-giving moment of relief as something cruel and barbaric.

Israeli propagandists would have seen Palestinians sharing videos celebrating their joy about the whale shark and recognized that if the footage isn’t carefully framed in a cunning way, it could actually bring hope to the people of Gaza and their supporters. So they made their very best effort to drop a big, steaming turd on it in order to kill those hopes.

Israel has done so many stunningly evil things to the Palestinians that it almost feels trivial to focus on this single act of social media propaganda today. But I expect this one will stick with me, just because of how much it says about Israel and its abusiveness.

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