By Alexander Willis, Drop Site
In late July, I received a peculiar cold email. It was an invitation from the American Middle East Press Association (AMEPA) for an all-expenses-paid tour of Israel, tailored exclusively to members of the U.S. media. As a journalist in Alabama whose job consists primarily of chasing around lawmakers and writing about committee hearings, the offer was certainly outside my wheelhouse. But as someone who has observed Israel’s war in Gaza closely and the western media’s coverage of the war, I was intrigued, especially since AMEPA’s goal is “to get the truth out there,” according to Kim Kamen, the organization’s chief operating officer. So in September, I took them up on their offer and headed to Israel.
During the five-day trip, we were told that nearly every Palestinian in Gaza shared culpability for the October 7 attack by Hamas. Several of the experts and officials AMEPA introduced us to said that rape and brutal killings are inherent to the Islamic faith and that many United Nations aid workers were terrorists. Some even suggested that the countless videos of Palestinians injured or killed by Israeli bombardment were, in fact, often staged film productions.
AMEPA’s truth, as I discovered, amounts to a version of pure Israeli propaganda far more extreme than anything I could have expected.
On the evening of September 15, I landed in Tel Aviv. Of the 14 press trip participants, the majority were journalists from the U.S. of both statewide and regional publications, including Sinclair Broadcast Group, Business Insider, and Newsweek, with a handful from European publications. With three other U.S. journalists also attending the trip, I hopped in a cab and soon made our way to the Prima City Hotel, right on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
I had some sense of what I was getting into. AMEPA was founded in 2023 by Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the chairman of the organization’s three-member board and founder of several similar groups in Europe. Margolin has openly defended Israel’s war in Gaza. He has accused the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) of harboring ties to Hamas and claimed that “Israel is going beyond what most militaries do in war to protect the civilian population.”
On the first night of our trip, we huddled in a conference room at the hotel to meet with Nir Natan, the press trip’s coordinator for AMEPA, and Major General Israel Ziv, a regular on Israel’s Keshet 12 television channel, for a geopolitical overview of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, first, one journalist raised an interesting question: Was AMEPA funded in any part by a political party or the Israeli government? (Before asking their question, the reporter requested it “not get reported” by those of us in the group.) “Absolutely not,” Natan said.
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