on a tangent from the guidelines suggesting israelis:
'distract the world with “the stuff we’re good at” – “creative energy”, like being good at business or fashion, or that Israel “invented the cherry tomato”; to “fill the picture of Israel with all kinds of [other] images'
...turns out - **shock** - that's bogus. Cherry tomatoes have been around for centuries, in both new and old worlds. Israeli researchers, funded by Marks & Spencers, cross-bred some in the 70s which resulted in improved shelf-life, making them more suitable for transportation and sales in supermarkets. They also bred the '2-dimensional fishbone' form of the trusses which allowed for more efficient stacking of boxed tomatoes. For a while they cornered the market in seed sales to southern Europe (no evidence for the israeli govt claim that 40% of tomato seed in Europe came from israel), then other companies figured out how to get similar results. That's it.
Here's a 2016 paper going into it and looking at how claims like this feed into the general hasbara effort, which appears to be most effective on israelis themselves:
on July 14, 2025, 12:54 pm