Propaganda dies the second you meet the person it was written about. The whole world is finding that out this summer — one gas station at a time. Just not about Israel.
Somewhere in the American South this week, a German soccer fan walked into a Buc-ee’s — the Texas gas-station chain that is less a rest stop than a small sovereign nation — took in the wall of jerky and the 50 fuel pumps and the acre of brisket under heat lamps, and had what I can only describe as a religious experience. Millions of people have watched it. I am one of them — an American Jew, watching from a couch in Florida, as charmed as everyone else. I have watched it more than once.
This piece is about why I can’t fully enjoy it.
The Brochure
My FYP has been a genuinely lovely place to live lately, which is not a sentence I expected to type in 2026. My Twitter feed too, somehow. For weeks it’s been wall-to-wall World Cup tourists discovering America in real time, and discovering it the way a Victorian explorer discovers a waterfall. A Scottish guy weeping over the sauce-by-the-vat situation at Raising Cane’s. Japanese visitors narrating a Walmart cereal aisle in the hushed tones of people touring the Vatican. Grown men becoming visibly emotional about free refills. Free ice. The radical proposition that you can simply take more.
It is delightful. It is also, if you watch closely, not really delight. It’s surprise. The specific surprise of a person discovering that what they were promised and what is actually in front of them do not match.
Because here, roughly, is the brochure the rest of the world has been handed on the United States these last few years:
A war zone with a flag, gunfire in every parking lot.
A place where one illness bankrupts you and the bodies stack up in the street.
A cruel, stupid, joyless dystopia in the late stages of collapse.
And then they land. And the guy behind the counter is kind. And strangers wave, and nobody is dying in the road, and the portions are frankly unreasonable, and a whole genre of video turns out to be the same admission, over and over, in a dozen accents: we were lied to.
That’s the engine here. Not that America forgot to advertise its Waffle Houses. That people were sold a story — a deliberate story, told confidently and often, built to make them fear a place they had never set foot in — and ten seconds of contact with a real human being blew the whole thing apart.
This Is How Walls Come Down
Which is, when you think about it, the entire mechanism of grace. You arrive somewhere carrying a cardboard cutout of it in your head. You meet one actual person. The cutout turns into a person too. Propaganda cannot survive the gas station. That is how walls come down — not through arguments, not through campaigns, but one free refill at a time.
I love this. I’ve watched approximately 400 of these videos. I’ve sent them to my entire family. It is the best the internet has been in years.
So let me sit in it one more second. And then let me ruin it.
Except One
Because there is exactly one country on earth the rest of the world was handed a brochure on — a far darker one — and has never, not once, allowed itself to discover it was a lie.
This isn’t about countries with grim reputations in general. Some places earn theirs; a few, like North Korea, bolt the door from the inside so no outsider can check. Israel is the opposite. You can fly in tomorrow. Its ordinary Tuesday is sitting right there to be seen. And still the world won’t look.
You already know the brochure on Israel. Nothing but rubble and soldiers. An apartheid hellscape with no ordinary life inside it — no beaches, no weddings, no Tuesday, no people, just cruelty all the way down. It runs on the same machinery that was aimed at America — a story built to make you hate a place before you ever lay eyes on it — but I won’t pretend the two are the same size. They aren’t.
The lie about America was mostly ambient, half of it accidental, and aimed at a superpower that can shrug, wait, and let the tourists show up on their own. The lie about Israel is none of those things. It is deliberate, organized, relentless, and genuinely dangerous, and it is aimed at a country of roughly ten million people about the size of New Jersey — a place with none of a superpower’s margin to absorb being hated. By every measure that matters, what is done to Israel is worse, and the stakes are higher.
Which is exactly what makes the rest of it so hard to watch. America — the easy case, the low-stakes case, the one where being wrong costs the world nothing — is getting its correction in real time, one Buc-ee’s at a time. Israel, the case where it actually matters, gets none. The brochure stays bolted to the wall, because nobody will go and look, and on the rare occasion an actual Israeli turns up in front of them, the response isn’t curiosity. It’s confiscation.
I am being literal. Same tournament. In Los Angeles, at the Iran—New Zealand match, a fan stood holding an Israeli flag. Stewards came over and made him hand it over. The stated reason was “safety.” A few rows away, Palestinian flags stayed exactly where they were. Iranian flags too. So the man did the only reasonable thing a person can do in that moment — he pointed at the other flags and asked the obvious question. “This feels like antisemitism,” he said. “When you take that flag down, I’ll take mine down.”[1]
They took his.
And it isn’t a stray incident. There were protesters in Toronto with a “Kick Israel out of FIFA” banner. There are organized campaigns to throw the Jewish state out of international soccer altogether. The same crowd that will drive six hours to film a gas station and call it one of the most beautiful things they’ve ever seen — the same people going misty over a stranger’s iced tea, marveling that they’d been lied to about America — cannot spare an Israeli a single second of that same curiosity. They’ve got infinite room to discover they were wrong about one country. None left over for the other.
The Substitution Test
There’s one question that’s the fastest way to see a thing like this clearly. Would you apply it — in the same words, with the same heat — to literally any other country?
So run it. Swap the flag. A Brazilian flag, confiscated “for safety” while every other flag in the section flies. A Japanese flag, gone, while the row behind it keeps theirs. You already know there’d be a statement by morning. An apology. A hashtag. A FIFA spokesman in a bad suit. The rule only sounds reasonable when the flag is the Israeli one. And a rule that works on exactly one country isn’t a rule. It’s a target with a paragraph of justification stapled to the front.
The Curiosity Gap
Now the disclaimer. I’m not saying every flag dispute is antisemitism, or that Israel floats above the criticism every country on earth has to absorb. Israel is a country. Countries get criticized. That’s the deal — and good-faith critics of Israeli policy, including Jewish ones, exist; calling all of them bigots is a cheap move, and a lazy one.
What I’m pointing at is narrower, and harder to wave off. It’s the curiosity gap. Everyone else at this tournament gets the benefit of the doubt — the let me see for myself, let me actually go, maybe it isn’t what they told me. The travelers extended exactly that to America, and reality rewarded them with the truth. Israelis are the only ones never offered it at all — before they’ve said a single word, before they’ve poured a single free refill.
Deleted Before You Arrive
Here’s the cruel part. You can’t discover you were lied to about a place you refuse to visit. You can’t be surprised by someone you’ve already cast as the villain before they open their mouth. The American cutout fell apart because people showed up and let reality talk back. The Israeli cutout survives precisely because the one thing that kills propaganda — contact, curiosity, a human face at a normal distance — is the one thing an Israeli is never granted. The person gets deleted before the encounter can even happen.
And that’s the bitter joke of this whole lovely month. The entire point of it — the thing melting everyone’s hearts — is the discovery that the people on the other side of the wall are just people. Living their lives. Wanting their team to win. Filming something stupid for strangers on the internet. That’s all an Israeli is asking for. Not your agreement. Not your absolution. The same shot at being seen that a Texas gas station gets for free.
See For Yourself
I can’t make the world curious. Nobody can — that’s the whole reason the gas-station videos work and a tourism ad never would. But I can ask you to notice when the world’s curiosity has one conspicuous, load-bearing exception: when millions of people can look at America and say wait, I was lied to, and not one of them will turn and ask it about Israel.
I’m not Israeli. I’m an ocean away from all of it, on the same couch as everyone else, and I love these videos as much as anyone does. I just can’t watch the entire planet rediscover that strangers are people and miss the one stranger it still won’t meet.
I’d just like to know why the discovering stops at one flag.
And why the only person in that stadium willing to say so out loud was the man whose flag was already in the steward’s hands.
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[1] On the removal of the Israeli flag at the Iran—New Zealand match in Los Angeles, the “safety” rationale, the Palestinian and Iranian flags left in place, and the fan’s exchange with stewards (“This feels like antisemitism. When you take that flag down, I’ll take mine down”), see Israeli flag removed at World Cup match as Palestinian flags remain, The Jerusalem Post, June 17, 2026 (reporting on coverage by Israel Hayom).