INSIDE THE HYPERBOLIC CHAMBER
WHEN FACTS AREN’T ON THEIR SIDE, HUMANS RESORT TO APOPLECTIC LANGUAGE. NO GROUP DOES IT BETTER THAN “PRO-PALESTINIANS.”
The Palestinian case — or, more accurately, the anti-Israel case — is built on misrepresentations and outright lies. Palestinians and their overseas allies effectively invented fake news before the Trumpsters culturally appropriated it.
A related distinguishing characteristic of the Palestinian movement is extravagant rhetoric. Given that the movement cannot sustain itself on historical truth or contemporary morality, it necessarily relies on chanted slogans and drowning out the opposition. Extreme soundbites and emotive memes prevail. Dialogue is, by definition, a recipe for disaster. They can’t find victory through veracity so they vanquish with volume.
The main case of Palestinianism is fairly simple. It opposes the existence of a Jewish state. It is primarily oppositional — it does not, by and large, seek any constructive objective; it is not, despite its claims of being “pro-Palestinian,” primarily devoted to the creation of a Palestinian Arab state. That opportunity has been offered and rejected many times.
It is a secular religion impervious to reason, more than an intellectual premise. (Although it is also fueled by actual religion, which is an added, hardly irrelevant factor.) It holds that Israel’s existence is illegitimate, that the Jewish presence in the region, at least as a self-determined people, is a nakba, a “catastrophe.” It seeks to disregard decades of historical fact to advance a status quo ante in which a Jewish state does not exist. It is racist goons masquerading as a national liberation movement.
As a result, the case for Palestinianism, such as it is, relies less on convincing arguments than on ferocious hyperbole.
Even the Great Thinkers of the Palestinian movement throw away any pretense of academic rigor and rely on feverish rhetoric.
Ilan Pappé is a champion on this front. According to him, Israel is perpetrating “incremental genocide,” a particularly laughable assertion given the exponential growth in the Palestinian population. If there were a Palestinian genocide, the Israelis would be doing an uncharacteristically amateurish job of it: The Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza has gone from one million in 1960 to 1.5 million in 1980 to 2 million in 1990, to 4 million in 2010, to 5 million today. In Israel, the growth is parallel, with the Arab population expanding from 156,000 at the end of the war in 1949, to 1.2 million in 2001, to just under two million in 2021. This didn’t stop the “moderate” Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas from accusing Israel of perpetrating “50 holocausts” against the Palestinians. If you want examples of massively over-the-top hyperbole, you don’t need to plumb the fringes of the dark web. You can go straight to the top of the Palestinian movement.
Another “academic” declaims the “slow-motion ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians that has been going on in the occupied territories since 1967.” If it is ethnic cleansing, it is ethnic cleansing not in slow motion but in reverse.
The brightest minds of the Palestinian movement habitually employ hyperbolic language that is provably false at the slightest examination. How do they get away with it? Because their followers (and much of the world) are not concerned with veracity. You can shriek “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” until you pass out, but this is where the two collide — not only in ideology, but in methodology: Raging mobs driven by merciless bloodthirst typify both historical antisemitism and contemporary anti-Zionism. Do they have nuanced dissimilarities? Sure. But those distinctions are mostly irrelevant to the Jew (or “Zionist”) being chased down the streets of Crown Heights, Montreal or Malmo.
Pappé condemns “the daily destruction of Palestinian property and holy places.” Paralleling the “incremental genocide” embroidery, one wonders how many Palestinian holy places there could have been in the first place to permit decades of “daily destruction.” You kind of expect a little more rigor from someone with a PhD after their name.
He sees the structure of governance in the West Bank as “Palestinian Bantustans,” one of many images pilfered from South Africa that the Palestinian movement finds simply irresistible despite the cultural appropriation it requires.
Israel’s blockade of Gaza to prevent the importation of yet more terrorist weaponry is “economic and geographic strangulation.” (Pappé) Terror attacks are recast as justifiable homicide by Gazans “unwilling to live under conditions of strangulation, isolation, starvation and economic collapse.” (Pappé again) Palestinians are among the most obese people on earth, so the “starvation” thing is a rich pudding, and their “economic collapse” comes despite receiving by some measures the highest per capita aid in the world. But sure, let’s blame Israel for “strangulation,” a particularly attractive motif for “pro-Palestinian” shills. Nathan Thrall evokes a similar choking metaphor, accusing Israel of “economic asphyxiation” of Gaza. These allegations, all from before October 7, are especially evocative since then, as narratives emerge of literal strangulations of toddlers by bare Palestinian hands.
Edward Said, while a smidge more scholarly, still reverted to extravagances that brand Israelis “savage and ruthless,” engaging in “immoral subjugation.” According to Said, Zionism is “one of the most frightening cultural episodes of the [20th] century,” which is truly ponderous and soul-chilling coming from a historian. I mean … oh my gawd. This is one of the great thinkers, if not the seminal theorist, upon which the entire Palestinian movement and ideology is founded?
How many different ways can a professor say it? This is ethnic cleansing, that is apartheid, this is racist. Strangulation! Asphyxiation! Genocide! It is a book-length form of a chanting mob.
The hyperbole itself is a symptom of an inherent failure in the narrative. Because the Palestinian case cannot stand up when compared with dozens of quantitatively and qualitatively graver issues worldwide, they fail to contest the issues rationally and so resort to monotonous lies and embellishments.
The “progressive” approach to this one issue differs from their behavior toward every other issue and human condition on the planet. They employ murderous, spiteful language that they would use against no other people, in no other situation. They reject dialogue, they drown out opponents, they lie.
Do they shout like this to subdue their own doubts? Do they invent terms of invective and employ blatantly false claims of genocide and other crimes to cover the inability of reason to substantiate their case? Are they using exaggeration, outright lies, historical revisionism and desperate hyperbole to distract themselves from the root cause of their fervent devotion to a Palestinian movement that embodies every regressive, intolerant, misogynistic, homophobic, violent, racist value they say they oppose? Are they afraid that, if they strip away all of the rhetoric, hyperbole and blah blah blah that undergirds their dogma, they will find at the heart of their movement a motivation that is truly unconscionable? Do they employ this extreme language so they do not have to face the fact that their “reasoning” on this issue is not reasoning at all but based on the most steadfast, enduring prejudices and bigotries?
Only deep introspection by individuals can answer these questions. Every person should undertake self-reflection around this issue. But this is unlikely to happen because, on this issue, introspection, moderation and basic human decency are uniquely absent.
As is the case with almost every aspect of the Palestinian narrative, none of this overseas hysteria helps Palestinians and it doesn’t make much difference one way or another to Israelis, either. The primary victims of these behaviors are the perpetrators themselves and the values and causes they claim to respect. Their rhetoric, toxicity, hyperbole and lies betray every progressive, antiracist, human value they ostensibly endorse.
How can they justify it? They can’t. That’s why they keep screaming louder, self-righteously “refuse to engage with Zionists” and inventing fresh invective to disguise their jingoistic con job as a just cause.
Sadly, it seems to work wonders. Just as the most imaginative slanders against Jews have always resonated with a segment of the world.
But sure. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.
Yes but you expect people to think. People don't want to think. They want quick and easy. Your whole essay means nothing beside one lying, incendiary meme. Some barbaric image of suffering that may or may not have anything to do with Gaza/West Bank along with some flagrantly lying accusation the length of a sound byte, and the viewer is off to the races, they didn't have to wade through paragraphs. We expect people to think. People don't want the trouble. Essays can't compete with a campaign that targets the amygdala. Reptile brains? That is what we're dealing with, "educated" or not, because we now live in an age where indoctrination takes the place of education and few people have critical thinking skills. Where are all the great Jewish advertising minds? They need to get to work.
Antizionism is a club for broken, defective people.