LIES, DAMN LIES AND PALESTINESE

An Orwellian refusal to ascribe fixed definitions to words allows “pro-Palestinians” to think they are peace activists when they endorse atrocities.

Isn’t it precious?! A couple of squiggly lines and words take on different meanings.

What does intifada mean? Well, it depends who you ask.

Literally, it is an Arabic word for “uprising,” “rebellion” or “shaking off.”

Ask any of the millions of Israelis who lost loved ones, limbs, or a sense of security during the two intifadas during which Palestinians engaged in orgies of violence against civilian targets and you will get a more vivid definition.

Intifada is terrorism and its goal is dead Jews.

Ask a Palestinian sympathizer these days what the word means, though, and you’ll get a shocked — shocked! — reply.

Violence? Murder? Explosive devices packed with nails detonated in Tel Aviv cafes? How dare you! Why intifada just means ….

And then you will receive as many definitions as people you ask.

Because in the Palestinian movement — that is, Palestinians in the Middle East as well as their overseas enablers — words have no fixed meanings. Or, rather, they exist on a spectrum and mean whatever suits the agenda of the moment. Definitions are fluid. They serve less to illuminate than to obfuscate. They are plausibly deniable dog-whistles.

The term “resistance” can (and has been used since October 7) to justify beheadings, immolations, rape, kidnapping and mass murder. But, at a polite dinner party, the same person who celebrates the atrocities of that day as “amazing” and “brilliant” (yes — there are despicable human beings who do so, including in my hometown, at one of my alma maters) they might recoil in defensive umbrage.

Advocate violence? Me? Why, “resistance” merely means politely marching for human rights and supporting UN resolutions. I would never …

This disingenuous wordplay is not an incidental tactic of the Palestinian movement. It is its very foundation.

We need to understand what members of the Palestinian movement mean when they use terms like “intifada,” “just,” “justice,” “human rights,” “reconciliation,” “coexistence,” “freedom” and “peace,” because they do not use these terms in ways the rest of us do.

The “injustice” at the heart of the Palestinian narrative is not the laundry list of complaints that moderate-appearing overseas activists drone on about: settlements, checkpoints, “humiliation.” The injustice is the creation and existence of the state of Israel.

When Palestinian activists use the term “human rights,” it does not refer to individual rights as Western observers understand the term. The right to those freedoms most of us take for granted, like freedom of conscience and assembly, the right to representative government and equality before the law — these are not what activists mean by “human rights.”

And it sure as hell doesn’t mean the right to freedom of expression, a “frill” to which Palestinian leaders — both the nihilistic terrorists of Hamas and the “moderate” globally recognized government of the Palestinian Authority — have demonstrated not a whit of commitment and of which there is precisely no evidence an independent Palestine would embody.

And Godknows it doesn’t mean human rights for women, LGBTQ+ people or ethnic or religious minorities. No, “human rights” in the Palestinian lexicon means nothing like the term as it is employed in Canada or other democracies.

In Palestinese, “human rights” is an extremely narrow formulation that refers to the collective rights of Palestinians to be free from Israeli occupation.

That is a fair and justifiable goal. But it ain’t human rights as reasonable people understand them.

If replacing what amounts to the military dictatorship of the Israeli occupation with an indigenous dictatorship by terrorists and autocrats is the objective here, fair enough. Indigenous dictators are always better than non-indigenous oppressors, as our culturally relativist consensus accepts. But, if this is the extraordinarily modest end-goal of a massive global Palestinian movement mobilizing students and other activists to engage in peaceful demonstrations, civil disobedience and synagogue fire-bombings worldwide, that’s a pretty pathetic crusade. All this passion and fireworks just to replace one tyranny for another?

Progressive groups get sucked in by the Palestinian movement’s fraudulent appropriation of terms like freedom, equality, justice. But Palestinians and their allies use these words the way eastern European communist dictatorship called themselves “democratic republics.”

The narrative of the conflict is of course biased on both sides. There are misrepresentations, propaganda and specious claims. But on the Palestinian side there is something else. There is an intrinsic dishonesty that permeates even the definition of words and terms used in the dialogue.

Well-wishing Western activists sign up to groups with names like Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East or Jewish Voice for Peace. Who doesn’t want justice and peace? Well, it depends on the definition.

In Palestinese, “peace” is what comes after the Jews have been violently routed from the Middle East. “Justice” is the condition in which the “injustice” of Israel’s existence has been remedied and the Jewish state has been annihilated. “Coexistence” is the status quo ante in which Jews are returned to their station of dhimmitude. Not exactly the kumbaya and rainbows reasonable Canadians imagine when we hear these words.

“Freedom” is not individual freedom, but freedom from Israeli occupation. Again — fair enough. But let’s not pretend Palestinians would be free, by any definition we would recognize, in an independent Palestine.

“Equality,” in this imaginative construction, is a relative term, meaning Palestinians collectively would have an analogous identity to Israelis or other self-determined people. As individuals, though, there is precisely no reason to believe that ordinary Palestinians would experience anything we would call “equality” in terms of fairness before the law, democratic rights or a relatively non-hierarchical status in which the most and least powerful in society are remotely proximate.

An intensive Palestinese immersion course is necessary to appreciate the dog-whistles, subtexts and intellectual dishonesty in the anti-Israel narrative.

As an aside, all this is perhaps more proof of the horseshoe theory, the idea that far-left and far-right are not opposites but essentially the same. This may not be true in substance, but it is absolutely true in style. As much as “pro-Palestinian” activists detest Donald Trump (and, of course, the feeling is mutual) their strategy is remarkably similar: they lie like they learned from the master.

In the bigger picture, this is all evidence of a basic deceit at the heart of the movement that has swept the world like wildfire. People marching side by side in London or Victoria might believe they are chanting for justice and resistance, with one believing these words mean Palestinians and Jews living adjacent in heavenly peace, while the other idealizes a future of blood-soaked kibbutzim and beheaded babies.

Does the last part of that sentence strike you as gratuitously violent and unnecessarily inflammatory?

That proves my point. As some of us have always suspected, and any sentient person has seen in spades since October 7, there are people in North America who think decapitating babies and raping women is totally legit political strategy.

Most of them, however, know that, even in the dystopic, amoral, antisemitic environment that much of the activist left has created in the past nine months, this rhetoric is still (if just slightly) a bridge too far for most, or at least many, of the “mainstream” marchers in the streets of Melbourne and Milwaukee.

This creative lexicon, the ambiguity of definitions, is the glue that allows genuine peace activists to march alongside advocates of evisceration. They can chant for intifada, with one chanter believing they are calling for coexistence and the other certain they are screaming for Jewish genocide.

It’s quite brilliant, really. When you have a big tent that attempts to welcome a diverse crowd that includes pacifists and the most bloodthirsty extremists, it can take a little ingenuity.

Creating an environment where words can mean whatever the listener want to hear works wonders.