SPIN CYCLE

THE ANTI-ISRAEL NARRATIVE CAN’T WITHSTAND FACTS. SO ACTIVISTS CHANGE DEFINITIONS.

Null and void.

The allegation of “genocide” against Israel was inevitable, I wrote recently, not because it’s true but because it is the worst crime known to humanity. And when you have exhausted the thesaurus inventing new invective to throw at the Jewish state, you have to start just making stuff up.

This is hardly the first time. Hand-in-hand with the false allegation of genocide is the made-up accusation of “ethnic cleansing.”

The population of the West Bank has increased 370% since 1967. The population of Gaza has skyrocketed 600%.

A people whose population has grown exponentially in the period of “occupation” are not being ethnically cleansed. Yet the world swallows the lies whole.

There is another rhetorical phenomenon happening. When the facts don’t fit the “pro-Palestinian” narrative, they change the definitions.

This goes far beyond mere rhetoric. In the most grotesque example of this outrage, Palestinianism, in cahoots with a corrupted United Nations, redefined the very term “refugee” to mean one thing for every other people on earth and something different for Palestinians.

In order to perpetuate, rather than resolve, the statelessness of millions of Palestinians and to keep them caged up and enraged at Israel, the UN agency responsible for them, UNRWA, made refugee status for Palestinians a permanently inheritable status.

As a result, about a million actual refugees have proliferated into six million Palestinian “refugees.” This is the opposite of what is supposed to happen with refugees — and it is evidence of a refugee agency (UNRWA) perpetuating the problem they were supposed to resolve, for the most cynical reasons imaginable. Millions of Palestinians, for generations, have had their potential snuffed out so they can be exploited as pawns in an atrocious geopolitical game.

And just as UNRWA, the Palestinian leaders and the Arab world knew they would, the world looks at this catastrophe and blames the Jews.

The redefinition of the term refugees is among the most unspeakable treacheries in the toolkit of Palestinianism. But there is a long list of similar affronts that form the scaffolding of the movement.

When anti-Israel activists can’t make their narrative stick, they simply change definitions. Returning to the “genocide” libel, consider how the entire lie was legitimized by groups like Amnesty International.

Knowing that a genocide was not taking place, Amnesty redefined “genocide” to make sure that it was. They abandoned the evidentiary bar and the definition of genocide under international law. To fit their fundraising and ideological agendas, they created a new category of “genocidal intent” that has as its proof, essentially, a suspicion based on no substantiation that Israel would like to genocide Palestinians. No proof required. Previous definitions null and void. Batteries not included.

If outright falsehoods so easily take hold, slight redefinitions of terms go down even easier.

Consider the foundational assumption of the Palestinian movement — that Palestinians are the indigenous people in the land and Jews are the interlopers.

Arabs, obviously, are from Arabia. Importantly, a huge proportion of today’s Palestinians are descended from Arabs who came from other parts of the collapsed Ottoman Empire after the First World War, when the Arab population of Palestine increased 120% — drawn by Zionist economic development.

Meanwhile, there have been Jews in the land for thousands of years, albeit often in small numbers. But there is no statute of limitations on indigeneity. To accept that Palestinians are the indigenous people in the area, we must assume that people who came later were there first. This requires more than a redefinition of terms. It requires Superman to reverse the rotation of the planet to turn back the hands of time.

The entire Palestinian narrative depends on this false assumption. All their subsidiary lies (“settler-colonialism,” “imperialism,” “European imposition,” “Zionist invaders”) rest on the foundation of falsified Arab indigeneity.

The fictions go on and on. Even the defining concept of the conflict — the “occupation” — is a contestable term in international law.

The legal definition of occupation is the temporary military control of another sovereign state’s territory.

Was the West Bank, in 1967, “another sovereign state”? It was controlled by Jordan, which had annexed it in 1950 in a move recognized by almost no other country. Before that, it was part of the British Mandate, and before that, the Ottoman Empire. Likewise Gaza with Egypt.

Since there was no recognized sovereign power prior to Israel’s control, some argue these are “disputed,” not “occupied” territories. But facts like these never interfere with the Palestinian narrative. A movement that is willing to hold millions of people as stateless hostages to win a political argument is hardly going to let a little rhetorical slight-of-hand discourage them.

With a history of ridiculous redefinitions of words, Palestinianism’s greatest act of chutzpah may be the redefinition of Jews themselves and their experiences with discrimination.

The founding charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization takes it upon itself to define for Jews who they are.

“Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality,” it declares.

Ignoring the reality that Jewishness is a complex, multifaceted identity that includes ethnicity, culture, history, peoplehood, and shared memory, alongside religious tradition, the PLO arrogates to itself the right to tell Jews who and what they are. It goes on to repeatedly negate Jewish historical connections to the land, invoking the discredited conspiracy theory that the people who call themselves “Jews” are in fact central Asian Tartars.

More recently, the Palestinian movement has decided that, unlike every other group, Jews do not have the right to define what constitutes the discrimination they experience. When the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance created a working definition of antisemitism that is arguably the most comprehensive definition ever attempted, the Palestinian movement and its “progressive,” “antiracist” spokesidiots rejected the definition.

When the prevailing definition declares you a racist, don’t engage in introspection or improving your character. Change the definition.

Obviously, a movement that has the audacity to create a new dictionary for terms like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “refugees,” “indigeneity” and “occupation” will not be restrained by propriety from telling Jews who they are, what constitutes discrimination against them and when they’ve had enough of it.

There is also something fundamentally bigoted in this phenomenon of prevarication.

Activists — the ones who aren’t total morons, anyway — must know their narrative is full of holes. I mean, they reinvent meanings for words to make their disordered worldview fit, so they clearly recognize something is askew in their reasoning.

What if that is not a handicap but a bonus?

Presumably they recognize that a core characteristic of Jewish tradition is dedication to learning, reason, argument and seeking truth.

The Jews love facts? We’ll kick them where it hurts. Right in the veracity.

It’s a two-fer.

A narrative that should be a hard sell becomes the new hula-hoop based on a web of lies.

And the targets of the negative advertising get their tzitzit in knots because the very things they value — truth, honesty, human decency, fairness — are spat on by deceitful dealers whose scams are snapped up like the latest iPhone.

Con artists depend on the ignorance of the masses. But in their own way, they require a certain amount of genius to sell bullshit so proficiently.

Some people have generously asked me to make it possible to make one-time contributions to support my work. I have now set up a PayPal link for donations. If you like snappy smackdowns of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and want me to keep it up, any support is deeply appreciated. Click here.