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We live in an age in which the words “genocide”, “apartheid”, “colonisation” and “ethnic cleansing” are swiftly losing all meaning and, as the recently sacked adviser to the UN Alice Wairimu Nderitu has noted – after she failed to support repeated claims that Israel was guilty of such atrocities – this poses serious consequences for real victims.
Too many within the literary and arts scenes of both this country, and across the West, are actively leading an assault against language, and by extension against humanity, by perpetuating the lies and false narratives that are the source of the tragic conflict in the Middle East. Moreover, they are “proud” to be doing so.
Since October 7, 2023, in a rush to be relevant and radical (condemning terror and, especially, sexual torture seems passé), a stampede of publishers, presses, cultural institutions and arts organisations have feted and platformed so-called Palestinian writers, artists and film-makers – very often with public funding.
Among all the stunningly brave writers and artists from whom I keep receiving updates about “solidarity” and “unconditional liberation”, I have tried and failed to find a single one historically literate enough to understand that the ongoing conflict might be more complicated than: bad Israelis like to massacre innocent Palestinians and take their land.
Bracketing, for a moment, the grotesque irony of feminist, trans and queer activist organisations signing up to the side that perpetuates actual gender apartheid and other atrocities against women and the torture and death of gay people, there is a larger irony here.
These writers and artists are using public money in the free West – using their “privilege”, in other words – to lobby for the oppressors of some of the most oppressive places on Earth: Gaza under Hamas, Lebanon under Hezbollah, Yemen under the Houthis (actively trying to bring back slavery) and Iran under its Islamic regime. Unlike actual Gazans, such as Mosab Hassan Yousef, Taysir Abu Saada, Yaron Avraham, Dor Shachar and Hamza Howidy, who work tirelessly to bring the world’s attention to Hamas’s cruelties, having each been imprisoned and tortured, for example for participating in the We Want to Live protests to which no one in the West paid any attention, Western writers and organisations choose not to campaign for true freedom and a sustainable peace for Palestinian-Arabs.
Instead they repeat and disseminate the lies, hatred and historical misinformation that keep Palestinians locked in perpetual struggle against their Israeli neighbours.
It should be noted that the word “Palestinian” itself was used to define Israeli-Jews within living memory, and that the phrase “free Palestine” was coined by an American Jew in the 1930s as a call to free the Jewish homeland from the British.
Leading the charge are some of the most disingenuous “Palestinian” writers and poets never to have set foot in Gaza, but who have nonetheless had the cherished moniker “refugee” passed down to them through generations like family silver.
These writers, and all those who promote them, are at the forefront of the unmooring, from their true meanings, of terms such as “genocide” and “apartheid”, and taxpayer-funded organisations like Arts Council England are more than happy, it seems, to use our money for the dissemination of their propaganda – propaganda that has real world consequences both here and in the Middle East.
For it is thoroughly dishonest to label as “apartheid” or “an open-air prison” or, most grotesque of all given the context, “a concentration camp”, the heavy security and restrictions on borders between Israel and Gaza and the West Bank, without discussing either Gaza’s border with Egypt or the time when, in living memory, there were no such restrictions.
Then in 2000-2005, in a murderous Second Intifada, hundreds of Israeli men women and children – Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze alike – were killed by Palestinians and many thousands injured.
But we could also take the word of Hamas themselves, to understand why Israel has to enforce such heavy security of its borders:
“I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher el-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told the New York Times following the October 7 massacre.
Khalil al-Hayya, a member of the terrorist group’s politburo in Qatar, said they planned the October 7 assault to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash”, adding that “we succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm”. “Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said al-Hayya. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”
He added: “This battle was not because we wanted fuel or labourers. It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.” Likewise, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told Lebanon’s LBC TV on October 24, 2023 that the terror group would continue to carry out massacres like the one it carried out in southern Israel until the Jewish state is destroyed. This is, of course, also stated publicly in their founding charter.
All the writers and artists currently screaming about the “indignity” and “inhumanity” of having security forces on Israel’s borders or, worse, baying for a one-state solution in which Jews would be made to live under potentially Islamist rule, elide all this completely.
Nor do they ever mention what happened to the 140,000 Algerian Jews kicked out of Algeria after 1948, or the 75,000 from Egypt, the 13,500 from Iraq, the 5,000 from Lebanon, the 38,000 from Libya, the 30,000 from Syria, the 105,000 from Tunisia, the 63,000 from Yemen and the 265,000 from Morocco – and these are just the Jews who made it out alive.
Nor do they ever write about what happens when Israeli Jews accidentally stray into Palestinian territory.
Do any one of them ever “bear witness” to the Ramallah lynching in 2000 when two Israeli reservists were murdered and their bodies mutilated by Palestinian funeral marchers?
It is perhaps one of the biggest lies of all to pretend that Gaza is a state whose inhabitants would live “free” and prosperous lives if it weren’t for Israel and America or, simply, “the West”. Gazan women have no rights. Gay people have no rights. Non-Muslims have no rights. There are no Jews allowed – at all – in the land; not even Jewish graves. It is Judenrein. The level of inhuman hatred inculcated in the Gazan population against Jews was on full display on October 7 and in the days following, when even ordinary civilians were spitting on and beating Israeli hostages.
And is it any wonder, when their education system, including in Unrwa schools, teaches hatred from the day Gazans are born?
An interview with a little Palestinian boy that has been uploaded to YouTube sums up the situation painfully clearly.
He is only 14 and has already imbibed many of the fictional narratives to which I refer above: the Jews stole his home – despite his never having lived in Israel; his mission is to free the Al Aqsa mosque from Jews (the one built on top of the destroyed Jewish temple); there is no two-state solution possible, only a return of Arabs to their land, which confusingly isn’t the Arab peninsula but the place where, for thousands of years, Jews have been living and praying at the Western Wall; and all this is what God wills – this is a religious, not territorial conflict.
I know that my fellow writers and artists love to lift up individual voices and cherish personal stories, often with a lot of poetic licence.
Most of us like to champion the vulnerable and oppressed. But writers have a responsibility not to misuse words to the point of utter falsehood.
Producers of culture should not be claiming fiction as fact. Artists interested in “social justice” should not be turning this ideal on its head.
If the source of this interminable conflict is, in the Palestinian mind, the founding of Israel and the Nakba, we might like, critically, to examine the evidence surrounding this historical event.
We could even examine some of the events that led up to it, say, in the 1920s, before the state of Israel was re-founded, to learn about the campaign of violence waged by Muslims against Jews in their holiest of places, incited by the Salafist father of the Palestinian Liberation Movement and Nazi ally Mohammed Amin al-Husseini.
Indeed, it was al-Husseini’s oft-stated desire to cleanse the Jews from the Middle East that led him to befriend Hitler and which made the establishment of the modern state of Israel all the more urgent and necessary.
Or we could read and understand the stated aims of the PLO even more recently. For example, in this admission by the former head of the PLO bureau of military operations, Zuhair Mohsen, in 1977: “The Palestinian people do not exist.
“The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity.
“In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians and Lebanese; we are all members of the same nation.
“Solely for political reasons are we careful to stress our identity as Palestinians.
Since a separate State of Palestine would be an extra weapon in Arab hands to fight Zionism with.
Yes, we do call for the creation of a Palestinian state for tactical reasons. Such a state would be a new means of continuing the battle against Zionism, and for Arab unity.”
Perhaps all those presses and organisations currently posing as “anti-colonial” might like to come to terms with the fact that Israel is a “post-colonial state” par excellence.
Those with a genuine interest in this fraught area of the world could learn that before Israel, it was the British who controlled the region as a League of Nations mandate (along with Jordan) and that, before the British, were the Ottoman colonisers; before the Ottoman empire was the Islamic state of Malmuks of Egypt; before this was the Ayubid Arab-Kurdish Empire; before this, the Frankish and Christian kingdom of Jerusalem; before this, the Umayaad Empire; before this, the Byzantine Empire; before this, the Sassanids; before them, the Roman Empire; before this, the Hasomean state; before this, the Seleucid Empire; before this, the Empire of Alexander the Great; before this, the Persian Empire; before this, the Babylonian Empire; before this, the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and before all of these was the United Kingdom of Israel. But we don’t even have to go that far back or do that much work to educate ourselves.
We can listen to contemporary voices – Palestinian, Gazan, Lebanese, Iranian, and so on – to find out what happens to you if you try to speak out against the false narratives perpetuated by those governments from inside those places – the torture, rape, mutilation and death suffered by real freedom-fighters, not the keffiyeh-adorned crowds of London, New York or LA.
We could try to give those people a voice, rather than embracing only one side of this conflict, however fashionable, and celebrating only those stories that make that conflict worse. For this is a language-driven fight over who gets classified as “indigenous”, who as “coloniser”; who has “genocidal” intent and who is fighting for “freedom”; who is perceived to be an “oppressor” and whom is “oppressed”. Words have power and writers and cultural producers know this.
The fact that so many of them are actively choosing to hijack language and weaponise its true definitions – to deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender – is a war on morality, on the truth, on humanity itself, one which we must resist wherever we see it.
This article is by a UK university professor who wishes to remain anonymous
English (US) ·