Palestinian propaganda: Credibility and folly

Palestinian propaganda is effective, just like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," from which, incidentally, it has drawn heavily, but that does not make its content true or factual. At best, its effectiveness rests on a willful, and misguided, illusion of truth and consensus.

It is so effective that it has led people to believe the exact opposite of reality.

But it has achieved something even more troubling: by equating argument, truth and effectiveness, it has brought into play, not justice or tolerance but their opposite: the club as a moral force, or "morality" as a club and a gag. For this very reason, it is a "cause" embraced by the Soviet Union in its time, by Qatar, by China, by Venezuela, by the ayatollahs, by every satrapy there is and by every antisemite, careerist and opportunist.

All of this is coated, for Western consumption, with the cynical academic jumble of "post-colonialism," "orientalism" and other "-isms"; with a flag originating from the 1916 Arab Revolt against Turkey, by a keffiyeh from Kufa, Iraq; and with an almost inexhaustible flow of money and "arguments" from various "generous" sources.

And its audience, cloaked in the disguises of everything and nothing that is this multiculturalism, which no longer conceals fear, stupidity, and subservience, believes that, to the tune of "cumbayá," destiny can be twisted or thugs can be pacified.

Amid this fabrication, amid that hypocritical and pitiful spectacle, a group of people, the Palestinians, those commonly referred to as "ordinary folk," definitely not those living in mansions in the West Bank (which the press avoids showing for the sake of the narrative), nor those amid luxury abroad, are treated and used by their beloved leaders, their advocates and the entire cohort of revelers (all so upright and humane) as mere necessary elements of that propaganda and of the alibi for the unpunished exercise of the stale antisemitism. Their centrality and importance abruptly vanish as soon as their mention, their actions, or their suffering no longer serve the intended purpose: Then it is acceptable to do to them what the Assads did in Syria and the Jordanian monarchy did in the 1970s; to treat them as second-class beings, as in Lebanon or Kuwait, or deem them unworthy, as the Egyptians do along that border that resembles the hyperbolic suture of an obsessed surgeon.

And between a dance that seeks to connect with the 1960s and a proclamation harking back to the 1930s, that much-touted morality rolls through the streets so often demonstrated… Like that game of marbles that everyone claims to remember and long for, that everyone claims to have played, but that no one plays anymore. "From the river to the sea" is the form in which that propaganda has taught so many Westerners to embrace suicide as if it were the elixir of Justice and Immortality: the engineering of consensus that Edward Bernays spoke of. The cultivation and glorification of credulity and folly.