We Need To Call It What It Is: Palestinianism
To effectively combat antisemitism, we need to start using more specific terms.
After the savage attacks on October 7, 2023, we’ve been engaged in a type of national event as Jews which most of us had never seen in our lifetimes. There has been a large degree of unity (but we need more), lots of introspection, and a heightened awareness for many of us of what it means to be Jewish in a (very) non-Jewish world. Because of that, there has been a massive amount of articles written about all of the above (to which I pray that my small contribution has meant something). Many of these articles have introduced an idea that we may not have been familiar with. Some of those ideas are represented by words that we may not even have known previously. But we have been forced to update our vocabulary to reflect the enormity of what took place on 10/7, and to describe what has taken place since.
Last year, I read an article that introduced one such a word.
“Israelophobia” is the demonization of Israel outside of the normal boundaries of criticism. If you accuse Israel of “genocide” because it is attacked, must defend itself, and kills a terrorist in the process – that is “Israelophobia.” While “antisemitism” is the irrational, and virulent hatred of Jews, “Israelophobia” is antisemitism presented in the guise of “legitimate” criticism of the world’s lone Jewish state. It is related to the “We like Jews, we just don’t like Zionists” argument – you can’t like Jews if you hate Zionists. You can’t love, or even like, the Jewish people if you hate our national home, and deny our right to live there in peace as the indigenous people of the land.
In that sense it is in line with the IHRC definition of antisemitism, which as we all know by now, states that one form of antisemitism is “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
Language helps us clarify the world around us, so understanding the nuances of antisemitism, which requires language, is helpful in combatting it. Words like “Israelophobia” which is central to the strategy of using critiques of Israel (real, but usually imaginary) to attack Jews, are necessary because the better we understand how our enemies operate, the more effectively we are in combatting them.
In that same vein, another clarifying word is “Palestinianism.”
Palestinianism is another form of antisemitism. It is even more insidious than Israelophobia but is also part of the same strategy of denying and denigrating Jewish rights to our historic homeland. It is an attempt to deny Jewish indigeneity by denying Jewish history, archeology, and Jewish peoplehood itself.
This form of antisemitism has become a favorite of far-left protestors and Jew haters around the world. Their ultimate goal is to diminish the perception of Israel as the Jewish homeland to the point where “normal” people will succumb to the relentless narratives of Jews as “stealers of the land” and an “occupying” people. Unfortunately, that strategy is working.
It's also not new. It has been in use for decades.
As David M. Weinberg pointed out in a recent Jerusalem Post article:
“Palestinianism is an ideology and an identity invented by the KGB and advanced by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas ever since he rejected John Kerry’s 2014 peace initiative. It makes conflict in the Land of Israel a zero-sum game.
It fabricates Palestinian inhabitance of Israel going back to the Canaanites and Philistines of the Bible; it inverts Arab rejection and invasion of young Israel in 1948 and the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands by claiming a Palestinian “Nakba”; it turns the Temple Mount into al-Haram al-Sharif, denying any Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Land of Israel; and it converts genocidal assaults on the People of Israel, like Hamas’s Simchat Torah attack, into heroic acts that must be celebrated by all freedom seekers.”
It dates all the way back to the 1960s, and was first invented by the KGB (as referenced above). The Soviets viewed Israel’s relationship with the United States and United Kingdom as an attempt to grow Western influence in the Middle East.
It was the Russians, through the KGB, who had first introduced the idea of the “Palestinian”: a people fighting against colonialist Jews intent on destroying a (newly invented) indigenous Arab Muslim people.
They inverted reality: instead of multiple Arab nations and massive armies attempting to destroy (G-d forbid) the tiny, nascent Jewish state, it was the brave Arabs who were in a struggle for national liberation. This new, false, narrative was specifically designed to replace reality.
In real life, the return of the Jews to our native homeland, and then winning the War of Independence in 1948, was a modern David and Goliath story, which was unique and breathtaking in its singular place in history. No nation had ever returned to its land after millennia. That we are the people of the Bible, instilled even more wonder in the miraculous reformation of the Jewish state.
Then in 1967, we repeated the modern David and Goliath story even more dramatically. The world was in awe of the little Jewish nation. Even antisemites marveled at our resilience, tenacity, and refusal to EVER give up the dream of returning to Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel), or our total unwillingness to relinquish it.
In another excellent article about Palestinianism, Victor Rosenthal explains why it made sense that the Soviets were the ones to introduce the idea to the world of Jews as “European colonists,” and Arabs (who are not indigenous to the region) as the “real” indigenous people:
“The Soviets had always used race as a weapon in their psychological warfare against the U.S., correctly seeing the exacerbation of race-based resentments as a highly effective way of sowing division among Americans. During the 1970s, they introduced the racial element into the Arab Israeli conflict, as exemplified by the passage of the United Nation’s “Zionism Is Racism” resolution in 1973.”
Of course, that narrative ignores the fact that what happened in the “nakba” was simply what happens in every war: populations are displaced. It also ignores that roughly the same number of Jews were ejected from nations all throughout the Middle East. In many cases, those Jewish communities predated Islam, many dated back to the exile from Judea, and some even earlier to the Biblical era.
It also ignores the fundamental difference between the two: Israel was attacked in a war of aggression, so whining about the results is morally absurd. If you pick a fight and lose, you deserve the consequences. Period.
The false narrative is also egregiously historically illiterate.
The first Arabs arrived in the region during seventh century CE. People attempt to claim that it was Islam that arrived in the Seventh Century, and that the Arabs had been there all along. Which is an obvious falsehood. “Arabs” originated as a series of tribes in the Arabian Peninsula. Look at a map and you can see how far that is from the Levant (where Israel is located). Not to mention that a major factor of tribal/national identity is language, and Arabic didn’t emerge as a language until 3rd – 6th century CE.
Hebrew was already close to 2,000 years old when a proto-Arab first uttered “salam alaikum.”
Jews at the time were not the only inhabitants of the region. However, Canaanites, Moabites, Philistines etc. disappeared from this planet thousands of years ago. Therefore, to bolster the “indigenous” people myth, it became necessary to manufacture ties between modern Arabs and long extinct tribes like the Philistines.
Israelophobia and Palestinianism are both strategies used to confuse people and bolster ignorance. Now that you know that, use the knowledge to educate, teach, and let people know that we, and we alone, are the indigenous people of Israel. Nothing scares Jew haters more than facts.
Never give in. Never give up.
Am Yisrael Chai.
This article appeared originally in Orange County Jewish Life.
Joshua Namm is a longtime Jewish community pro, passionate Israel advocate, and co-founder/co-CEO of Moptu, a unique social platform designed specifically for article sharing, and dedicated to the principle of free speech.