The Palestinian Arabs in Gaza have just won another propaganda victory over Israel. The world media, by and large, pictures them as oppressed victims of a tyrannical and brutish bully named Israel that has tried to imprison them in Gaza. The Hamas opening of the wall to Rafah was interpreted as a great act of liberation and freedom. The small, oppressed and weak Palestinians have overcome the Goliath Israel and its supporter, the evil monster

A good part of the world wants to hear anything that condemns the Jewish State.

superpower, the United States.


That victory is illustrative of many Palestinian propaganda victories in the past and, in fact, their ongoing propaganda victory. For, in most parts of the world, it is the Palestinian “narrative,” however false in relation to the historical record, which is taken as absolute truth. How have the Palestinians succeeded in making Israel seem to be a monstrous, cruel oppressor and making themselves seem to be innocent victims?


One simple answer is that a good part of the world wants to hear anything that condemns the Jewish State. There is, after all, the anti- Semitism of the extreme Right, the neo-Nazi type, and there is the anti- Semitism of the extreme Left. There is Christian anti-Semitism and Islamic anti-Semitism. A predisposing tendency to single out the Jews and blame them for everything is certainly one reason Palestinian propaganda succeeds.


But there are other reasons. The Palestinians are Arabs and mostly Muslims. Three hundred and fifty-plus million Arabs and over one billion Muslims naturally give credence to those who share their ethnicity and religion. And this is so especially when the particular group has a quarrel with the larger world, feels itself oppressed, and makes conspiracy theories its daily intellectual bread. There is no surprise in the fact that every Palestinian lie and falsehood is eagerly adopted by this part of the world. It is well to remember that this part of the world also produces massive anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda in part as a way of explaining its own failures.


The Islamic world, moreover, has ties with other parts of the Third and Fourth World, the poorer peoples who often find the cause of their poverty in the wealth of the richer nations. The Palestinians are seen as poor refugees living in squalor who are oppressed not only politically, but economically. Their economic backwardness is seen as a result of the exploitation of Israel as a colonial Western nation. The whole story of the years of economic struggle of Israel, its settling of Jewish refugees from Arab lands and the former Soviet Union, its innovativeness in making contributions to mankind in medical and scientific fields is thrust aside. For the mentality of those who find themselves perpetually “exploited,” there are no real achievements and accomplishments- and the only real economic story is one of how others oppress them.


Israel, too, serves in the mind of many as a surrogate for the United States. Wherever US actions are found wanting and problematic, there is opportunity to link this with Israel and blame the Jewish State. This no doubt partly explains why largely leftist academic circles in the West have turned so viciously against Israel. There is a certain Communist or former Communist hardcore element involved, as are the Trotskyites in the British labor unions.


Another important and very different kind of reason for the Palestinian propaganda success is that their case is promoted endlessly by Arab and Islamic states, most notably perhaps Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars demonizing Israel, and distributing the anti-Semitic Czarist forgery that so well served the Nazis, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is no doubt the Saudi influence that has played a central role even in moving the administration in Washington to adopting the Palestinian cause, and the idea of the centrality of Palestinian statehood for Middle East peace. Saudi money also has bought a place in Middle Eastern Studies Departments in the United States.


The Palestinians use their own backwardness and failures as propaganda weapons. If billions of dollars of foreign aid are not used to build a viable Palestinian economy or to greatly alleviate the burden of the poorest elements in the society, then those poor remain an eyesore to the world that can be endlessly photographed and used to

Israel... serves in the mind of many as a surrogate for the United States.

accuse Israel. The Palestinians again and again use the tactic of shifting responsibility away from themselves and blaming Israel for situations that are the product of the Palestinians' decisions.


But why, one still wants to ask, does the media fall for Palestinian propaganda tactics? Why does the media show such reluctance to place the responsibility for Palestinian actions on Palestinians? Why do even those who might chide Palestinian leadership, like the US State Department or the New York Times, show such reluctance to criticize the Palestinian Arab people? Why can the Palestinian people as a whole engage in the most vicious kind of anti- Semitic and anti-human propaganda, the most evil kind of terror against civilians, and still not be held responsible for it? Why are they always seen as victims when they are clearly the perpetrators? Why have the suicide- bombing Palestinians received more media sympathy than the civilians they murdered?


Is it because so much of the world, and even the media, are incapable of truly trying to understand a subject in depth, probing it in all its complexity to arrive at the truth? Or is resentment of Jews and a desire to get at them, no matter what, really the answer?


Or perhaps there is no one answer, and it is all the answers taken together that explain this strange and persistent form of injustice - in which the one truly democratic state in the Middle East is persistently demonized, and a people that endlessly incites to and practices terror is made into a victim and hero.