The Invention of the "Palestinians"

Despite having no real-world legs to stand on, virtual Palestine continues to flourish in the public mind.

[This is a long-form essay that looks at the way in which several forces all came together in the late 60s: the collapse of book culture along with its notion of Truth; the professionalization of propaganda techniques and the manipulative use of narrative; and the explosive growth of mass media which culminated in the creation of the virtual world behind your TV screen. The confluence of these forces at this historical moment was what made it possible for the “Palestinians” to be invented out of thin air.]

Today the mass media has replaced book culture as the dominant force creating the imagery we associate with various countries and their peoples. Mention an “Italian vacation” and someone pictures the Coliseum or the Trevi Fountain and Gina Lollobrigida on the back of a cherry-red Vespa, rather than, say, the smoke-filled kitchen of a peasant family negotiating their share-cropping contract with the landowner. We all know that the actual place and the mental representation of it that we carry around in our heads are not the same thing. We know that the fish-eye lens that was used to picture the hotel room we’re looking at on Booking.com makes it look bigger than it really is. But, apart from selective focus and “enhancements,” we take it for granted--and the law requires--that the photograph in the brochure or the image on my laptop screen are faithful representations of the actual object in the real world.

All that said, let the buyer beware: the fact remains that the physical world and its virtual representation are two distinct realms and that the gap between the two presents a potential vulnerability which can be exploited in a variety of ways. In terms of understanding and mastering the opportunity presented by the gap between the real and its representation, the Palestinians’ achievements are without equal. In a moment we’ll look more closely at the difference between the actual Palestine and its virtual doppelganger. But first it will be useful to revisit the historical moment in the 1960s when the development of mass media and the eclipse of the Gutenberg galaxy provided the necessary conditions for the invention of the Palestinian people.

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The new media of the 20^th century, such as the radio, TV, and motion pictures made it possible for the first time for an individual or a small group to communicate with multitudes. Marshall McLuhan, an English professor at the University of Toronto, became quite famous in the late 1960s for his speculations that these new media were quickly displacing literacy and the role of book culture as the bedrock of academia and intellectual life.

McLuhan noted that a street protest involving a dozen people carrying signs might gain the attention of one hundred people walking or driving by. But a 30-second spot on the evening news could be seen by one hundred thousand viewers. McLuhan was possibly the first social critic to formulate this observation as a theorem about the distortive power of the new media: the impact of the media-reported event is orders of magnitude greater than the impact of the actual event. Eventually, this insight made its way into the political sphere where its studied application changed the game dramatically.

The intelligentsia largely dismissed McLuhan’s gloomy predictions, but popular media culture became enamored of his vision of their growing importance and identified him as its champion. Newsweek magazine featured him on its cover, and McLuhan even made a cameo appearance in a Woody Allen movie. There’s a scene in Annie Hall where Woody and Diane Keaton are waiting in line to buy tickets while a guy behind them pontificates pretentiously about art and culture and really gets on Woody’s nerves. When he eventually moves on to discuss Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about media, Woody turns around and tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The two of them bicker until Woody pulls a deus ex machina move. Stepping out of line he brings over a man from offstage who, lo and behold, turns out to be Marshall McLuhan himself. McLuhan agrees completely with Woody, and Woody’s opponent is defeated and humiliated. Woody turns toward the audience and says wistfully, “Wow, if real life was only like this!”

Consider this scene as a metaphor for a contest taking place in the Western world. Here, in the late 60s, we still find ourselves in a world where a professor can descend from the heights of academia to resolve for mere mortals what is true and what is not. That world is now long gone: the relative merit of one theory versus another is no longer established by peer reviews, credentialed committees and learned argumentation among professors. In their stead we now have search engines that rank the answers to your query based on the popularity of the material that’s located. We’ve gotten rid of the all the middlemen: the judges, authorities, and experts, all the intermediaries who used to be in place to filter results, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

In certain spheres, such as online shopping, this approach has yielded very positive results. If you’re looking for a new electric toothbrush, and you see on Amazon that 74 people love this model and only 3 people hate it, the odds are pretty good that it’s a quality product: the system works. But what if you want to know what led to the fall of Rome? Or, what’s the best book about the Golden Age of Spain? Or what brought about World War II? In the search for truth about such matters, ratings algorithms based on popularity turn out to be worse than useless. Let’s take a quick look at a very successful current effort to game the system—and then we’ll turn our attention to the Palestinians.

On The Tucker Carlson Show in September 2024, Carlson interviewed a podcaster named Darryl Cooper whose controversial claims about World War II have attracted considerable attention. Carlson introduced him as follows: “Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest historian in the United States.” An estimated 30,000,000 viewers watched the show and listened to Darryl Cooper’s version of what happened during WWII. In Cooper’s alternate reality, Winston Churchill was a warmonger who dragged a reluctant Adolf Hitler into war against his will. The Jews were prisoners of war who fell into Nazi hands and the Nazis were unprepared to accommodate such large numbers of POWs. So they mercifully murdered millions of them to spare them the suffering of starving to death.

More recently, on the Uncommon Knowledge podcast produced by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, three distinguished historians were interviewed by the series host, Peter Robinson. Asked for their opinions about Darryl Cooper as a historian, all three authors pointed out his abundant errors of fact, his failures to respect chronology and his outlandish, absurd conclusions. In essence, they dismissed him as a fraud and a charlatan pretending to be a serious historian. So far, so good, but don’t celebrate just yet. Tucker Carlson’s fawning interview with Cooper received over 30,000,000 views while the powerful rebuttal of Cooper’s views on the Uncommon Knowledge podcast has received only about a million views.

In our current landscape, even when hucksters with “fake facts” are shown beyond any shadow of a doubt to be bullshit artists, this is no longer sufficient to stop them in their tracks. Indeed, with persistent promotion and diffusion, “alternative realities” based upon “alternative facts” often become widely accepted simply because people become familiar with them. “I hear this all the time. There must be some truth to it.” This is the core principle behind Goebbels’ assertion about “the Big Lie”: keep it simple, repeat it constantly, and people will begin to believe it. Add to this some emotional appeal to tug at our heartstrings—along with the natural tendency that people have to willingly embrace “fake facts” which are more congruent with their beliefs—and you have the basic ingredients for constructing an alternate reality.

Which brings us directly to the Palestinians.

The odds are that while you have probably never visited Malawi or Kirghizstan or Palestine, you know almost nothing about the first two countries, but you definitely know something about the third. Even though Palestine is much smaller and less populous than the two others, it occupies a more prominent place in the public mind. That’s because Real-World Palestine is tiny but Virtual Palestine is huge and powerful. The first may be described as reality-based and the second, as a fantasy injected into the public mind.

Real-World Palestine today includes two separate territories, each administered by Palestinian militias who are deadly rivals: (1) Gaza, which is still under the dictatorship of Hamas, and (2) portions of Judea and Samaria (aka the “West Bank”), which is ruled by the Palestinian Authority under the de facto dictatorship of Mahmoud Abbas, now serving the 20^th year of the four-year term to which he was elected. Abbas leaves his stronghold in Ramallah rarely and always under heavy guard to minimize his risk of being assassinated by rivals from Hamas. His most successful political initiative has been the implementation of a “pay-to-slay” program through which Palestinian assassins are rewarded for murdering their Jewish neighbors next door according to a sliding scale payment schedule that is based directly on the severity of the crime and the length of time of incarceration.

Virtual Palestine is a much broader, more complex entity that exists primarily in and through the efforts of activists to promote the Palestinian narrative worldwide and to undermine Israel’s viability as a national homeland for the Jews. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means, quite simply, free of Jews. Far outside the small footprint of Real-World Palestine, Virtual Palestine thrives in many countries and involves university academic departments, NGOs and student groups, organized public events like conferences and debates, promotion of initiatives like the BDS campaign, and independent actions by filmmakers, journalists and politicians who disdain the Jews and share a common goal of ending Jewish sovereignty in the historic Jewish homeland. Virtual Palestine proclaims its ubiquitous presence through the promotion of the Palestinian “brand” in the form of distinctive clothing, slogans, and artifacts.

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Today, throughout the Western world we’re called upon to witness the conflict between two opposing narratives, one offered by the Palestinians and the other by the Jews, each claiming to be the rightful possessor of the land of Israel. For those who know little or nothing about the history of the Middle East, which includes most people, this is a confusing situation which they really don’t know how to resolve. Who’s telling the truth and how can we know what to believe? Why can’t they all just get along?

Well, the good news is that this really isn’t a very difficult puzzle to resolve. It’s very much like the situation that King Solomon faced when the two women were brought before him, each one claiming that the crying infant was hers, and hers alone. Clearly, one of them was lying. And the king’s clever stratagem quickly revealed which woman was the real mother. In our present circumstances we don’t need the wisdom of Solomon to discover who is lying: all it takes is a rudimentary understanding of the facts—and the truth of the situation becomes obvious.

Let’s begin with the name itself, Palestine, which first enters our story in the 2^nd century C.E. It’s the name which the Romans gave to the land of the Hebrew people after they suppressed their rebellion against Roman rule, destroyed their capital city, Jerusalem, and drove most of the surviving Jews into exile. As a final act to humiliate their defeated enemy, the erudite Roman emperor changed the name of the vanquished country from Judea to Palestina to honor the Jews’ notorious enemy, the Philistines. And Goliath smiled in his grave…

And, so, the name, Palestina, became attached to the territory which changed hands under various conquerors several times over the next two thousand years. Toward the end of the 19^th century, diaspora Jews began returning to Palestine, some pulled by nationalistic ideals, others pushed by European antisemitism. Eventually they came in sufficient numbers to build the infrastructure and institutions of a modern state, assisted by migrant workers seeking employment who came in from the surrounding Arab countries. During this period the Jewish residents of Palestine referred to themselves as “Palestinians.” Unsurprisingly, their newspaper was called, “The Palestine Post,” and their wire service was the “Palestine Telegraphic Agency.” But after declaring their independence from British rule in 1948, one of the nation’s first official acts was to adopt the Biblical name, “Israel,” and to shed the shameful name, “Palestine,” with which they had been tarred by the Romans.

The first use by Arabs of the name, “Palestine,” to refer to themselves didn’t occur until the 1960s. The choice of the name is almost comical considering that the Arabic language lacks the letter “P.” Thus the “Falestinians” or “Balestinians” became the first nation on earth unable to pronounce their own name. But they never let minor details block their agenda. “Palestinian” became a household word after it was popularized by the band of terrorists under the leadership of Yassar Arafat who engaged in dramatic, high profile acts of sabotage and terror under the banner of the “Palestinian Liberation Organization” (PLO). Airplane and cruise ship hijackings, explosions and assassinations, and the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics before an estimated audience of nearly one billion viewers, all served to carve out territory in the public mind for the newly invented “Palestinians” and the plight of the “Palestinian people.” The Palestinians made the correct assessment that it didn’t matter if they attention they received was purely negative. The goal was to obtain real estate in the public mind, and the strategy worked brilliantly. With a single hijacking, the Palestinians left Malawi and Kirghizstan behind in the dust and became a lead item on the evening news. Once you had the public’s attention, you could always explain later why you had to do dreadful things. Or, as the young hoodlum in the Jets gang tells Officer Krupke in Leonard Bernstein’s musical, West Side Story, “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived.”

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Until the Six-Day War in June 1967, the Gaza Strip was in the hands of Egypt, and the West Bank was ruled by Jordan. The resident population in these territories, and for 19 years after Israel was created, included Druze, Bedouins, Christians, Arabs, and Jews and a smattering of other minorities. And, curiously enough, all through this time when Gaza and the West Bank were in Arab hands, there were no demands for freedom or independence from or for the Palestinian people. Puzzling, isn’t it? Yes, but only until you realize that the “Palestinian people” hadn’t been invented yet.

Zuheir Mohsen was a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In a candid moment during a 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper “Trouw”, Mohsen acknowledged that “the Palestinian people” were a propaganda invention:

“The Palestinian people does 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, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”

The truth of Mohsen’s statement is easy enough for anyone to confirm. There are simply no references to a Palestinian people in any book published before the 1960s! What other nationality cannot point to a single distinguishing feature that identifies them as a people? No monuments, no broken pottery, no literature, no great battles, no famous artists, poets, music, no nothing, just a gaping void, a black hole which offers only the keffiyeh (appropriated from Iraq) for a distinctive national identity, and the “Nakba,” the failed effort to exterminate the Jews, which serves to provide a maudlin, collective history.

And yet, despite having no real world legs to stand on, Virtual Palestine continues to flourish in the public mind. And Palestinian activists continue to promote it everywhere they can, wherever they can find an audience who will listen: trade unions, professional societies, college classes, churches and synagogues, corporate boards, city councils, you name it. Here, there and everywhere they promote their own fictive narrative while demonizing their Israeli opponents for invented crimes and imaginary offenses. They tell the tale of how the noble Palestinian people lived peacefully for many millennia in harmony with nature in the land of Palestine. Until, one day, an imperial army of white settler Jews invaded and stole their land and enslaved their people. (It’s amazing how similar their story is to the plight of Pocahontas and her people in that Walt Disney movie.) And that’s why they have come to seek help from all people of good will to repel the invaders and restore the land of Palestine to its rightful inhabitants. The invasion of Palestine by the settler Jews was a crime of such great villainy that it can only be compared with the day Captain Hook invaded Never-Never-Land and captured Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. So, strike a blow for freedom and justice: don’t buy Israeli products; withdraw funds invested with Israeli companies; stop hiring Israeli academics to teach university classes; ostracize Israeli students and their Jewish supporters on campus; donate to Palestinian charities to help feed the starving children; justify Hamas’ acts of terror as legitimate resistance; join Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine; buy a keffiyeh and wear it proudly.

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The most remarkable and defining characteristic of the Palestinians has been the way that they have focused almost exclusively on dominating the media realm and implanting their fabulous narrative of Virtual Palestine in the public mind. Meanwhile they have expended only the most modest effort toward developing Real-World Palestine, i.e., their own productive, functioning state in the real world. Is there any other culture in the history of the world that has ever actively pursued a similar agenda? Is there any other culture whose physical presence in the real world is as miniscule in relation to its commanding presence in the virtual world?

The Palestinians have learned how to punch far above their weight by establishing a dominant position in the public mind, in the virtual realm, through the simple and relentless repetition of the Big Lie. The Arab propagandists are still driving down Main Street with loudspeakers blaring while the Hebrew scholars are quietly double-checking the accuracy of their footnotes. Boycotts and sit-ins proliferate like crabgrass, always in support of Virtual Palestine and in opposition to the imaginary colonizers. And, for the most part, the Israelis still have no idea what hit them or how to respond.

Dr. Samuel Hilt publishes the Paradigm Wars newsletter and is the author of Paradigm Wars: A Brief History of Consciousness from the Insects to the Antisemites.