Palestinians are in Israel’s crosshairs because they are not Jews
Jews pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in the late 19th century
Thomas Suárez writes in The Electronic Intifada:
If Israel were stripped of its endlessly elaborate narrative, all that would be left would be the violent replacement of a native population with an imported Jewish “tribe.”
That – all charade dispensed with – is the reckoning Israel’s supporters must face. To be sure, millions of Evangelical end-of-timers may say “Amen!” to that, but the pretense will be gone, exposing what Israel’s claimed “right to exist” actually means.
What stands in the way of that reckoning is language – control of the words used to explain the so-called conflict in Israel-Palestine, not least the word “conflict” itself. The manipulation of language is key to Israel’s impunity, to securing the Western public’s complicity for its crimes, and so a critique of that language is evident among those fighting for justice.
Yet the most basic linguistic construct serving to blur public understanding of Israel’s crimes has escaped proper scrutiny: the very term, “the Palestinians,” as the target of Israel’s crimes. Yes, they’re all Palestinians of course — but although “being Palestinian” has long been synonymous with what puts them in Israel’s cross-hairs, this equation obscures the deeper truth: their “crime” is not that they are Palestinian but that they are not Jews. Hiding this fact is essential to Israel’s propaganda.
Zionism’s goal of a “Jewish” state in all of historic Palestine has always required expelling the land’s native people, except for Palestine’s native Jews. When early Zionist colonizers reached Palestine, they found a Palestinian population comprising a small minority of Jews, the rest being Muslim and Christian. All that mattered was that the rest were not Jews and so an impediment to Zionism’s goal of ethnic “purity.”
Palestinian Jews, moreover, were not willing converts – as the eminent historian Ilan Pappé has documented. They were as distrustful of Zionism as were their Muslim and Christian countrymen. Over time, however, the Zionists successfully incorporated them into their messianic project, yet as late as November 1945, the British still reported that the native Jews of Levant states are “apprehensive of Zionism” and “show solidarity with [the] local Arab population.”
False framing
The term “Palestinian” suggests geographic association – people whose heritage and cultural identity derive from historic Palestine, whether native-born or diaspora. When a public already indoctrinated by the Israeli narrative hears that there is trouble between Israel and “the Palestinians,” it creates a false sense of conventional territorial haggling, reinforced by the phantom of a Palestinian “national” Authority.
The false framing vanishes, however, when “Palestinians” is replaced with “non-Jews” or “non-Jewish Palestinians.”