Just Sociology Tings: The history of Zionist propaganda

It is almost laughable to see the mental gymnastics people will perform to defend Israel’s actions. 

While the civilian casualties of the Oct. 7 attacks are no doubt a tragedy, they do not justify the nearly 400 days of constant bombardment and terror that the people of Gaza and the occupied West Bank have been subjected to. 

Even though Israel is responsible for the bombing of refugee camps, schools, hospitals and places of worship, many people still rally behind the idea that Israel reserves the right to defend itself, therefore warranting such acts of aggression toward the Palestinian people. 

Palestinian acts of resistance and self-defense are often portrayed as terrorism, and this is due to the dehumanization of Palestinians and Israel’s history of widespread propaganda. 

Israel’s establishment as a nation-state in 1947 came with the agreement to split Palestine into two separate states, but the war between Israel and neighboring countries resulted in Israel’s expansion into the rest of the Palestinian territory. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were forced out of their homes, and in the following decades, the world witnessed the emergence of an apartheid state that mirrored South Africa and the United States. 

This act of colonization forced Palestinians into separate territories and subjected them to different institutions, infrastructure and a lesser quality of living, fostering the sense of otherness needed in order to create an “us-versus-them” mentality among Israeli citizens. 

Dehumanization is one of the key elements required in marginalizing a group of people. While establishing a sense of otherness is often the first step, stripping that group of its likeness and humanity is essential for an oppressive group to gain and maintain power over the oppressed.

With Palestinians now being labeled as the “other” in their own homeland, it didn’t take long for the dehumanization of their people to follow. 

Different religious texts often referred to the people of Palestine as idol worshippers that were prone to violence. Both Christians and Jews wrote about Philistines  extensively. The Philistines were a group that occupied the area now known as the Gaza Strip. Their polytheistic religious practices were considered sacrilegious by those who practiced monotheistic religions, and they were often written about in an antagonistic light. 

This precedent gave birth to the narrative that the rivalry between Palestinian and Jewish people is one that stemmed from thousands of years of religious differences, allowing the rest of the world to dismiss the conflict as mere tribalism rather than an extensive history of genocide and colonization. 

We also see the repercussions of this narrative in the language often used to describe ethnic groups that are indigenous to the Middle East. 

Currently, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “Philistine” — among many things — as “an uneducated or unenlightened person; one perceived to be indifferent or hostile to art or culture.” 

The numerous other definitions listed in the dictionary all exist within a somewhat negative connotation, either used as a derogatory or antagonistic term. 

On top of that, the development of the concept of race enabled the dehumanization of Arabs and Palestinians. During the rise of European colonialism after the 16th and 17th centuries, many people tried to justify their inhumane treatment of Indigenous and enslaved peoples by determining that they were a human subspecies, making them more comparable to animals rather than Homo sapiens. 

The combination of all these factors gave birth to the narrative that the holy land that supposedly belonged to Jewish people was being inhabited by a “lesser race” that was uncivilized by nature and worshiped the “wrong God.” 

And while this dehumanization existed years before the 9/11 attacks, the aftermath of the attacks and the subsequent war on terror did irreparable damage to the West’s perception of people in the Middle East. 

That same “us-versus-them” mentality soon infected America, with many people unifying against a common enemy they saw as a threat to their freedom and safety. As soon as news came out that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were of Middle Eastern descent, anti-Arab and Islamophobic rhetoric began to spread like a plague all across the United States.  

Even though this type of sentiment in American politics and Western media has never fully disappeared, it saw an influx during the Trump presidency and another one recently in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks — allowing more Westerners to support Israel in their current bombing campaign on Gaza. 

The dehumanization of Palestinians has always played an integral role in Israel’s mission to justify its violence and oppression of the Palestinian people. In a world where anything outside of whiteness is antagonized, it didn’t take much for Israel to gain the support of the West. 

However, I think it's also important to discuss the ways anti-Semitism influences the way people discuss Israel’s status as a nation-state. Many criticisms toward Israel’s actions are often written off as anti-Semitism, which highlights another key aspect about Israeli propaganda: the conflation of Zionism and Judaism. 

While the idea that Jews were entitled to Palestinian land has existed for centuries, the term Zionism wasn’t introduced until 1885 by Nathan Birnbaum. While Birnbaum gave a name to the concept, it was Theodor Herzl — a pioneer of the Zionist movement — who expanded on the ideas exponentially. 

He championed the belief that giving Jewish people a home in Palestine would serve as a solution for Jews escaping the threat of persecution in Europe while also granting the anti-Semites their wishes of living in a land free from Jews. 

When the atrocities of the Holocaust were finally unleashed, and the rest of the world saw firsthand the devastating impact that anti-Semetic rhetoric could have on an ethnic group, the push for Zionism intensified with numerous Western nations backing behind the establishment of a homeland for European Jews. 

Because of the belief that Israel’s existence as a nation-state provided a solution to anti-Semitism and its harmful consequences, it didn’t take long for people to latch onto the idea that Zionism represented Judaism as a whole. Under this paradigm, any criticism of Zionism — and  Israel — was a criticism of Judaism, which would be interpreted as anti-Semetic. 

Israel very much uses this narrative to its advantage whenever organizations and media outlets are critical of its inhumane treatment of Palestinian people. Numerous activists, politicians and journalists have been labeled as anti-Semetic and have even suffered repercussions as a result of denouncing their support of Israel as they continue to oppress and kill thousands of Palestinians. 

While more people are starting to uncover the extent to which Israeli propaganda runs in our media, it’ll take so much undoing to get to the root of the issue — and reverse the real world implications and repercussions that it has had on the people who suffer the most from it. 

In America, we see the same dispute around the discussion of critical race theory — or CRT. CRT places a lot of emphasis on how the under-discussed elements of history allow for the mistreatment of Black and brown people in the United States. 

So much of Palestinian history has been hidden away and misconstrued as a result of Zionist ideology and propaganda, allowing for antagonistic historical narratives to justify the mistreatment of the people of Palestine.