THESE NEWS STORIES ARE EXACTLY ONE DAY APART
"Doublespeak (n): language used to deceive usually through concealment or misrepresentation of truth"
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
A HISTORY OF PALESTINIAN DOUBLESPEAK
1937: Haj Amin al-Husseini openly tells Lord Peel that he will not guarantee the rights — or lives — of a Jewish minority in an Arab-majority state in all of British Mandate Palestine.
1947: Arab leaders make open statements to the United Nations threatening destruction and violence if Palestine is partitioned into one Jewish and one Arab state.
1960s: As the Soviet Union increasingly gains influence over the Palestinian cause, Communist leaders such as Võ Nguyên Giáp encourage Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to “stop talking about annihilating Israel” and instead “turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights.”
1969: Algerian President Houari Boumediene encourages Arafat to shift to a diplomatic strategy by taking a “diplomatic revolution” to Europe and the United Nations.
Boumediene assigns Muhammad Yazid, an Algerian government minister, to Arafat’s cause. Yazid instructs Arafat to shift the narrative, eliminating all perceptions of Israelis as underdogs in the wider Arab-Israeli conflict and portray Palestinians as victims of imperialism, rather than as refugees of war.
1988: Hamas publishes its founding charter in Arabic, which is chock full of Nazi-esque antisemitism, openly calls for the extermination of Jews, and rejects any form of partition.
1993: After the fall of the Soviet Union, the PLO turns to the Oslo Accords, publicly agreeing in front of Western audiences to establish a diplomatic path forward toward the development of a two-state solution and an end to the conflict.
1994: But, in front of Arab and Muslim audiences, Arafat paints a very different picture, going so far as to tell worshippers in a mosque in Johannesburg that the Oslo process is a mere temporary truce to allow the Palestinians to regroup, and that he has no intentions of abandoning violent jihad.
2017: Hamas publishes a new document in Arabic and English, eliminating overt references to antisemitism and even appearing to accept a two-state solution.
But just 10 days later, speaking to an audience in Gaza, Hamas senior official Mahmoud al-Zahar assures his audience that the new document does not replace the original 1988 charter.
OCTOBER 2023: Representatives of Hamas speaking to Western media beginning labelling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide.
But in internal documents and Arabic media, Hamas assures its population that they are crushing the Israeli forces and describe the high number of Gazan casualties as an asset to the Palestinian cause, threatening to carry out October 7s over and over again until Israel is eliminated and encouraging Palestinian martyrdom.
JAN. 2024: After proudly disseminating their October 7th atrocity videos on their Arabic Telegram channels, Hamas publishes a PDF online in English, titled “Our Narrative – Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” The document both justifies the massacre using the language of anti-imperialism and omits key facts about the massacre, denying Hamas’s war crimes and crimes against humanity and presenting the terror group as a peace-loving, moderate movement, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
BUT...WHY?
- Both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are highly dependent on international foreign aid Western diplomatic support for the Palestinian cause, prompting leaders to moderate their stances when speaking before Western audiences.
- To gain and maintain internal support, however, Palestinian leaders have relied on populist approaches that celebrate much more extremist sentiments.
- Even relatively more moderate Palestinian leaders have had to play up the populism and anti-Israel, antisemitic rhetoric to satisfy Islamist and other extremist internal factors at bay.
- Internally, moderate or pro-peace stances can result in accusations of collaboration with the State of Israel.
I was initially motivated to write this post after seeing this comment from American influencer and pro-Palestinian activist Chelsea Hart, who is neither Palestinian nor particularly qualified on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I understand that no leftist in the West – theoretically, at least – would dream of associating with a Nazi. So Western activists do what they do best: they Westplain the pro-Palestine movement to the rest of us.
LET'S ADDRESS CHELSEA'S ARGUMENTS
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The Palestinians had newspapers and radio shows condemning Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and member of the Nazi SS.
Sure. In the 1920s and 1930s, Palestinian Arab society was hardly monolithic, as no society is. Newspapers associated with al-Husseini’s rival clan, the Nashashibis, frequently condemned the Mufti. But the condemnation had little to do with his alliance with Hitler. Instead, newspapers such as Al-Difa and Falastin accused al-Husseini of nepotism, monopolizing power, and using violence to silence the opposition. Falastin, in particular, frequently criticized the Mufti but expressed support for Nazi Germany.
There were no independent Palestinian Arab radio broadcasting stations during the period of the British Mandate. Instead, the Palestine Broadcasting Service was strictly controlled by the British government.
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More Palestinians fought with the Allied forces against the Nazis than Palestinians who fought against Israel in 1948.
Maybe.
Between 5,000-10,000 Palestinian Arabs fought in 1948, either under the Mufti’s Army of the Holy War or under the banner of the Arab Liberation Army, which was also commanded by a former Nazi, Fawzi Al-Qawuqji.
Between 9,000-12,000 Palestinian Arabs enlisted to fight in the British Army during the World War II (as opposed to over 100,000 Jews who tried to sign up), but that’s actually not the entire picture.
See, the British, fearing accusations of pro-Zionist favoritism, only acquiesced to the Yishuv’s demands to fight with the British Army if an equal number of Arabs enlisted. To circumvent the problem, the Yishuv offered Arabs financial compensation for enlisting.
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The Mufti was not democratically elected, but was instead appointed by the British.
Sure.
The British appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921, despite placing third in the election, to appease tensions between rivaling Arab clans. They removed him from the position in 1937, following the outbreak of the Arab Revolt.
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The Mufti was a “stooge” of Western occupation. He was not really Palestinian.
Chelsea’s implication here is that the Mufti actually wasn’t popular among Palestinians. That’s a blatant lie. He was wildly popular, which is precisely why the British appointed him as a form of appeasement.
In fact, the Mufti was so popular that the rest of the Arab Higher Committee couldn’t make decisions without him, leading them to reject the 1939 White Paper, despite the protests of the other AHC members.
HOW THE PUBLIC FELT ABOUT THE ALLIANCE
We only have one public opinion survey from the time period, conducted by Sari al-Sakakini, the son of Khalil al-Sakakini, a Palestinian Arab teacher, scholar, poet, and Arab nationalist. It is, evidently, the first such survey ever created of Palestinian Arabs.
It was conducted in February 1941. The results were as follows:
It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to question the survey’s methodology or argue that anti-British sentiments were rooted in anger over the British implementation of the mandate, rather than pure antisemitism. But Chelsea’s implication that there was any sort of significant anti-Nazi movement among Palestinian Arabs is false.
HOW RELEVANT IS THE MUFTI, ACTUALLY?
Pretty damn relevant. To begin with, he is considered the father of Palestinian nationalism because he was the first Palestinian Arab to advocate for a strictly Palestinian Arab state, as opposed to an Arab state in Greater Syria, which would include Palestine.
Yasser Arafat, the most recognizable Palestinian leader in history, was al-Husseini’s cousin. He was also his protegé. And he delivered the eulogy at his funeral in 1974.
- There is an Amin al-Husseini Street in Ramallah.
- There is also an Amin al-Husseini Street in Gaza City. It’s a major thoroughfare, though it’s not currently functional in light of the war.
- There is an Amin al-Husseini Elementary and Middle School for boys in Ramallah.
WE'VE SEEN THIS WESTPLAINING TIME AND TIME AGAIN
- When the media describes protestors waving Hezbollah and Hamas flags and chanting “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud,” “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around,” or “bomb, bomb Tel Aviv” as “pro-peace” or even “pro-ceasefire.”
- When the media publishes Hamas’s demands for ceasefire but seldom, if ever, mentions Hamas’s promises to carry out October 7s again and again until Israel’s annihilation.
- When Western media translates Arabic statements that mention “Jews” as “Zionists” or “Israelis.”
BUT WAIT...DON'T ISRAELI POLITICIANS ALSO ENGAGE IN DOUBLESPEAK?
That’s a fair point. All politicians, to varying degrees, speak differently to an audiences at home versus audiences abroad. It makes sense; they are speaking to different audiences, with different goals and cultural and social contexts. But the major discrepancy between Palestinian and Israeli doublespeak is in how the media and diplomatic ecosystems in the West receive those statements.
Hateful or problematic statements from Israeli politicians are picked up relentlessly by the Western media, repeated over and over again as proof of supposed collective Israeli ill intent. There is no space given whatsoever to the Israeli cultural context, Benjamin Netanyahu’s “Amalek” comments 20 days after the October 7th massacre being a perfect example. Despite the fact that, in the very same speech, Netanyahu spoke about protecting Palestinian civilians, and despite the fact that, historically, Jews have referred to murderers of the Jewish people as “Amalek” (Haman, Hitler, and Hamas, to name a few), the media ran with this as iron-clad evidence of Israel’s alleged genocidal intent. Meanwhile, not only are Hamas’s comments in Arabic generally nowhere to be found in the Western media, but Western supporters of the pro-Palestine movement consistently emphasize (their own interpretations of) cultural context to soften Hamas’s language of jihad or open calls for murdering Jews.
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