The genius of Palestinian disinformation has been to reverse cause and effect
“Checkpoints are not the cause of terror. Terror is the cause of checkpoints”
Those two sentences in a Facebook post from a man who grew up on a kibbutz next to Gaza exposes the trickery and manipulation used over many decades to turn the Jewish state into a pariah.
So let me repeat them: “Checkpoints are not the cause of terror. Terror is the cause of checkpoints.”
In those simple sentences, the man who grew up at a time when there were no checkpoints, has thrown a spotlight on 50-plus years of duplicity; on 50-plus years of deception; on 50-plus years of deliberate omission; on 50-plus years of the manipulation of facts and on 50-plus years of hiding inconvenient truths.
By endlessly, and in every context, reversing cause and effect, Palestinian propagandists have made the victim (Israel) appear to be the victimizer – even, sometimes, to Jews and Israelis.
Reversing “cause” and “effect” is so simple and so devastatingly effective because once you establish the idea – in this case that the genuine victim is the victimizer – every defensive action taken by the victim in response to the actions of the real victimizer looks like aggression.
And checkpoints are the perfect illustration of how the premise of “Israel the victimizer” was created and then “confirmed”.
Just as there were no inconvenient, time-consuming security checks at airports before terrorism made them essential, there were no checkpoints or fences or so-called “apartheid walls” in Israel until the mid-1990s – despite the fact that hundreds of terror attacks were launched from the territories.
But following the Oslo Accords when the West Bank and Gaza were given autonomy – an embryo Palestinian state – a reign of terror was unleashed on Israel inside the Green Line (which is the part of Israel that even the UN is forced to recognize as “legitimately” belonging to Israel.)
The murderous terrorism launched from the newly autonomous West Bank and Gaza was unprecedented. There were stabbings, shootings, rammings, kidnappings and, of course, suicide bombs on buses, in cafés, in bars and restaurants, and in markets and shopping malls. After hundreds of Israelis were killed and hundreds more left with life-changing injuries, checkpoints became routine. In other words, checkpoints are a reaction to Palestinian terror; checkpoints are a consequence of Palestinian terror; checkpoints, barrier walls and those “humiliating searches” – referenced by the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, in his Christmas Day sermon as a way to defame Israel – were the response to decades of Palestinian terror attacks. Checkpoints are what every civilized country on earth installs when its civilians are being murdered – including the UK at the time of the IRA bombings.
It is sad that some Palestinians are “humiliated” or inconvenienced but the simple solution would be to reject the Jihadist ideology and terrorism and resist radicalization which serves only the geo-political objectives of fundamentalist Islamists rather than the peace and well-being of Palestinians.
But this campaign by Palestinian propagandists to reverse cause and effect, and make only “effect” visible, could not have succeeded without the the collusion of a biased media.
Initially, of course, it was just a few outriders – at the BBC, The Guardian and The Independent. But ultimately a vast cohort who had heard – probably at university – and believed the fake, Soviet-fabricated narrative of Palestinian displacement and suffering, joined in.
Their bias – or perhaps just a deliberately misdirected liberal sympathy – led them to sanitize or minimize terrorism, or make it disappear altogether. In reports, they enthusiastically amplified threat and harm to Palestinians, carefully played down threat and harm to Israel, ignored context and framed Israel’s need to defend its citizens as “oppression.”
If you doubt the veracity of that assertion, do search out news stories from The Guardian, or news reports from the BBC from the period when security measures were being installed – notably some of the BBC’s “news features” from correspondents such Fergal Keane. The reports – clearly prompted by Palestinian press releases (or possibly just Palestinian press releases forwarded to news desks accompanied by photos of suitably downtrodden Palestinians) – unfailingly focused on the difficulty, disruption or “humiliation” caused by Israel’s security measure, while unfailingly ignoring entirely the years of murderous terror that had made such measures necessary. Or, of course, using the infamously perfunctory phrase “Israel claims…” as a way to dismiss very real concerns…
