Forty years after Edward Said demanded ‘permission to narrate’, the truth from Palestine has never been more widely known. And yet the annihilation continues.
www.equator.org
Fascinating article on why so many in the West repress the reality of Palestine in order to salvage the rotting fiction of its own moral innocence. Applicable to many on here, who no doubt won’t read it.
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We have never had so much evidence: since 7 October 2023, an endless stream of information and images of war crimes has poured forth from Gaza. Palestinian journalists, with targets on their backs, have transmitted live footage of airstrikes on hospitals, of children pulled from rubble, of families starved. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers have gleefully documented their own atrocities. They film themselves demolishing universities, humiliating detainees and rummaging through the personal belongings of families they have displaced or killed, and then post the videos on social media.
Israel no longer attempts to conceal its violence. It acts with the confidence of a state that has learned that impunity is itself a form of power. Yet the unprecedented visibility of this genocide has been matched by an unprecedented willingness to defend and excuse its perpetrators.
The template for this manufactured ignorance was set early on. In November 2023, during the initial siege of Al-Shifa hospital, US president Joe Biden declared at a press conference that Hamas had their headquarters beneath the facility. “And that’s a fact,” he insisted. When a reporter pressed him for evidence, he simply refused: “No, I can’t tell you. I won’t tell you.” Though it was subsequently established that the charge was entirely baseless, military disinformation had become official state truth. Two years later, Western leaders still routinely broadcast Israeli propaganda, no matter how absurd or easily disproven.
How to make sense of this response? We might understand it as a kind of moral stupidity. In an interview last year, the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé elaborated on this diagnosis in striking terms, linking it to the habits of certain European intellectuals. “These are people I know,” he said, “who usually have a lot of interesting things to say about the past, the present, about morality, and I have learned a lot from them. But something peculiar happens when they switch to talking about the situation in Israel and Palestine: it is as if the fountain of knowledge they usually drink from has suddenly dried up, and they are left without any commonsensical ideas. They simply sink into repeating, almost word for word, the Israeli prayer book; they parrot Israeli propaganda in a very shameful way. And surely, you say to yourself, they must know these are fabrications. They must know that they are actually working in the service of propaganda, rather than in the service of truth. And that is, in fact, a kind of moral cowardice.
Pappé is describing a form of trained incapacity: a density that will not yield. It is the posture of people surrounded by archives, images and testimonies who still manage to look and not see, to hear and not listen. Stupidity, in this context, is a saturation point, a condition that renders persuasion impossible. For Pappé, this wilful ignorance is a symptom of moral cowardice.
But cowardice implies a subject who encountered the truth and flinched: someone who could have chosen otherwise. What we face instead is something more intractable than a failure of nerve. The Western intellectual who parrots Israeli talking points does not experience themselves as evading the truth. They experience themselves as being on the side of reason, of complexity, of responsible restraint against the seductions of easy outrage. The stupidity is not felt from the inside as stupidity. It presents itself as judgement.
This is the first thing to understand about the stupidity that meets Palestinian speech: it is a deliberate formation. Far from arriving empty and waiting for evidence, it arrives preloaded – having already passed its verdict and closed the question it gestures toward holding open. When a European politician invokes complexity, when a liberal commentator reaches for both-sidesism, when an intellectual who would never tolerate such reasoning in any other domain suddenly discovers the irreducible nuance of Israeli security concerns – thought has rushed past the obstacle entirely. It has arrived at its conclusion before the encounter could even take place, metabolising the question by the very act of appearing to consider it. The judgement was always already made; what follows is mere performance.
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England
Wales
