Israel has signed an agreement with Facebook and collaborated with other major social media companies to censor Palestinian pages it has smeared Israel’s critics as anti-Semites, destroying careers and worse it has set up a “Lawfare Project” to drag students and activists through courts and it has successfully pushed legislation around the world to criminalise criticism of Israel. It has become harder to obscure Palestinian humanity. Israel has floundered over the past two decades, trying to sort out a strategy to deal with this popular unveiling of its colonial rot. ‘It’s complicated’ and other shifting myths Suddenly, the masses had access to videos, photos, eyewitness accounts, independent media, human rights audits, and UN reports that laid bare Israel’s sadistic oppression of Palestinians.

Then came the internet, and social media made the world smaller. No longer able to hold the claim that Palestine was ever without her people, Zionists shifted the narrative – through countless films, books, ads – to one that caricatured Palestinians as two-dimensional, irrational Arab terrorists, depictions that still persist in popular media. Only when we organised into armed guerillas and hijacked planes was the world finally forced to reckon with our existence. Palestine already had an ancient, extensive society, and when European Zionists descended on their country, committing well-documented massacres and pogroms to expel them, Palestinians pleaded to the world for help – to no avail.

People lapped it up by the millions and refused to accept that it was anything but absolute truth, with Biblical authority to boot.īut it was – as everyone now knows – a lie. It was the romantic happy ending Europe needed following the genocide of its own Jewish citizenry. It narrated a true event (a ship carrying Jewish refugees sailing to Palestine) as the seed of an elaborate myth – a land without a people for a people without a land – which functioned to obscure the indigenous stewards of the land.

The result was Exodus, a bestseller turned blockbuster film. In the mid-1950s, powerful Hollywood executives financed the writing of a novel by Leon Uris to sell a pro-Israel agenda to Western popular imagination. Hollywood director Steven Spielberg recently bought the film rights to a novel about “Israel Palestine” before it was published, something that may take us to a cultural moment of unfortunate deja vu.

Apeirogon a novel by colum mccann