Even Palestinian poetry is filled with antisemitic lies

The current issue of World Literature Today is dedicated to Palestinian literature. 

It unwittingly highlights the fact that even fiction - and even poetry - can lie.

There is a tacit contract between the writer and reader of fiction. No matter how fantastical literature is, it all relies on some common set of facts that the writer and reader can agree on. This way the readers can empathize with the characters and allow themselves to be swept up in the emotion of the story.

When fiction or poetry is insidious propaganda, the writer feeds the reader lies as if they are facts. The reader assumes that the contract is valid, that the writer would not purposefully feed the reader lies to turn the reader into an antisemitic bigot.

Yet this is what much - not all, but probably most - of Palestinian literature does.

One of the poems in this issue is about a Palestinian prisoner who smuggled his sperm out of prison in a candy wrapper to his wife, who then conceives. 

Most of the poem is based on actual facts.  There have been nearly seventy cases of such births. But then, this poem goes into a bizarre scene where Israel - observed by the UN - is blocking the woman from her hospital, pointing guns at her as she gives birth.

This is not how I imagined it would be

Legs parted on the blood-soaked dirt

Strangers rolling up my skirt

Hands pulling down my undies

Guns and phones pointing at me

UN observers counting indignities

They write me down

They write down me

They write me down . . . a number

I’m case #70

Sixty-nine women before me

Not one . . . not two . . . not three

I inhale strength and sumud

And exhale their cruelty

I’m not a stray animal left on the dirt

That ambulance they block is for me

I booked a hospital room

I decorated a nursery

I even prepared a music playlist

To reduce my anxiety

But all of this is out of reach

I’m case #70

I push . . . I push . . . I push

Can I have some privacy?

I inhale the wisdom of a thousand matriarchs

And the patience of a million refugees

And I exhale fear and tyranny

The scene described is indeed inhuman. And it is a complete lie - no one would stop her from her doctor, no one would point guns at her as she gasps through labor. The emotional arc is based on the poet breaking the contract with the reader and creating a universe of the monstrous Jew persecuting the innocent Palestinian, a Jew whose evil is assumed and does not have to be explained; Jewish depravity is just an unquestioned part of the universe like gravity.

In another poem, "Taking Back Jerusalem," even the title is propaganda - it tells the reader that Jerusalem is unquestioningly "Palestinian" and Jews who have lived there and prayed for return there for thousands of years are the outsiders. Excerpt:

& for the first time that night,

   a familiar I could but couldn’t

have known: a boy with moonlit tongue

promising his mother he’ll make it

   back with every breath – peering

around the corner: a soldier, his

gun, that precise small

   -ness – I couldn’t unsee him

or Him, couldn’t uncast that smile

from his nodding face, our mouths

   pretty with english – he stopped

one of us. he searched

only one of us. & there, I remembered

   my mother, begging God to watch

over us in Jerusalem, where,

at four years old, a soldier held a gun

   to her head & maybe it was or wasn’t

at this exact spot, & maybe she prayed

for the wrong son but in that moment,

   I prayed. & there was no God

but the space between us – how the distance

between my holy & His

   holy could resurrect a broken

lord on my breath – & there I began

to understand how my mother could

   abandon her birthright –

& I suppose, she made it out.

Here there is another soldier, someone who may randomly kill an Arab for any or no reason, who stops an Arab in a group. This reminds the poet that another soldier pointed a gun at his mother's head when she was four years old.

If the reader knows that this is impossible, that Arabs were not expelled from Jerusalem, there there are hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live in Jerusalem today (more than at any time in history,) that Arabs and Jews walk together and take classes together and sit next to each other on buses and shop together every hour of every day in Jerusalem, and that it is inconceivable that a Jewish soldier in 1967 would have held a gun to a four year old girl's head when there was a real war going on - the poem would lose its power. 

The poet knows that the reader is ignorant, and that the poet must fill in these gaps of knowledge with lies to create the impression of Jewish immorality.

The poems don't have to say "Jew" to be antisemitic. The propagandist/poets know that the reader knows that the vile soldiers are Jews. Their depravity doesn't need to be explained any more than Nazis do in World War II -era movies. Their actions need no explication, their humanity simply doesn't exist. Their mere presence in Israel is oppressive and has no possible excuse - in this world, curated for the naïve Western reader, there are no terror attacks, no stabbings, no car rammings, no suicide bombings, no daily calls for ethnic cleansing, no explosive packages left by the good native Palestinians for the evil colonial Jews. 

In Arabic, the poems can romanticize the terrorists, but not in English. Not in World Literature Today.

Not yet.

Later, when the world is primed to hate the Jews more through these poems and stories and editorials and activist reporters, then the terrorists can become heroes and the suicide bombers who blow up the irredeemably evil Jews can become freedom fighters.

That will have to wait for the 2031 edition of the magazine. 

(h/t ymedad)

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