Palestinianism, Defined Eight Ways and Meaning None ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, June 14, 2026

Palestinianism, Defined Eight Ways and Meaning None

At the far Left site Countercurrents, Dr. Ghassan Shahrour writes "Why Palestinianism Is Misread as Hostility, and Why That Misreading Must End."

This should be fun.

First of all, what exactly is "Palestinianism?" Shahrour gives us a definition. Actually, his short article gives us about eight definitions.

Palestinianism is a dignity-centered framework grounded in humanitarian practice.
Palestinianism examines how systems of protection operate, why they fail, and how they might become more equitable.
The purpose of Palestinianism is not to elevate one people above another. It is to use a prolonged encounter with exclusion to illuminate how protection systems function across contexts.
Palestinianism critiques structures, not identities.
Palestinianism is grounded in humanitarian practice, not ideology.
Palestinianism reveals how protection mechanisms can be selectively applied, withheld, or manipulated.
Palestinianism brings suppressed memory into analytical view.
Palestinianism offers something constructive: a universal lens for analyzing exclusion and a human-centered ethic that applies to all peoples. It helps identify structural failures in protection systems and offers pathways toward more equitable responses. It is grounded in decades of humanitarian practice and in the lived experience of communities whose dignity has been repeatedly denied.

Do you understand now?

No one does. It is defined by whatever word salad comes into his head. It sounds roughly like a field of social science, or maybe psychology, or perhaps politics. But from what we can see, it has nothing to do with...Palestinians.

Which is really the point. If it was about Palestinians, then Palestinianism would be critiquing Lebanon or Jordan or Egypt for how they mistreat Palestinians today, or Gulf and other Arab countries for refusing to give Palestinians citizenship even after four generations of living there. But Palestinianism is really anti-Israelism dressed up as a positive movement for a people who are, at best, pawns in the entire framework.

But let's take the article seriously for a minute. It quotes Jewish thinkers to defend Palestinianism: "Jewish philosopher Judith Butler." "Jewish historian Alon Confino." "Jewish physician and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté, who lost family members in the Holocaust." Richard Falk is introduced as "one of the most respected Jewish public intellectuals of our time." Ilan Pappe is also quoted, and Eyal Weizman is mentioned. All of them are anti-Zionist Jews.

Since only Jewish experts are quoted, most of them explicitly as Jews, then Shahrour must believe that Jews have a special insight into Palestinianism and support its goals. But 90% of Jews support Israel. I would venture that, say, Bernard-Henri Lévy is a bit more prestigious than Richard Falk as a public intellectual. If Jews are the ones to listen to about Palestinianism and Israel, then by Shahrour's own standards, he should be a Zionist.

In this light, Shahrour's use of Judith Butler is richly ironic. He says that she charged that Zionists “instrumentalize Jewish identity to shield power from accountability.” Which is exactly what he does by citing seven Jews and not one non-Jew.

Let's go deeper.

Sharour says that a protection system is a mechanism that shields a favored party and can be "selectively applied, withheld, or manipulated," under which "accusations become tools of narrative control rather than genuine ethical concerns."

He just perfectly described his entire essay. Palestinianism shields a favored party — Palestinian nationalism — and it withholds that shielding from every critic by defining them out of the picture. It manipulates the incoming accusation, converting bias, antisemitism, and hidden-agenda charges alike into evidence for the position they were meant to test. Each objection is reclassified, on contact, as a "tool of narrative control." Shahrour has built, in the act of denouncing protection systems, a flawless specimen of one, and it fails in exactly the manner his definition specifies. if Sharour would point his own framework at Palestinianism itself as a protection system, by his own metrics, it fails.

This is a ridiculous essay dressed up in pseudo-academic garb. Maybe readers of Countercurrents think it is brilliant, but if you actually try to figure out his arguments, there aren't any - just his own assertions framed in such a way that there is little to attack since he keeps his subject so nebulous. But since he claims that it is a structural analysis, any structural analysis of his system shows that it damns itself.

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