The Myth of Palestine: Language Manipulation and Historical Fabrication
George Orwell famously wrote in 1984: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Tyrants have always understood that language control is mind control. Among the most egregious examples of language manipulation are the myths and fallacies that surround Palestine.
A wise man once told me that memory is the essence of life. We all have witnessed tragic instances of people with dementia who no longer know who they are, as though they never existed. Similarly, erasing historical memory is tantamount to deleting a people’s existence.
The Romans knew this well and practiced a “condemnation of memory,” damnatio memoriae. They physically erased from monuments the names of previously honored persons who were later perceived as disgraced public enemies. After the Jews bravely revolted against Roman rule in 135 A.D., the Romans punished them not only by suppressing the rebellion with extreme cruelty but by renaming the province of Judea as Palestinian Syria, thus removing any reference to the Jews from their land.
The term Palestinian in the name Palestinian Syria was a reference to the Philistines, who were one of the ethnicities inhabiting the area centuries prior. The ancient Philistines are of unclear, possibly Greek, origin, and have nothing to do with the so-called “Palestinians” today. There is no Arab ethnicity that is historically or linguistically Palestinian. While the Jews have inhabited their ancestral land for millennia and have formed various states in that territory, the Arab inhabitants of the region are much later colonizers.
Just as the Romans used language manipulation to dissociate Judea from the Jews, totalitarian ideologues created the myth of Palestinian martyrdom and resistance. They fabricated tales of heroic sacrifice against a powerful aggressor, while in fact it is the Jews who need to constantly defend themselves against fanatical terrorists whose goal is Israel’s annihilation. The enemies and detractors of Israel have no desire to accept the so-called Palestinians in their countries but prefer to keep them indigent and manipulated by terrorists as a political weapon.
Totalitarian ideologues have turned language manipulation into an art form. This is poignantly illustrated by Holocaust survivor and prominent linguist Victor Klemperer (p. 14):
[L]anguage does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it…. Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. If someone replaces the words “heroic” and “virtuous” with “fanatical” for long enough, he will come to believe that a fanatic really is a virtuous hero, and that no one can be a hero without fanaticism.
Similarly, reflecting on the Soviet use of language, Russian historian and dissident Mikhail Heller remarked (pp. 280-81):
Total power over the Word gives the Master of the Word a magical power over all communications…. In the Soviet language there are no neutral words—every word carries an ideological load…. That is why the same words are repeated over and over again, until they become a signal that acts without any effort of thought.
While both national socialists and communists employed repetition of propaganda slogans to elicit brainless obedience, the communists surpassed the Nazis in manipulating language and distorting facts. The Marxist professors who have trained the leftist political elites in the West today see the world as a battleground of victims and oppressors; to them anyone who is successful, independent, and prosperous is automatically an oppressor, regardless of the truth. This is evident from the terminology leftist media use to describe the current conflict in the Middle East. They twist and transpose the meaning of words and create a labyrinth of moral confusion.
Today’s leftist elites, programmed to mindlessly recycle Marxist falsehoods, have no historical memory and care little about the facts. They disregard the fact that the ancient name Palestine has nothing to do with any Arab ethnicity; that Israel is a prosperous and humane country that is the only democracy in the Middle East; that it needs to defend itself in order to survive; and that Palestinian terrorists purposely use children as a human shield and do not value human life.
It is no surprise that such ignorance has led to the appalling instances of campus anti-Semitism that continue to disgrace once reputable institutions of higher learning. The lack of historical memory and education is painfully visible in the deceptive way in which Israel has been vilified as the “colonial” and “imperialist” power in the Middle East, while, in fact, its ancestral land has been colonized, and it grants full rights and benefits to its non-Jewish minorities.
Renowned British and Israeli journalist Melanie Phillips wrote in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre:
People in Britain don’t understand how support for the Palestinian cause has destroyed the west’s moral compass. In fact, it’s been part of a lethal cultural feedback loop: the west signed up to the Palestinian cause because it had already lost its moral compass.Having lost its ability to discriminate between truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor, it inevitably reversed truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor over a range of issues. Hatred of its own culture and its inherited values made it all too vulnerable to Palestinian Arab lies, forged in the infernal crucible of Soviet mind-control and laundered by the west’s intelligentsia and progressive classes.The result is the horrifying situation now on display, in which untold thousands of people believe that genocide by Palestinian Arabs is resistance and true resistance against this by Israel is genocide.
Historical education can provide an enduring antidote to this toxic propaganda and a way out of this moral maze. In order to secure a long-term victory for civilization over barbarism, we need to preserve the historical memory of what made the West free and prosperous and reverse its enemies’ “long march through the institutions.” As Elie Wiesel reminded us, “Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.”
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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