In conversation with Richard Landes
There they were in the no-man’s-land between blood and bullets, Israeli military on one side, Palestinian forces on the other. Muhammad al-Durrah was 12 years old and screaming in terror, his father struggling to shield him behind a small concrete barrier. Then the camera suddenly shakes, dust sifts across the lens, focus returns, and al-Durrah is lying dead in his father’s lap. This was September 30, 2002, two days into the uprising of the Second Intifada, and the world had an image that it couldn’t ignore.
Media of all stripes and languages began running headlines about an Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, Jewish indifference to life, and the cold-blooded killing of a child. Across the Arab world al-Durrah became an instant martyr, with pictures of his dying body soon used on postage stamps around the Middle East; while the heat and intensity of the Intifada burned brighter with rockets, suicide bombings, and more of that gunfire.
And it was all “the cheapest kind of fake!”
The video of al-Durrah and his father that was released to the media wasn’t even close to what critical journalists would ordinarily accept. Instead of raw, continuous footage, we got six separate ten second long clips, cut and glued together; all grainy, all unfocussed, and showing the before, and the after, but not the actual killing. The reporting was that al-Durrah was shot multiple times in the legs and stomach, but there was no visible blood. Blame was immediately and persistently attached to the Israeli military, but when you look at the angle that the bullets must have come from, the shooters could only have been Palestinian.
The discrepancies built thick and fast for anyone asking honest questions… and then an extra couple of frames were leaked. Al-Durrah is lying dead, his father lost in grief and trauma, a few more seconds tick by, and the young corpse rolls slightly onto his side, moves his hands away from his face, opens his eyes, and stares knowingly down the camera lens. Not dead, not wounded, just an actor on a dusty stage. When Richard Landes first saw the footage, he immediately understood what it was: “Pallywood” (the Palestinian practice of forging evidence against Israelis, in the hope of turning global outrage against them).
By far the most alarming thing about these obvious forgeries is the greedy, unquestioning way in which they are accepted. Despite clear echoes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a significant French anchor on a mainstream news channel stared-down her audience after watching the al-Durrah footage, and said “this picture erases/replaces the picture of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto”. With Israel as the “new Nazi”, everywhere you looked people like our news anchor were lining up to free themselves, and their countries, from the hungover shame of the Holocaust.
There was a heat and an energy built around this particular instance of Pallywood that had Landes worried. After the Holocaust, open anti-Semitism and the manufacturing of modern blood libels (false, and persistent, allegations that Jews murder Christian children for religious rituals), largely stepped-back into the shadows as the accounting of those horrors stepped-out into the light. Sure, there were always those communities so tight within their own ideology, and religiosity, that they never felt the appropriate guilt, never corrected course, and never dealt with where their bigotry had led them.
But in those years of post-war reckoning, the Western world had been largely different. Though a catch phrase of a sort, “never again” was taken seriously, and hugged close, as a reminder that they too had shared in Hitler’s hatred, and so also bore a distant responsibility for his camps. “The West had resisted blood libels” Landes says, “until this one!”
On the streets of cities in France, chants of “death to Jews” began reverberating for the first time since the Nazi era. Jews were being attacked and abused and harassed with a righteous glee – “given what is happening in Palestine, what do you expect? You have brought this on yourselves.” – while most people turned away in silence and acceptance. No left-leaning political party uttered a concerned word, no anti-hate NGO did their self-declared job and campaigned against it, and most journalists didn’t even bother to file a report.
The obvious fraud of the video, combined with the near revelry and joy that people took in being able to legitimately target Jews again had something atavistic, and intensely memetic, lurking just below the surface. The sight of ordinary, and otherwise rational, people, going about their distant lives, turning their heads in a happy instant, and uncritically accepting the most outlandish of claims, took some explaining; and mere anti-Semitism just wasn’t going to cover it.
On the other side of the world from Landes, and deep into the writing of an upcoming book on irrationality and self-destructive behaviour, Oxford physicist David Deutsch had an uncomfortable answer:
I went to visit a twitter friend, the physicist David Deutsch. He’s writing a book about patterns of irrational thought that sabotage human creativity and progress. He has a chapter on the Jews in which identifies a pattern (he calls it “the Pattern”) concerning the Jews. The key to people’s behaviour in this regard, he argues, is the need to preserve the legitimacy of hurting Jews, for being Jews. This legitimacy is much more important than actually hurting Jews. And it targets only the Jews. It is not, accordingly, either a hatred or a fear, a form of racism or prejudice in the conventional sense, even though it can lead to those feelings and attitudes. But it is actually unique. No other group can substitute for the Jews as the target whom it is legitimate to hurt.
The truth of this is going to be found, or lost, in the details. Of course, a pattern needs to be explained, but much more so, it needs to be shown. It is not a claim that something is there, but rather that something repetitious is there. So where does someone start to show that the hatred of Jews is more than your garden-variety bigotry? At the beginning!
“His blood be on us”, reads the gospel of Matthew, “and on our children.” Deicide! The murder of God! It is a crime that no other people have ever been accused of, and a guilt which no other children have ever inherited. In fact, it wasn’t until 1965 – a full 20 years after the end of the Holocaust – that the Catholic Church finally, and begrudgingly, revised its official doctrine which named all Jews, past, present, and future, as directly responsible for the death of Christ; as the heirs to Matthew’s blood curse.
The worry around this issue burrows a little deeper still… and in a slightly different direction. As the keepers of the Old Testament, the killing of God (or the son of God) can strangely be excused through that same canon. After all, Christ didn’t actually die on that cross, and was quickly resurrected for his trouble. More importantly, as every Christian will tell you, his death was the event which brought salvation to all of mankind. So as Landes humorously puts it, “perhaps the Jews should be thanked by Christians, not vilified?”
Maybe this could have been true, if history had played out a little differently. But the Jews have a richer and more persistent stain on their record, something even more unforgivable than murder: denial! As the gatekeepers of prophesy they saw Christ in the flesh, and rejected the obvious truth (for all Christians) that he was the long talked about, and anxiously waited for, biblical Messiah. How could they not see what was before them? The answer for so many people is, they did! And they lied… because it is in their nature. This is a sentiment similarly shared by many Muslims, substituting Muhammad for Jesus.
For The Pattern to hold as true, more is needed. What is being proposed here by Deutsch, is not that an ancient hatred still lingers in the minds of many people today, but something much more insidious and destructive. Here the Jews are not just the scapegoats for the ills and violence of the world (no other group has ever been substituted for the Jews), but a special category of delight; where people find joy and celebration in being able to harm them – a prostrate, and deserving enemy.
Harm is the important word there, because it is not about being able to commit violence, but about the legitimacy of doing so, if it were ever chosen. Most people operating under The Pattern never have, and never will, actually raise a fist against a Jew – rather what they want is for fist-raising against Jews to be legitimate and correct… and they want every Jew to know that this is the case, well-founded in evidence, and always hanging over their heads. It is about preserving the right to harm Jews, not just about physical violence.
Embraced when it is there, and craved in its absence, The Pattern has the resilience and dopamine-high of an addiction. And as with every addiction, work-arounds and excuses are always at hand, always manufactured, so that those who are afflicted can happily, and greedily, indulge themselves.
The Enlightenment – with all its commitments to reason, liberty, tolerance, and progress – became a problem for The Pattern. Squeezed beyond respectable circles for the first time, The Pattern would slowly adapt and evolve and find its way back to prominence through a sleight of hand, best encapsulated by the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here the rapacious and cunning Jews were placed as the manipulators of our kindness and naivety.
It, and similar hoaxes, ran like this: why do the Jews support democracy, a free press, and the free flow of capital? Well it’s not because they are a benevolent people who believe deeply in these ideas. And not even because the Jews prosper when everyone plays by democratic rules. But rather because they are seeking to enslave all of mankind, and these are the tools with which to do it! So even the Enlightenment quickly becomes a Jewish plot for global domination.
But this retrofitting of evil intentions has its limitations, and tends to hit the heroin addict’s vein with the disappointing tang of methadone. Hot flushes, cold sweats, and sleepless nights, become frantic heartbeats, horrible cramps, and skin so itchy that it is scratched away to blood. Soon the physical symptoms are intolerable to the point of crime and hospitalisation, with the addict now in so much withdrawal that he walks the streets in complete desperation – willing to do anything, anything, for a hit of that long denied drug (The Pattern).
And when it is eventually found again, it came with all the pent-up frustration and anxiety of a sudden overdose – with Hitler, the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and six million dead Jews. Spurned out loud for so long, The Pattern was back again in the public eye. And with so much catching-up to do, never had it been so efficient, so ruthless, so explicit, and so proud.
It was the kind of binge that addicts only wake up from on hospital beds, in jail cells, or in front of judges (that’s if they wake up at all). As quickly as it exploded in European rampage (and collapsed with defeat at the end of the Second World War), The Pattern was hushed back into silence, sent away to a court-ordered rehab centre, where again it would become much less acceptable, and much harder to express.
Despite the horrible recognition of where The Pattern had brought us all, there were still pockets of the world that never paused – for that small twinkling of self-doubt and reflection. Particularly in the Arab world, blood libel-type stories found a new voice and urgency at the very moment at which the full extent of Hitler’s crimes were under post-mortem. In their minds, and in their propaganda, those cunning Jews had tricked the world again, faked all those stories of massacre and genocide, and were plotting as always for global domination.
What could possibly explain such an inconceivably tone-deaf response to human suffering? Answer: The Pattern was under threat. And the danger was then, as it always had been, and as it remains today, either defend it or risk losing it forever. The scorn and the embarrassed looks from (some) Western eyes is an easy price to pay for the continuation of your favourite, and most satisfying, addiction; after all, they will likely thank you for it later on.
But the greatest threat to The Pattern was still on its way. Riding that wave of international sympathy and guilt, in 1948 the unthinkable happened: the state of Israel was established. Unthinkable because now every Jew in the world had a safe haven and a home, free of persecution and violence. There it was as a bright and unavoidable banner, speaking the new language of internationalism and human rights – the Jewish people had sovereignty… they were protected within the borders of their own country. The might of international law was on their side.
And of course, it was a return home of a kind. In the second century CE, the Romans had expelled the Jewish population from what is currently Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and western Jordan. Renamed after the Philistines (ancient Jewish enemies), the region became Palestine by Roman decree. And there it stood, while the homeless Jews wandered from persecution to persecution, through pogroms, inquisitions, and violent conspiracy theories.
It wasn’t until 1894 that the Zionist movement was founded by the disappointment, the fear, and the exasperation, of the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl. With his own assimilation going badly (along with most of European Jewry), Herzl quickly found momentum for the cause, and the first Zionist congress was held in Basil, Switzerland, in 1897. The issue swirled, locations were offered and reneged upon, and importantly the control of the great empires collapsed; replaced slowly by the ideal of the nation-state.
With little to expect from the kindness of strangers, Jewish philanthropists took matters into their own hands and began buying-up land in Palestine for the resettlement of European Jews; people who would re-join the surviving 10,000-odd population that had escaped Roman expulsion, and who had quietly eked-out lives within the city of Jerusalem. 40,000 Jews arrived from Russia between 1905 and 1914, as they were hunted out of Tsarist society. 600,000 more arrived between then and the Second World War.
With each step toward safety and sovereignty, Arab violence grew worse; most sharply in 1929, when the Jewish community of Hebron was massacred and run-out of town. In 1933, as the Nazis stepped into control of Germany, the Grand Mufti, al-Husseini, immediately contacted the German Consul General in Jerusalem, offering to help with Jewish eradication. By mid-war, the Mufti was broadcasting Nazi propaganda, organising attacks on British troops, and recruiting Arabs to enter the war from Yugoslavia. For his efforts, the Nazi high command appointed him to the ranks of the SS with the title of Major-General.
The war ended in 1945, Hitler had lost, and in that same year the League of Arab States (or Arab League) was formed. Its first order of business? Declaring a regional boycott of all Jewish farms, Jewish stores, and Jewish employment in Palestine.
But the Jews had a mandate from the freshly-minted United Nations, an allotted territory, and for once in the long history of their people they had momentum at their backs. The British left, and Israel was declared with David Ben-Gurion as the first Prime Minister. America officially recognised the new state, then it was the Soviet Union, then the rest of the world followed suit… Except for a significant holdout, with not a single Arab country willing to acknowledge that Israel had a right to exist.
As long as Israel stood, the Jewish people had borders from which to legitimately defend themselves, and so The Pattern was in sudden, and permanent, danger. Then as the world waited to likewise recognise another new state – the long since championed Palestinian state – in the neighbouring portion of the territory, those same Arab countries instead took the first modern step towards delegitimising Israel: the armies of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, invaded Palestine.
In control of Gaza, Egypt systematically expelled the entire Jewish population. Jordan, in control of the other territory, forbade the very use of the word Palestine, instead naming it the West Bank. And this is where relations remain frozen, with the stifling realisation that any recognition of an independent Palestinian state – with its lines drawn next to the Israeli state – would, by its own existence, also formalise the existence and borders of Israel.
Attempts to destroy Israel through calculation and war, came in 1948, 1967, and 1973, and went, in each case with Jewish victory and a deepening sense of Arab humiliation: they were losing their grip on The Pattern.
Not to be deterred, the failure of open warfare was replaced by the Intifada, a persistent campaign of low-level, non-stop violence. The Intifada ran from 1987 to 1991, after which – through all the bombs, stabbings, riots, shootings, and thrown rocks – 20 Israelis had been murdered by Arabs under the banners of Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). During the same period, 528 Arabs were murdered by their fellow Arabs, and those three organisations. Their crimes? Collaboration! Disagreeing with the violence, warning Jews about impending attacks, or for simply maintaining friendly relationships with the Jewish community.
Worried that Palestinian support was shifting to Islamic Jihad and to Hamas, in 1993 the PLO decided to meet with Israeli negotiators to discuss a peace deal. The meetings took place in Oslo, and due to the anti-collaborator atmosphere that had been drummed-up during the Intifada, it all happened in complete secrecy. Led by Yasser Arafat, the PLO walked out of the summit two years later with the signed Cairo Treaty in hand, and an agreed-upon “two-state solution”.
The Palestinian side of the bargain required a repudiation of terrorism, an end to anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli propaganda, and the altering of the PLO constitution to remove language which promised the destruction of Israel. For his efforts, Arafat pocketed the Nobel Peace Prize, flew back to Ramallah, stood before a crowded Mosque, and demanded that Palestinians “continue their Jihad until they had liberated Jerusalem” (both in its violence and territorial claim, a violation of the Cairo Treaty he had just signed).
The official PLO emblem remained unchanged as a map of the entire pre-1947 region (before the existence of Israel). Fatah’s emblem (Arafat’s core constituents within the PLO) remained the same as the PLO’s, just with rifles and grenades added for a little flare and emphasis. Palestinian schools continued to teach and lecture about the importance of destroying Israel. Anti-Jewish blood libel stories became a core part of Palestinian culture, taught, repeated, and accepted uncritically. An ancient law stating that any Arab who sells their property to a Jew will be executed and denied a Muslim burial, was revived. And when Arafat was subsequently rewarded by the Palestinian electorate for running away from what he had agreed upon in Oslo (receiving 90% of the votes), terrorism and violence increased sharply across Palestine.
In 1999, Ehud Barak was elected Prime Minister of Israel, and along with American President Bill Clinton, made a desperate attempt to rescue the commitments of Oslo. Hashed-out at Camp David, almost every demand of the Palestinian negotiators was acceded to. East Jerusalem (including the Jewish holy sites there) would become part of Palestine, all Jewish settlements not contiguous with Israel would be evacuated (by force if necessary), and the whole of Gaza and 96% of the West Bank would form the new Palestinian state, with Israel adjusting its own border and agreeing to land swaps to make this possible.
Given almost all that he had asked for – and so also on the precipice of having to give up The Pattern – Arafat again panicked. He walked-out of the meetings, promising to return in a few days to polish the final details. Instead he flew back to Ramallah and launched the Second Intifada against Israel. Soon the world was watching those faked images of Muhammed al-Durrah bleeding to death on his father’s lap, and with that, everyone (not just the Palestinians and the Arabs) was free and happy to roll again in the thick mud of Jewish hatred.
The language had shifted to appease modern sensibilities, and to provide enough cover for those who still cared about such things. Unchanged in purpose and intent, the hatred of Jews had become the hatred of Israel! All just another step, another evolution of The Pattern, “needing to preserve the legitimacy of hurting Jews, simply for being Jews”.
Once something like this hooks itself into culture, a huge amount of effort and persistence is needed to break it… as well as even to notice what it is in the first place. All patterns exist in their details as much as their explanations, and so with The Pattern it is found in what passes unchallenged nearly every day, from the mouths of activists, to global newscasts, and into accepted truth:
* ‘Israel is an apartheid state’ – there are 1.9 million Arabs living inside Israel (and growing each year) with full rights; while the Jewish populations across all Arab countries combined, have shrunk from 800,000 in 1948 to less than 9,000 today (Egypt: 80,000 in 1948 down to 100 today; Yemen: 60,000 in 1948 down to 50 today; Iraq: 140,000 in 1948 down to 5 today; Libya: 35,000 in 1948 down to 0 today; and so on…
* ‘Israel are an occupying power’ – there have never been any such similar claims made about Egyptian, Jordanian, or Syrian occupations of Palestine, and when asked what is meant by the phrase “occupation”, the response is often a reference to 1948 and the creation of Israel itself. Meaning that the very existence of Israel is what many people consider to be “occupation”. A fact further emphasised by the multiple offers of statehood to the Palestinian authorities, and the rejections of these offers.
* ‘The Israeli military are a vengeful institution who massacre Palestinians (men, women, and children) – indiscriminately’ – Israel has been attacked multiple times by its neighbours, and has never launched a war itself that was not in self-defence. When Israeli forces enter places like Gaza in response to rocket fire, they take the unprecedented – and near comically cautious – steps of warning Gazan residents beforehand through leaflets and text messages. And when Israeli soldiers do commit crimes or human rights abuses, they are publicly tried in court; while Palestinian suicide attackers are still honoured as martyrs, with their families paid lifetime stipends for their sacrifice to the nation.
* ‘Israel are committing a genocide of the Palestinians’ – The Palestinian population has increased from under 1 million in 1950, to over 5 million today.
Before sitting down to start work on his upcoming book, David Deutsch was part of a project to write an up to date history of Israel. He decided to start things off with a bit of humour… and from best intentions, and light-hearted fun, The Pattern still managed to squirm its way into the light, jumping back off the page at Deutsch and his fellow authors:
Once upon a time, we wrote a parody history of Israel, intended for the blog Setting The World To Rights (now in suspended animation), in which every sentence contained at least one lie.
But the reactions of many of our friends who read it were alarming. Instead of falling about laughing, most of them read it as fact. These were not opponents of Israel, but people sympathetic to it. We hadn’t realised how pervasive the prevailing distortions and falsehoods are. Considering that the parody began: “Judaism is unique among religions in being exclusive to a particular ethnic group (the Jews). It teaches (in its doctrine of ‘the Chosen People’) that all other races are genetically inferior to the Jewish one and that Jews are entitled to rule over them”, this was alarming.
We realised that we couldn’t put the parody into the public domain. After all, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is also a crude forgery, but is now part of the standard repertoire of the Pattern usually called ‘antisemitism’. For instance it is in the Charter of Hamas. We didn’t want to be responsible for another anti-Jewish canard that might last the next few centuries.
*** The Popperian Podcast #10 – Richard Landes – ‘Deutsch's Theory of the Pattern - The Widespread Compulsion to Legitimise Hurting Jews’ https://popperian-podcast.libsyn.com/the-popperian-podcast-10-richard-landes-deutschs-theory-of-the-pattern-the-widespread-compulsion-to-legitimise-hurting-jews