In my last column, I had suggested that, as evidenced from the events in Palestine, a permanent shift is taking place in the West towards a hegemonic and brutal conduct that will endanger peace in human society. And that we cannot allow degenerate propaganda from Western leadership and media to control the semantics, and muzzle debate and protest about their conduct. That they must not be allowed to determine what we should and should not say, and what our words ought to mean.

Since the writing of those words, a war has begun over the meaning of intifada, genocide and colonialism. The effort to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is an older struggle, which is badly failing thanks to the large number of Jewish peace activists leading the campaign for a ceasefire in Palestine, and against Zionism and Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

Yousef Munayyer who directs the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and is a contributing policy analyst for the Arab Centre in Washington, DC, recently wrote an insightful Twitter thread in reply to Professor Corey Robin asking when people of influence and power came together around the idea that the word intifada meant genocide. I quote and paraphrase it below.

Munayyer traces its history to the two Zionist projects that have been operational for decades: “the dehumanisation of Palestinians along the lines of longstanding colonialist tropes,” and, “the specific practice of deliberately mistranslating Palestinian or Arab or Muslim language and culture to suit racist agendas.”

Munayyer writes: “There is an entire genre of literature (if we must call it that) that can be summed up as non-Arabic speakers telling other non-Arabic speakers ‘the real meaning’ of Arabic terms. Intifada is but one of these but this also isn’t limited to the Palestine context. Madrasa, Shariah, etc, there are many examples.

“Central to this practice is the belief that the sneaky and barbaric Arabic speakers conceal the true meanings of their language ... and it is important to note that this is not limited to the mistranslation of language, it includes the mistranslation of culture.

“When Palestinian babies are martyred by Israeli bombs, the very concept of martyrdom is twisted by self-appointed mistranslators as a love of death or even a desire to seek death for propaganda purposes.”

Munayyer documents a turning point in Israeli policy that occurred sometime in 2015. The global civil society had turned against Israel and its government was increasingly unable to justify its abominable treatment of Pelestinians, and was openly and rightly being called an Apartheid state.

In response, Israel decided to adopt a policy of attacking the critics and advancing “repressive objectives, including things like anti-BDS laws, in the US and Europe.” But in the US, they ran into the freedom of expression laws enshrined in the First Amendment.

“So how do you repress protected activity like speech and get around the First Amendment? The answer is, define the speech of those you are targeting as speech that doesn’t merit protection ie discriminatory or violence-inciting speech. To do this, effectively and at scale, you need to institute a decoder, a framework that converts protected speech into non-protected speech.”

Israeli policy makers used the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) vague definition of Antisemitism as the fulcrum to achieve their purpose. The following are two of the several examples Munayyer quotes, that were used to silence Israel’s critics:

“Let’s say you call for equality before the law in Israel so it could be a state of all its citizens. Since that would mean an end to privileging Jews over Arabs that means you are denying the right of Jews to self determination, therefore ANTISEMITE!

“Let’s say you call for an end to occupation, well now you are calling Jews occupiers in their homeland and therefore denying the right of Jews to self determination, therefore ANTISEMITE!”

In conclusion, Munayyer writes: “The aim of this conversion device is to legitimise repression of dissent against Israel across the world and to recruit, in the process, the law enforcement apparatuses of third [party] countries to do the work.”

While it is important to protect our speech from censorship of bad faith semantics demonstrated in the above examples, it is equally important that our speech reaches our community and audience without insidious online censorship by the platforms we use for communication.

As the Palestinian genocide has picked up pace after a brief pause in hostilities, those of us who raise our voices about Palestine and highlight Israeli atrocities through our social media accounts are increasingly being ‘shadow-banned’, and see much lower engagement levels for our content.

It is interesting how Marx’s theory of class, which defines classes in their relation to their ownership and control of the means of production, can be neatly rephrased to explain this modern social segmentation in relation to people’s ownership and control of the means of communications.

“Communications capital” is the fuel on which modern society runs, the foundation on which it stands, and the base it uses to project its power. With social media, those who own the platforms own the means of communications, and have and use their power to set the communications quota, influencing the discourse and its direction.

They may also lend the platform to other repressive powers, who may use it to further their own agendas, by suppressing or drowning out voices hostile to their interests. An example of this is the recent experience of many pro-Palestine X accounts that were swarmed by Zionist troll accounts to distract and silence them.

It is important that those who are doing valuable work organising against Apartheid and genocide should devote a part of their energies and resources in creating such global communication platforms whose ownership rests with people.

It is not important that these platforms have powerful people and celebrities as subscribers in the way we are used to seeing on popular social media platforms. What is important is that one is able to communicate and share one’s ideas without being filtered or silenced; and able to organise a community around shared ideas.

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator. X: microMAF

Website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 17, 2022