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In the last two years, I have made three trips to Israel and occupied Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza Strip). Each trip represents a journey into an approximation of the literary nightmares of George Orwell and Franz Kafka. To a certain extent we are all subject to the Orwellian version of these nightmares.1 It was Orwell’s conviction that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectful.” Here in the United States we ought to recognize the truth of this maxim, for we have once again been drawn into deadly foreign adventures based on lies and exaggeration. However, in Israel the influence of “political language” has reached a unique level of intensity. Increasingly , many Israelis live in a “closed information environment” wherein an insidious Orwellian “newspeak” (a language of propaganda aimed at creating ideologically determined boundaries for thought) shapes thinking and perception relative to the Palestinians. This is true not just of your average citizen manipulated by mendacious politicians and a censured press. In Israel, as in Orwell’s novel 1984, society’s leaders are as shaped by the prevailing “political language” as those they rule. Thus, descriptions of Palestinians by Israeli leaders range from “there are no such things as Palestinians” (Prime Minister Golda Meir, June 15, 1969) to “beasts walking on two legs” (Prime Minister Menachem Begin, June 25, 1982) to “drugged cockroaches in a bottle” (Chief of Staff Raphael Eitan, April 14, 1983) to “people who do not belong to our continent , to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy” (Israeli President Moshe Katsav, May 10, 2001). For a man like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, “peace” for Israel comes through dominating and controlling “the enemies of humanity” (January 5, 2004). Oppression and warmaking become peacemaking in the land of Zion. With the Palestinians, in contrast, the use of language is much more descriptive of their reality. Just about every Palestinian has been negatively impacted by the Israeli occupation, so no propaganda can hide the truth from them. Any politician, of whatever nationality, who tries to tell the Palestinians that the Israelis have their best interests at heart and are in “Judea and Samaria” to raise Arab standards of living, introduce progress, and otherwise help the Palestinians into the modern world (all claims made by Zionists in the last fifty Orwell and Kafka in Israel–Palestine Lawrence Davidson 253 years) would be laughed at and thoroughly despised. Thus, deceptive language that substitutes for reality is not what defines the world of those in occupied Palestine. Instead, the particular nightmare of the Palestinians is best described in the pages of Franz Kafka. In Kafka’s world, the prevailing theme is uncertainty and unpredictability. There are no set rules for behavior, and the orders given by authorities seem arbitrary and even contradictory. One does not know what the laws are. The “authorities” in Kafka’s work sit in their fortresses and periodically intrude into the lives of the confused and apparently helpless protagonists. This Kafkaesque situation describes life in occupied Palestine. Israeli authorities suddenly intrude into the lives of the Palestinian population, and they do so in an unpredictable and arbitrary manner. They also destroy in an arbitrary manner. Israel’s message to the Palestinians reflects one of Kafka’s more depressing maxims: “why build knowing destruction is inevitable?” A Palestinian might be safe one moment and in danger the next. A Palestinian cannot predict if he or she will make it to work, the grocer, or school or, for that matter, back again. As a result, many Palestinians can identify with Kafka’s character Joseph K. in the novel The Trial, who, “without having done anything wrong was arrested one fine morning.” ISRAEL Israel has entered into an Orwellian world of inbred perceptions and unanalyzed assumptions. These appear to make sense from inside Israeli society (as well as among the Zionist community worldwide), but from the outside, they seem to be out of touch with reality. The inside “reality” is dominated by the obsessive concept of fortress Israel—that is, Israel against the world. This mental paradigm, which ascribes all criticism of Israeli behavior to eternal antiSemitism , is assimilated from childhood, taught by one’s family and one’s teachers at school. It is a belief commonly shared, and thus reinforced, by neighbors , coworkers, newspapers, television and radio, and the military (some of the army induction ceremonies are held at the site of the 73 BCE mass suicide of Jewish zealots...

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