We’re Not ‘Post-Truth’ Because We Palestinians Never HAD Truth

By Saeb Erekat

Much hay has been made lately of the phrase “post-truth,” to the point that Oxford Dictionaries named it the 2016 word of the year. As far as that goes, fine, but we Palestinians can’t really jump on that bandwagon, because for post-truth to carry any meaning, one must assume truth ever was a value, and it certainly is not for us.

I could spend the next few paragraphs rehashing the ways in which the term “post-truth” applies to the 2016 election campaign, or its antecedents in the way the Obama administration has handled discussion and debate of the Iran Deal, but none of that would involve an authentically Palestinian perspective, because the way the term is used in the West presupposes a time when the media or political establishment had some respect for truth, a notion with which my culture has had only a coincidental relationship.

When I say “my culture,” you immediately assume I have one, and you further assume it has an ancient pedigree, because we and our allies have conditioned you to believe that. But in fact a distinct Palestinian Arab culture is so recent that without the word “Arab” in there, any time before 1948 the term “Palestinian” was used, ninety-nine times out of a hundred the speaker or writer meant a Jew living in the Holy Land. But our narrative shoved that truth aside, and now you think those Jews came in and supplanted us indigenous people. There never WAS a truth to Arab Palestine to which a “post-” could be meaningfully appended.

This phenomenon is so pervasive that we and our supporters unself-consciously spread images of “Palestine-this” and “Palestine-that” institutions from before the establishment of the State of Israel, as if that proves the existence of a sovereign Arab political entity, and many of those supporters or activists seem blissfully unaware that those images depict Jewish institutions, organizations, or sites. To a culture that values truth, such moves would constitute embarrassing gaffes, and, if we were honest, lead us to reexamine the invalid assumptions that govern our worldview and goals. But since truth is one of the farthest things from our minds – one of the others being our actual material self-interest – those mistakes, if they are mistakes, get repeated endlessly, because we don’t actually care what the truth is: we’re just looking for a way to shoehorn our narrative into the public consciousness and shout down anyone who disputes it.

If that doesn’t work, we shoot them. But then we call it resistance to occupation, and you folks buy it. It’s about the only thing that was established long ago as authentically Palestinian Arab.

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