It’s no accident that the anti-Israel campaign is also a war on history. What’s fascinating is that it didn’t have to be. It is entirely possible – even actually easier and more effective – to simply demand Palestinian independence. But that’s not enough. That’s not, in fact, what the most powerful of Palestinian elites have been demanding for a century: That the Jews, first their identity and story and later their existence, be erased. To that great end, even Arab history can be rewritten. A “disaster” that once meant humiliating defeat for the Arab armies was transformed into a Nakba, the word no longer translated because it had become a totem, a conscious counterpoint to Shoah as a signifier of paradigmatic victimhood. This was done two generations after the event in a fully conscious attempt to compete with the Jewish story and so rob it of its power. And of course it landed on fertile ground among western elites grown weary of bland, static liberalism and eager for new intellectual horizons that might serve as the great crusading impulse of the age. It isn’t so much a fight for Palestinian independence - any version of independence that leaves Israel intact is considered a moral failure - as for the rewriting of history to satisfy the cravings of the new crusade.
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