Israel is losing the war of perceptions and ideas

Israel launched Operation "Wrath of God" to assassinate a group of Palestinian leaders in a retaliatory move after the Munich Olympics operation in 1972, but the assassination list was not primarily directed at the military and political officials responsible for the Munich operation; instead, it focused on leaders with media, cultural, and diplomatic roles. The assassination of figures like Bassel al-Kubaisi, a prominent Iraqi academic, and the Algerian Muhammad Boudia, who had extensive connections with global resistance movements, and even in the Beirut operation, two of those targeted in the assassination led by Ehud Barak were engaged in media and cultural affairs in the Palestinian revolution.

Reflecting on the map of Israeli assassinations, which extended into the space of many countries around the world, leads to questioning an early Israeli plan to strike any bright and modern image of Palestinians, confining them within the image of the extremist terrorist representing a society inferior in civilization to Europeans and Americans, translating the saying of a land without a people.

In Madrid in 1991, the world was surprised by the appearance of an elderly doctor and political and social activist heading the Palestinian negotiating delegation, and it seems that the charisma of Dr. Haider Abdel Shafi was more than Israel could bear or allow, for Palestinians should not have their version of De Gaulle or Mandela, and what is happening is embarrassing, especially since the quiet presence of Abdel Shafi was bringing out the demagogic charisma of a stubborn person with a broad history of violence and cruelty, like Israel's Prime Minister at the time, Yitzhak Shamir.

Palestinians were not allowed to have a special face from the beginning, as the Nakba occurred while colonial ideas about the backwardness of the East, and sometimes its savagery, still lived in Western societies, and the images of the Nakba and exile were distant, not showing Palestinian faces, thus withdrawing part of their human credit, and stifling the idea of sympathy in its cradle.

In contrast, with the rise of Nazism, thousands of Jewish professionals and academics emigrated to American universities, and in an intellectually flattened environment somewhat under the direct influence of pragmatism, and without the historical depth of society in America, the emigrants from the Jewish intelligentsia turned into stars drawing a large part of their brilliance from investing in the victimization of anti-Semitism, engaging in a rising issue at the time related to minorities and identity anxiety, entering first into intellectual leftist circles and politically Democrats, integrating that with the media and extensive dominance over cultural production. The Arab media in its stumbling and faltering beginnings offered only what complicates the situation and deepens the negative image of the Arab, compared to the positive one enjoyed by the Jew, so the mobilization and incitement discourse launched by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, which was directed for local consumption, was utilized in the opposite direction, casting an image of a gang with an unrealistic tendency on the Arabs.

This extends to the Palestinians, although Abdel Nasser himself adopted a rational discourse when speaking calmly with foreign journalists, but the sifting process takes place within the broader and calmer cultural and media manufacturing system in the West, so that sympathy with Israel, as a human and moral remorse for the scandal represented by anti-Semitism, became a fad that Western intellectuals and influencers rush to adopt and affirm, as if it were one of the necessities of the civilized person.

The poet Mahmoud Darwish noted in his way this unfair situation, but no effective action was taken institutionally, and Palestinians remained among the absent, or specifically presented in the space of misunderstanding, and with the entry of Islamic extremism, the image became loaded with more fears among Westerners, so Palestinians are forbidden from presenting their fair share of the available narrative to the world, then the war on Gaza came to represent a fundamental reversal in the war of perceptions that was woven to besiege Palestinians, for the issue is no longer Palestinian in the polarizing sense of the conflict, but it has taken a global dimension, and from American and European universities, campaigns of advocacy for Palestine were launched by youth raised in the West, resembling Westerners in their behaviors and actions, and the value structures they carry, and that was embarrassing and an entry to raising the big and unspoken questions among American politicians, especially among Republicans, who began to rally around the slogan "America First."

This different tone that rose in the last two years attracted the attention of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, whose last weeks of life will remain in the category of puzzles for a long time, and may join other American puzzles like the assassination of Kennedy and the disappearance of Oscar Zeta Acosta, the activist for the rights of Americans of Latin origin.

Kirk remained close to university circles in his political activity, and stopped at the moral burden that Israel constitutes on his country, and with his political sense, he adopted the slogans carried by hundreds of thousands of students in American universities, and although he did not take clear or heroic positions, or even minimally human ones, until a clash was forming with Benjamin Netanyahu and the lobby that supports him in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, the influential cities, but not all of the American pulse, especially among Republicans concentrated in states with white majorities, large sectors of which began to see the ugly face of Israel, which is shedding the makeup that carries the ashes of the Holocaust.

The major transformation is carried by one of the influencers in Republican circles, Tucker Carlson, who confronted with great patience and nervousness the accusation of anti-Semitism, which remained the last bullet in the Zionist lobby's arsenal, in the face of questions expanding on the populist scale among Republicans, and in recent days, Carlson contacted Trump, to start a broad internal battle before the midterm elections next year, which Republicans can lose a lot of their ground in, due to the tension and chaos left by Trump in foreign policy, and the Israeli file is at the forefront of the hot friction points in the Republican camp.

Trump, bound by family and business relations with the American Zionist elite, will not do much expected, in the face of escalating pressures in Washington and influential cities, but that does not extend to those preparing for succession, especially his deputy JD Vance, who spoke in an unusual way for first-tier American leaders, in his recent visit to Israel, and it is expected that he will take advanced positions if he can overcome the caution and awe he lives with to avoid any mistakes that hinder his political career, and Carlson himself realizes that, and declares that he will not become a burden on Vance in the upcoming electoral battle.

Netanyahu with his brazen face that seeks to win everything, and to exploit a major humanitarian catastrophe for his benefit, and his survival and protection of his corruption, will harm Israel in the long term, but it seems that the bulldozing process that occurred with the rise of settlers and extremists in Israel has damaged the position that Israel stole in the war of perceptions and ideas, in contrast, a new generation of youth is emerging to gain positions that Palestinians and their supporters were not expected to have, a generation consisting of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students and activists, including Zahran Mamdani, and although governed by the major American equations, it can enter a new struggle on an open ground after decades of monopolizing perceptions and ideas for the Israeli narrative almost exclusively.