Photo by Simone Dinoia
Note: This opinion piece reflects my personal views and not those of any group with which I am affiliated.
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania is a totalitarian society where Big Brother demands unquestioning conformity and obedience; where the Thought Police constantly monitor and punish every infraction of the rules; and where the Ministry of Truth proclaims, “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” According to the story’s protagonist, the greatest heresy in Oceania is common sense, and the most essential command is to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Ultimately, nobody escapes this total surveillance state — “Big Brother Is Watching You!” — because those who rebel in any manner are identified, captured, broken, and often “vaporized” as if they had never existed.
I sometimes find myself recalling Orwell’s Oceania when I read the daily distressing and outraging news from Palestine and the broader region. I think about how, much like Big Brother, today’s Israel Advocacy Machine demands complete allegiance, compliance, and submission. And how it, too, often goes to extraordinary lengths to silence and discipline those who question or reject its deceptive and deceitful propaganda.
For example, Oceania’s ruling Party “freezes history” whenever necessary to fit their preferred narrative, convinced that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Israel advocates attempt something similar when they promote the view that Israel’s relevant history seemingly begins and ends with the horrific Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. Through this distorted lens, they disregard decades of Palestinian suffering and oppression while claiming that, in any moral reckoning, nothing Israel has done since that day can be counted against it. By their account, all Israeli atrocities over the past two-and-a-half years either never happened or are fully justified (Israel’s own version of Oceania’s “doublethink.”) Of course, incontrovertible evidence of Israel’s war crimes and disdain for basic human decency has exposed that fiction. In recent weeks, Israel’s indiscriminate assault on residential neighborhoods and civilian infrastructure in Lebanon and Iran has also laid bare any lingering pretense that “self-defense” is always the sole basis for its acts of mass violence and devastation.
Consider too that in Nineteen Eighty-Four Big Brother rewrites history as needed and ensures that Oceania’s citizens live in constant fear for their safety. During a daily mandatory ritual called “Two Minutes Hate,” telescreens everywhere display rage-inducing fabricated images of enemy soldiers — a reminder that Oceania is in a state of perpetual war and loyalty must therefore be absolute. For many years, beginning long before October 7th, the Israel Advocacy Machine has been pursuing its own Orwellian campaign of control and disinformation focused on the demonization and delegitimization of the Palestinian people. Palestinians of all ages have been dehumanized and portrayed as animals posing an existential threat to Israel’s survival. And their brutal and merciless expulsion decades ago from what is now the state of Israel has been repeatedly discounted or denied.
But Israel and its staunch supporters are losing ground on all of these public relations fronts. Despite the killing of hundreds of journalists and media workers, 
heart-wrenching reports from Gaza, including images of some of the thousands of children who’ve been slaughtered or orphaned, have proven difficult for the world to simply ignore. Fanatical West Bank settlers ransacking and razing entire villages have prompted expressions of concern from even some of Israel’s most friendly allies. Newly discovered official documents from Israel’s founding leave no doubt that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes by ruthless terror offensives. And at least some sympathizers who’ve opted for willful ignorance are now finding it increasingly difficult to overlook the unfolding livestreamed genocide.
There’s one more parallel with Nineteen Eighty-Four worth highlighting here. To eliminate noncompliant speech and independent thought, Big Brother creates “Newspeak” — a new language with far fewer words. A Party disciple explains it this way:
It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words…The great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well…The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought…In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
The Israel Advocacy Machine appears to have adopted its own version, with a similar goal: to control the narrative about Israel by tightly restricting language so that unwelcome ideas and truths become much harder to express or even think. Words like “Palestine,” and “Palestinian” therefore don’t appear in the “Newspeak for Israel” dictionary. They’ve been replaced with “anti-Israel,” anti-Zionist,” and similar expressions that blur the distinction between victim and perpetrator. This figurative erasure of the Palestinian people matches their literal removal and destruction, and it facilitates the fading of Israel’s war crimes from minds and conversations. In much the same way, “occupation,” “apartheid,” “genocide” and other Israel-offending words are also missing from the “Newspeak for Israel” dictionary. They’ve all been supplanted by one word that Israel advocates are encouraged to use as often and as loudly as possible: “Antisemitism” (with an implicit exclamation point). The ultimate goal is a “Greater Israel” in both word and deed.
Big Brother’s iron grip persists throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the novel’s appendix suggests that Newspeak is never fully adopted in Oceania, and that the regime is eventually overthrown. So too, the Israel Advocacy Machine is showing signs of faltering. Here in the United States, the longstanding “Palestine Exception” — the vigorous suppression and punishment of speech defending Palestinian rights and freedom — is losing its hold. Today, the American public increasingly understands who the Palestinian people are and how they’ve been profoundly misrepresented and mistreated by Israel and its supporters. National polling data confirm these promising developments, as do recent statements and shifts in the positions of many political leaders in Washington, DC.
We don’t know exactly how Israel’s dedicated advocates will now respond as their hall of mirrors collapses, their propaganda balloons burst, and their desperation grows. But what’s clear is that we can’t take for granted the growing tide of support for Palestine. It reflects the tireless efforts of many courageous defenders of human rights who’ve risked their livelihoods, their freedom, and, in some cases, their very lives. In ways large and small, we can all help fight the erasure of the Palestinian people by elevating their cause in our thoughts, our words, and our actions. You won’t hear it from the Israel Advocacy Machine, but “Never Again” is now, and for all people.
