Pondering "Pallywood"

Peaced Off! is back with a supersized episode that takes up what is being called “Pallywood,” the portmanteau of “Palestine” and “Hollywood.” Is it a derogatory term used by pro-Israel commentators to falsely accuse Palestinians of staging suffering and civilian casualties to manipulate the media? Or, is it a global symbol of Palestinian suffering born out of the current state of affairs in which Palestinians lack authentic mainstream media outlets? We spoke to Tom Divon, an ethnographer and media scholar at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Richard Landes, a former history professor at Boston University and now an independent historian living in Jerusalem, about the origins of the term and their respective takes on its significance. The resulting discussions were both eye opening and quite troubling, but gave us a lot to ponder and digest.

Transcript

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Welcome back to another episode of Peaced Off! This episode is particularly called “Pallywood,” which has been an area of interest for Orly and I since we’ve started this podcast. It’s a play on words from the word Hollywood, because much of the imagery we’re seeing on social media is reported as fake news, and I believe that two things can be true at the same time. So what we decided to do is talk to people who are in this space, who have, in the case with Tom, an educator. And, so we’re here today to talk about that. We’ll get both perspectives in another episode. But for today, it’s all about you, Tom Divon. Welcome. Hi. Thank you so much. So I got to first say, what is an ethnographer? That’s the most interesting description I’ve seen yet. Yeah. I mean, I guess that it’s the ability to observe human beings and, to mainly just sit in quiet and watch. So I guess this is probably what ethnographers are mostly doing. So yeah, that would be probably my go-to definition. So the question is, this is an area that you’re considered, a student of, but an expert now. So what is your take on when you first heard this expression, and how did you kind of want to go down this rabbit hole, which it seems like to be one? Yeah. So, I know the term Pallywood for quite a while. I mean, the term actually comes from the second Intifada, around the case of Muhammad al-Durrah. which was a 12-year-old boy filmed in Gaza. He was filmed sheltering with his father before being shot. And this specific footage, was the starting point of Pallywood. It became quickly, like a global symbol of Palestinian suffering. And, to make it, like, more a term, Pallywood as a coin, we had historians like, Richard Landes, that started this kind of line of thinking through visual forensics analysis, like to see, to slow down every tape, every piece of evidence coming from this Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to actually see if there is any manipulation and this moment of, Muhammad al-Durrah, this moment when the boy got shot, was actually a subject of inquiry and, we have seen many historians and visual scholars zooming in on the boys last moments to argue, with a very like, let’s say, some people would say not really solid proof, that the whole thing was staged. And that’s where Pallywood became a thing, like, as the Palestinian Hollywood. And actually it’s a very basic idea that Palestinians were faking their tragedies. And the real power of the term wasn’t about proving anything at all. It was about creating doubt. And this is what is very interesting because, it’s about to plant the suspicion that is very correlated with how we as Israelis were born and raised, and how the education system, taught us about Palestinians. It’s always with a grain of salt about those narratives. So this is kind of like where things started and how I became more curious about it because I became a media scholar, and specifically an expert on Palestinian activism and how it’s being portrayed in the media. So that’s probably where I will start the conversation. So in your mind, is there any truth to the questioning of that? And now that you see so much footage being presented on social media since the Intifada, which side should people believe is to be true? Let me just interject, if I may. Or is it as neat and clean as that, or is it more complicated? Yeah. I mean, I think that everything and everywhere online, you find staged and recycled clips, right? Yyou see manipulation in many places. And that is true across conflicts and war zones. And I think the crucial point is that the suffering in itself is not staged. And to fixate on fakery is to miss the reality, of atrocities and to, I feel like offering it a more convenient excuse to dismiss them. And what I think is very important when you think about those, fabrications coming from Gaza is that in Gaza, this dynamic is, even sharper because Palestinians lack a mainstream media outlets to report freely to the world, right? You don’t really have the presence of journalists who are doing the labor of reporting to their newsrooms and then to have a very organized process of news dissemination and exposure. So in that vacuum, you see social media becoming the only space to bear witness. And yet it is impossible to document every dead body, every second of explosion or the devastation that follows in real time. And I think the chaos, the danger and the scale of loss make it really unrecordable and also that impossibility is what drives activists to produce those moments, sometimes through synthetic means. And this is how they will be heard. And it’s not really fabrication, but a desperate attempt to fill the silence that left when cameras fail or even when mainstream media is banned from reporting. And I feel like this......it’s discussed widely among Israeli activists. And to the point where we started to notice this industry of death where every child killed, every bombed building, every starving body has to be documented and redocumented simply to prove that it happened. So when you have this environment of such chaos and death in every corner, you start to think about how you’re capturing those moments and recreating moments that are......you are unable to recreate, in real means. So you use staged means or fabricated means. And, this is also based on conversations we have with, among us, Israeli and Palestinian activists, that you cannot really fully give sense to this phenomenon. Like, you know, if at the end of the day, if it’s a staged video, then it’s a staged video, but it comes with another layer of truth and meaning into it. And I think that in this way, those testimonies are instantly met with the suspicion of Pallywood, right? Because you can see the hand is moving, the leg is not really like, the boy is maybe a doll, or something like this. And yes, videos are manipulated, but the overwhelming archive of Palestinian suffering is not. And the tragedy is that the disbelieve itself has been normalized as a way to dehumanize and absolve responsibility. And this is what really worries me as a civilian and a scholar. Tom, this is really Abe’s episode, but I’m going to jump in with two follow up questions, because I was just reading today and I’ve read it so many times, right? The degree to which Hamas is controlling, I mean, I understand the IDF also controls media access, but Hamas is really controlling journalism out of Gaza in a very significant way that’s not supportive of the Palestinian community in Gaza. And a lot of Palestinians are doing their best to protest that, obviously at their own peril. Why, given the Hamas’ motivation to document the suffering of Gazans, would this be so hard? I’m just sort of curious as to still why the need for the manipulation notwithstanding everything you said. And while you’re at it, what do you think animates historian Richard Landes? Like what’s behind his work? Because again, as we said, there is those layers of obstacles, right? Like at the end of the day, you don’t really understand how a war zone or bombardments are actually handled at the specific moment, right? So when you have catastrophe and you have chaos all around, you start documenting, and you have to make sure that this footage will go through different layers of obstacles. So what I can tell you, from my expertise in Palestinian activism and resistance online, most of the content being uploaded to social media is being immediately removed. So if you think about those people uploading to Facebook or Instagram or doing the live when a bombardment starts or a specific incident in Gaza, then most of the chances that it will immediately be banned due to too graphic, inappropriate, all kinds of reasons that Meta thinks that are inappropriate to show to the world, although it’s a crucial part of the world. And, so you have to think very strategically about how you show those stuff. And if you cannot document and upload real time, you might have to think like pause the moment and you have to think about how to recreate the moment. So this is what I was referring before when I said, like, there is this layer of fabrication that is very much to tell a real story. And yes, Hamas is controlling every aspect of life, obviously, in Gaza, and bears responsibility to have those landscapes of war being shown to the world. I’m not sure exactly, what is the you know, how this industry works in the sense of, like, how each moment and each second are looking like. But I can, from a more broader perspective, I can see that it’s not that they’re telling a different story from what is happening on the ground. And this is what is so problematic for Israelis to understand, I think, because, again, this is discourse that I’m dealing with on a daily basis with friends and family, and students. It’s amazing how Pallywood is so powerful because it’s enough that you have this war, you have this coin, you have this notion and it’s a shield to deny every moment and every possibility of something bad happening in Gaza. So if you see a dead body and eventually it was mimicked by a living boy, it’s enough to say, “oh, they’re not bombarded.”“They are not starved, they’re not dead.” It’s enough for them to just deny it completely. So, I mean, it’s……for me, it’s something that is very psychological, right? It’s a defense that you need to put on. So I’m most fascinated with how Pallywood is being integrated in the Israeli mind of the everyday Israeli person, I guess. Thank you. So since you’re also exploring AI and how right now this is going to become the biggest issue for social media, how are you looking at trying to tell stories, or, can you determine which one automatically is or isn’t, not only related to Pallywood and Gaza……I mean, there’s incidents that happen in Israel that kind of just get swept under the rug because everyone is so Pro-Palestine right now around the world, so that even the Israeli stories that are traumatic are just kind of getting forgotten. So how do you look at AI being like a tool and a weapon against Jews? Even when we settle what’s happening in Gaza, like in the post Gaza moment, like, how do we kind of get through this moment where antisemitism is just really, you know, at and all time high? What I......so the centrality of AI in my work, in my knowledge, and the set of tools that I already came to learn more and more, is mainly about how AI is used and weaponized by Palestinians, that in the face of content moderation, in the face of being silenced on specific depictions and captions of life like death and war zones. Then AI becomes a very important tool. So if you would imagine Palestinians living in Gaza or activists living outside of Gaza, but wanting to amplify what happens in Gaza, Then you cannot show things as they are, right? Because of the sensitivities that are usually more geared towards Western understandings of what is insensitive to show online. So, even the image of a dead person like under the buries [rubble], or something like that, is too inappropriate to show. So this is where synthetic media comes into play, and I see how Palestinians are using it in order to filter this specific moment of death through synthetic media, which I actually see as synthetic realism, because, again, it’s a real moment. It is being displayed differently or altered to fight or resist silencing. And this is what is interesting because again, this AI, which is, again, something like to go through a specific obstacle online when it’s triggering the system, when, let’s say Meta’s moderation notices the use of AI, it’s immediately shadow banned or deplatforms the specific content that is being used by AI due to suspicions of like coordinated campaigns or something that is too synthetic. So it’s kind of like, it’s kind of like a trap because you need to show something that happened, but you cannot show it because it’s too graphic. So you use AI, but then you trigger the system, by using this AI. And two interesting examples, actually, that you......the one that you probably, both of you know well, is the All Eyes on Rafah template that was widely circulated online. And this was an interesting moment where the assault on Rafah, started to take place and Twitter was floating with content, which was extremely graphic. But Twitter is a whole different story of content moderation. Like, you can show things there that are definitely the things that you won’t show on Meta. So you realize there are some things to archive and to document, all kinds of crimes being committed right now against civilians. So, everything that was online, on Instagram, activists were saying, like, it’s constantly being down and taking down and down and down. So they moved to synthetic templates. And then the result was a very, a very, dehuman template like Rafah was not shown as Rafah it was just like mountains and buildings, which has nothing to do with the landscapes in Rafah. And it was quickly becoming very viral in the sense of like, okay, participate, join with your own Instagram story, look at Rafah, look at Rafah. But then, the quickest that it got viral, it also got banned because the system recognized it as a coordinated campaign. So again, that’s a trap of using AI to communicate and document actual reality. So that’s just one example of how AI in my expertise is becoming a very interesting tool of using the fake in order to show the real. And this is a tension that also Pallywood represents in a way. And I find it this parallel very interesting, in the sense of Pallywood. And then in another example, if you remember, it was a few months ago where there was a big story about a doctor from Khan Yunis, Doctor Alaa al-Najjar. She had nine children that died in one of the IDF attacks in Khan Yunis. And there were many images of their bodies circulating, but becoming quickly shadow banned because of the graphicness of those images. And it wasn’t immediately banned. It was like gradually the visibility was starting to get slower and the circulation of it got less engagement. So it was a gradual progress rather than an immediate takedown. And then you saw a counter reaction to it were with many AI representations of the children, and the story was actually depicted in multiple multimodal audio visual storytelling of how the children died. And it was very fascinating to see how one family from Khan Yunis, which is obviously not the only family who died in Gaza in the last two years, became a symbol of using synthetic means to tell a very human story. And here in Israel, all the focus was about, “Oh, look at this, all of those images are fake. This is not the real doctor. And this is not her kids. It’s fake. It didn’t happen.” And the story did happen. So it’s like AI becomes a weapon for Israelis to say, “Oh, it’s fake. It’s not real. It’s Pallywood.” So this is the intersection for me of AI, and Pallywood, and Gaza, and stories from Gaza. And it’s also, you know, a part of the bigger picture about mis- and disinformation, which Orly just did a Law review article about. And it all kind of is the whole universe of misinformation, whether it is, and you’re telling a very compelling aspect of Pallywood that I think everyone should hear about, because there’s a sensitivity that has been shut down. But that’s not to say that mis- and disinformation isn’t the biggest issue with social media. So you’re a student, a professor, or you’re studying that, how does this go? Where do you see this all going? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a topic I’m still trying to wrap my mind around because media literacy in a conflict zone is something that is… it’s very challenging to choose the aspect you want to focus on. And……and I think that……because it’s kind of impossible for the ordinary user to really understand if what they’re seeing is true or not. I’m trying to give more profound questions and contexts and nuances to this use of AI and how manipulation sometimes is a necessity for survival. So I’m trying to give more nuances for them, for people, friends, family, students, for them to judge with their own understanding. But I think it’s also, like when you think about a conflict zone and media literacy, it’s not just about fact checking, it’s also about emotion checking and also asking ourselves like why we find one image believable and another unbelievable, and what kind of bias this might reflect. And I think that this goes, also to the response of educators and activists and, we all can model a literacy that resists this cynicism, right? Like how you are reacting to Palestinian suffering in more capacity? And I think that, insisting on seeing Palestinians as credible witnesses and as human subjects, right? This is something that is mostly important when you think about media literacy in a war zone is to understand that you don’t watch one side that is completely fabricated and not real and one side that is profoundly human and tragic. It’s both sides being like this. And storytellers and teachers and artists can build those counter narratives that challenge disbelief rather than reinforcing it. And I also think that I want to say that Pallywood in itself is not disinformation or a response to it, but it’s, what I see sometimes, it’s an Israeli manufactured epistemology of doubt. And this is kind of like, a way to delegitimize this Palestinian evidence. And you don’t even need to see the evidence, in order to deny it because, again, the Pallywood is a reflex. So, it kind of like, enables mis- and disinformation to flourish. And the Israeli government and the military spokespersons, and also influencers that we see online that are more right wing influencers are pushing those narratives, those false claims, that dead children are dolls and that the grieving fathers are actors. And again, those might be true, right? That dead children were being dolls or playing dead. But again, there is this underlying truth to it that we don’t deal with. And this is something that we see that is getting wide visibility in our mainstream narratives and our mainstream media and, I think this is what makes it especially dangerous in this AI era of skepticism, like you’re becoming skeptical to everything, and everything could be fake, and it’s supercharging the Pallywood lens. And this is something that I’m constantly trying to put into conversation and not because I believe there is one side that is right. Because I believe those true stories are to be told. And as you said before, when we started the conversation, you said that you believe there are two truths happening at the same time. And this is exactly what I’m trying to advocate for. And I just want to honor what you just said and just say that I also think the media being so polarized now, where it seems to be media is either kind of much more to the left or much more to the right, and kind of always framing things in a certain way, excluding other information, being selective, biased, in how it’s reporting is facilitating that kind of polarized mindset to the point where people feel like they must sort of stay in their camp and not take in anything else, and then they sort of just, you know, continue to support their own polarization and expand it. And so I, you know, I know that we’re going to run out of time. And I just want to honor what you said, and we really appreciate it. Is there anything I mean, Abe, is there any last question or any last thing that you want to say, Tom, before we conclude? I just want to say thank you for, you know, opening up another channel into how I look at social media. I personally have lost a lot of following and eyeballs because I’m Jewish since the war started, I mean, shockingly, but I don’t, you know, so that’s why I just want to be sensitive to both sides of the story, which is what I think you shared with us today. And that was very important. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I truly, I’m still learning. And I think in this process there is much unlearning to do because you have been as an Israeli person, all I know is the Israeli society. All I know is my Israeli upbringing. I had to unlearn a lot of things and to expose myself to things that were also, things that were taking away from me, right? Like, if you want to be more smart, you need to consume the Israeli media and Al Jazeera. You need to do it if you want to understand better the world. But again, you know, living in a country where I don’t have access to Al Jazeera makes it more problematic. And I think that like, you spoke about those media frames and this selective media moments. I think there is true ramifications of when media reports the things that are happening in Gaza and constantly minimizing the human in to numbers. I think when you are growing up in this mindset, you are becoming so automatically, a dehumanizer for the other, and in our case, it’s Palestinians, right? Because it’s from day one, was the other to the Israeli. And it’s important for me to say that. And as an Israeli researcher, I don’t see Pallywood as a reflection of reality. And the truth is that atrocities are happening and they are often documented with great risk, as well, of journalists and doctors and just ordinary civilians. And I think that what is most interesting and important to say is that Pallywood in a way reveals the Israeli incapacity to look at this truth without collapsing. Right? Because it’s so profoundly tragic. And this is why no content from Gaza has a chance to stand as evidence of truth, in this current climate where we are conditioned to search for the fake and this is what the media shows us like, all we see is amplification of moments of fabrication. Like I see my local news showing me,“Oh, look at this picture from Gaza. Guess what? It was fake.” So this is what I’m getting on my screen. And this lie operates as a shield. It’s not that Israeli’s generally uncover depiction. It is that we have been conditioned to disbelieve Palestinians all together because acknowledging them as credible witnesses would shatter this dome that is our defending of our moral self-image. And, so I guess to sum up, my takeaway is that if we only automate the suspicion, we probably will normalize the atrocity and we probably already normalize it. And the harder task is to recognize Palestinians as narrators of truth and as lives that are different, that are very much different and worthy of grieving. And without that recognition, I don’t think that fact checking will ever matter. And I think that this is something that, you know, going back to basics of believing and acknowledging, a person as a human being. This is something that I would like to have as a takeaway. Well, that’s a lot. That was great. What a great way to end. No, I mean really thank you so much, Tom. Thank you for finally making it so that we can have this conversation. Of course, thank you so much for this conversation. You’re welcome. We’re continuing our conversation about Pallywood, and we’re honored to have Richard Landes with us. And Orly, if you would like to give a little background. Absolutely. I’m thrilled to, introduce you, Richard Landes. He’s a historian and author specializing in millennial movements and media narratives. Former professor at Boston University, and he coined the term“Pallywood” to describe, as it’s described, staged media from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He’s the author of several books, including one from 2022,

“Can the Whole World Be Wrong?: 30:02

Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad anti-Semitism in America.” So he now lives in Jerusalem, writing and speaking widely on antisemitism, propaganda and the battle over truth. Richard Landes, it’s really, really an honor to have you. Thanks for squeezing us into your busy day. Thank you. So, I mean, let’s get started. Abe, do you want to tee us off? I want to go to the moment when you said“Pallywood” is a good moment here to kind of coin that phrase. What was happening? And, it’s kind of a catchy term. So how did that come? So in 2003, I read an article by James Fallows in The Atlantic Monthly on this researcher named Nahum Shahaf in Israel, who had looked into the story of Muhammad al-Durrah, a young boy, 12-year-old boy, who was allegedly shot to death in his father’s arms. And it was captured on video, and it was......in the book I wrote, I describe it, and other people do too, as a post-modern blood libel, that this was a staged scene that was put together in order to accuse Israel of targeting children, which was exactly what the Palestinians did. And they staged this to sort of invert the narrative and accuse Israel of what they proudly did. So I’m looking into it, and I go to visit Nahum Shahaf. And, I see the footage. He he asked all the agencies that were there that day that it happened for footage. And Reuters actually sent him two hours of footage taken by their cameraman at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip on September 30, 2000. And I’m looking at this, and, you know, he had seen it many times, and he helped me understand that scene after scene is staged, you know, a boys running down the street, like when we played Cowboys and Indians, you know, he goes, “ahh” and then he falls and you see his hands reach out to break his fall, and he rolls on the pavement. And then a bunch of people run up and pick him up and throw him into an ambulance. And to be honest, if you were actually injured, the treatment that he got from his saviors probably would have killed him. But in any case. So I’ve seen these, you know, saw these things, and then, I got a chance through my actual academic connections, to see the original footage of the photographer who took the pictures of Mohammad al-Durrah’s alleged death. And so, I’m in France 2 studios with Charles Enderlin, who is the journalist who essentially turned this piece of Palestinian war propaganda into news for the West. And we’re looking at the footage and his assistant, an Israeli photographer, is there clearly seeing the footage for the first time, too. And it’s just one scene after another of fakes. And at one point, this big fat guy, grabs his leg as if he’s been shot in the leg and starts limping painfully, and he looks around for people to come get him and take him to the ambulance. And, you know, it’s just a bunch of little kids. And he shoos them away, looks around, sees nobody’s coming, and walks away with that limp. And at this point, the cameraman, the Israeli cameraman snickered. And I said, “Why do you laugh?” He said, “Well, it seems so fake.” And I turn to Enderlin, and I said, “Yeah, all of this seems like it’s fake.” And Enderlin’s response, which as an academic, I can tell you, is classic Orientalism, was,“Oh yeah, they do that all the time. It’s a cultural thing.” And I said, “Well, if they do it all the time, why do you think they didn’t do it for the Muhammad al-Durrah case?” And he says, “Oh, no, they couldn’t, they couldn’t fool me.” Well, they did fool him. And anyway, so as I’m leaving, I realize, I mean, I had seen with Shahaf in the Reuters footage that they stage stuff all the time. What I didn’t know was that Western journalists look at this and don’t say,“This is staged, you’re fired.” They look at the footage they get, they say, “This is… How can I hide the staging with, you know, clips?” What I called sight bites of, you know, 3 or 4 seconds that I string together of action. And in which I remove all the evidence that it’s been staged. And as I was leaving the office, I realized it’s an industry that, you know, they go out in the street, they have the cameras from the main news agencies. People do sort of spontaneous fakes, and they send that off. And the Western journalists cut it so that it’s believable and present it to the West as news. And as I was thinking about how it’s become an industry, and this is 2003, I said,“it’s like Bollywood, it’s Pallywood.” It’s a national industry of filmmaking. And since then it’s become infinitely more sophisticated, more elaborate. I mean, we could spot things like there was some makeup, you know, this guy running down the street without any sign of injury has, you know, blood on his forehead, but, you know, and then he’s picked up and carried past the cameraman and into the ambulance. But now it’s very sophisticated stuff. There is a literal industry. And when people attack Pallywood, you know, I get notices for when Pallywood appears in the media, most of the time it’s to attack, it is hateful, Israeli propaganda. In other words, to denounce propaganda is hateful. One of the things that comes up again and again in terms of, you know, what’s wrong with this accusation of Pallywood is it’s heartless. How can you belittle Palestinian suffering? Well, Palestinian suffering is literally being shoved in our faces via social media, constantly. And a lot of it is in fact staged. It’s not that they’re not suffering, it’s just that, you know, the people in Yemen and Somalia and Sudan are suffering in much greater numbers. But they don’t have an industry to shove their suffering in your face. Or the Ukrainians. Richard, thanks for mentioning, well, thanks for the answer and for talking about the more current time. So I’m curious before we talk about... Yeah, I mean, there are critics of the term Pallywood and of even the discussion about it. But before we get there, just are there some examples in the last, you know, since, let’s say, October 7th, that you think are particularly not only notable, but that you feel like the evidence that they’re Pallywood, that they’re, you know, not authentic, is really crystal clear, like, you know, unimpeachable? Well, I mean, you know, this isn’t a video, it’s a picture. But the picture that appeared on The New York Times of the Madonna with child, was classic Pallywood, including the clipping out of the brother of this child who was standing in other pictures that appeared online, who was standing next to the mother and who shows no sign of famine or even hunger. And so the clipping out of the giveaway that it’s fake, is a good example. There’s a site called Gazawood which collects these, and although some of them are open to question, there are a lot that aren’t. There’s one, one of the key giveaways of Pallywood is that when somebody is acting as if they’re in terrible pain and suffering and sorrow and mourning, especially men, because men don’t do that at funerals. What you see, if you have enough footage is that the people around them are smiling because they know it’s a fake, and they know that this is being put on. There’s one of girls who were, you know, for Time Magazine, and the girl right behind the girl who’s screaming about being starved to death is smiling. So, there’s that. I think I wrote extensively about the Al-Ahli Hospital affair. October 17, 2003, 2023, right after October 7th. And, you know, that was a classic case. You know, you have, the reality was a stray Palestinian, Islamic Jihad rocket landed in the parking lot of a hospital. They claimed that it was an Israeli shell that had bombed the hospital. And 500 people had been killed and others buried under the rubble when there was no rubble. And, you know, Jeremy Bowen of the BBC not only talked about the hospital being flattened, but afterwards when it came to light, that it was nothing of the sort, his response was,“I don’t care, you know, it was leveled.” So, you know, you’ve got major figures in the media who are carrying this across, who, even when they’re confronted with their mistakes, are unfazed in their support of what they’ve said and shown. And one of the things that accompanied it was, you know, if you look at the footage on CNN, just constantly they run the same loop of what looks like destruction in the hospital, you know, and that stuff is supplied to them and that sort of B-roll to make the story that they’re telling, which is a complete inversion of reality, into news. I know Abe has more questions for you, but we’ve heard the argument against discussing Pallywood that at the end of the day, this, as you already acknowledged too, the suffering is severe. It’s pervasive, and it’s hard to upload actual media of, you know, starvation and very extreme bodily injury because that gets flagged by, you know, and taken down or not even allowed to be uploaded to social media platforms. And so this is a way to get out the truth. It’s still truth, even though it’s staged. In fact, by the way, speaking of the image in The York Times, and I was also very upset about that whole choice that The New York Times made. But I’ve heard defenses of The Times saying, “At the end of the day, isn’t it true that Gazans are starving?” Right? Does it really matter that this image was doctored or cropped and the information about the child having, you know, underlying serious illnesses, being not disclosed, does it really matter when the truth is that’s really happening? So I guess, what’s your answer to that? Right. So this also happened with the al-Dullah case. There was a fellow who wrote a piece after the Atlantic Monthly article saying“It doesn’t matter if it was staged, it’s a higher truth.” But that’s literally the definition of propaganda. That’s literally…so, you know, the stuff about the famine. Well, let’s take it on two levels. First of all, there’s not a massive famine. And when the U.N. comes out with a report and it’s misrepresented by a U.N. leader, and then further disseminated by U.N. sources, claiming that 14,000 infants are on the verge, within the next two days, are going to starve to death. That’s totally ridiculous. It’s got nothing to do with the reality. There are very few people who are actually starving to death. So that’s one thing. It’s not a famine. There are people that are going hungry, there’s no question. But then the second point comes in because, part of what Pallywood implicitly and explicitly does is accuse the Israelis of being the causes of these things, whereas any serious examination of what’s going on in Gaza cannot help but identify Hamas as a hoarder of supplies. Eating well, there are restaurants all over the Gaza Strip where advertising the crowds that come to their bountiful, establishments and eat to their fill while other people are starving. So, the real cause of the starvation, wherever it is in Gaza, if it is……the real cause is Hamas, and the culture,…and this is the thing that drives me crazy… as a medievalist, I recognize this culture. This is a culture where the elite eat to their fill and the peasantry live at the margins of subsistence. And then it’s hypercharged, because part of Hamas’s, or part of Hamas’s main strategy is to make the Palestinians and the Gazans suffer, so that they can show these pictures of suffering and blame Israel. So you’ve got a sort of double inversion of reality. Not only is it not nearly as bad as these pictures imply, which, you know, like the claim of 14,000 immediately calls to mind, the starvation of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis, which was systematic, and people did die in large numbers, not 14,000, but okay, but the point is that that you have this, you get this impression of a disaster, which it’s not, and you get the impression that it’s Israel’s fault, when in fact it’s the fault of a culture, a political culture, that considers Gazans as legitimate sacrifices in their cognitive war against Israel. Thank you. Abe. Yeah. So I found you by doing research for helping Orly with the law review article she was writing about. How the legacy media had been misrepresenting Israel and the Jews since October 7th. That’s when I found you. It’s all about what’s happening in the media right now, it seems like, because you can say Pallywood is an industry, they’re on the offensive and doing a fabulous job, clearly. But on our side on the Israeli side, they’re only, you know, the only visuals we see are a bomb that Israel is doing. And so a complete, you know, it’s almost like whatever happened on October 7th has become less and less relevant for the brutality of that. Right? So since we’ve uncovered that the universities in Qatar and that kind of investment in messaging, pro-Palestine messaging is like 20, almost 30 years into it, how do you see us shifting out of this moment for this next year to get through this? Well, so, you know, I’ve been following this for the last 20 years, 20 plus years, really starting in 2000, when this al-Durrah affair came out and the coverage of the Second Intifada was so profoundly skewed. So I’ve been following it for a long time, and it seems to me that one of the things that throughout this period I’ve of sort of kept as a fond hope is, look, this is this is self-destructive. I mean, it’s one thing to report the lethal war propaganda of one side against another as news in an outside conflict. But when you report the lethal propaganda war propaganda of your own enemy as news to your own people, that’s suicide. And in this case, I had to look this up. But, when the Greeks wanted the Trojans to take the giant horse which was made so large they had to break down the gates of the city in order to bring it in. When they left that horse, they left behind somebody whose job was to convince the Trojans that this was a gift from the Greeks for the Gods, and that they should bring it in. And, on the one hand, Laocoön, and on the other hand, Cassandra denounced it and said,“No, no, no, don’t do this.” In fact, I think Laocoön actually threw a spear into the belly of the horse. And they could hear the weapons rattling inside. But they believed Sinon, they brought the, the horse into the city, and the city was destroyed as a result. So that’s the first case of what we call cognitive warfare. When you can’t win in the military battlefield, you have to use cognitive warfare. That’s the first successful cognitive warfare campaign that we know of in recorded history. And, you know, it depended on having somebody getting the targeted country or population to accept the enemy’s war propaganda as true. And that is exactly the role that our mainstream news media is playing right now in aligning its narrative, analytic and statistical analysis with what Hamas wants them to say. Literally running enemy propaganda as news. So it’s not just lethal propaganda, lethal journalism, it’s own goal war journalism. You’re literally scoring points for the enemy. And when you do that, you know, how long can you do that? Democracy is a regrettably vigorous and substantial affairs, especially American democracy, which is 250 years old, the oldest in the world. But there’s a limit to how long it can run enemy propaganda as news and not suffer. So, so I kept thinking, at some point people are going to wake up and realize that this is not in their interests. Just as an example, right now, there’s a lot of talk about recognizing a Palestinian state somehow as a way to solve the problem. It’ll only make the problem worse. But it’ll only make the problem worse for the Israelis. But it also makes the problem worse for the West. You know, “Why in the world?”……and I said this to a Belgian, diplomat in Jerusalem. I said, “Why in the world would Belgium want another Muslim majority state with a terrorist infrastructure added to the ones that are already there?” And it had never occurred to him. He had never thought of that, and he wasn’t in a position to go to his boss and say,“No, this is not a good idea.” But it isn’t. And it’s not a good idea for the West. It’s not a good idea for the democracies. And so I keep waiting for the wake up. Now, 7/10, October 7th, ahould have been a wake up call. And instead it went the opposite way. People were out there cheering it, and students were out there defending Hamas.“We love Hamas” in the streets and on the campuses and stuff. So, you know, I think that for people to realize how poisonous this is to……and here I insist on the progressives waking up……these people are against everything progressive. They’re against women’s lib. They’re against— they’re homophobic, they’re misogynist, they’re triumphalist, theocratic, you know, mosque and state are married in their minds, so there’s nothing more unprogressive than this group. And yet, throwing our support to their side seems so insane. So, on the one hand, it seems to me, you know, how we wake people up. Obviously, if you get on a soapbox and say the Muslims are coming, the Muslims are coming, you’ll be dismissed as a paranoid islamophobe. How do you, you know, develop a voice that, as people wake up, can reach them? I remember talking with people in Y2K back in the 1990s. And one of the things they said was, you know, how do you wake up a driver who’s fallen asleep while doing 80 miles an hour on a mountain road in a storm at night without having him jerk and fly off the road? How do you wake people up in the West to the fact that they’re under assault? And it’s an effective assault? When first people first heard, when Bin Laden smashed into the Trade Towers on 9/11, you know, you would say to people,“These people want to establish a global caliphate. They want to take over the world.” And the response was, “Don’t be ridiculous. These are a bunch of nuts in a cave in Afghanistan. They can’t possibly do that.” Well, you know, 25 years later, they’re not nuts in a cave in Afghanistan, they have literally occupied the Western news media and Western academia. So that’s a huge accomplishment. And how do you wake people up to that? I don’t know, but that’s one angle. The other angle is we’ve got to hold our media accountable. They are constantly being intimidated. They’re constantly denying they’re being intimidated. We did a study of CNN that shows that, you know, 85 plus percent of the time, their narrative message is aligned with Hamas. They are literally aligning and complying with Hamas demands on how this war should be covered, which is massive civilian casualties, Israel’s fault. You’re saying they’re being intimidated. And we recognize that Hamas controls the media that it gives access to. And in fact, I know there’s been reporting around, you know, someone who reported something saying, no, I got it wrong because they were intimidated by Hamas. I mean, I know the journalist, an editor who spoke about that. He used to be at the AP. Is there more evidence beyond the correlation, right? Seeing the output is one sort of piece of evidence, but is there more explicit evidence? Have you heard from journalists discussing being intimidated? Oh yeah, sure. In fact, I think I have an interview with an Italian journalist who is there during the riots, that lynching in Ramallah that took place ten days after Abdullah, talking about the intimidation widespread. And it’s not just in, you know, territory controlled by the Palestinians. It’s true of coverage from China. It’s true of coverage from a whole bunch of places where, you know, there was a big scandal during the Iraq War, when CNN came out of Iraq, once the war started, and admitted that their coverage had been completely controlled by the Iraqis, by Saddam Hussein’s regime. I mean, what’s striking in this current situation is that, you know, the environment for journalism in Gaza is literally controlled by an organization, Hamas, a jihadi organization, which considers a free press an anathema. They’re not going to allow people to run criticism of them. We’re not allowed to know what Gazans think about how this campaign is going. So, on the one hand, you’ve got this environment which is literally a totalitarian environment of no free press, and the Western press is reporting the news from there as if it’s news. And Israel, which is a place where, you know, you have a probably the most vigorous free press in the world, is reported as a bunch of propagandists, etc.. And then the only people that CNN likes to interview are critics of Bibi Netanyahu. And sort of the far right that the, you know, implicitly is crazy, if not explicitly. So I think that there’s plenty of evidence for the intimidation, but there’s also plenty of evidence for the denial of the intimidation. So in 2014, when the intimidation was really clear and there was an Indian group who, outside their window of their hotel, saw Hamas set up a rocket to fire at Israel and took pictures of it, didn’t know whether they should publish it or not because it would......they certainly couldn’t do it while they were still in Gaza. And once they got out of Gaza, you know, their thoughts were,“Well, the people who helped us are our friends.” And that’s the Mahti Friedman article that you’re referring to. You know, you want to protect the people that you’ve been working with in Gaza because they’re in trouble if you violate the standard rules of procedure. So, yeah, so, the Foreign Press Agency came out with an unusual statement criticizing Hamas of intimidation. And Jodi Rudoren, who was at that point The New York TImes correspondent, chief correspondent for the Middle East, said, “It’s completely ridiculous. There’s no Hamas intimidation.” So, you know, if somebody from The New York Times is willing to lie boldfacedly to the press, you know, only people who are in the know understand that something’s wrong. I mean, it’s very hard for people to realize that right now they are getting Hamas propaganda as news from most of the Western news agency, BBC, CNN, France 24, New York Times, L.A. Times Washington Post, Le Monde, you name it, Haaretz. So, you know, it’s hard to believe. I mean, I remember when I first realized this in 2003, I first realized that we’re literally being betrayed by our......this is our eyes and ears. The eyes and ears of civil society is a free press. It’s really hard. And Jews have been repeatedly put in a position where either they say Israel has to stop what it’s doing because that’s the cause of people being hostile to me or the reason people are hostile to me is because they’re being lied to by the mainstream news media. Given the choice of believing that Israel is wrong, or the entire mainstream news media is wrong, you know, obviously it must be Israel, you know, and one of the attacks on Pallywood and the criticism of Muhammad al-Durrah was, you know, this is a conspiracy theory, as if people don’t conspire. Of course the people conspire. It’s not, you know, the fact that you would identify a conspiracy hardly means that it’s false. You can get wacky stuff. But, you know, the idea that......I remember talking with[James] Fallows after I made Pallywood and I showed it to him and he said,“Well, this resolves something for me because I couldn’t believe that, you know, if they were faking this stuff, at least somebody would have said something.” No, in an honor-shame culture, you don’t break rank, you don’t tattle on your own people. Journalists are supposed to. He is a journalist and he did, he broke rank. He published this piece on the al-Durrah case. Got a lot of flack for it. But you know, in general, in the Arab world, the idea that you would break rank, that you would interview people who were critical of Hamas and who, according to some of my Arab sources in Israel, I hear that a majority of people in the Gaza Strip would like Israel to come back. Life was a hell of a lot better before the 2005 disengagement. So you know, you’re not going to get that news. And certainly CNN or The New York Times isn’t going to go ferret it out. At this point, it’s bad business for them, too, because the other narrative is quite popular. This has been so engaging. Well, it just seems to me that truth is no longer 100% true. And this is proof of that. The other thing is, it’s sadly, we’re looking at a situation where the propaganda is actually being spewed by the media that we’re supposed to hope, is bringing us the facts. But the sad thing that I’m taking away from part of you story, with waking up the driver who’s going 80 miles an hour falling asleep, the only way he’s going to wake up is if he crashes into a wall and survives and wakes up, and that is how he is going to wake up, because it’s... Well, either crashes into a wall or scrapes against a wall and manages to right it, which would be, for instance, once some region in Europe, whether it’s a chunk of Belgium or a chunk of the Netherlands, gets taken over. I mean, they have a bunch of Gazastans in Europe, both inside their cities and literally whole areas that are majority Muslim and ripe for the picking. And when that happens, maybe people will say, “Holy mackerel.” But right now the commitment to believing what Muslims say to us about what motivates them and what the problems are. And of course, the problems are all us. In my book, I talk about what I call “Y2K mind” because it came in in the year 2000, which is when jihadis attack a democracy, which they did when they attacked Israel. And then a year later when they attacked America, when jihadists attack a democracy, blame the democracy. And that’s what the jihadis do. But that’s also what the progressive left, which has convinced itself that American and Western imperialism is the only evil that’s to be fought. Well, this was a sad, or, you know, it’s a perspective that really just shines a light on how ineffective Jews are against fighting back against this, because we are like, it’s not even David and Goliath. Right…right. I don’t think that we have the strength that David has anymore against this... No, we do have the strength, you saw that with taking out both the Iranians and Hezbollah. But the interesting thing here about, not responding is, Israel is always treated the cognitive war as a secondary battlefield of lesser importance, and understandably, because if you lose in the military, it doesn’t matter. Hey, your image is good. But if you win in the military and your image is destroyed, which is what’s happening right now, you got to wake up to the importance of this front and I just spoke with some people, Israeli officials, you know, and their position is,“Look, we can’t accuse them of Pallywood because if we do, you know, then...” In their minds, they can’t do it. You know, when Israel was taken before the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, one of the things involved was, you know, could you pull out the implications in something Bibi said that he had genocidal intent? Well, Hamas is openly genocidal. Their media, their preachers are openly genocidal. There’s a whole tradition around the hadith of the rocks and trees that calls for the killing of all Jews before the Day of Judgment. And this is just not reported. So, you know, instead of our going to the U.N. and saying we’re not genocidal, we should have gone to the International Criminal Court and said,“Look, you want genocidal intentions? Here they are. It’s our enemy, and they’re...” The problem is they’re not, they haven’t given into to the authority of the court. So the court can’t do anything against them. That’s the reason, I think that’s a separate political issue. But yeah. No, I understand. But again, this is not just a court case. This is a battle for public opinion. If you tell Americans who read The New York Times and listen to NPR and watch CNN that the Palestinians are genocidal, they’ll look at you like,“What? What are you talking about? I’ve never seen anything.” You know, I would love to ask Christiane Amanpour, “do you know about the hadith of the rocks and trees? Are you aware that the Palestinians are running a genocidal war campaign against Israel?” And if she says “yes,” then the question is,“why don’t your viewers know this?” And if she says “no,” the question is,“What kind of a journalist are you? How can you report on the Middle East when you don’t know such a fundamental and shocking fact?” So, you know, there is stuff that can be done. Because, I mean, in order to give the coverage that they give, CNN and The New York Times, etc., have had to violate all kinds of basic professional ethical rules and procedures. I started my blog in 2005, and I called it the Augean Stables because it literally, the Western media is like the Augean stables. This is the story of Augeas who had the largest herd of cattle in the entire peninsula of Greece. And, he never cleaned it. And so the crap was caked on, and that’s what’s happened with the media. And I said that in 2005. In 2020, there have been additional layers of crap that had been caked on to the media coverage. And, you know, the Greek myth has it that the entire peninsula......you could smell it from everywhere. It was so bad. Well, yeah. But, you know, apparently people are walking around with nose plugs and don’t smell just how bad, how noxious. It’s a poison pipeline. The good thing is, is that now, and we can wrap up with this, is that I do know that a lot of people who really had blind trust for what we describe as legacy media, and I talk about in my article, are starting to wake up. I mean, there are plenty of people who are buying it completely, but there are other people who are......and there’s so many alternative sources, right? I look to other sources, such as The Free Press to get a more balanced take on this conflict, but this has been incredible. Your obviously a wealth of knowledge and of course, because you’re a historian, thanks for filling in the blanks when you told us about ancient Greece and, I guess, Abe take us home, because we’re going to wrap up. I am determined to be part of the truth, the truth squad, because I know that even though we are aware of Hamas being the control of the information, I still feel that there is hope to get on the other side of this. And it’s unfortunate that the media has just become the enemy, which I hate to quote somebody, which whose name will remain nameless here, but, yeah, we have a lot of……we have a hurdle to climb here still. And even if the war ends tomorrow, I still feel we’re going to have a lot of catch up work to do. That’s for sure. Well, look, the truth will out eventually. The question is, how many people are going to die before it comes out? And will Israel survive it? Will the West survive it? Israel may survive longer than the West, because there are too few Israelis take this stuff seriously. Whereas in the West, the majority of the sort of elite intellectual, you know, talking head class buys into it. I think the West is in more danger than Israel. That’s interesting. Yeah, that’s for our next, podcast series. Thank you so much, Richard Landes. It was wonderful to have you. I really appreciate you... Thank you, RIchard. Peace. Caio. This has been episode 10 of Peaced Off! , a film and conversation series presented by The Film Collaborative. With our guests Tom Divon and Richard Landes. Peaced Off! is curated and executive produced by Orly Ravid. It is produced by Abe Gurko. Both Orly Ravid and Abe Gurko serve as moderators for this episode. Our head of audio and video production is David Averbach, who also serves as series art director. You can find more about this podcast at getpeacedoff.com.