Blood Libel #26 | “Israel suppresses Palestinian culture.”
Anti-Zionist:
Israel tries to erase Palestinian identity — language, food, history.
Pro-Zionist:
Have you been to Israel? Because if you walk through cities like Haifa, Jerusalem, or Jaffa, you’ll see Arabic signs, Arab-owned shops, mosques, churches, and Arabic spoken freely.
(They may cite Israeli appropriation of falafel or keffiyehs.)
Pro-Zionist:
Falafel and hummus are Middle Eastern, not Palestinian exclusives.
But let’s talk about actual cultural suppression:
The Palestinian Authority bans books, censors art, and imprisons critics.
Hamas arrests musicians, bans concerts, and mandates gender segregation in schools.
Palestinian schools use textbooks that erase Jewish history, glorify terrorism, and call for martyrdom.
So the real question is:
Who’s silencing culture — Israel, or the unelected regimes ruling the Palestinians?
BEYOND THE TALKING POINTS
Certainly. Here is the full “Beyond the Talking Points” section for Blood Libel #26, now seamlessly incorporating the Qatar material in context and consistent with your established voice and format:
Beyond the Talking Points
The claim that Israel suppresses Palestinian culture is not only misleading—it projects onto Israel the very tactics used by the unelected Palestinian regimes themselves. In reality, Palestinian cultural life thrives inside Israel, where Arabic is an official language, Arab schools operate openly, mosques and churches are protected, and Palestinian citizens participate in music, literature, and cuisine alongside Jewish and other minorities. The real suppression of Palestinian identity comes not from Israel, but from within: from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and the ideological infrastructure they control.
In the West Bank and Gaza, art is censored, books are banned, and artists are imprisoned. Musicians in Gaza have been arrested for performing at weddings. Writers critical of the Palestinian Authority have been detained. Cultural life is not nurtured—it is filtered through a political and religious lens that punishes dissent and crushes pluralism.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the Palestinian education system. PA and UNRWA textbooks systematically erase Jewish history, deny the legitimacy of Israel, and glorify terrorism. Martyrdom is celebrated. Maps show all of Israel as “Palestine.” There is no mention of Jewish indigeneity to the land, no reference to the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy, and no call for peaceful coexistence. This is not education—it is indoctrination.
UNRWA, the United Nations agency tasked with educating Palestinian refugees, continues to employ teachers who publicly praise Hitler, call for the murder of Jews, and celebrate Hamas attacks. Despite repeated promises to reform its curriculum, UNRWA remains complicit in promoting a worldview that treats Jewish identity as an enemy to be erased.
This ideological campaign is rooted in the legacy of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose influence permeates Hamas, the PA, and increasingly, Palestinian political movements in the diaspora. The Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology casts Zionism as a colonial evil and calls for the full Islamization of society—by force if necessary. In this worldview, the existence of Jewish national identity is not just wrong—it is a religious offense.
That ideology isn’t confined to Gaza or Ramallah. It’s now being exported—funded by regimes like Qatar, and embedded into Western institutions. A May 2025 investigation by The Free Press revealed that Qatar has spent nearly $100 billion over the past two decades to influence “Congress, colleges, think tanks, and corporations,” buying access and shaping narratives across American public life.
What does Qatar want in return? Influence, yes—but more specifically, the normalization of Islamist worldviews and the delegitimization of Israel. The same report details how Qatar has funded organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, backed student activist networks that attack Zionism, and helped shape academic discourse to erase Jewish indigeneity and reframe Jewish self-determination as “colonialism.”
Qatar’s lavish funding of elite American universities has led to a wave of anti-Zionist curriculum, efforts to de-Judaize Holocaust studies, and the spread of “decolonization” rhetoric that casts Jews as oppressors and erases their ancestral roots in the Land of Israel. Through endowments, research chairs, and behind-the-scenes lobbying, Qatar has created the conditions for ideological capture—particularly among progressive student groups and faculty unions that now serve as unwitting echo chambers for an imported, illiberal agenda.
So yes, culture is being suppressed. But the target isn’t Palestinian identity. The target is Jewish identity—Jewish indigeneity, Jewish peoplehood, and Jewish history.
When the PA imprisons musicians, Hamas bans concerts, and schools teach children to hate Jews, that’s cultural erasure. When Western activists erase Jewish historical connections to the land of Israel in the name of “decolonization,” that’s cultural erasure.
Israel isn’t silencing Palestinian culture. It’s the regimes claiming to represent the Palestinians—and their global ideological allies—who are doing the silencing.
This is not a both-sides issue. One side protects cultural freedom and pluralism—even amid conflict. The other side weaponizes education, silences artists, and indoctrinates children to hate. Israel, with all its flaws, upholds the conditions for cultural expression, religious diversity, and historical truth. The Palestinian leadership—alongside its foreign patrons—is engaged in the deliberate erasure of Jewish identity and the suppression of internal dissent. Any honest conversation about cultural oppression must begin with that reality. To invert it is not only dishonest—it’s immoral and it brings us further away from peace.