The Global Arab Conspiracy: Zionism's Ideological Analog to Antisemitism

On deceitful peoples, eternal enemies, Pallywood and other fascist delusions

American People #15: Hide Little Children, Faith Ringgold, 1966, via Wikiart

This might be a controversial one and judging by some of the choice comparisons I’ll be making, potentially criminal in my not-so-lovely, genocide-supporting German home. Let’s try it anyway. What are they gonna do? Search my apartment and confiscate my hard drives for posts I made that advocate for the stance of every single relevant human rights organisation, international body and human being with a single shred of conscience?

Surely not. They would never. Unless…

Oh well.

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On the Function of Antisemitism

There is a famous quote by Jean-Paul Sartre about the nature of antisemitism, and by extension fascism, that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while now. It goes like this:

“If the jew did not exist, the anti-semite would invent him.”

True. Very true. Good job Sartre, thank you. That is so true.

But what does it actually mean?

For Sartre, as he explains in his 1944 essay fittingly called ‘Antisemite and Jew’, the jew fulfils a symbolic function in the worldview of the antisemite, that has next to nothing to do with real Jews. Instead, they become a pseudo-magical explanation for the ills of modernity and everything that is new, mysterious or incomprehensible to the antisemite—reason is abandoned for an arch-reactionary outlook that defies reality and replaces it with the fantastical and downright absurd. This is where conspiracy becomes the motive force of the world and the jew, as viewed by the antisemite, might as well be an evil magician enthralling unsuspecting victims by sheer force of depravity—a distinctly pre-modern imagination constructed by the concrete conditions of modernity.

When Sartre writes that antisemites would have invented the jew if he didn’t exist, he is referring to the conspiratorial worldview that requires the jew as an unknowable and devious actor, moving behind the scenes, and most critically, as the connective tissue between various otherwise unrelated narratives.

To some degree antisemitism is present in all fascist movements—its most radical and best-known expression is found in national socialism’s genocidal ideology—and this isn’t coincidental. Fascism, as I talked about in my last article, needs something to divert focus away from the crass contradictions in its material base, and it commonly turns toward antisemitic motifs to re-focus the attention of the masses on an enemy that is untouchable but at the same time concrete.

Jews—again, not in their actuality but rather in the imagination of the antisemite—become a perfect diffusion of various fears. On the one hand, they are presented as the immediate other, invading and subverting the ‘national home’ of any given demographic, unwilling and indeed impossible to assimilate, poisoning the moral fibre of the nation—one need only look at the downright pornographic screeds written in the nazi agitation paper ‘Der Stürmer’ to understand this almost psychosexual fear of the foreign. At the same time, Jews are the most common representation of what Umberto Eco called ‘the plot’ in his text on Ur-Fascism.

On this, he writes:

“Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside.” — Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism, 1995

The plot becomes the bulk between the ideological justifications for fascist policy. After all the nation must be defended from this entirely abstract, insidious threat that is lurking just around the corner to destroy the hard-fought victories of the ‘national movement’. Conveniently, the plot can never be defeated, because its exact features remain murky. Again, its most infamous iteration can be found in the nazi ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ conspiracy, alleging an absurdist international plot by Jewish communists to the East cooperating with Jewish bankers to the West, for the purpose of destroying Germany. Of course, these features can be re-arranged without much effort, so it is little wonder that they have turned toward other forms—the ‘New World Order’, various narratives about George Soros, the ‘Deep State’ and incoherent discussions of ‘fractional banking’ only to name a few—to remove the taint of direct association with national socialism from the plot.

So far so bad on the functional necessity of antisemitism for fascist ideology.

Let me pose the central question on that though:

What happens, if the construction of a Jewish plot is not an option, because your particular brand of fascism espouses Jewish ethno-supremacy? This was the fundamental challenge faced by revisionist Zionism as an ideology—a thoroughly fascist ideology backed by a petit-bourgeois settler class—and to resolve it, it had to follow through with ‘inventing the jew’.

The entirely dysfunctional result of this contradiction in the superstructure of revisionist Zionism is what I like to call the ‘Global Arab Conspiracy’. Let’s talk about (some of ) its various iterations, and why it has largely been a failure for Zionism—and at the same time, an avenue of attack against it.

The Logic — Literally Everyone is Hamas

I remember exactly when I first thought about writing on this subject. I was scrolling through my Twitter feed in early January 2024—yes, I still used Twitter back then—when I stumbled on this absolutely insane headline of a Politico article:

By Pierre Emmanuel Ngendakumana, January 10th 2024, via: Politico

My first question, after laughing out loud, naturally was: What the hell is that even supposed to mean?

Don’t get me wrong: Much like everyone else I was already used to the seemingly random accusations the Israeli state made, claiming everyone who didn’t support their genocide was secretly affiliated, or at least ideologically aligned, with Hamas. UNRWA is Hamas. The UN as a whole is Hamas. Random anti-zionist university students are Hamas. Everyone is Hamas. This pattern began long before October 7th, as soon as the earliest framing of the Nakba by the colonial state as a response to ‘Arab aggression’.

Still, this statement seemed especially absurd, because I knew that deep down nobody except the most ardent conspiracy theorist, could ever believe that South Africa is the ‘legal arm’ of Hamas, be it in a metaphorical or literal way. Certainly, it would never convince the Western audience these statements are seemingly intended for—even if scattershot propaganda like this only needs to hold up on a surface level, claiming that Hamas has any amount of influence over South Africa doesn’t even manage that.

In case it needs to be said:

• South Africa is the largest economy on the African continent and certainly the most influential country on the continent, when it comes to international affairs.

• Hamas on the other hand is a resistance group, struggling against genocide in a colonial reservation in one of the poorest places in the entire world.

There is nothing to argue or disprove here. Nobody, except delusional conspiracy theorists already completely immersed in zionist narratives, could ever believe this—and it isn’t the only such case, as I’ll be showing later on.

So, why is Israel saying it? Who is this for? What is this for?

Let’s look at what the Israeli foreign ministry actually said on this matter, in order to dissect the ideology expressed by this specific statement:

“South Africa, which is functioning as the legal arm of the Hamas terrorist organization, utterly distorted the reality in Gaza following the October 7 massacre and completely ignored the fact that Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, murdered, executed, massacred, raped and abducted Israeli citizens, simply because they were Israelis, in an attempt to carry out genocide. South Africa seeks to allow Hamas to return to commit the war crimes, crimes against humanity and sexual crimes they committed repeatedly on October 7, as its leaders have stated.” — Israeli Foreign Ministry, 11.01.2024

Ignoring the usual, disgusting atrocity propaganda used to justify the genocide [If you are a Zionist and are still reading along, this sentence is your invitation to express outrage in my comment section, all while boosting the algorithm and allowing me to ridicule your atrocity propaganda in detail. Thanks!] two things, in particular, stand out:

• Israel claims that South Africa is ‘functioning as the legal arm of Hamas’ without even bothering to elaborate. For them, and in the logic it is expressed with here, the mere attempt to hold Israel accountable for their genocide in front of an international court is akin to not only supporting Hamas but acting in accordance with its supposed goals—South Africa ‘seeks to allow Hamas to return’. Anyone who stands against Zionism in any way whatsoever is framed as an existential enemy, but always through the larger primary enemy: Palestinians and their organisations.

• Critically, there is no interrogation of why South Africa would be acting as the ‘legal arm of Hamas’. It is left unspoken that the reason must be some sort of universal antisemitism, or perhaps an insidious plot against Israel motivated by this universal antisemitism. The space created by leaving it unspoken allows the conspiracy to become a natural part of the discussion: An international plot against Israel, connected with the ‘Arabs’—Israel, of course, refuses to acknowledge Palestinian identity on its own terms—inside their own borders.

What we are left with is a statement not aimed at a largely disinterested, maybe even sympathetic Western audience, but an expression of the generalized psychosis inside the settler colony—a constant perception of threat from both inside and outside, driven by ‘the Arabs’ and their supposed international supporters, that have their outposts in every country around the world, from South Africa to Great Britain.

It is this same logic—the logic of besiegement through an enemy that is both concrete and untouchable—that allows Israeli news broadcasters to frame college protests thousands of miles away as an existential threat to their ‘national security’ while acting entirely unconcerned about the genocide happening a few hours away from their studios.

To put it once again in Umberto Eco’s words:

“The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. […] However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

Palestinians, in the imagination of the Zionists, are at once laughably weak compared to the forces of the IDF—they are not merely the most moral but also the most powerful army in the world, yet somehow still the underdog in any confrontation. This motivates their enemies, alongside their implicit uncivilized nature, to use ‘insidious terror’ against civilians to strike past their ‘defenses’. At the same time, this laughably weak enemy is somehow able to compel international media, massive human rights organisations, entire governments, yes even and especially the whole of the United Nations, to do its bidding. Of course, they are also all Hamas.

Everyone is Hamas, yet Hamas is weak.

How does that make any sense? Well, that’s the thing: It doesn’t. Fascist ideology is internally incoherent; its function is to convince its followers of the necessity of an eternal struggle against their supposed enemies—in this case, the Palestinians.

This is the function and the logic of the ‘Global Arab Conspiracy’ and nowhere does that function become more clear than in one specific expression: The Pallywood Conspiracy.

An Example — The Pallywood Conspiracy

The Pallywood Conspiracy allows Zionists to discount the bodies of those murdered by the IDF—be they women, men or children—as not only irrelevant but as an expression of the insidious nature of the ‘Arab’.

This is, to put it politely, insane in the actual sense of the word: It is a complete and almost instinctive denial of reality. At the same time, it is a necessity to at least maintain a surface level of structure for Zionist ideology. Since the IDF is the most moral army in the world, anything that would put that morality into question—such as murdered women, men and children—needs to be discounted. If you ever had the displeasure of listening to someone who genuinely believes in the Pallywood Conspiracy, they will make sure to remind you that they don’t know if this particular massacre or murder is fabricated; perhaps they will even concede that it could very well be true. The issue is, as they will make sure to thoughtfully express, there is just no way to know. The ‘Arab’ can’t be trusted, so any massacre is just as likely to be fabricated as real, and those limbs just don’t look convincing enough. Sorry. Maybe they’ll come around when the IDF makes a press statement. In the end, those children probably deserved it.

This is no different from the tired old excuses veterans of the Wehrmacht would tell their children twenty years after the Second World War trying to uphold the myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’. Sure, they would say, sometimes the force was excessive, but now everyone is claiming we did this and that for no reason at all. We couldn’t have even shot that many people in such a short time, they would claim, so don’t believe everything you hear in the media. It wasn’t that bad, and in the end—this part would need long discussions and usually alcohol to get out of them—the ‘partisans’ probably deserved it. They can’t be trusted. By ‘partisans’ they of course meant the men, women and children they murdered.

The murder of children is universal to fascism in action.

In practice, the Pallywood Conspiracy takes on a dual function:

• On one hand, it essentially functions as an ethnic slur against Palestinians who have been victimized by the Israeli state in the most violent way possible: Their own murder or the murder of their family and friends. Zionists will deny the numbers, they will deny the journalists’ articles, they will deny the human rights organisations’ reports—all part of the larger ‘Arab’ plot against Israel, naturally—and through Pallywood they can deny even what their own eyes see. Everything can be explained and every crime can be denied through the untrustworthy nature of the ‘Arab’ in this framework.

• On the other hand, it is an expression of the plot in its purest form. If you genuinely believe that Palestinians are fabricating footage of their own slaughter, the next question is to ask why nobody exposes this aside from inherently trustworthy Israelis. The answer: The global plot, cutting its way from Gaza to Al-Jazeera studios in London, and college campuses in the US. ‘They’ are perpetuating the lies and are spreading the fabrications, all motivated by a desire to destroy Israel in the name of whatever you can come up with—everyone is a potential antisemite.

Do most open zionists believe in the Pallywood Conspiracy, in their heart of hearts? If you could talk to them in a quiet moment away from public scrutiny, would they admit the delusion? Maybe. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter at all. In Sartre’s terms, they aren’t ‘completely unaware of the absurdity’ of their claims but are content with the ambiguity. Maybe the IDF burned sleeping Palestinians alive in their tents. Maybe they didn’t. It is hard to say; better not to think about it. Pallywood allows Zionists to avoid questioning their core belief: That everything is well, ordered and righteous in heaven and on earth, especially in Israel. Ignoring the bodies is a necessity for fascism, if you can’t revel in them.

Sometimes they revel in them. They probably deserved it.

The Consquences — An Imagination Besieged

Belief—or at the least professed belief—in the Global Arab Conspiracy runs through all levels of government and society in Israel. The architect of the Gaza genocide Benjamin Netanjahu infamously claimed that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem gave Hitler the idea for the Holocaust, and every Israeli school teaches the Nakba, in official terms of the Israeli state the so-called ‘War of Independence’, as a sort of international arab conspiracy to commit a second holocaust in the middle east, only prevented through the brave resistance (read: ethnic cleansing) of the Haganah, turned into the IDF.

The results of this are as unsurprising as they are terrifying. Anything inflicted on Palestinians—including their genocide—can easily be justified by the perceived threat of subversion from inside and out. Inside the Palestinian, who is stripped even of his own national identity and is turned into merely an ‘Arab’ to identify him with the outside, acts as subversion and subdued native at once, while outside the looming threat of Arab intervention—even Iran is ‘Arab’ in the context of the conspiracy—is never far.

The Israeli state finds itself in a constant mode of self-inflicted crisis, caused by the very conditions of colonialism, while only amplifying it through the lens of this international conspiracy aimed against it. Just as the petit-bourgeois landowner fears nothing more than becoming a worker, the Zionist’s greatest fear is that what he is inflicting on the Palestinians will one day be done to him—justified or not, this fear becomes a neurosis.

Frantz Fanon wrote about this omnipresent terror of the settler, once colonial rule begins to unravel:

“The settler who ‘understands’ the natives is made aware by several straws in the wind showing that something is afoot. ‘Good’ natives become scarce; silence falls when the oppressor approaches; sometimes looks are black, and attitudes and remarks openly aggressive.” —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

As we all watch the house of cards that is Israeli colonialism come crashing down around us, and as the methods of the settler colony become more brutal each day, there is no way to avoid the simple fact that the conspiracy, this self-inflicted state of siege, is no longer a credible mode of propaganda even for Israelis, far less for their vital supporters in the West.

The Global Arab Conspiracy is recited as a mantra in all its forms, but the images of the dead speak a far clearer language than the lies ever could. There is no denying what is happening in Gaza, and the usual Israeli response to simply decry it as part of the Arab conspiracy, of Pallywood, or whatever other ridiculous Hasbara narrative they can come up with, is no longer functional. People can be convinced that Palestinians implicitly can’t be trusted—centuries of racism and islamophobia make that task easy for zionists—but the same doesn’t go for the very institutions Israel is attempting, and failing, to adopt into the conspiracy.

It is a sad state of affairs that Palestinians are still not heard when they raise their own voices, but the collapse of the credibility of the international propaganda spread by the regime is still a vital weapon that has been lost, and in itself is finally opening up ‘the West’ for Palestinian voices. Israel is a fortress besieged in the imagination of the settler, but in reality, it is a terrible, brittle thing armed to the teeth but built on shattered foundations.

In the end, it will hardly matter what Israelis believe about ‘the Arab’, because they have lost control of the narrative altogether—all that is left are lies, exposed in all their brutality to anyone who is willing to listen. There are more of them each day.

Palestine will be free.

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