Last year, the online magazine +972 revealed the existence of a specialised military intelligence unit known as the “legitimisation cell”. Its mandate is narrative management. “Whenever criticism of Israel in the media intensified on a particular issue,” the report said, the cell combed through intercepted calls and fragments of intelligence from Gaza to identify material that could be deployed to defend Israel on the international stage.

“If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there’s a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent,” an intelligence source told the journalist Yuval Abraham. In one case, the cell misrepresented intelligence to frame a journalist in Gaza as a Hamas fighter. “They were eager to label him as a target, as a terrorist – to say it’s OK to attack him,” another source told Abraham. “They said: during the day he’s a journalist, at night he’s a platoon commander. Everyone was excited. But there was a chain of errors and corner-cutting. In the end they realised he really was a journalist.”

When Israeli air strikes killed Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif in August 2025, the cell released documents claiming that he had been in Hamas from 2013 until 2017 – even if true, long before the current war. More egregious still was the case of Ismail al-Ghoul, another Al Jazeera correspondent, who was assassinated in a drone strike that also killed his cameraman and a boy passing on a bicycle. The legitimisation cell then presented evidence from “a Hamas computer” claiming that al-Ghoul had joined its military wing in 2007, when he would have been 10 years old.

This strategic misinformation represents one side of Israel’s public relations campaign; the other is the monotonous uniformity of recycled denials and counter-accusations: the global media is antisemitic, the UN is biased, Israel’s army takes unprecedented care to avoid killing civilians. These arguments do not require evidence, because their purpose is to create conditions under which any evidence will be dismissed.

Alongside this liturgical certainty runs a remarkable carelessness. The propaganda is often visibly shoddy. But this paradox is resolved once we realise that Israel’s hasbara apparatus does not aim for plausibility. Its mission is expediency, to find something that might introduce a trace of doubt, or give those who wish to look away a reason to do so.

But while outfits like the legitimisation cell manufacture these pretexts, the demand for them comes from a Western ear that is desperate to avoid the truth.

Why do journalists and academics – trained to evaluate evidence and detect inconsistency – seize upon these denials and evasions? The facts of Palestine are spoken, and increasingly by Palestinians themselves, but they are met by a refusal to listen, by ears that prefer the drone of implausible denial to the unbearable weight of fact.

This structure of disavowal is deeper than mere propaganda, and recognising it as such redefines the Palestinian predicament. If the issue were simply censorship, the solution would be more documentation or more insistent testimony. But when evidence proliferates, and visibility increases, while political evasion persists, we face a different obstacle entirely. The facts are out there, but their implications are repeatedly refused. It is a cultivated imperviousness to what is already known.

The traditional task of Palestinian intellectuals in the West – following Edward Said’s formulation – was to secure a “permission to narrate”, to breach the wall of silence surrounding Palestinian dispossession, to make inroads within institutions that exclude Palestinians. From the mid-1970s, beginning roughly with Yasser Arafat’s “gun and olive branch” speech at the UN, and throughout the Oslo Accords and the Second Intifada, this was the dominant intellectual approach. Intellectuals put their focus on raising Western awareness of Israeli apartheid and Palestinian suffering, building archives of evidence, and constructing an argumentative edifice to dismantle Zionist half-truths.

To speak as a Palestinian in the West was to be treated as a political problem long before you could articulate an argument. You arrived already categorised: as the grievance, the disruption. Even to name the Nakba was to be cast as the aggressor. If you insisted on the continuity between 1948 and the present, you were accused of ‘maximalism’, of refusing any chance at peace. The mere assertion of Palestinian existence – not rights or justice, just bare historical fact – registered in the Western ear as an act of aggression against someone else.

What accumulated across generations of Palestinian intellectuals was a structure of feeling that I would call exhausted vigilance. Not despair; despair would have been simple. This was the permanent, draining alertness of those who must translate themselves into a language designed not to recognise their words.

Entering the Western public square required that you suppress your own grief and fury. Palestinian suffering was admissible only when abstracted from its own content – drained of the names of villages, the mechanics of land seizure, the grammar of permit and curfew and demolition order – and repackaged in the universalist idiom of human rights, the vocabulary of the very order that had sanctioned the dispossession in the first place.

To show too much of the actual thing was to be dismissed as irrational, partisan, too emotional to be heard. Composure was the condition of entry. And composure, sustained indefinitely in the face of an ongoing catastrophe, produces its own specific damage: it slowly erodes your capacity to speak from within the Palestinian experience.

What made this condition distinctive was that there was no escaping it; there was no way to make yourself heard. An intellectual labouring over an argument already knew, before speaking, that the institutional defences were firmly in place. If your words were not met with deliberate indifference, they faced the strategic distortion that rendered historical catastrophe as “a complex, two-sided situation”.

Palestinian meaning was intercepted before it could land. Grief was required to perform continuously before an audience immunised against its claims. Cruellest of all was not the hostility – hostility can be opposed – but the expectation of gratitude. Access to the Western public square was treated as a gift, shadowing the expression of Palestinian experience with the implicit debt of being permitted to speak at all.

Measured against that long history, the current moment marks a profound shift in how Palestinian speech is received. Across much of the West, being pro-Palestine has become the common sense of a generation: the default orientation for students, cultural workers and the youthful intelligentsia of Europe and North America.

The permission to narrate, so long withheld, has in certain respects been granted: Palestinians now write for major publications; documentaries circulate without suppression. Academic studies have built a substantial field. The Palestinian narrative has been codified, affirmed by Israel’s own historical archives, and validated by the very institutions that once policed its admissibility. Never have we been more visible, more legible or more present in the discourse of the world.

And yet. And yet the annihilation continues. The genocide is ongoing, prosecuted with the full material and diplomatic support of Western states where public opinion has nominally shifted away from unwavering support for Israel. Settler violence across the West Bank accelerates with total impunity, administered in daylight, documented in real time, and met with statements of concern from capitals that simultaneously approve the weapons transfers. European leaders pose for photographs with Israeli war criminals. The narrative has been won, one might say. The argument has been accepted and confirmed. And very little – almost nothing that matters – has changed.

Two years on, this grotesque convergence – total narrative victory coexisting with the unhindered erasure of Palestinian life – reveals that the issue was never a lack of facts or a failure of empathy. The reality of Palestine induces a special form of disavowal, because its implications threaten too much of what the West believes about itself. To truly accept what is happening in Palestine requires acknowledging that the international order is a fiction, and that Western prosperity remains tethered to a brutal, selective inhumanity. Confronted with a truth that would shatter their own moral and ideological self-conception, Western liberals retreat into moral paralysis: they validate the trauma and permit the genocide to continue anyway.

We have never had so much evidence: since 7 October 2023, an endless stream of information and images of war crimes has poured forth from Gaza. Palestinian journalists, with targets on their backs, have transmitted live footage of airstrikes on hospitals, of children pulled from rubble, of families starved. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers have gleefully documented their own atrocities. They film themselves demolishing universities, humiliating detainees and rummaging through the personal belongings of families they have displaced or killed, and then post the videos on social media.

Israel no longer attempts to conceal its violence. It acts with the confidence of a state that has learned that impunity is itself a form of power. Yet the unprecedented visibility of this genocide has been matched by an unprecedented willingness to defend and excuse its perpetrators.

The template for this manufactured ignorance was set early on. In November 2023, during the initial siege of Al-Shifa hospital, US president Joe Biden declared at a press conference that Hamas had their headquarters beneath the facility. “And that’s a fact,” he insisted. When a reporter pressed him for evidence, he simply refused: “No, I can’t tell you. I won’t tell you.” Though it was subsequently established that the charge was entirely baseless, military disinformation had become official state truth. Two years later, Western leaders still routinely broadcast Israeli propaganda, no matter how absurd or easily disproven.

How to make sense of this response? We might understand it as a kind of moral stupidity. In an interview last year, the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé elaborated on this diagnosis in striking terms, linking it to the habits of certain European intellectuals. “These are people I know,” he said, “who usually have a lot of interesting things to say about the past, the present, about morality, and I have learned a lot from them. But something peculiar happens when they switch to talking about the situation in Israel and Palestine: it is as if the fountain of knowledge they usually drink from has suddenly dried up, and they are left without any commonsensical ideas. They simply sink into repeating, almost word for word, the Israeli prayer book; they parrot Israeli propaganda in a very shameful way. And surely, you say to yourself, they must know these are fabrications. They must know that they are actually working in the service of propaganda, rather than in the service of truth. And that is, in fact, a kind of moral cowardice.”

Pappé is describing a form of trained incapacity: a density that will not yield. It is the posture of people surrounded by archives, images and testimonies who still manage to look and not see, to hear and not listen. Stupidity, in this context, is a saturation point, a condition that renders persuasion impossible. For Pappé, this wilful ignorance is a symptom of moral cowardice.

But cowardice implies a subject who encountered the truth and flinched: someone who could have chosen otherwise. What we face instead is something more intractable than a failure of nerve. The Western intellectual who parrots Israeli talking points does not experience themselves as evading the truth. They experience themselves as being on the side of reason, of complexity, of responsible restraint against the seductions of easy outrage. The stupidity is not felt from the inside as stupidity. It presents itself as judgement.

This is the first thing to understand about the stupidity that meets Palestinian speech: it is a deliberate formation. Far from arriving empty and waiting for evidence, it arrives preloaded – having already passed its verdict and closed the question it gestures toward holding open. When a European politician invokes complexity, when a liberal commentator reaches for both-sidesism, when an intellectual who would never tolerate such reasoning in any other domain suddenly discovers the irreducible nuance of Israeli security concerns – thought has rushed past the obstacle entirely. It has arrived at its conclusion before the encounter could even take place, metabolising the question by the very act of appearing to consider it. The judgement was always already made; what follows is mere performance.

This foreclosure operates collectively. It shelters within institutions, within the ‘we’ of professional consensus, and within the shared horizons of what can be uttered in a given editorial room, faculty common room or diplomatic brief. No individual chooses it explicitly; it functions as the ambient condition of belonging to a particular class of professional knowledge. It is how the anonymous, averaging force of institutional life decides in advance what can be heard and what must be redirected.

Palestinian speech enters this machinery only to be processed: acknowledged in a form that neutralises it, accommodated in a way that disqualifies its demands. The evidence is received; its implications are dissolved.

Ultimately the problem lies entirely outside of documentation or argument. For Western institutions, the excess of evidence has produced the opposite of a crisis of conscience. Instead there is a saturation that enables the desire to put this all behind us. Bearing witness to everything, registering the horror as it passes through the digital feed, creates a comforting illusion of a debt discharged, of a crisis already dealt with. This is why more evidence fails to move the needle. The Western subject already has the facts; what they require is a disruption that prevents this sense of closure. Even when the evidence compels an admission that genocide is taking place, what follows is too often a passive resignation: an assumption that nothing can be done about this truth, or that naming it is all that is required, while Israel carries on killing and dispossessing. The structure of moral stupidity functions by converting raw evidence into the mere performance of its own absorption. Witnessing is revealed to be an insufficient means of preventing a genocide.

This stupidity is politically effective because it appears with the grammar of intelligence. It speaks fluently, cites carefully, and reasons in complete sentences. This is the stupidity of the conference paper and the op-ed – dressed in the vocabulary of critical thought and fluent in the idiom of nuance and complexity. It bypasses the raw animus of the loudmouthed bigot entirely.

Far from being opposites, intelligence and stupidity are intimately bound. The most elaborately intelligent performance can be the most structurally vacant, mobilising all the resources of thought in the service of erasure. The European intellectual who produces a meticulous, footnoted, beautifully reasoned case for Israeli complexity exhibits a stupidity that has learned to speak the language of thought so fluently that it can no longer be distinguished from it. No one sees themselves as shutting down the question; they believe they have thought deeply and arrived, responsibly, at a difficult position.

Moral stupidity in the face of Palestine is therefore both symptom and defence. As a symptom, it marks the site of recognition that has been refused – the negative footprint of what is already known, the psychological distortion signalling an unbearable truth nearby. As a defence, it is the elaborate institutional architecture by which that discomfort is managed: the demand for Palestinian composure, the sudden discovery of complexity.

All of this is designed to prevent a single, shattering realisation: that to truly hear Palestine is to hear a total indictment of Israel, but also of the global order that sustains it. This is a system built on the foundational myth of a “rules-based” liberal internationalism, which is underpinned by the flow of Western capital and weapons, and dependent on a selective and racialised definition of humanity. Moral stupidity is essential to the perpetuation of this order.

Recently, in a smoky cafe in Ramallah, a man who had given decades of his life to Israeli prisons leaned close and spoke with calm authority. “Intellectuals,” he said, almost as if spitting out the word, “are the rotten ones.” He lingered on the phrase, letting it settle in the air. “Nothing more, nothing less than merchants of words.”

His judgement was harsh, but within Palestine itself it was hardly unusual. The figure of the intellectual has become ambivalent, at times even despised. While the tension between thought and action haunts all political struggles, here it is sharpened to a razor’s edge by the extremity and persistence of Israeli violence.

The Palestinian intellectual writes to resist the erasure of their community, yet they are distrusted by the very people in whose name they labour. This suspicion is entirely rational. It was earned over decades in which words multiplied while conditions worsened – a period when the sophistication of Palestinian intellectual production grew in inverse proportion to the political horizon it was supposed to illuminate.

It was not always like this – or rather, it was not always like this in quite the same way. Even when it was better, the tensions were never absent. In the decades after the Nakba, at the high noon of Palestinian armed resistance, intellectuals were part of the struggle, though that integration was never seamless. Ghassan Kanafani did not see a distinction between his literary work and his role as spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “I feel more than ever that the only value of my words lay in their being a brazen and trivial substitute for the absence of weapons,” he once wrote in a letter. The confession is revealing in its self-deprecation: even at the moment of greatest integration, the intellectual was measuring his words against the standard of action, and finding them wanting.

The guilt was constitutive of the position. This was a generation whose intellectual formation was inseparable from the crisis that produced it. They emerged from the camps, from exile, from the claustrophobic interiority of life under military occupation in Haifa and Nablus and the villages that no longer existed on any official map. Their words circulated in clandestine, poorly mimeographed pamphlets passed hand to hand under the nose of military governors, in the fragile pages of resistance journals, and in lines of poetry that Palestinian schoolchildren memorised in the diaspora. The intellectuals of this era did not speak on behalf of the collective; they were continuous with the people, constituted by the same dispossession, and subject to the same erasure.

Because of this shared condition, creative production was understood as a primary front of the struggle, rather than a passive commentary on it. When Kanafani wrote Men in the Sun and Returning to Haifa, he was actively shaping the political consciousness of a fragmented nation, lending raw historical trauma an aesthetic weight that rendered the Palestinian experience impossible to dismiss.

But we must be precise about the nature of this integration, and resist the temptation to romanticise it as a natural condition. It was the specific achievement of a specific historical moment, sustained by the organisational infrastructure of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the broader secular-left movements of the period, which carved out genuine institutional space for revolutionary art. This dynamic depended far less on individual commitment or courage than on macro conditions, which first made such integration thinkable, and later made it impossible. One way to measure this collapse is to ask: can one imagine a writer doing today for the Palestinian Authority what Kanafani did for the PFLP, or what Darwish did for the PLO? The question answers itself.

Yet this golden age was more contested than memory suggests. Ghalib Halsa, the Jordanian novelist who lived and worked inside the Palestinian movement throughout this era, documented a reality that more celebratory accounts tend to suppress: the PLO was not only a shelter for intellectuals, but also, in important respects, their antagonist.

The organisation that had created the institutional conditions for cultural resistance fiercely resisted intellectual independence. It treated culture as a resource to be managed, and intellectuals as mere functionaries to be absorbed or neutralised. Some of the most serious Palestinian thinkers of this era, including Anees Sayigh, Naji Alloush, Mahmoud Darwish and Hussein Abu al-Naml, were employed by the PLO research centre in Beirut, where they faced intense surveillance, political purges and bureaucratic exile by the very leadership that housed them.

Halsa provides a precise explanation: the PLO celebrated the fida’i and instrumentalised the intellectual, following a rigid logic of centralisation that required the subordination of creative thought to organisational discipline. At the heart of the PLO’s cultural policy was an anti-intellectual ethic: “Do not think; thinking is for cowards.” While Israeli assassins killed figures like Majed Abu Sharar and Naji al-Ali, the internal machinery of the movement actively shaped the isolation that made them targets. Internal betrayal and external violence operated as twin forces.

The figure of the intellectual thus lived in permanent double exposure: celebrated as the voice of the nation, managed as a potential dissident. Darwish understood this, which is why “A Non-Linguistic Dispute with Imru’ al-Qays”, his poem about the PLO leadership in the wake of Oslo, reads as a kind of bitter negotiation – caught between loyalty to the journey he had undertaken with the PLO, his friendship with Yasser Arafat, and his critique of Oslo itself. Tragedy became the genre through which he could maintain empathy for a leadership whose choices he knew to be wrong. In Simone Bitton’s film Mahmoud Darwish: As the Land Is the Language, he recalls Arafat pressing him to become minister of culture in the newly established Palestinian Authority. What harm had Malraux done, Arafat asked, in joining de Gaulle’s government? Darwish’s answer had the compression of a poem: “There are at least three differences: first, France is not the West Bank and Gaza Strip; second, Charles de Gaulle is not Yasser Arafat; and third, Mahmoud Darwish is not André Malraux. These, you may say, are little differences.” But he refused to rest on the arithmetic of little differences. Even if Palestine were to become France, he went on, and Arafat de Gaulle, and if Darwish himself were to attain the stature of Malraux – he would still prefer to be Jean-Paul Sartre.

What Darwish declined was the completion of the double exposure: the final conversion of the poet into a functionary, the voice of the nation absorbed into the administration of its defeat.

Halsa, writing from Beirut during the Israeli siege of 1982, records a different dimension of this crisis: the intellectual’s own encounter with the limit of their function in the moment of direct confrontation and the eruption of war. Under bombardment, surrounded by the dying city, he found himself incapable of producing anything that matched the urgency of what was happening around him. The words that came were beside the point. The siege revealed a truth that the relative calm of cultural production had obscured: intellectual work and political survival operated on entirely different temporalities. When those timelines collided – when the question became how to survive the struggle – the intellectual discovered the terrifying fragility of their position. The sentence could not keep pace with the bombardment. The archive was useless when the building was on fire.

When the battle shifted to the terrain of international diplomacy, beginning in the mid-1970s, Palestinian intellectuals took it upon themselves to represent their community on the global stage. As Western states colluded to support Israel’s illegal occupation, Palestinian voices sought to secure recognition in international forums, in order to break through the mechanisms of silencing. No one accomplished this more ably or tenaciously than Edward Said. In “Permission to Narrate”, Said placed the question of Palestine within a wider problematic: the assault on Palestinians’ capacity to appear as historical agents, to speak in their own name, and to inscribe their experience within the field of intelligible discourse. Palestinians, he observed, were structurally confined to speaking as objects of policy – “the problem” to be solved – and stripped of their status as self-determining historical subjects.

Yet Said did not leave this diagnosis at the level of theory. In the decades that followed, he treated the very spaces that excluded Palestinians – American television studios, elite universities – as contested ground. He challenged the diplomatic euphemisms of the Oslo years, warning that political recognition without real sovereignty would entrench subordination. At the same time, he worked to build durable institutions designed to anchor the Palestinian presence in the media: more than insisting on the right to narrate, he carved out platforms to ensure that narration could endure.

But Said was the final figure who could make this wager with full conviction, the last for whom the distance between the intellectual and the liberation movement felt like a productive tension to negotiate, rather than an irreversible wound.

The status of the Palestinian intellectual grew more fraught in the wake of the Oslo Accords. Darwish quit the PLO. For many others, distance became the only honest posture. This period witnessed the wholesale hollowing-out of the institutions that had traditionally mediated between the lived daily experience of Palestinians and the political labour of resistance. The Beirut research centre – once the intellectual engine of the PLO, a repository of archives, demographic studies, land records and strategic analyses – had been looted during Israel’s 1982 invasion and never recovered its former vitality. Meanwhile, the liberation movement was effectively domesticated, absorbed into a toothless, collaborationist proto-state.

The intellectual drifted from the struggle, yes – but the struggle also drifted from the intellectual, from the ethical and moral ground that culture alone could sustain. The literary critic Faisal Darraj saw this early and clearly: Palestinian cultural institutions had become like a sealed room – no windows, no doors – engaging with reality only when given permission. They produced a culture that drew its authority from the political bureaucracies housing it, rather than the people it claimed to serve.

What Darraj diagnosed theoretically, Halsa had already experienced during the siege of Beirut: the precise moment an intellectual recognises that the organisational container giving them their function has colonised the function itself. Independence – the only thing capable of making thought useful – is surrendered in the name of belonging.

This political drift was reinforced by an economic transformation. The collapse of PLO patronage in the post-Oslo years left a profound institutional vacuum, one quickly filled by international NGO funding and foreign aid. Almost overnight, the material survival of the Palestinian intellectual was decoupled from the national movement, and anchored instead to the logic of nonprofit bureaucracies, whose own political constraints quietly regulated what could be said and, more consequentially, what could be sustained.

This shift dramatically altered literary and cultural production by reorganising the conditions under which writing could exist at all. What subjects could secure an institutional home, what forms of inquiry could land a conference, a journal or a publication run – all began to be shaped by the priorities of external funders whose relationship to Palestinian liberation was, at best, managerial. The vocabulary of national liberation did not disappear from Palestinian writing; it was simply no longer underwritten by any formations that treated it as an emergency. Culture continued. The infrastructure that had once given it political weight, connecting it to a movement with a concrete strategy, vanished.

This process eventually fractured the very centre of Palestinian intellectual life: a permanent rift between speaking and acting, the word and the deed, the analysis of resistance and its material practice. For Palestinian intellectuals, this was a permanent condition rather than a mere ideological choice. It formed the inescapable terrain of a political field in which the organisations once capable of translating thought into action had been liquidated, co-opted or stripped of their capacity to provide writers with an institutional home. To write about resistance was one thing; to attempt to enact it was to discover that the political architecture that might once have received and directed that impulse had simply ceased to exist.

Bassel al-Araj understood this fracture from the inside. A West Bank intellectual and activist steeped in Gramsci and Fanon, he had written about the theory of resistance before making the decision to take up arms. He was killed by Israeli forces in 2017, after months of moving between safe houses with minimal organisational support, operating in the chasm between a politics that celebrated resistance rhetorically and an environment devoid of organisations capable of sustaining it practically. He had already been arrested by the Palestinian Authority before the Israelis killed him: he was detained for the crime of resisting an occupation with which this collaborationist apparatus had long since made peace. The Palestinian intellectual who turns to action discovers that Israeli bullets are accompanied by the active hostility of a native political order, a bureaucracy that has reconciled itself, structurally if not rhetorically, to the permanence of the occupation.

Al-Araj’s trajectory illuminates something that the binary of ‘speaking versus acting’ conceals. It’s not simply that intellectuals talk while others fight, or that fighters distrust words. The real crisis unfolds when speaking and acting finally meet. When the intellectual takes the logic of their own analysis seriously enough to act on it, they encounter the full weight of the abandonment that the words had been circling around all along.

When Al-Araj picked up a weapon, he brought his thinking with him. Consequently, his death was an intellectual event, a demonstration of what happens when analysis is pushed to its conclusion in a landscape denuded of any revolutionary infrastructure. To act, in these conditions, is paradoxically also to fall silent: a final and most serious utterance – the one that the merchants of words, by remaining merchants, have chosen not to make. Halsa had glimpsed something of this logic in Beirut – the moment when the intellectual, surrounded by the wreckage of an organisation that had consumed its own creative energies, finds that the only honest response to the impossibility of the word is the risk of the body.

It was hardly surprising, then, that the Tufan of 7 October found a largely muted response among Palestine’s cultural institutions. Within the West Bank and Gaza, universities fell silent, with rare exceptions. In Ramallah, where cafes usually buzzed with political debate, intellectuals gathered in private, but rarely spoke publicly. Research centres and writers’ unions issued bland statements, or none at all. A few days later, the Palestinian Museum released an emblematic announcement, which opened with an abstract question – “How can we imagine a future that is free from colonisation?” – before explaining that it had “closed its doors to the public and postponed its events until further notice”. Many academics clung to this quietude, unwilling to speak or mistaking silence for a form of authenticity.

This shock completely paralysed the cultural establishment, exposing an acute lack of vision – as the Palestinian writer Rana Anani concluded in her own assessment, published a few months into the war. For Anani, this paralysis exposed a deeper erosion dating back to Oslo: a cultural sphere “domesticated by foreign funding”, which “was unable to carry out its critical role and rise up against the occupation”, and instead sought merely “survival (not steadfastness)”.

The genocidal war on Gaza laid bare the fragility of institutions whose existence had become tied to conditional funding. Her conclusion is both diagnosis and call: the era of Oslo’s illusions has ended, and what is required now is a unified cultural effort grounded in social solidarity and a clear emancipatory vision. What she does not say – what perhaps cannot yet be said – is that such a vision would require not only new words, but new organisations capable of giving words the weight that Al-Araj sought to restore through other means. These are organisational forms that the history of Palestinian political life – from the PLO’s internal anti-intellectualism to the PA’s managerial accommodation – has not yet proven capable of building.

What that history has produced instead is a Palestinian managerial formation more comfortable with consultants, experts and technocrats than with intellectuals – especially those intellectuals who continue to exhibit fidelity to the truth. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that, for many intellectuals of the First Intifada and the PLO’s exile, the main task of remaining relevant in the post-Oslo years was to transform themselves into technical experts.

Across the diaspora, Palestinians and those who stood with them refused to be quiet. They spoke from stages and street corners, in lecture halls and open letters, and they paid for it – in careers, in reputations, in platforms withdrawn and invitations rescinded. The old obstacles stood where they had always stood, the weaponisation of antisemitism as cynical as ever. But something else now rose behind them. The wall of silence had been breached at last, only to be rebuilt from different material: a wall of moral stupidity.

This took various forms, proliferating and intensifying as the Israeli violence escalated. At first, it was the stupidity of catechisms and clichés: recitation and doctrinal reassurance in place of listening.

No matter what Israel’s actions, Western leaders would respond with prefabricated phrases: “both sides”, “cycles of violence”, “tragic complexity” and so forth. Consider Keir Starmer, reflexively repeating that “Israel has the right to defend herself”, even as Gaza was placed under total siege – a maxim so worn that it shut off the need to think about what was actually happening.

What follows will be familiar. The names, the statements, the legislative manoeuvres – they have been documented, catalogued, condemned. The risk of repetition is real, and acknowledged. But the familiarity is itself the problem: that these episodes have become, for many, part of a settled past, filed under the heading of early-war excess, is precisely the evasion that needs naming.

The depth of what occurred has not yet been properly grasped, and to allow it to recede into the already-known is to perform, at the level of memory, the same operation that was performed at the level of policy. With that in mind, other leaders took recourse to the stupidity of disorientation. Despite the plain evidence of war crimes, of an attack on a civilian population, they insisted on not knowing where to stand; they pretended to be lost, overwhelmed by the complexity of history and the unreliability of news reports.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the aspersion repeatedly cast on the Gaza health ministry’s casualty figures – figures that international bodies and even Israeli sources later confirmed were broadly accurate. In the early weeks of the assault, Biden publicly declared that he had “no confidence” in the ministry’s death tolls, despite the fact that those same figures had long been relied upon by the United Nations and humanitarian agencies in previous wars. A few months later, the US House of Representatives passed legislation barring the state department from citing Gaza health ministry statistics, transforming scepticism into policy. Major Western media outlets routinely prefaced casualty reports with the qualifier “Hamas-run”, which became an insinuation disguised as a clarification.

Meanwhile, sympathetic publications and commentators went further, attempting to marshal “statistical” rebuttals to demonstrate that the casualty numbers were exaggerated – constructing elaborate demographic arguments in venues such as Tablet and The Free Press to cast doubt on what subsequent reviews and independent analyses suggested were, if anything, undercounts. This manufactured scepticism produced an effect far more insidious than simple epistemic confusion: it engineered a moral delay.

Insisting that the numbers could not be trusted was a way of converting documented deaths into a matter of interpretive debate. Instead of looking at what was happening in Gaza, people discussed whether one could ever truly know what happened. It was a posture designed to suspend judgement and defer accountability.

When denial became impossible, a new, more aggressive posture became necessary: the stupidity of racialised disavowal. In this case, words were heard but then instantly annulled. The Palestinian who speaks is already cast as unreliable, excessive, infected with grievance. When Rashida Tlaib called for a ceasefire, the House voted to censure her; the phrase “from the river to the sea” was formally described as “a genocidal call to violence”, her speech was precategorised as pathological. Across the world, the preposterous claim took hold that the phrase itself constituted a call for genocide. In a remarkable act of ideological inversion, Palestinian demands for liberation and equality were recast as an exterminatory project, transforming a political claim for decolonisation and justice into a fabricated expression of genocidal intent.

Racialised disavowal was taken to extraordinary extremes, as with the “cancellation” of various Palestinian cultural figures’ appearances at international events, on the grounds that their very presence might somehow harm Jews. Germany has most thoroughly converted historical guilt into a mechanism of Palestinian silencing. What followed 7 October – cancelled exhibitions, withdrawn platforms, banned demonstrations, defunded organisations, each justified in the vocabulary of “security” and “sensitivity” in the “current climate” – amounted to a coherent political project: the memory of the Holocaust institutionalised as a particularist shield, deployable on behalf of one state and withheld from those whom that state dispossesses and kills.

This logic soon spread elsewhere. In early 2026, the Adelaide Writers’ Week in Australia withdrew its invitation to Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah, saying it would “not be culturally sensitive” to host her, “given her past statements”. In all these cases, the implication was unmistakable: Palestinian narration, especially when politically unambiguous, was framed as provocation.

This censorship, however, is merely the visible machinery of repression. The engine needs fuel, and this fuel long predates the current war: an historical guilt discharged onto those least responsible for it.

The best demonstration I have seen of the internal mechanics of this displaced guilt, well before its public hardening, came at a meeting I attended years ago in Germany. Long before the book fair cancellations and the protest bans – when the underlying architecture of displacement was still veiled by the pregenocidal status quo – its psychic foundations were already set.

This meeting involved politicians, journalists and think-tank representatives. Nothing that we presented to them was incendiary. It was just the basic lexicon of daily survival in the West Bank: the matrix of checkpoints, land confiscations, permit regimes, and the slow suffocation of ordinary movement.

It did not go well. Many of those in attendance sat distracted, their attention divided between their phones and the ritual performance of being there. At the end, almost predictably, came the German refrain: “We have our history.” The phrase was uttered as a form of closure, a shield against engagement. Palestine was received as something perpetually displaced by Europe’s unresolved past. It was as if acknowledging Palestine required confronting both Israel and Germany’s own ghosts – a task they were unwilling to take up.

This was a revelatory encounter, because it offered such a raw view of the affective substrate that gave rise to today’s bureaucratised censorship. It revealed a deeply ingrained reflex of self-referral, where every Palestinian claim is instantly converted into an anxious question about German identity. The conversation is permanently stalled in the anteroom of European conscience, fundamentally barred from ever arriving at its ostensible subject.

In this way, Germany predicted the reaction of the Western order to the genocide, when the visible evidence of Palestinian death and Israeli atrocities would be sublimated into anxieties about the collapse of Western moral authority and self-indulgent debates about the tactics for “managing” Netanyahu in Brussels and Washington.

To understand the moral stupidity displayed in the face of the Gaza genocide, we might turn to psychoanalysis, which has the best explanation for the psychic structure that makes stupidity necessary. Ilan Pappé’s diagnosis was of moral cowardice: the posture of those who know, or pretend not to know, and find ways to look away. The diagnosis is not wrong. But it is insufficient, and its insufficiency matters. Cowardice is an individual characterology: it describes a failure of nerve, and locates responsibility within the subject who flinches. It falsely implies that this same subject, under different pressures, might have chosen otherwise.

We are dealing instead with a phenomenon far more entrenched than a collection of converging individual failures. The stupidity is too consistent, too predictable, and too reliably reproduced across institutions and individuals who share no coordinating intent to be the aggregate of discrete personal cowardices. When identical evasions appear simultaneously among the editorial board of a liberal newspaper, the foreign ministry of a social-democratic government, the faculty meeting of a progressive university and the private conscience of a sympathetic intellectual, we are no longer in the domain of moral psychology.

This is where Freud becomes indispensable. In his account of the “Wolf Man”, he described how a subject suppressed a primal memory by transforming it: fragmenting, displacing and reconfiguring the unbearable into a fantastic nightmare that could be inhabited without being confronted. The mechanism is distortion – the truth is present and pressing, and precisely for that reason, must be rendered unrecognisable. The Wolf Man does not lack the memory; he cannot afford to have it.

And crucially, this is not a choice in the ordinary sense. The distortion is not decided upon; it is produced by the proximity of what cannot be borne. Cowardice implies a moment of decision, a fork in the road where a different path was available, and was declined. The Wolf Man’s distortion knows no such fork. It is the form that the unbearable takes when the psyche has no other means of surviving its pressure.

This is the order that underlies the responses catalogued above. The journalist who repeats Israeli army talking points that they know to be flimsy, the intellectual who applies to Gaza standards of evidence that they would reject in any other context, the head of state who clings to implausible denials in the face of live-streamed destruction; these are not problems of misinformation. The truth presses too close. Moral stupidity, understood this way, signals the unbearable in negative form, marking the place where recognition was refused precisely because recognition was available. These people act morally stupidly not because they know nothing, but because they know too much – and because what they know, if inhabited fully, would cost them their world.

To carry the argument forward, we need a name for the feeling that accompanies stupidity when it is finally, despite everything, cracked open. The word for this is shame: the public scrutiny of your distortion of the truth. Shame is diagnostic if it is allowed to speak. It says: I distorted the truth because staying on the road would have cost me my world.

Some years ago, a German Jewish friend visited me in Ramallah. She walked its streets, observed the settlements that surround the city, met my family. The recognition she experienced was immediate, visceral and profoundly disorienting – the encounter with the humanity of those who had been cast for her, from childhood, as the enemy. The truth of the landscape required no interpreter. What unsettled her most was not the hills or the walls, but the checkpoint on her return to Jerusalem: an old Palestinian woman struggling to pass while soldiers, with their smirks and revulsion, enacted the routine of humiliation.

Shaken, she texted me afterwards: “Now I know why Palestinians blow themselves up.” The remark was startling precisely because this tactic had been contested so fiercely in Palestinian politics. But her blunt statement was a sign of shame: the shame of finally seeing what she had refused to see, and of recognising that the refusal had been a choice – a recognition that arrives only in retrospect. Shame, then, is not merely a moral sentiment. It is the crack in the structure: the moment when the Wolf Man’s distortion can no longer hold, when the proximity of the truth overwhelms the psychic architecture assembled to keep it at bay – when what was never decided reappears, at last, as a choice.

Moral stupidity is not unbreakable. The question is what the Palestinian intellectual is to do in the interval between the possibility of that fracture and its actual occurrence – which is to say, in the indefinitely extended present, in which evidence accumulates while political obligation is endlessly deferred, and in which shame remains a possibility that the system is specifically designed never to actualise.

Here the argument arrives at its most painful station. The Palestinian intellectual faces three limits, pressing simultaneously from different directions. First, from without: the fact of Western stupidity, a listening subject already fortified against the implications of what it hears, a political discourse that turns truth into noise, that converts even the most exhaustive documentation into the occasion for another round of managed uncertainty, and that has learned to wear the grammar of intelligence as its instrument of foreclosure.

Second, from within: the dissolution of the organisational infrastructure that once gave intellectual work its political destination, the NGO economy that decoupled cultural production from the national movement, the Palestinian Authority that arrested Bassel al-Araj before the Israeli military killed him.

And third, from the community in whose name the work is done: the judgement delivered with such quiet finality in that Ramallah cafe – merchants of words, rotten ones, substitutes for the absence of weapons.

This is the tragic reality of the Palestinian intellectual’s position – and it is important to be precise about what tragic means here. Not defeat or despair. Tragedy names a situation in which every available option is compromised by the logic that produces it, in which the very act of continuing to speak is overshadowed by the knowledge of what speaking cannot do, and in which the alternatives to speaking are also shut down.

To speak is to risk becoming part of the system that absorbs speech and renders it harmless: to produce, for the Western ear, another document to be acknowledged and archived and acted on by no one. To fall silent is to abandon the field to those whose version of events requires no refutation, and to perform, at the level of the intellectual, the disappearance that the colonial project has always demanded. And to act – to follow the logic of one’s own analysis into the domain where words give way to something else, as al-Araj did – is to be already betrayed by the organisations and formations that should have received his words.

The paradox – and this is where the earlier analysis of stupidity rejoins the question of the Palestinian intellectual – is that Pappé was not entirely wrong. What our reading reveals is that the individual dimension, though real, is insufficient as an explanation. The Western intellectual’s cowardice is real: the fork in the road existed, the choice was made, the responsibility is not dissolved by calling it structural. But the Palestinian intellectual’s tragedy cannot be resolved at the individual level either. The Palestinian who speaks is not merely facing individual bad-faith interlocutors who could, with sufficient courage, choose differently. They are facing a formation – a system that has achieved the remarkable feat of making individual cowardice feel like responsible complexity, and of making the refusal of Palestinian humanity feel like a carefully considered position, despite its brute stupidity. Against this, the individual intellectual’s integrity, however fierce and however maintained, cannot be the final answer.

What remains is the substitution. The words go on being written because silence is not available as a principled position, because the record must be kept, because the act of narrating is also the act of refusing the erasure that the colonial project requires. But they go on in the full knowledge of their inadequacy, as something closer to what Kanafani meant when he called his own writing a brazen and trivial substitute for the absence of weapons. The substitution is acknowledged. It is made anyway. The acknowledgement does not redeem it. The making does not resolve the contradiction. Both are held simultaneously, without resolution, as the only form of fidelity to the dead that remains available to those who are still speaking – and who know that speaking and falling silent have, under the specific conditions of this particular historical catastrophe, begun to converge.