Revitalizing the Psychological Front in the Conflict with Zionism – Mohammad Abdul Moneim Shazli

Since the Palestinian issue emerged on the Arab scene, we have faced it as Arabs from the beginning, at all levels and in all aspects. At the civil level, the Palestinian people rose up in protest against the British allowing refugees to flow in in 1936 and 1939. We responded to them politically by rejecting UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947, which divided Palestine, and refusing to recognize Israel. We confronted them militarily in the 1948 war to prevent its creation, and when we stumbled towards that goal, there followed the 1956 and 1967 wars, the war of attrition, the 1973 war, and the continuation of the wars of those who raised the arms of resistance in Palestine and Lebanon, the last of which is the ongoing saga in Gaza.

We responded to it economically with a boycott, which lasted for many years until we gave it up after the peace treaties and imperialist pressure, but it came back with a vengeance from conscious people who started boycotting the goods of companies that crudely supported the Israeli army, which killed defenseless Palestinian people.

We even artistically countered it with a group of wonderful hymns, such as the poem “Filastini”, written by Mohammed Taha, composed and sung by Mohammed Abdul Wahab, and the hymn al-Awda, sung by Fairouz and written and composed by the Rahbani brothers, from “Zahrat al-Mada’in” and “Jisr”.

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Unfortunately, however, we have failed to face what I consider to be a very important front in our war against Israel and global Zionism, namely the psychological front. Perhaps one of the reasons why Zionism is dominant is that it realizes the importance of the psychological level and therefore it uses it to the maximum to penetrate the subconscious and unconscious minds of the people of one of the most powerful and controlling countries. An important tool to achieve this goal is psychologist Edward Barney, nephew of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychology and founder of public relations.

Perhaps the first thing that Zionism was interested in was to destroy the Christian belief in the responsibility of the Jews for the crucifixion, a belief that was the cause of the contempt and hatred of the Jews in Christian countries, and they succeeded in this effort through academic methodological work in psychological and sociological research.

In the 1960s, the papacy absolved Jews of the blood of Christ and stressed that Jews in the present age could not be held responsible for the sins of their ancestors, which led to intense political action. This fatwa, issued at the same time as Vatican II and made by the pope because of the necessity of developing the Catholic Church, caused a lot of confusion, especially because it contradicted the provisions of Genesis regarding the first sin. If we are responsible for Adam’s disobedience: should the Jews not be held responsible for killing Christ?

This was an important step in breaking the Christian subconscious, but despite its importance, it was smaller than a major event that occurred more than thirty years earlier, namely the persecution and ethnic cleansing campaign of the Jews in Germany and European countries, which occurred during the Nazi rule and World War II, known as the Holocaust. Zionist sponsorship made the Holocaust something sacred that could not be reviewed or verified, and whoever reviewed the figures proposed to be reviewed was punished and imprisoned, as experienced by French thinker Rouge Baroudi, and it became a driving force for the revival of Zionism. The Balfour Declaration emphasized the need to establish a national home for the Jews where they could be protected and safe.

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Only three years after the end of World War II, the Zionist dream of the State of Israel was realized, with a systematic psychological campaign that worked its way deep into the collective unconscious, glorifying the Jewish state, and using the most powerful weapon of all: Hollywood, the authority on world cinema, which released a series of films with huge budgets and even more movie stars, including the film The Ten Commandments with Paul Brynner and Charlton Heston, the film Exodus with Paul Newman, the film The Pianist, about twenty films about the Dutch girl Anne Frank, and the film Schindler’s List, all of which won Oscars.

Perhaps helping the movement’s success in convincing the world that the Jews are a peaceful, oppressed, persecuted people is the Arab style that has countered it artistically with songs and anthems, the most vulgar of which is sung by Feiza Kamel: “Missiles in Tel Aviv,” sings Mohammed Salman, holding high the banner of Arabism, saying, “At your command, from our skulls a ladder leads to your glory.” The crowd sings, “Abu Khaled, my dear, tomorrow we will enter Tel Aviv.”

After the 1967 war, with Israel’s overwhelming victory over the Arabs, the message had to change, and gone was the image of the little shepherd David, defenseless with only a slingshot in front of the powerful giant Goliath, fully armed and armored. The psychological propaganda machine was transformed to portray Israel as an advanced, civilized country, an oasis of civilization and democracy in a brutal, backward environment, highlighted by the percentage of Jewish geniuses who won Nobel Prizes, and the percentage of Jews who excelled in the arts, sciences, and media, and by promoting Israel as the only democracy in an oppressive environment and hiding the fact that non-Jews lived in oppression, oppression. The psychologists of the Zionist movement realized that this was the situation in all Western democracies, especially in the United States, where blacks, Asians, indigenous peoples, and Mexicans lived in abject disadvantage.

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Perhaps we are living these days at a turning point in our struggle against Zionism and Israel, the recent events in Gaza have exposed the ugly face of Israel and the barbaric crimes it has committed and is still committing, killing dozens of thousands of unarmed civilians, a large part of them women and children, and using the methods of genocide and ethnic cleansing of Nazi Hitler, and its impact on the international community, which has prompted many countries to take action against Israel at the international level. The establishment of the Court and the International Criminal Court, and the general reaction of the countries of Israel’s traditional allies, and unconditionally supporting it, so that universities and students and the younger generation have begun to hold marches and demonstrations to condemn it and its crimes. Opposition from media voices and public and artistic figures.

All this provides the right atmosphere for launching an Arab campaign implemented by experts in the fields of psychology, sociology and the media to confront the Israeli psychological front, to break into the subconscious and the European collective subconscious, to purify it. To expose the delusions to which it is subjected and to remove the naked fig leaf that covers Israel and Zionism, their crimes against humanity, and the genocide and ethnic cleansing they have been carrying out since the days of Lod, Ramla, Zibya, Sabra and Shatila, the killing of unarmed Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai Peninsula, the killing of the child Mohammed al-Durra and the American activist Rachel Corey, the assassinations carried out by the Mossad, and the lie of Israeli democracy, behind which the hateful Israeli, racist, terrorist apartheid regime is hidden.

The opportunity is ripe, let us as Arabs act in a scientific, thoughtful way and not waste it.