Orwellian doublespeak

By: Rashid Khalidi

I served as an adviser to the Madrid and Washington Palestinian-Israeli negotiations during 1991-93, and long wanted to use documents that I collected then, but I never found an opportunity to do so… The book addresses some of the common distortions of language that are so prevalent where the Palestine issue is concerned in Israeli-American official and media discourse.

I deal with corrupted terms like “peace process”, “Palestinian autonomy”, “Israeli security” and “terrorism”, all of which in this parlance have a heavily loaded meaning. I, thus, am challenging both those who use these terms in policymaking, political discourse and the media, and the vast literature that reproduces them without critical analysis of what they actually mean.

As I suggest in the book, this is truly Orwellian, and this corrupt language has a profound impact on reality. I show that an “autonomy” scheme for the Palestinians devised by Menachem Begin to provide permanent Israeli control over the entirety of “greater Eretz Israel” in the 1970s has defined every essential feature of the so-called “Palestinian authority”.

In practice, this has meant ultimate Israeli control of security, land, and water, unlimited settlement and exclusive Israeli possession of Jerusalem… It has become the bedrock of the policy of every Israeli government since. Worse, it constitutes the ceiling of what US policy will allow to the Palestinians.

From “Brokers of Deceit: How the US has Undermined Peace in the Middle East”