The obsession with 'Palestine' is out of control.

The disproportionate focus on a single conflict now dominates global culture, distorts moral priorities, and crowds out nearly every other story.

photo: Nikolas Gannon /Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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This year, three of the top 15 international films shortlisted for the Oscars (the Academy Awards) are centered on Palestinian themes or stories. That alone might not raise eyebrows, until you consider scale.

The combined population of the Palestinian Territories makes up roughly 0.06 percent of the world’s people, yet Palestinian-related narratives account for 20 percent of the most visible international films in this year’s awards cycle. That ratio is not just unusual; it is a cultural distortion hiding in plain sight.

Film awards are not a census, and no one expects perfect proportionality. But disparities of this magnitude demand explanation. Why this story, this often, in this cultural moment?

The usual explanation is that Palestinian life is uniquely tragic or underrepresented, and that prolonged conflict naturally produces powerful art. But it still fails to explain the sheer volume, repetition, and insulation from scrutiny that Palestinian narratives enjoy relative to countless other conflicts around the world, many of which are longer-running and more unfortunate.

There is nothing inherently or uniquely compelling about Palestinians as a people that would naturally place them at the center of global cinematic attention. Like most populations, they are diverse, historically complex, and shaped by migration, economic opportunity, and regional movement. Many families now identified as Palestinian trace roots to Egypt, Syria, or the Arabian Peninsula, settling in the area during periods of economic development and labor growth produced by — you guessed it — the Jews.

Further Arab migration to the area occurred after the Jews eradicated it of malaria in the 1920s, so let’s not be fooled by the narrative that “Palestinians” have existed in “Palestine” for generation after generation or hundreds of years. It is revisionist nonsense.

Certainly, this history is neither shameful nor unusual; it is typical of developing regions, including but not limited to the Middle East. What is unusual is how that history is flattened into a singular, mythologized identity and then elevated above all others in global storytelling.

The persistence of the Palestinian fixation has far less to do with who Palestinians are than with what their story symbolizes. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict functions as a kind of moral theater for Western audiences, one that offers presumed clarity, emotional immediacy, and ideological alignment with contemporary political instincts. The conflict is often framed not as a tragic clash between two peoples, but as a simplified morality play involving power, victimhood, and resistance. That framing travels exceptionally well, especially when it comes to film and television.

Western cultural institutions today are deeply drawn to stories that offer clean moral binaries. Complexity is risky; ambiguity is uncomfortable. Palestinian narratives are frequently presented in ways that require little contextual knowledge and reward immediate emotional response. This is not because the reality itself is simple — it is not — but because the global media ecosystem increasingly favors narratives that can be understood instantly and shared effortlessly.

There is also an institutional dimension that’s rarely acknowledged. International films do not emerge in a vacuum; they are shaped by grants, NGOs, cultural funds, festival gatekeepers, and development pipelines that reward certain themes over others. One of these films, “Palestine 36,” was financed by a list of suspects, including the film department of the grossly antisemitic BBC, the Doha Film Institute (cosplay for the Qatari government), and TRT (Turkey’s state-run broadcaster). These sponsors alone should automatically disqualify a film from being platformed by any institute that wants to keep its reputation far away from being a propaganda peddler.

And yet, the opposite appears to be true: Stories related to perceived grievances like “occupation,” “statelessness,” and “resistance” are more likely to receive funding, festival placement, and critical enthusiasm. Once a particular narrative proves successful — no matter how detached it is from intellect or historical record — it generates momentum. Filmmakers are subtly incentivized to tell far different versions of the same story, and institutions are rewarded for platforming them.

This helps explain why Palestinian stories are elevated while countless other conflicts remain largely invisible. Kurds, Yemenis, Sudanese, Uyghurs, Tigrayans, and Sahrawis all endure prolonged violence, displacement, and repression — often on a scale equal to or greater than anything seen in the Palestinian Territories. Yet their stories rarely command sustained cinematic attention, let alone repeated celebration on the world’s cultural stages.

The disparity is striking, and it demands an honest explanation: The answer has far less to do with Palestinians themselves than with the symbolic role their conflict plays in Western moral imagination. Palestinian narratives occupy a privileged position not because of unique cultural, political, or social features, but because of who they are framed as opposing. The conflict is persistently cast as a struggle against Jews, and that framing activates deep, unresolved tensions in Western history, politics, and conscience.

A sober examination of Palestinian society reveals patterns that, in most other contexts, would not be rewarded with uncritical international platforms: pervasive antisemitism often repackaged as “anti-Zionism,” weak protections for freedom of speech and religion, incredibly limited pluralism, and intolerance of internal dissent. These traits are not unique to Palestinians; they are widespread across much of the Middle East and North Africa. What is unique is that they are routinely overlooked, excused, or rendered invisible when filtered through the lens of opposition to Israel, the Jewish state.

This preferential treatment is not speculative or conspiratorial; it has been institutionalized for decades. In 1949, the United Nations created two refugee frameworks: one for every displaced population on Earth, and another exclusively for Palestinians. No other refugee group, before or since, has been granted a parallel, hereditary status maintained across generations. Intellectually, this distinction is indefensible; politically, it is enormously consequential.

The result is a permanent, internationally sustained grievance — one that ensures the conflict never resolves and that Israel remains uniquely burdened, scrutinized, and constrained. Much of the world is deeply uneasy with the existence of a strong, sovereign Jewish state. Keeping the Palestinian issue perpetually unresolved serves as a pressure point (geographic, diplomatic, political, and cultural) that limits Jewish power without ever requiring its opponents to say so explicitly.

The irony is that many of the people most aggressively promoting Palestinianism are undermining the very values they claim to champion: peace, pluralism, coexistence, and self-determination. By endlessly affirming a single narrative of absolute victimhood, they freeze Palestinian society in a posture that discourages self-examination, accountability, and growth.

When a people are told over and over again that all of their suffering is externally imposed, that all shortcomings are someone else’s fault, and that moral responsibility lies entirely outside their own institutions and leadership, the result is not empowerment; it is eternal victimhood. It absolves leaders of responsibility, rewards grievance over reform, and removes any incentive to confront internal dysfunctions that every serious nation must eventually address if it wants legitimacy, stability, and respect.

No society earns peace or sovereignty by outsourcing all responsibility for its future. Pluralism, coexistence, and national dignity are built internally — through strong civic norms, protection of dissent, tolerance of minorities, rule of law, and the willingness to criticize one’s own leaders and cultural pathologies. Yet the global Palestinian advocacy ecosystem rarely demands any of this. Instead, it treats internal critique as betrayal and reform as capitulation.

In this way, international Palestinianism does not merely misrepresent reality; it actively infantilizes the people it claims to defend. It tells Palestinians that they need not look inward, that they need not confront antisemitism, political repression, corruption, or intolerance within their own society — because all moral scrutiny is reserved for Israel alone. That message may feel affirming in the short term, but it is corrosive in the long run.

True solidarity does not mean permanent absolution. It means holding a people to the same standards demanded of every other aspiring nation: moral agency, institutional responsibility, and the courage to confront uncomfortable truths. By denying Palestinians that expectation, their loudest champions deny them something far more valuable than sympathy: the chance to become a society defined not by grievance, but by achievement.

In much of the West, “Palestine” has been rebranded as a universal cause, folded seamlessly into movements for people of color, LGBTQ communities, gender, and decolonization. It is presented less as a specific conflict and more as a moral symbol — an all-purpose stand-in for “oppression” itself. This symbolic adoption is striking, not least because it often bears little connection to the actual social realities of Palestinian society, many of which openly reject the very values these Western movements claim to uphold.

What unites these causes under the banner of “Palestine” is not shared political substance, but shared narrative utility. “Palestine” functions as a moral shortcut: a way to signal virtue, radicalism, and resistance without grappling with complexity. Within this framework, Israel is cast as the ultimate embodiment of power, privilege, and illegitimacy, while Jews are recoded as representatives of all three.

This is where something far darker emerges. Longstanding antisemitic tropes (Jews as powerful, manipulative, oppressive, or uniquely immoral) are not confronted but repackaged in the language of social justice. Hatred that would be unacceptable if expressed openly is rendered permissible when filtered through “anti-Zionist” rhetoric or activist aesthetics. The Jew is no longer named directly; instead, “Zionist,” “settler,” or “colonizer” does the work, allowing ancient prejudices to pass as moral critique.

The result is a coalition in which Jews are uniquely excluded from the protections extended to every other minority group. Jewish identity, history, and vulnerability are treated not as lived realities but as inconveniences, obstacles to a narrative that requires a singular villain. This is why Jewish voices are routinely dismissed, shouted down, or told to “check their privilege,” even as antisemitism spikes across campuses, institutions, governments, cities, and digital spaces.

What makes this dynamic especially corrosive is that it operates under the banner of progress. Movements built to challenge bigotry have, in this one case, made space for it — so long as it is aimed at Jews and justified as politics. The language has changed, the moral vocabulary has evolved, but the underlying pattern is familiar: Jews are once again the exception, all in the name of “Palestine.”

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