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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There is a peculiar neurosis familiar to every clinician who has treated narcissistic personality structures: envy-driven identity theft.
The patient does not simply wish to defeat his rival; he wishes to wear his skin. He covets his rival’s history, mimics his cadence, and steals his trauma, hoping that by draping himself in the victim’s garments, he can claim someone else’s moral immunity.
In statecraft, there is no better example than the Palestinian national movement’s psychological theft of Jewish trauma.
For over a century, Palestinian nationalism has faced an insurmountable ontological problem: It has no independent, positive historical existence before the Zionist return.
It has no distinct ancient language, no unique legal codex, no indigenous archaeological record that does not point directly to Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, or Arab-imperial hegemony, and not a single coin minted in its name. It is a political construct forged entirely in the negative: defined solely by a desire to extinguish the Jewish state.
So rather than doing the grueling, dignified work of nation-building — cultivating institutions, establishing an independent philosophy, and accepting compromise — the Palestinian leadership executed an audacious intellectual heist. They looked across the armistice lines, observed the Jewish story’s profound, indestructible majesty, and plagiarized it.
Every sacred symbol, historical agony, and theological category of the Jewish People has been stolen, inverted, and retrofitted into a cheap ideological knockoff. It is an exercise in wholesale replacement theology, updated for a gullible and maleducated Western academy that has forgotten how to read history without ideological training wheels.
Consider the Palestinian narrative’s centerpiece: the Nakba (meaning “catastrophe”).
Today, the Western press and the academic claque treat the Nakba as the Arab counterpart to the Holocaust: a designated event of cosmic sorrow, complete with black-and-white photographs of wandering refugees, survivor testimony, and an insistence on unique, irredeemable victimhood.
Yet, even the term’s meaning has been retrofitted for current political purposes. Professor Constantin Zureiq, a Syrian Arab nationalist from the American University of Beirut’s history department, coined the term in 1948. In his foundational pamphlet, Ma’na al-Nakba (“The Meaning of the Catastrophe”), Zureiq was not weeping about the displacement of Arabs. It was a scathing autopsy of Arab incompetence.
To Zureiq, the disaster was that seven sovereign Arab nations, boasting modern standing armies and millions of citizens, had suffered a humiliating, catastrophic military defeat at the hands of 600,000 poorly armed Jews, many of them fresh out of European refugee camps.
The Nakba was the shame of failure. It was the intolerable cognitive dissonance of an Islamic supremacist culture discovering that the dhimmi — the subjugated, cowering Jew — could fight, out-think, and crush his tormentors in battle.
Only decades later, particularly after Israel’s even more humiliating rout of Arab armies in the 1967 Six-Day War and the launch of the murderous Palestine Liberation Organization’s Western PR offensive, was the word retroactively sanitized.
The shame of defeat was repackaged as the martyrdom of innocence. Arab leaders looked at the Holocaust’s moral currency in the post-war West and realized they needed their own Auschwitz. Having failed to throw the Jews into the sea, as promised, they decided to steal their mourning clothes.
Having manufactured a facsimile Holocaust, the movement required an exile to match.
For two millennia, the Jewish soul’s defining heartbeat was Galut — the agonizing, unyielding condition of exile. It was a tragedy commemorated three times a day in Jewish prayer, etched into the shattering of a glass beneath the wedding canopy, and preserved in the immortal oath of Psalm 137:
“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.”
The Jewish return to Zion was not an administrative real estate venture; it was the cosmic fulfillment of a biblical promise, the gathering of the scattered bones as Ezekiel foretold.
The Palestinian apparatus, noting this civilizational memory’s irresistible power, went straight to the photocopying shop.
Suddenly, the Arab diaspora became the Shatat. Workers’ migration across the Levant and the Gulf was converted into a sacred, metaphysical banishment. And to mirror the ancestral memories of Jews who carried the keys to their homes after the Spanish expulsion of 1492 — or the priests who, as the Talmud recounts, threw the keys of the burning Temple into the heavens — the Palestinian movement manufactured the sacrament of the Key (Al-Miftah).
The iron key is now paraded through European capitals, hung around the necks of demonstrators, and erected as colossal iron idols in refugee camps. It is a brilliant piece of agitprop, designed to transform a dislocation resulting from a war of annihilation that the Arabs started into an indelible, multigenerational curse.
The message to the West is simple: You felt guilty for the wandering Jew? Look at us. We are the new wandering Jews, and the old ones are our Cossacks.
The plagiarism did not stop with modern history; it crawled backward into antiquity.
When the Zionist movement began uncovering Israel’s archaeological bedrock — unearthing Hebrew seals from the First Temple, Davidic inscriptions, and the Dead Sea Scrolls — the Palestinian political elite found itself in an ideological panic. How do you claim indigeneity when everywhere you dig pulls up the Hebrew language?
The initial response was pure, brazen theft: They claimed to be the Canaanites. Yasser Arafat, a Cairo-born thug, began declaring with a straight face that Palestinians were the direct descendants of the ancient Jebusites. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority’s late and perpetually aggrieved chief negotiator, used to tell international diplomats that his ancestors were Canaanite kings who walked the hills of Jericho 5,000 years before Joshua crossed the Jordan.
It would be hilarious if Western academics did not nod along with such earnest, bovine solemnity.
The historical reality is pedestrian: The vast majority of Arabs in the Levant trace their arrival to the Islamic imperial conquests of the 7th century, followed by waves of economic migration from Egypt, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula in the 19th and early 20th centuries, drawn by the agricultural and economic boom that Jewish pioneers created as they built modern Israel. They migrated for work and opportunity, as people always have and still do.
To leapfrog three millennia of continuous, documented Jewish habitation by claiming descent from extinct Bronze Age pagans is the desperate maneuver of an interloper who knows he has arrived late to the house, trying to forge a deed that predates the foundation stones.
Another sinister theological inversion was tailored for Christian consumption: the transformation of Jesus of Nazareth into a Palestinian freedom fighter. Every December, the Palestinian Authority’s propaganda machine goes into overdrive. Official media declares Bethlehem an “occupied Palestinian city” and proclaims that Jesus was the “first Palestinian martyr.”
The audacity is breathtaking. Jesus was a circumcised Jew who lived in Judea, preached in the Second Temple, and read the Torah in Hebrew (though he was an Aramaic speaker). The Romans executed him as a suspected Jewish rebel claiming the Davidic throne. The Palestinians have tried to scrub off his Jewishness and present him as a kaffiyeh-clad guerrilla dodging Israeli checkpoints.
This is the resurrection of ancient Christian supersessionism in third-world drag.
For centuries, European antisemitism justified the persecution of Jews by claiming that the Church had replaced Israel as God’s chosen people, and that the Jews were cosmic outcasts cursed for deicide. Palestinian nationalism took this theological poison and gave it a secularized, anti-Zionist spin. By recasting Jesus as a Palestinian, the Israeli soldier is subliminally transformed into the modern Roman centurion, and the Jewish state is painted as the perpetual crucifier of innocence.
It is a pitch tailor-made for decadent Western churches, institutions that have lost their faith in the resurrection but still retain their historic reflex of blaming Jews for everything.
Another of the Palestinian counterfeit covenant’s morally bankrupt acts is its grotesque exploitation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Whenever the Israel Defense Forces respond to thousands of indiscriminate rockets fired at its civilians, the Palestinian propaganda apparatus instantly reaches for Holocaust vocabulary. Gaza is christened an “open-air concentration camp.” The refugee camps of Jenin are described as “ghettos.” The IDF’s defensive counter-terror operations are fantastically branded as “extermination.”
Holocaust inversion is the Palestinians’ ultimate psychological gambit.
In the contemporary Left’s warped taxonomy, the Holocaust is the gold standard of evil, so if you can argue that Jews are doing to Arabs what the Nazis did to the Jews, you achieve two catastrophic moral outcomes simultaneously. You strip Jews of their historical immunity and grant the jihadis license to carry out genocide under the guise of “anti-fascism.”
It erases the foundational moral distinction between a regime that constructed mechanized factories to murder millions of Jewish civilians and a sovereign democracy defending its borders against a theocratic death cult that embeds its military assets beneath its children’s beds.
Palestinian nationalism’s tragic paradox is that in its desperation to clone the Jewish national revival, it has destroyed its own future. A real nation cannot be stitched out of stolen garments. You cannot construct a healthy society upon a counterfeit foundation and an organizing principle that is to destroy your neighbor.
Zionism succeeded not because it had a grievance, but because it had a soul. It was fueled by 3,000 years of continuous textual, spiritual, and moral continuity. When the early pioneers returned to our ancestral homeland’s swamps and deserts, they did not define themselves by who they hated. They built universities before they had a state. They revived an ancient language, established courts, planted forests, developed agriculture, and laid down the infrastructure of a vibrant, democratic civilization.
Palestinian nationalism, by contrast, has spent a century staring into the Jewish mirror, furiously trying to copy the reflection while smashing the glass.
It has built no lasting culture of its own, fostered no scientific revolution, and produced no great literary tradition that does not circle endlessly around the black hole of anti-Zionist grievance. It has spent billions of dollars of international aid not on hospitals, libraries, or industries, but on concrete attack tunnels, terror stipends, and school curricula designed to teach 6-year-olds the mechanics of martyrdom.
The Palestinian people’s tragedy is not the Nakba. It is their refusal to abandon the counterfeit covenant.
Terrific piece. What the Palestinians are doing reminds me of the comic book character,Bizarro Superman, who tries to imitate real Superman’s actions but gets it all wrong or warped and the bizarro citizens love him. Unfortunately, the Palestinians are much craftier than Bizarro Superman and know that most of the press is on their side. They also know that the press is shamefully ignorant of ancient history and the history of the Jews. I find all of this very depressing.
What an eloquent piece of writing. I loved your description of the Jewish story as "indestructible majesty". Beautiful! It gave me a chill.