[7] It was also used by Alfred Sherman, the London correspondent for Haaretz at the time also in 1970, while expressing his surprise that the Palestinians' bid for independent statehood had garnered widespread support in the West.
[b] The word assumed some importance in the 1980s when the Palestinian academic Edward Said, author of the influential book Orientalism which analysed bias in foreign representations of the Arab world, adopted it.
"[c] According to Adam Shatz, US editor for the London Review of Books, Said endeavoured to elaborate a "counter-myth" to that which underwrote Zionism, one written in counterpoint to the "dark historical fatalism and exclusionary fear of the other" characteristic of the Zionist narrative.
[17] As construed by Ilan Pappé, Said's "Palestinianism" was a compromise between the narrow call of nationalist impulses and the universal values he subscribed to, consisting in striving to overcome both Zionism and Arab tyrannies by the three principles of acknowledgement, accountability and acceptance: namely, global recognition of the Nakba which was more important than achieving Palestinian statehood; in obeisance to universal principles, Israel should accept its accountability for ethnic cleansing, as a prelude to a future return of refugees; and, thirdly, an acceptance of the historic reality of Jewish suffering, a precondition for integrating Israelis into the larger Arab world within which their state was founded.
[d] Two years later, Jason Franks employed it to denote the ensemble of values, beliefs, traditions and history underwriting Palestinian nationhood.
[20] A year after Gerber's article, in 2005, and writing in the context of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Bat Ye'or, in her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab which peddled a conspiracy theory,[21] dedicated a whole chapter to the word, entitled "Palestinianism: The New Eurabian Cult", where she claimed that Palestinianism, which she glossed as "Palestinolatry", was both a new vehicle for traditional European anti-Semitism,[22] and "a return of the Euro-Arab Nazism of the 1930-1940s.
[25][26] Neither of these writers, however, had ever used the term at the time of her writing, but Bat Ye'or deployed it to characterize what she saw as ecclesiastical attempts to play on European consciences by depicting Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation.
[31] In 2007, the idea that Palestinian national rights were a threat to Western civilization, and in particular to its religious values, was argued for in a book by evangelical theologian Paul Wilkinson, assistant Minister at Hazel Grove Full Gospel Church in Stockport, Cheshire and a member of Tim LaHaye's Pre-Tribulation Rapture Research Center.
[42] According to Tower Magazine journalist, and former advisor to The Israel Project Ben Cohen,[43] Palestinianism is the core ideology informing recent antisemitism, one that assumes the guise of a social movement which, bundling together neo-fascists, liberals, extreme leftists, and Islamicists, is militantly opposed to the age of Jewish self-empowerment after 1945.
[j] In 2018, a pro-Zionist English blogger David Collier, whose mission was described as one "show(ing) everybody how toxic our enemies are", claimed that Palestinianism was a threat to freedom of speech and the cause of human rights, an infective agent of anti-Semitism: "Palestinianism" is a disease that is anathema to freedom, to debate, to openness and to human rights.
He argues that the allegations of the former, that such criticism was anti-Semitic, was itself evidence of bigotry – "treating people as inferior because of their group identity" – and takes the form of anti-Palestinianism, which is, he claims, commonplace throughout American society.
Any Google search, he found,[m] will unfold an endless number of links associating such politicians with antisemitism, whereas Google yields no evidence that the congressmen he cites – Michael Waltz, Jim Banks, Claudia Tenney, Ted Deutch, Josh Gottheimer, Kathy Manning, Elaine Luria, and Dean Phillips – who repeat these accusations in the House of Representatives, are hostile to Palestinians, despite his claim that there is strong evidence for their bias in this regard.
[n] Beinart considers that the group of Democrats accusing Israel of apartheid practices or Jewish supremacist territorial ambitions (B'Tselem) are simply reflecting an opposition to violations of international law: a view shared by NGOs like Human Rights Watch.