Pallywood. It’s undeniable that defenders of  Israel often have the need to try and hurt others. As most bullies they  have some intuitive understanding of what hurts. Maybe because they were  hurt so often in their childhood they know first hand what works and  what doesn’t work. A rather incisive and painful slash at someone is to  deny that person’s experience.

Survivors of sexual abuse will often  report that not being believed by others, sometimes not even their own  mother ‘you must have dreamed that the babysitter did this to you’, was worse than the sexual abuse itself. What they also often  need to hear, usually repeatedly and very loud and clear, is that they  are not the guilty party, they did not trigger the sexual abuse, they  did not invite it. If you want to throw oil or kerosine on the flames of  trauma simply suggest that the victims brought it upon themselves. I’ve seen very intelligent and kind-natured clients drift  towards drugs and severe forms of self-sabotage because their  experiences were repeatedly denied and reframed disingenuously.

This  is exactly what Israel’s online bully gang is doing by using the term  Pallywood. They know precisely what they are doing and don’t believe for a  second that the Palestinians are staging their own suffering. In many  cases they – willfully and comfortably – avoid thoroughly researched  history books and perhaps genuinely believe that the Palestinians are  the quintessential driver of all hostilities, but they do know that many  Palestinians are suffering in the worst ways imaginable. Yet they  deliberately continue to label obvious evidence of human agony as  Pallywood.

It helps to not feel guilt, it  helps to counter any criticism of Israel, and, most of all, it’s easy. You may have  noticed that defenders of Israel don’t put effort into their propaganda.  This could be laziness, but it’s also because it’s hard to consistently  come up with details to embellish a lie. A simple lie is much more  effective than a complicated one.

Pallywood  may first remind you of Hollywood, but it should also remind you of  Bollywood. There is fundamental racism lurking under the word. It’s the suggestion  that Pallywood videos are as boring, as poorly executed and as  repetitive as all those Indian movies only Indians can sit through. It’s become clear to many of you  how much disdain Israeli society has for other cultures. That they can  always drag some local Uncle Tom along for a photo op is never very  convincing.

It’s also easy to spot that  even the angriest Pro-Palestinian voices tend to be driven by love and a  strong reflex to protect the weak. Yes, some point out that  pro-Palestinians identify so much with the underdog, because they  themselves were hurt at some point and don’t want others to be hurt. If, as  in a thought experiment, we accept this theory, we can then say that  pro-Israeli voices act so hysterically because of hurts in their own  past. The difference is in the reaction. Pro-Palestinian: I am hurt, I  don’t want others to hurt. Pro-Israeli: I deny that I was ever hurt and  distract myself from my own personal traumas by trying to victimize and  hurt others. Pro-Palestinians are more courageous and embrace the hurt,  pro-Israelis deny the hurt and want others to suffer, others who are different from them, others who they know very little about.

There is namely nothing benign about throwing around the term Pallywood. If they wanted  to expose the Palestinians for faking their hell, they could do it with  facts, but they can’t. They have to keep it simple and primitive and  purely emotional. All they can do is abuse the behind the scenes images  of a war movie filmed in Lebanon some time ago to confuse people who are  not familiar with what has been happening in this region of the world.

It’s been an exceptionally bad year for pro-Israel propaganda.

As  a test I once took a tweet that went: ‘Pallywood productions and its  distributors hurt the Palestinian cause so much’ and changed it to  ‘Izrawood productions and its distributors hurt Israel so much.’ This  immediately trigged buckets of anger, because they know their own  tactic, they know exactly how malignant the term Pallywood is.

And what must be hurting the most, is that it hasn’t worked. Israel’s pointless slaughter of the Palestinians cannot be covered up by using such a lame tactic.

They know that too and what they hope for is hurting a few folks, as a revenge for living in a world they assume  believes something bad never happened to Israelis. They think we deny their reality and so they want to deny the reality of the Palestinians. We don’t deny their reality, we just don’t accept their lies. Yes, if you scrape away the pathological lies, some bad stuff has happened to Israelis. It was at times horrible, but not as perversely and Baroque style horrible as Izrawood would like you to believe and nothing of it offers a justification to murder more than 100,000 people (see the Lancet).

But Israeli propaganda doesn’t have to hurt anyone. It’s an entirely toothless worn out and obese attack dog. A bit annoying, but peeing itself by trying to bark too loudly for its own good.