The hysteria and lies that surrounded the battle of “Jeningrad” in the spring of 2002 are a prime example of the process—and very instructive in the present context. The occasion was Israel’s incursion into the armed “refugee” camp in the West Bank town of Jenin after scores of Israelis had been killed in Arab suicide bombings over the previous weeks. Relying on tactics designed to minimize civilian casualties, Israeli forces suffered 23 dead while killing between 46 and 52 Palestinians, mostly fighters, in days of fierce house-to-house combat. Immediately there was talk of “genocide,” of “thousands” of Palestinian dead, of a “siege” rivaling that of Leningrad in World War II. The purportedly judicious and sober Palestinian spokesman Saeb Erekat offered up an estimate of 3,000 dead; he subsequently adjusted this to 500, a figure that, although no less mendacious, was treated with solemn respect, as if to come down from so grand an initial falsehood were a moral triumph in itself.

Indeed, rather than providing Saeb Erekat with his own “Baghdad Bob”-like web page, where his untruths could have been held up to deserved scorn, the Western media, led in this case by the British, canonized them. On April 17, 2002, the Guardian called the supposed massacre at Jenin “every bit as repellent as Osama bin Laden’s attack on New York.” The Evening Standard trumpeted the term “genocide,” and its columnist A.N. Wilson further accused Israel of “poisoning the water supply” to ensure its “cover of genocide.” Not to be outdone, the London Times’s Janine di Giovanni snapped that not even Bosnia or Chechnya rivaled “such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life.”†

From this perspective, the Arab inebriation with falsehood and the propaganda of the lie begins to look not so irrational after all. However injurious such habits of delusion may turn out to be when tested in actual clashes of arms, politically they have proved, at least until now, rather useful—and quite in step with the deductive predispositions of influential sectors of opinion in the West. This is especially so where the subject of Israel and the Palestinians is concerned, but it applies elsewhere as well. European efforts over the years to sell arms to Saddam Hussein’s regime, machinations to hamper American military action, and the postwar European support for Syria to resist the extradition of Iraqi Baathists—these are some of the fruits of a tacit acquiescence in the idea of Arab victimhood. So are the large percentages of Frenchmen and other Europeans favoring Palestinian terror over Israeli democracy. Whatever the particular motive involved, it has been generally the case that Arab adversaries of Israel or of the United States have been able to win politically and diplomatically what they have been unable to achieve through arms on the battlefield.