A banner at the Newton Public Library bore the Star of David, and equated the symbol of Judaism to a swastika and a slain Palestinian child to make a strong statement about the growing conflict in the Middle East and how some Westerners may be deceived by Palestinian propaganda.
Boston University College of Arts and Sciences professor Richard Landes spoke a week ago about symbolism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and about Muhammad al-Durah, a Palestinian boy who was allegedly killed by Israeli troops in late 2000 to trigger anti-Israel sentiment in Europe. Landes said he does not think Israelis killed al-Durah – he said Palestinians staged the boy’s death for cameras through a medium known as “Pallywood.”
Landes coined the term “Pallywood” to mean systematic Palestinian attempt to stage scenes for Western cameras, effectively serving as anti-Israeli propaganda for the Western press, he said.
“This was run as news and seized upon by a world anxious for nasty stuff about Israel,” Landes told attendees.
Landes said after the speech that in two hours of propaganda footage, “the best we got is a fake ambulance scene.”
Landes founded the Center for Millennial Studies in 1996, a BU organization dedicated to studying the millennium and its impact on apocalyptic thought, which he said surrounds claims of radical Islam.
Jack Schuss, a member of the Boston Israel Action Committee, which sponsored the lecture, said he thinks Landes’s thoughts on the subject of Palestinian and Israeli conflict are noteworthy.
“On the subject he’s very knowledgeable” he said.
Andrew Gow, a University of Alberta history professor, said he met Landes at the first conference for millennial studies in 1996.
“This is a guy with enormous insight and intuition,” Gow said. “[His] eagle eye pierces to the core of the matter. His ideas are often utterly original. He’s willing to pursue a question because he’s curious about it.”
Landes goes against established precedent by asking new and oftentimes controversial questions using techniques shunned by tradition historians, Gow said.
“I think his work is controversial. I think the establishment doesn’t like it,” Gow said. “They’re objecting as much to the conclusions as to his methods.”
Although trained as a medieval historian, Landes uses skills honed as a historian in his analysis for Pallywood, Gow said. Historians need to detect abnormalities inside and outside a text to determine its authenticity, and Landes has applied this skill towards raw video footage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Gow said.
Landes has analyzed select, raw footage of clashes between Palestinians and Israelis and discovered that, as outlined in his 2003 movie Pallywood, Palestinians sometimes stage scenes in front of Western cameras to deceive Western audiences into being more sympathetic toward their cause, Landes said.
Landes said he thinks the mainstream media disseminates one-sided news coverage because of a fear of angering Palestinians and jihadist Muslims, and because they want to help people they feel are oppressed.
In his presentation at the Newton Library, Landes detailed his evidence and said he thinks the al-Durah incident was staged, and the incident sparked anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiments in France.
“There is no cost to saying nasty things about the Israelis,” Landes said. “You say something bad about the Palestinians and the best you can hope for is to not be let back in . . . You have this masochistic postmodern narrative where we are guilty.”