A funny thing happened on the way to another mass grave

The Israelis just dumped another load of Palestinian bodies into Gaza—bodies bearing what I can hear Western media outlets delicately calling “signs of mistreatment,” which in non-euphemistic English means torture marks and bullet holes in the back of the head. This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Why do Israelis publicize their crimes like this, you ask? To scare Palestinians and neighboring Arabs. As for the risk of upsetting Western audiences, well, Israelis think they simply won’t believe it.

That’s right. For decades, Israel has operated on a simple principle: commit atrocities so outlandish that Western audiences literally can’t process them. Evacuating entire cities like Yaffa and Haifa? Poisoning water supplies with typhus in Akko and Lyddia? It sounds like the fever dream of a conspiracy theorist, especially when it’s being reported by brown people with accents who pray five times a day. Surely it must be more complicated than simple ethnic cleansing, right? There must be context we’re missing. Both sides, you know.

This was the formula, and it was bulletproof. The sheer audacity of the crimes, combined with good old-fashioned Western racism and the assumption that Palestinians were inherently unreliable narrators, created a perfect shield. The reports were too crazy to believe, and the reporters were too foreign to trust. And our Zionist-controlled, government-subservient media is right there to discredit Palestinians at every turn.

But something broke.

The Gaza genocide—let’s be honest and call it what South Africa called it at The Hague—changed the equation. Seventeen months of high-definition horror, posted in real-time by Palestinians themselves, fundamentally altered the credibility calculation in the Western mind. People started believing Palestinians. Worse, from Israel’s perspective, they started going back through the archive, re-evaluating decades of Palestinian testimony with fresh eyes. The Nakba? Maybe that actually happened the way they said it did. Deir Yassin? Jenin? The prisoner abuse? All of it suddenly crackling with an electric charge of plausibility it never had before.

Even better: the credibility transfer went both ways. The same audiences who stopped reflexively doubting Palestinians started reflexively doubting Israelis. Why exactly should we assume Mustafa Barghouti is biased but take Mark Levin at face value? Why are Palestinian casualty figures “claims” while Israeli statements are just… reported? Why does the Muslim guy in the keffiyeh need three sources while the IDF spokesman with the better PowerPoint gets printed verbatim?

The Israelis don’t seem to understand this shift has happened. They’re still playing by the old rules, broadcasting their brutality to intimidate Arabs while assuming Westerners won’t believe the reports anyway. They’re advertising their crimes on the assumption that the audience will remain incredulous.

This is why you see the increasingly frantic attempts to keep this old paradigm alive. “Pallywood!” they shriek, trying to paint Palestinians as Hollywood-level fabulists. The starvation reports are exaggerated! The genocide numbers are inflated! It’s all fake! The desperation is obvious: they’re trying to claw back the credibility gap, to restore the comfortable old arrangement where Israelis were presumed truthful and Palestinians presumed lying.

It’s not going to work, and here’s why: Palestinians got good at this. Decades of having every single claim scrutinized, picked apart, and dismissed made them into obsessive documentarians. They know they’ll be doubted, so they film everything, source everything, archive everything. The result is that their reporting has become ironclad in ways that make the IDF’s increasingly preposterous explanations—she was shot by Hamas, the hospital bombed itself, the aid workers were terrorists, the journalists were combatants—sound like the propaganda they are.

Meanwhile, independent media outlets have proliferated, places willing to apply the same skepticism to both sides. These outlets aren’t bankrolled by Sheldon Adelson’s heirs or dependent on access to Israeli officials, which means they can ask uncomfortable questions. And audiences, particularly younger ones, trust them more than the legacy outlets with their suspiciously shiny production values and their weird reluctance to use the word “killing” when Israelis are doing it.

The “antisemitism” card isn’t working anymore either. People have figured out it’s a mute button, a way to end conversations rather than have them. The spell is broken.

It must be a strange relief for Palestinians, finally being believed after howling into the void for a century. But the mainstream media? They’re going to keep playing the old hits, keep soft-pedaling Israeli crimes and interrogating Palestinian testimony, because they’re locked into the worldview of their donors and their access-based business model. They’re too compromised to adapt, which means they’ll be left behind, still insisting we can’t really know what happened while everyone else watches the videos.

The great credulity shift is complete. The Israelis are still acting like it’s 1982. The world has moved on.

“`