Richmond, September 9 - Every few weeks I find the one. I sit up, I taste the rare metallic flavor of a shared reality, and I announce to nobody that this, at last, will be the story the “pro-Palestine” advocates cannot circulate with a straight face. Then morning comes, the story has a caption, and I am back in the same chair with a shorter list of things I still assume are moronic enough not to gain traction.

One upon a time, I was sure the animals would do it. Not metaphor. Actual fauna: dolphins, birds, sharks, a boar with a sense of mission, all of them carrying a Tel Aviv employee badge in the popular imagination. I thought even a movement that can metabolize a lot of folklore would gag on Mossad wildlife. They did not gag. They posted the fish.

I moved the line to something that required a theory of mind, not a theory of zoology. The claim that Israeli soldiers are too racist to rape Palestinian women struck me as the sort of sentence that dies in the mouth. It did not die. It became an analytical framework.

Then came the pictures that were not pictures. The six-fingered orphans. The rubble with the texture of a screensaver. The child whose ear changed shape between posts. I have seen bad photography. This was not bad photography. I waited for the people who lecture others about “media literacy” to perform a little. They performed belief. The giveaway artifacts were, apparently, the occupation’s fault for being so unrealistic.

I saved famine for later, because famine is supposed to be the one subject that still has a body. Then the bodies arrived already fed. Men with the posture of a second lunch explaining that the cupboard is empty, the camera lingering on a midsection that had missed the memo. I thought the visual contradiction would impose a pause, a squint, a “maybe crop that.” The crop was applied to the skepticism instead.

Tonight’s nominee was the Nova Festival. Not “context” for the festival. The claim that the people in the field shot themselves, or were shot by their own side for the footage, a self-massacre staged so thoroughly that the perpetrators livestreamed the wrong uniforms. I had the old lift in my chest. Here, I thought. Even they will not take the killers out of their own Go-Pro videos.

The edge lasted until the first quote-tweet.

One day, I might yet find a narrative too stupid for the anti-Israel crowd to parrot. One day.

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