“I’ve always been fascinated by Trump’s attempts to disparage Chuck Schumer by calling him a Palestinian. The term of course, shouldn’t be a slur—Palestinians are a people like any other. In the mouth of Trump and many others, however, ‘Palestinian’ signifies the ‘Muslim terrorist,’ the ‘radical,’ the ‘enemy’ of the Judeo-Christian West. Trump’s figure of speech mobilizes intense anti-Palestinian bigotry (and by extension, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry) against his Jewish opponent. ‘Jews’ and ‘Palestinians’ are often constructed as opposites in mainstream discourse; here, with a Jew transforming into a Palestinian, the binary is blurred. So what’s behind this inversion?
Though Trump surely isn’t aware of it, there’s precedent for his turn of phrase. Eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, a key figure of the European Enlightenment, referred to European Jews as “Palestinians in our midst,” capturing the Orientalism at the heart of Enlightenment reason…”
Ben Lorber 
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