{"id":7190,"date":"2014-04-08T11:12:59","date_gmt":"2014-04-08T18:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7190"},"modified":"2014-04-08T11:12:59","modified_gmt":"2014-04-08T18:12:59","slug":"israels-worst-enemy-lies-and-myths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/israels-worst-enemy-lies-and-myths\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel’s Worst Enemy: Lies and Myths"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>\u00a0reports that some members of Secretary of State John Kerry\u2019s senior staff think it\u2019s time to say \u201cenough\u201d of Kerry\u2019s futile and delusional attempts to broker peace between the Israelis and Arabs and implement the \u201ctwo-<\/p>\n

\"Templar1307
Templar1307 via Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

state solution.\u201d That\u2019s a revelation one would think the chief diplomat of the greatest power in history would have experienced decades ago. Since the failed 1993 Oslo Accords, it has been obvious to all except the duplicitous, the ignorant, and the Jew-hater that the Arabs do not want a \u201cPalestinian state living in peace side-by-side with Israel,\u201d something they could have had many times in the past. On the contrary, as they serially prove in word and deed, they want Israel destroyed.<\/p>\n

As Caroline Glick documents in her new\u00a0book<\/a>\u00a0The Israeli Solution<\/i>, the \u201ctwo-state solution\u201d is a diplomatic chimera for the West, and a tactic for revanchist Arabs who cannot achieve their eliminationist aims by military means. But the \u201cPalestinian state\u201d is merely one of many myths, half-truths, and outright lies that befuddle Western diplomats and leaders, and put the security and possibly the existence of Israel at risk.<\/p>\n

First there is the canard that Israel is somehow an illegitimate state, a neo-imperialist outpost that Westerners created to protect their economic and geopolitical interests. In this popular myth, invading Jewish colonists \u201cstole\u201d the land and ethnically cleansed the region of its true possessors, the indigenous \u201cPalestinian people.\u201d This crime was repeated after 1967 Six Day War, when Israel seized the \u201cWest Bank,\u201d occupying it as a colonial power and subjecting its inhabitants to a brutally discriminatory regime. The continuing power of this lie can be seen in the frequent comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa. And this false historical analogy in turn drives the \u201cBoycott, Divest, and Sanctions\u201d movement, which is attempting to make Israel even more of a pariah state in order to duplicate the success of those tactics in dismantling white rule in South Africa.<\/p>\n

Every dimension of this narrative is false. The state of Israel came into being by the same legitimate process that created the other new states in the region,\u00a0the consequence of the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Consistent with the traditional practice of victorious states, the Allied powers France and England created Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, and of course Israel, to consolidate and protect their national interests. This legitimate right to rewrite the map may have been badly done and shortsighted\u2013\u2013regions containing many different sects and ethnic groups were bad candidates for becoming a nation-state, as the history of Iraq and Lebanon proves, while prime candidates for nationhood like the Kurds were left out. But the right to do so\u00a0was bestowed by the Allied victory and the Central Powers\u2019 loss, the time-honored wages of starting a war and losing it. Likewise in Europe, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled, and the new states of Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia were created. And arch-aggressor Germany was punished with a\u00a0substantial loss of territory, leaving some 10 million Germans stranded outside the fatherland. Israel\u2019s title to its country is as legitimate as Jordan\u2019s, Syria\u2019s and Lebanon\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Then there is the melodrama of the \u201cdisplacement\u201d of the \u201cPalestinians,\u201d who have been condemned to live as stateless \u201crefugees\u201d because of Israel\u2019s aggression. This narrative of course ignores the fact that most of the Arabs fleeing Palestine left voluntarily, the first wave, mainly the Arab elite, beginning in November 1947 with the U.N. vote for partition. At the time it was clear to observers that most of the Arabs chose to flee their supposed ancestral homeland. In September 1948\u00a0Time<\/i>\u00a0magazine, no friend of Israel, wrote, \u201cThere is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors [explaining the Arab flight] were the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Committee urging the Arabs to quit.\u201d These were followed in 1948 by 300,000 others, who either were avoiding the conflict, or were induced by the Arab Higher Committee with the promise that after victory they could return and find, as Arab League Secretary-General Azza Pasham said in May 1948, \u201cthat all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean.\u201d Indeed, the withdrawal of Israelis from Gaza in 2005 confirmed the prediction that failed in 1948.\u00a0The Gaza greenhouse industry, which American Jewish donors purchased for $14 million and gave to the Palestinian Authority in order to help Gaza\u2019s economy,\u00a0was instead destroyed by looters.<\/p>\n

But from a historical perspective, it is irrelevant how the Arabs became refugees. When in 1922 the Greeks lost their war they fought against the Turks in order to regain their sovereignty over lands their ancestors had lived in for nearly 3000 years, 1.5 million Greeks were transferred out of Turkey in exchange for half a million Turks from Europe. After World War II, 12 million Germans either fled or were driven from Eastern Europe, with at least half a million dying. In both cases, whether justly or not, the wages of starting a war and losing included the displacement of the losers. Yet only in the case of the Palestinian Arabs has this perennial cost of aggression been reversed, and those who prevailed in a war they\u00a0didn\u2019t<\/i>\u00a0start been demonized for the suffering of refugees\u00a0created by the aggression of their ethnic and religious fellows.<\/p>\n

In still another historical anomaly, in no other conflict have refugees failed to be integrated into countries with which they share an ethnic, religious, and cultural identity. Most of the some 800,000 Jews, for example, driven from lands like Egypt and Iraq in which their ancestors had lived for centuries, were welcomed into Israel, which footed the bill for their maintenance and integration into society. The Arab states, on the other hand, kept their brother Arabs and Muslims in squalid camps that have evolved into squalid cities, their keep paid for by the United Nations Relief Works Agency, the only U.N. agency dedicated to only one group of refugees. Thus the international community has\u00a0enabled the revanchist policy of the Arab states, as Alexander Galloway, head of the UNRWA, said in 1952: \u201cIt is perfectly clear that the Arab nations do not want to solve the Arab refugee problem. They want to keep it an open sore, as an affront against the United Nations, and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don\u2019t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.\u201d<\/p>\n

This brings us to the chief myth: that there exists a distinct Palestinian \u201cpeople,\u201d the original possessors of the land who have been unjustly denied a national homeland. In the quotes above notice that no Arab ever refers to these people as \u201cPalestinians,\u201d but as \u201cArabs,\u201d which is what most of them are, sharing the same religion, language, and culture of their Arab neighbors in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. In fact, as Sha\u2019i ben-Tekoa documents in hisbook<\/a>\u00a0Phantom Nation<\/i>, the first U.N. resolution referencing \u201cPalestinians\u201d instead of \u00a0\u201cArabs\u201d\u00a0occurred 3 years after the Six Day War,\u00a0marking international recognition of a \u201cPalestinian people\u201d\u00a0and nation as yet another Arab tactic in gaining support in the West by exploiting an idea alien to traditional Islam. Before then \u201cPalestinian\u201d was a geographical designation, more typically applied to Jews. Numerous quotations from Arab leaders reveal not a single reference to a Palestinian people, but numerous one\u00a0identifying the inhabitants of the geographical entity Palestine as\u00a0\u201cArabs.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, in 1937, Arab Higher Committee Secretary Auni Abdel Hadi said, \u201cThere is no such country as Palestine. \u2018Palestine\u2019 is a country the Zionists invented. \u2018Palestine\u2019 is alien to us.\u201d The Christian Arab George Antonius, author of the influential\u00a0The Arab Awakening<\/i>, told David Ben-Gurion, \u201cThere was no natural barrier between Palestine and Syria and there was no difference between their inhabitants.\u201d Later in his book he defined Syria as including Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. In testimony to the U.N. in 1947, the Arab Higher Committee said, \u201cPolitically the Arabs of Palestine are not independent in the sense of forming a separate political identity.\u201d Thirty years later Farouk Kaddoumi, then head of the PLO Political Department, toldNewsweek<\/i>, \u201cJordanians and Palestinians are considered by the PLO as one people.\u201d After the Six-Day War a member of the Executive Council of the PLO, Zouhair Muhsin, was even more explicit: \u201cThere are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity\u2026 Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such examples can be multiplied, which makes all the talk of a separate Palestinian \u201cpeople\u201d deserving of their own nation nothing but propaganda supported by a bogus history that claims the Arabs who came to Palestine in the 7th<\/sup>\u00a0century A.D as conquerors and occupiers, or later as migrant workers and immigrants, are the \u201cindigenous\u201d inhabitants descended from Biblical peoples like the Canaanites or the shadowy Jebusites\u2013\u2013a claim unsupported by any written or archaeological evidence. Meanwhile, of course, abundant evidence exists showing that the Jews have continuously inhabited the region since 1300 B.C. Once more the logic of history is turned on its head, with the descendants of the original inhabitants deemed alien invaders, while the descendants of conquerors and occupiers are sanctified as victims.<\/p>\n

Such an inversion is worthy of Orwell\u2019s\u00a01984<\/i>. Yet these lies and myths\u2013\u2013and there are many more\u2013\u2013 have shaped and defined the conflict between Israel and the Arabs, and set the parameters of diplomatic solutions. But we should heed the Biblical injunction about the liberating power of truth. And the truth is,\u00a0for a century fanatics filled with genocidal hatred have violently and viciously attacked a liberal-democratic nation legitimately established in the ancient homeland of its people. Until our diplomacy and foreign relations in the region are predicated on this truth, the \u201ctwo-state solution\u201d will continue to be a dangerous farce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 The\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0reports that some members of Secretary of State John Kerry\u2019s senior staff think it\u2019s time to say \u201cenough\u201d of Kerry\u2019s futile and delusional attempts to broker peace between the Israelis and Arabs and implement the \u201ctwo- state solution.\u201d That\u2019s a revelation one would think the chief diplomat of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[97,22],"tags":[255,1028,1027,1062,628,1046,542,1072],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1RY","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3052,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/corrupt-language-breeds-bad-history-and-bad-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":7190,"position":0},"title":"Corrupt Language Breeds Bad History and Bad Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 24, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society As the history of communism and fascism both illustrate, modern political tyranny has relied on fabricated history to legitimize its claims and actions, and such history in turn relies on the debasement of language. Nowhere is this axiom more evident than in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":978,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/harvard-promotes-the-palestinians-slow-motion-final-solution\/","url_meta":{"origin":7190,"position":1},"title":"Harvard Promotes the Palestinians’ Slow-Motion ‘Final Solution’","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Media There is no idea so hateful or useless that some university somewhere won\u2019t hold a conference on it. The latest example of this unfortunate truism is the recently announced \u201cIsrael\/Palestine and the One-State Conference\u201d scheduled for early March at the Harvard Kennedy School. Nineteen\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5507,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-stink\/","url_meta":{"origin":7190,"position":2},"title":"The Stink","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 18, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"What makes the worst lies in the Middle East acceptable? by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Remember Big Daddy in the movie\u00a0Cat on Hot Tin Roof? He kept walking around complaining about the \u201cstink of mendacity\u201d emanating from his dysfunctional family. I know how he feels, for every day the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8734,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-middle-east-and-orwellian-historical-arguments\/","url_meta":{"origin":7190,"position":3},"title":"The Middle East and Orwellian Historical Arguments","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 21, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"When lies are the foundation of policies. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Many of our policy debates and conflicts both domestic and foreign call on history to validate their positions. At home, crimes from the past like slavery and legal segregation are used to justify present policies ranging\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via www.breitbart.com","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/john-kerry-deep-thoughts-ap-500x375.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5556,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-impossible-peace-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":7190,"position":4},"title":"The Impossible Peace","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 25, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0editorial page published last Saturday a collection of short editorials on\u00a0Israel\u00a0\u2019s campaign to neutralize Hezbollah. With the exception of Richard Perle\u2019s, most of the opinions represent the tired received wisdom that ignores the true cause of the conflict and relies on various\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5145,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-impossible-peace\/","url_meta":{"origin":7190,"position":5},"title":"The Impossible Peace","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 25, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0editorial page published last Saturday a collection of short editorials on\u00a0Israel\u00a0\u2019s campaign to neutralize Hezbollah. With the exception of Richard Perle\u2019s, most of the opinions represent the tired received wisdom that ignores the true cause of the conflict and relies on various\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7190"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7194,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7190\/revisions\/7194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}