Occupied What? 14 False Myths about Who Has Rights to Palestine and the Basis for Middle East Peace
Flame
archive/flame_hotline_081809.html
August 18, 2009
Dear Friend of FLAME:
Last week the commentator Daniel Pipes reviewed the controversy
around a statement falsely attributed to former Israeli chief of
staff, Moshe Ya’alon, in which Ya’alon in 2002 allegedly said "The
Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of
their consciousness that they are a defeated people." At the time
this judgment was criticized variously as "incendiary" and "a harsh,
unyielding verdict on the fate of a thwarted nation." Though Ya’alon
actually did not make this statement, Pipes is willing to boldly
assert its truth today.
Likewise, the case for beginning Israeli-Palestinian peace talks,
as the Obama administration wants to, with the assumption that Israel
is "occupying" someone else’s land is false on its face. It makes no
historical sense. In fact, the Palestinians are actually dispossessed
Arabs left over from struggles between Israel and its Arab neighbors,
Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia after Israel’s 1948 War
of Independence and the 1967 Yom Kippur War.
Last week’s Hotline exposed the Palestinians’ futile (desperately
absurd, actually) attempts to claim dominion over all Jerusalem
as a pre-condition for peace talks with Israel. We also debunked
claims of some Palestinians over certain land in east Jerusalem and
rebutted U.S. State Department demands that Israel stop populating
east Jerusalem with Jews.
But as Pipes says, it’s time to stop parsing words and splitting
hairs. The Palestinians have gotten the short end of the historical
stick, no doubt. (So have the Poles, Kurds, Armenians and Tibetans,
to name a few.) But the Palestinians have also made and continue to
make huge historical blunders—like refusing to recognize Israel for
the last 61 years and making the expulsion of Jews from the Jewish
homeland the core purpose of their being.
It’s time to face the facts: The Palestinians are indeed a defeated
people, and they have practically zero leverage in suing for peace
(even if they wanted peace, which they don’t seem to in the least).
I think you’ll find this week’s Hotline one of the most valuable
you’ve ever received. The article below, by Professor Steven Plaut,
gives you 14 irrefutable talking points (and false myths) to use
when writing letters to President Obama and your local newspapers,
as well as for discussing the issues with friends, colleagues and
co-congregants. Steven Plaut teaches at the Graduate School of Business
Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the
Jewish Press ().
Please print this piece out and pass it along to others. It’s
powerful stuff.
Sincerely, Jim Sinkinson Director, FLAME P.S. Every day the two-state
solution seems less viable. Palestinian political organizations
are involved in murderous factional struggles, and governance is
in shambles. If you agree that U.S. pressure on Israel to make
major concessions to the Palestinians is unfair and unwise, please
review the recent FLAME position paper—"The Two-State Illusion:
Would it solve the Middle East problem?" I think you’ll appreciate
its outspokenness—and its truth. For this reason, we have sent
it to the President’s office, as well as that of every U.S. Senator
and Representative. Most importantly, we’ve published this piece in
national media (including college newspapers) delivering more than
five million impressions to the American public each month. (You
may enjoy another excellent article recently posted on our website,
showing why linking peace with the Palestinians to a greater Middle
East peace is a fallacy: "Linkage: The Mother of all Myths" by Dennis
Ross and David Makovsky. Please check it out.) Above all, if you
agree that FLAME’s outspoken brand of public relations for Israel is
important and valuable, I urge you to support us. Remember: FLAME’s
ability to influence public opinion comes from Israel’s supporters
like you, one by one. I hope you’ll consider giving a donation now,
as you’re able—with $500, $250, $100, or even $18. (Remember,
your donation to FLAME is tax deductible.) To donate online, just go
to Now more than
ever we need your support to ensure that Israel gets the support it
needs—from the U.S. Congress, from President Obama, and from the
American people.
P.P.S. President Obama has asked for input from U.S. citizens on
his Middle East policies. To give him your opinion about Israel’s
rights to its undivided capital city, Jerusalem, please write the
President—right now.
The 14 Lies Blocking Peace in the Middle East Steven Plaut, August
14, 2009, FrontPageMagazine.com If a Martian were suddenly to land
on earth and start listening to and reading the mainstream media,
he would form the impression that the entire Middle East conflict
were due to Israel building some settlements in land that much of the
world thinks should become a Palestinian state. A near-consensus exists
among the governments of the world and among media writers that peace
has yet to break out in the Middle East because of three principle
reasons. The first is that the Jews and the Arabs have been unable to
agree about whether there should be a Palestinian state. The second
is because Israel has obstinately refused to withdraw its troops from
(so-called) "occupied Arab" lands. The third is because Israel behaves
cruelly towards the Palestinians.
The Martian could easily carry these beliefs back to its home planet,
as long as it did not bother to learn the background and the history
of the Middle East conflict. Those three reasons cannot survive an
antibiotic of familiarity with Middle East history.
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seem to
think the idea of Palestinian statehood is the most wonderful idea
to come along since the Thirteenth Amendment. And almost all world
politicians, along with the Israeli Left, insist that all Israeli
settlements must be removed from the West Bank because they serve
as the main obstacle to peace. The reality is that the Middle East
conflict has very little to do with debate over Palestinian statehood
and even less to do with Israeli "settlements." In fact Israel has
agreed in principle, somewhat foolishly, to the erection of such
a Palestinian state, at least subject to some security conditions
and other concessions from the Palestinians — like recognizing
Israel’s right to exist. As it turns out, even so-called "moderate"
Palestinians reject any such idea.
Meanwhile debate about the Middle East conflict is based on an
incredible absence of historic information and on a series of stylish
misconceptions about Middle East history. The anti-Israel Lobby,
which grows by the day in its maliciousness and anti-Semitism, counts
on the ignorance of much of the public concerning how the Middle East
got to where it is.
Here are just a handful of popular misconceptions and their antidotes:
1. Falsehood: Israel was erected on land that belonged to Palestinian
Arabs.
Truth: Before Israel was created its territory never belonged
to Palestinian Arabs and had not been ruled by any Arabs at all
since the Middle Ages. It had been a Turkish province for centuries
until it was captured by Britain during World War I. The League of
Nations awarded governance of "Palestine" to Britain at the end of
the war in exchange for its commitment to turn the area into a Jewish
homeland. The lands on which Jewish immigrants settled before Israel
was created were purchased by Jews at above-market prices and in most
cases had no Arabs living on them. Virtually no Arabs were evicted.
2. Falsehood: The Jews came to Palestine as foreigners and aliens,
whereas the Palestinians were the indigenous people of the territory.
Truth: Jews lived in "Palestine," which is the Land of Israel or "Eretz
Yisroel," continuously from the time of the Bible. Most families of
"Palestinians" migrated into "Palestine," during the same period
as the Zionist waves of immigration, starting in the second half
of the 19th century. The largest ethnic group in the country at the
time was the Turks. The "Palestinian Arabs" in 1948 were primarily
families of migrants from Lebanon and Syria. Ironically, they were
motivated to become "Palestinians" in the first place thanks to the
Zionist movement, which brought capital and labor into "Palestine"
and improved living conditions there. Huge numbers of the names of
"Palestinian" Arab villages and towns are slightly-modified Hebrew
names. It is difficult to dig in the ground of "Palestine" without
uncovering Jewish artifacts, some thousands of years old. Meanwhile,
two-thirds of Mandatory Palestine’s territory had been sliced off
in the 1920s and used to set up Jordan, an Arab Palestinian state
much larger than Israel. The remaining territory, Western Palestine,
was to become the Jewish homeland. That was the original "two-state
solution," the same "innovation" now being promoted for the Western
third of the remaining part of Palestine.
3. Falsehood: There is no Palestinian state today because of Israeli
aggression and obstinacy.
Truth: There is no Palestinian state today because of Arab aggression
and obstinacy. In late 1947, the United Nations approved by a
two thirds majority a proposal to create in to create in Western
"Palestine" two states to replace the British Mandatory regime
there. One would be Jewish and the other a Palestinian Arab state. The
Jews agreed. The Arabs rejected the idea. The Arab states launched an
attack of genocidal aggression against the Jews, invaded "Palestine"
and gobbled up the lands earmarked for the Arab Palestinian state. Most
of those lands were then held illegally by Jordan and semi-legally by
Egypt until 1967 when they were liberated by Israel in the Six Day
War. The Arab world has maintained a state of war with Israel since
1948, refusing to recognize its legitimacy, and attacking Israel over
and over in a series of wars and terrorism campaigns. The Arab states
attacked Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, and sponsored
terrorist atrocities against Jews in Israel since it was created. The
reason for the attack which produced the first Arab-Israeli war in
1948 is exactly the same thing that stands in the way of any real
peace settlement today.
4. Falsehood: Israel conducted "ethnic cleansing" of the Palestinian
Arabs in 1948-49.
Truth: The Arab states conducted ethnic cleansing of Jews after
1948. About a million Jews were expelled by Arab states, their property
stolen, and most then became citizens of Israel. Palestinian Arabs
became refugees in 1948-49 as a direct result of the Arab war of
aggression against Israel, in which the Palestinians participated. The
estimated number of such Arab refugees varies between 400,000 and
750,000, with the former the more likely correct estimate. Afterwards,
many were quietly allowed to return to Israel. Hundreds of thousands of
Arabs from other Arab countries then declared themselves "Palestinian
refugees" in order to get handouts from the UN and other international
relief organizations. The actual Palestinian Arabs became refugees for
the same reason that ethnic Germans living in Eastern Europe became
refugees after World War II: because they were on the losing side of
the war of aggression launched by their own political leaders.
5. Falsehood: Israel is an apartheid regime and mistreats Arabs.
Truth: Israel is the only Middle East country that is NOT an apartheid
regime. Arabs living under Israeli rule are the only Arabs in the
Middle East who enjoy freedom of speech and of the press, free access
to courts operating with due process, legal protection for property
rights and the right to vote. Israeli Arabs have higher standards
of education and health than any other group of Arabs in the Middle
East. Israeli Arabs are quite simply the best-treated political
minority in the Middle East and are in some ways better treated than
are minority groups in many European countries. Israel is the only
country in the Middle East that does NOT deal with Islamist terror
through wholesale massacres of the people in whose midst the terrorists
operate 6. Falsehood: Arabs engage in aggression and terrorism because
Israel occupies territories.
Truth: Israel occupies territories (that had been controlled by Jordan
and Egypt before 1967) because of Arab aggression and terrorism. Had
the Arabs made peace with Israel after 1949, the West Bank and Gaza
would have remained under the hegemony of Arabs and they could
easily have erected a Palestinian Arab state there any time they
wished. Instead, they attacked Israel in an attempt at genocidal
extermination in 1967 and they lost.
7. Falsehood: The Middle East conflict is and has always been based
on Israeli opposition to Palestinian self-determination.
Truth: The Middle East conflict is and has always been based on
Arab opposition to Israeli-Jewish self-determination. There is
one and only one cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, even if that
single cause is buried beneath an avalanche of media mud designed
to obfuscate and confuse. That single cause is the refusal of the
Arab world to come to terms with Israel’s existence within any set
of borders whatsoever. The cause of the war is Arab refusal to come
to terms with Jewish self-determination in any form whatsoever. The
Middle East conflict is not about the right of self-determination of
"Palestinian Arabs," but rather it is about the Arab rejection of
self-determination for Israeli Jews. For a century, the Arabs have
attempted to block Jewish self-determination, using violence.
No Palestinians before 1967 demanded any "homeland," although they
did demand that the Jews be stripped of theirs. That is because
Palestinians are not a "people" at all and do not consider themselves
such, any more than do the Arabs of Paris or of Detroit. Palestinians
never had any real interest in their own state, and in fact rioted
violently in 1920 when "Palestine" was detached from Syria by the
European powers. Indeed the original term "Nakba" ("catastrophe" in
Arabic and in leftist NewSpeak) was coined to refer to the outrage of
Palestinians separated from their Syrian homeland. Immediately after
the Six Day War a sudden need for a Palestinian state was fabricated
by the Arab world, as a gimmick to force Israel back to its pre-1967
borders. Israel would then again be ten-miles wide at its narrowest,
and so prepped for the new Arab assault of annihilation and genocide.
The Arab world invented the "Palestinian people" so that it would
serve the same role as the Sudeten Germans did in the late 1930s. That
role was to provide a pretense of legitimacy for the war aims and
aggression of a large fascist power. The term "self-determination"
has been repeated as a rhetorical "inalienable right" for so
long that few people recall that pursuing "self-determination"
can also serve as a tool of aggression by barbarous aggressors and
totalitarian powers. When Hitler decided to go on a war of conquest
in the late 1930s, he dressed up his intentions in the cloak of
legitimacy, merely "helping disenfranchised and oppressed people
attain self-determination." He distorted the plight of ethnic
Germans living in the Czech Sudetenland and elsewhere in Eastern
Europe, inventing tales of mistreatment. In reality of course these
ethnic Germans already had the option of "self-determination"
within the neighboring, sovereign German nation-states, and in
fact enjoyed far more freedom and rights than did Germans inside
Germany. Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia was prepared through
postured indignity over the mistreatment of Germans by Germany’s
neighbors. Hitler insisted he was simply seeking to relieve the
"misery of mistreated ethnic Germans," supposedly suffering inside
democratic Czechoslovakia. "Self-determination" was also the pretense
when Germany attacked Poland and other countries.
The Arab world decided that the "Palestinians" must play the role
of Sudetens, serving as the political and moral pretense for Arab
aggression and Islamofascist imperialism. The Arab fascists then
misrepresent themselves as pursuing noble efforts at protecting
a mistreated oppressed minority group of Arabs in need of
"self-determination."
8. Falsehood: Palestinian terrorism has been a response to Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and as a response to Israeli
settlements there.
Truth: Palestinian terrorism against Jews began in the 1920s, escalated
in the 1930s, continued non-stop in the 1940s even in the midst of
World War II, and reached heights of barbarism in the 1950s. All this
was long before Israel "occupied" anything. The PLO was set up long
before the Six Day War, meaning before Israel "occupied" the West
Bank and Gaza, and before those areas held a single Israeli settlement.
9. Falsehood: Israel has no right to build settlements in the West
Bank.
Truth: Israel has as much right to build settlements in the West Bank
as France has to build towns in Alsace and Lorraine, or as Poland has
to build in areas that once held ethnic Germans. The Arabs launched
a series of wars of aggression against Israel and lost. Aggressors
who lose a war also lose territory. The bulk of Jewish "settlers"
are actually Israelis living in the suburbs of Jerusalem that were
constructed after 1967. A handful of small rural "settlements"
have been constructed in empty West Bank lands from which no Arab
civilians were evicted. In any real peace settlement, Jews would have
as much right to live in the West Bank as Arabs have to live inside
Israel. A peace accord that rules out such an arrangement would be
no peace accord at all.
10. Falsehood: The Middle East conflict continues because Israel
refuses to share its land and resources with Palestinians.
Truth: The Middle East conflict continues because the Arab world
refuses to share its land and resources with Jews. It is about the
absolute refusal of the Arab world to acquiesce in the existence of
any Jewish-majority political entity within any set of borders in the
Middle East. The Arabs today control 22 countries and territory nearly
twice the size of the United States (including Alaska), whereas Israel
cannot be seen on most globes or maps. Arabs as an ethnic group control
more territory than any other ethnic group on earth. They refuse to
share even a fraction of one percent of the Middle East with the Jews,
even in a territory smaller than New Jersey. Without the West Bank,
Israel at its narrowest point is less than 10 miles wide, about the
length of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The main reason the Arab world
demands that Israel relinquish the West Bank to Palestinian terrorism
is so that it can be used to attack Israel again and so that Israel
can at last be militarily annihilated. The Arab world controls such
vast amounts of territory and such vast amounts of wealth (thanks to
petroleum) that it could have created a "homeland" for Palestinian
Arabs anywhere within its territories at any time.
11. Falsehood: Israel deals with Palestinian violence and terrorism
using excessive disproportionate force.
Truth: The number of innocent Palestinian civilians intentionally
killed by Israel is exactly zero. The number of civilians injured
in Israeli anti-terror operations is tiny when compared with NATO
and Allied military operations in Serbia, Bosnia, Afghanistan,
or Iraq. Given the near universal support among Palestinians for
terrorist atrocities against Jews, the self-restraint and moderation
used by Israel in dealing with the threat has no precedent in the
world. Israel’s own Arabs make little attempt to hide their open
identification with the genocidal enemies of their own country and they
by and large support the annihilation of the state in which they hold
citizenship. No other democratic country facing such open sedition
and identification with the enemy in time of war ever responded with
anywhere near the same restraint as shown by Israel. In World War
II, when faced with a far less-dangerous problem, the United States
locked up its ethnic-Japanese domestic population in internment
camps. Democratic Spain set up teams of death squads to deal with
its separatist terrorists. Democracies in war have junked habeas
corpus and treated their internal Fifth Columns as the enemy, with
no hesitation or squeamishness.
Democratic Czechoslovakia and India (as well as non-democratic
countries throughout Eastern Europe) undertook wholesale expulsions of
millions of members of their internal ethnic minorities who had sided
with the enemy. Greece and Turkey and the two sections of Cyprus
simply expelled altogether their minority populations. Israel, in
contrast, operates affirmative action programs that benefit Arabs,
finances Arabic-language schools in which Israeli Arabs preserve and
develop their culture, overfunds Arab municipalities, and turns a
blind eye to massive Arab sedition and lawbreaking, including with
regard to illegal mass squatting on publicly-owned lands. Israel is
a Western democracy with a Scandinavian style social welfare system,
the only democracy in the Middle East. It is hard to come up with
words to mock satisfactorily the ludicrous nature of the complaints
about Israeli "mistreatment" of Arabs. These complaints come from
the very same people who are apologists for genocidal Islamofascist
terrorist movements and for the Arab fascist states, regimes that are
among the most barbarous and openly war-seeking on earth. The endless
complaints about "human rights violations" of the "Palestinians" by
Israel are a rhetorical part of the broader campaign of aggression
against Israeli survival. Arabs living under Israeli rule are the
world’s foremost illustration of "Moynihan’s Law," which holds:
"The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always
an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights
violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints
being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country."
12. Falsehood: Israel can achieve peace by trading "Land for Peace"
and by relinquishing territories that it "occupies."
Truth: Every time Israel relinquishes territory it "occupies"
it triggers an escalation of terror and violence by Arabs against
Jews. The main cause of anti-Israel terrorism today is the removal
of Israeli occupation from Arabs. This is so obvious that it is a
major intellectual challenge to explain why so few people understand
it. Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in its entirety
in 2004 and evicted all Jews who had been living there. The complete
Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip produced a barrage of thousands
of rockets aimed at Israeli civilians inside Israel (NOT in the
"occupied territories"), a barrage that eventually forced Israel’s
reluctant leaders to carry out the "Cast Lead" operation against Gaza
terrorism. The Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon was unilaterally
ended in the year 2000 by then-Israeli socialist Prime Minister Ehud
Barak. The direct result of that fiasco was the launching of 4,000
Katyusha rockets from Lebanon against northern Israel in the summer of
2006, and several times that number now poised to strike Israel. The
worst waves of Palestinian suicide attacks were directly triggered by
the early Oslo withdrawals – before which there had been no suicide
bombings. There can be no doubt that a complete Israeli withdrawal from
the West Bank and a return to pre-1967 borders would trigger a massive
rocket and terror assault against the remaining areas of Israel,
launched from the "liberated" lands in the West Bank. The same thing
would result from Israel relinquishing the Golan Heights to Syria.
13. Falsehood: The Zionist Lobby exercises excessive influence and
dictates policies to the United States, protecting Israel from just
criticism.
Falsehood: The anti-Zionist Lobby exercises excessive influence and
dictates policies to the United States, protecting Palestinians, Arab
fascist regimes, and Islamofascism from just criticism. While the
media overflow with nonsensical talk about a "Zionist/Israel Lobby,"
it would only be a small exaggeration to claim that there is no such
thing at all. The anti-Zionist lobby binds together anti-Semites
and fanatics, ranging from Islamists, to the radical Left to the
Neo-Nazi Right. There is little today that separates anti-Zionism
from anti-Semitism and I have never met an anti-Zionist who was not
also an anti-Semite. (Jewish leftist anti-Zionists are the self-hating
moral equivalents of Taliban John and Tokyo Rose).
14. Falsehood: The Middle East conflict can be resolved through
"Two States for Two Peoples."
Truth: The "Two States for Two Peoples" idea is not a solution at
all but simply a strategy for weakening Israel and forcing it behind
indefensible borders. Right after "Two States for Two Peoples" would
be implemented, the new "Palestinian state" would invite the rest
of the Arab world to finish off what remains of Israel. Even the
"moderates" within the PLO insist that any "Israel" left standing
within "Two States for Two Peoples" must be flooded by Arab migrants
and stripped of its Jewish majority, in effect converted to yet another
Arab Palestinian state. The Arabs still condition any "two-state
solution" on Israel agreeing to being flooded with Arab immigrants
purporting to be Palestinians, so that it will morph demographically
into the 24th Arab state. Israel obviously cannot agree. Israel would
be blanketed in rocket and mortar fire from "Palestine" and waves of
Arab terrorist infiltrators into Israel would raise the carnage to
unprecedented levels.
That such a "two-state solution" will not end the conflict, but
only signal the commencement of its next stage, has long been the
quasi-official position of virtually all Palestinian groups. These
have long insisted that any two-state solution is but a stage in a
"plan of stages," after which will come additional steps ultimately
ending Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. The "two-state solution"
is no more realistic an option today than it was in 1948, when it was
militarily squashed by the Arab states, terrorists, and armies. It is
ultimately as much of an existential threat to Jewish survival in the
Middle East today as the so-called "one-state solution," favored by
the anti-Semitic Left, in which Israel is replaced by a Rwanda-like
bi-national entity controlled by Arabs, in which the Jewish problem
will be resolved in a Rwanda-style manner.
Creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel would be a major step
in the escalation of the Arab war against Israel’s existence, even
if that war is delayed for a brief time while the world celebrates
the outbreak of a Potemkin "peace" in the Middle East produced by
the end of Israeli "occupation" of "Palestinians."
Since the Oslo "peace process" began in the early 1990s, the working
hypothesis endorsed by nearly everyone on the planet (including large
numbers of IQ-challenged Israeli politicians) has been that the most
urgent task at hand is to end the Israeli "occupation" of Palestinian
Arabs. The problem is that ANY Palestinian state, regardless of
who rules it, will produce nothing but escalated violence, terror
and warfare in the Middle East, certainly not stability or peaceful
relations. It will seek war with the rump Israel, and will seek to
draw the entire Moslem world into that war. It will be indifferent
to the economic and social problems of its own citizens.
Humans seem to have a basic impatience with hearing the truth repeated
over long periods of time. In an era in which technology, politics,
and science change so rapidly, many consider it to be implausible
that a statement that had been true 60 years ago could still be true
today. Surely, they insist, explanations from the past, such as those
of the Middle East conflict, must be obsolete by now, replaced with
new updated "theories" and more-modern perceptions of reality.
The result of all this is pseudo-history, where people invent new
"theories" about some of the most widely-accepted truths of history. No
subject has been subject to quite so much pseudo-historic revisionism
and denial of "out-of date" truths as the Middle East. George Orwell
once said that the first duty of intelligent men is to restate the
obvious. Obvious truths need to be restated because they are under
assault by so many dishonest men.
The Palestinians have no legitimate claim to a right to set up their
own state, and creation of such a state would result in escalated
warfare and bloodshed, not peace. There was never in history an Arab
Palestinian state. Even if such a right ever existed, the Palestinians
– like the Sudeten Germans – would have forfeited it thanks to decades
of terrorism, savagery, mass murders and barbarism. Their pacification
today requires reimposing of martial rule by Israel and a thorough
program of Denazification.
The promotion of a "Two States for Two Peoples" solution has
radicalized and Nazified most Israeli Arabs, who now identify with
and openly support Arab parties and politicians openly calling for
violence against Jews and for the destruction of Israel. The "solution"
is a recipe for more bloodshed and strife.
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