How Arab-Israel history was rewritten

The west remains in denial how it became the Soviet Union’s most lethal useful idiot

Yasser Arafat with Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu, Bucharest, 1974

The unprecedented UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry into allegations of war crimes and human rights abuses by Israel, which I wrote about here, appears to be intent on pinning upon Israel the lie of “apartheid”.

This evil initiative, designed to use this grotesque libel to demonise and delegitimise Israel and thus pave the way for its destruction, has been received in the west with monumental indifference. That’s because it rests upon the big lie about Israel which has become accepted in dominant cultural circles as unchallengeable fact.

The big lie is that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the land, that the Jews were the colonisers who deprived them of their rights and that the Israelis continue to oppress them.

Every part of this is untrue. The Jews are the only extant indigenous people of the land and the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom. The Arab and Muslim world merely constituted one of the waves of colonial occupiers of that land. Israel is the victim of Arab and Muslim war crimes and existential attack, not the other way round. And so on.

Many are bewildered by the way in which the campaign to demonise and delegitimise Israel ever got such traction. How can so many people have fallen for such egregious lies? How can the war by the Arab and Muslim world to annihilate Israel have been transformed into the demonstrable nonsense of Israel’s oppression of the “Palestinians”?

Accounts setting out the historical truth are either ignored or tend to be disbelieved. People choose to believe instead the opposing “narrative’ provided by Palestinian propaganda and its echo-chamber in western universities.

But it’s much harder to brush aside what people involved in this situation over the years have actually said. Which is why a recent article by Peter Baum in Blitz on the false legal claims to the land by the “Palestinians” is particularly illuminating. Baum writes:

In the 19th century, numerous travellers to Palestine testified to its desolate nature and absence of people. James Finn, the British Consul, wrote in 1857:

“The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population”.

Christian travellers to the area in the mid 1800s wrote that Arabs

“Cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it since they were strangers to the land – the desert wind brought them hither”.

When the Jews started to return under the British Mandate to settle them there to restore their ancient homeland, Arabs started to flock in. In the House of Commons in May 1939, Winston Churchill stated

“So far from being persecuted the Arabs have crowded into Palestine and multiplied until their population has increased more than even all world Jewry”.

Now look at what the Arabs themselves said:

Professor Philip Hitti, Arab professor and historian 1946:

“There is no such thing as Palestinians in history, absolutely not”.

Emile Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee interviewed in the Beirut Telegraph, September 6th 1948:

“The Arab countries which had encouraged those Arabs living in Palestine to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promises to help these people”.

The Jordanian daily newspaper Al Urdun, April 9th 1953:

“I could go on and on with this forgotten or deliberately obscured history. But you get the point. There was no Jewish conspiracy to chase Arabs out of their homes in 1948. It never happened. There are instead plenty of historical records showing the Jews pleading with their Arab neighbors to stay and live in peace and harmony. Yet, despite the clear unambiguous words of the Arab observers at the time, history has been successfully rewritten to turn the Jews into the bad guys”.

The Cairo Daily Akhbar el Yom, October 12th 1963:

“For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating the Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs. By spreading rumors of Jewish atrocities, killing of women and children etc. they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs until they fled leaving homes and properties to the enemy”.

So how did this patently false “Palestinian” claim become accepted as fact, underpinning all the other lies about Israel? To answer this, Richard Kemp has written a piece for Gatestone which should be disseminated far and wide.

For he details — again with some crucial quotes — the way in which the “Palestinian” terrorist leader Yasser Arafat (who was in fact Egyptian) made common cause with the Soviet Union to rewrite history, demonise the Jewish people and subvert the west by twisting its collective mind and destroying its moral compass. As Kemp writes:

General Ion Pacepa, chief of Romania’s foreign intelligence service, played a significant role in Soviet bloc operations directed against Israel and the US. In 1978 he became the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet sphere and, among many secret revelations, provided details of KGB operations against Israel.

Pacepa says the chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov (later Brezhnev’s successor as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party), told him:

“We needed to instil a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.”

An important element of Moscow’s anti-Israel/US campaign in the Middle East was a propaganda war. Andropov told Pacepa:

“Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterisation of the US Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.”

In other words, he knew that the Arabs would be easy tools in the anti-Israel propaganda war and were already playing their part. Their work only needed to be focused, intensified and funded.

To achieve its objectives, the Kremlin devised Operation SIG, a disinformation campaign intended “to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the US”. Pacepa reported that by 1978, under Operation SIG, the KGB had sent some 4,000 Soviet bloc “agents of influence” into Islamic countries to help achieve this. They also printed and circulated vast amounts of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda, translated into Arabic…

As well as mobilising the Arabs to the Soviet cause, Andropov and his KGB colleagues needed to appeal to the democratic world. To do so, the Kremlin decided to turn the conflict from one that sought simply to destroy Israel into a struggle for human rights and national liberation from an illegitimate American-sponsored imperialist occupier. They set about transforming the narrative of the conflict from religious jihad — in which Islamic doctrine demands that any land that has ever been under Muslim control must be regained for Islam — to secular nationalism and political self-determination, something far more palatable to Western democracies. This would provide cover for a vicious terrorist war, even garnering widespread support for it.

To achieve their goal, the Soviets had to create a Palestinian national identity that did not hitherto exist and a narrative that Jews had no rights to the land and were naked aggressors. According to Pacepa, the KGB created the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the early 1960s, as they had also orchestrated so-called national liberation armies in several other parts of the world. He says the 1964 Palestinian National Charter was drafted in Moscow. This document was fundamental to the invention and establishment of an artificial Palestinian nationhood.

The initial charter did not claim the West Bank or the Gaza Strip for “Palestine”. In fact, it explicitly repudiated any rights to these lands, falsely recognising them respectively as Jordanian and Egyptian sovereign territories. Instead, the PLO claim was to the rest of Israel. This was amended after the 1967 war, when Israel ejected the illegal Jordanian and Egyptian occupiers, and the West Bank and Gaza for the first time were re-branded as Palestinian territory.

The first mention of a “Palestinian people” to mean Arabs in Palestine appeared in the 1964 charter. Previously, and particularly during the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine 1919-1948, “Palestinians” had been commonly used to describe Jews living in the territory.

Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, admitted in 1977:

“The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.”

This reality has been publicly supported, sometimes inadvertently, in statements by several other Palestinian leaders. Quoted by Alan Hart in his 1984 book, “Arafat: A Political Biography”, PLO leader Yasser Arafat himself said:

“The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasir Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.”

The rest is history — or rather, its rewriting.