An article by David Meir-Levi picks its way through the myths that are believed about Israel’s ‘occupation’ and the reality. It explodes the myth that the quarrel is about a state for the ‘Palestinians’; the only reason why the Arabs of the territories do not have a state of their own is because although they were repeatedly offered it by both the international community and Israel itself, they repeatedly blocked it. As he writes:

‘In high-handed defiance of the UN partition plan, they launched a war of aggression which, by their own public rhetoric, was to be a war of annihilation. Their intent was not the correction of some border dispute or the reclamation of some turf lost in an earlier battle. Their vociferously ballyhooed intention was the destruction of the newly created State of Israel, and the genocide of its 605,000 Jews. Much to their chagrin, they lost. And in losing, they lost much of the territory which the UN had designated for the state of Palestine. However, the remainder of what was to have been Palestine (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) never became the State of Palestine. Rather, Egypt maintained illegal occupation of the Gaza Strip, and Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank, both in high-handed defiance of international law and UN resolutions 181 and 194. There was no Arab or Palestinian protest over this. ‘To add to the Arabs’ chagrin, they were faced in 1949 with an Israeli offer of peace. In exchange for a formal peace treaty, Israel would return much of the land conquered in the war and allow the repatriation of some substantive portion of the Arab refugees created by the war (Rhodes Armistice talks, February – July, 1949). Had the Arab nations been willing to accept the UN partition plan, or had they been willing to accept the Israeli peace offer, not only would there have been a State of Palestine since 1949, but there would never have been an Arab refugee problem. But the Arab response was NO PEACE. The refugees will return to their homes only when they can fly the flag of Palestine over the corpses of the Jews. Better our Palestinian brethren should rot in squalid refugee camps than that we should acknowledge a non-Arab state in our midst. As in 1937, Arab leadership rejected the possibility of a Palestinian state in favor of continued aggression against Israel. It was not the creation of the State of Israel that caused the refugee and other subsequent problems; it was the war of annihilation waged by the Arab states that snuffed out the second opportunity for the creation of a Palestinian state.’

The article explodes the myth of Palestinian identity; the Arabs who lived in what is now Israel and the West Bank arrived in huge number only because the Jews were developing waste land which they had bought, not stolen, from the Arabs and creating prosperity; these Arabs never thought of themselves as Palestinians at all — the term was reserved for the Jews — but as Arabs from a single Arab nation. As the article states:

‘In a March 31, 1977 interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Dagblad de Verdieping Trouw, PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhse’in said: “The Palestinian people does 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. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. 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. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.’

This is the truth which the useful idiots of the west completely fail to grasp — that the whole ‘Palestinian state’ grievance is a cynical fabrication, used by genocidal Arab regimes as a proxy for a conventional war of annihilation against Israel which they know they cannot win. This is, as it has always been, a war waged by the Arab states against the existence of Israel, in flagrant contravention since 1948 of the will of the world community. The Arabs of the territories have been used as pawns in this strategy, kept by the Arab states as displaced persons and brainwashed with demented lies about the Jews and incitement to murder them. The bodies of the Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza have literally been turned into the smart bombs of the Arab League’s arsenal.

Much of the animosity directed against Israel in the UK is fuelled by total ignorance of this history, and the utterly false belief promoted by Arab propaganda that there is such a thing as a Palestinian people whose land this was and which was stolen from them by the Jews to appease the conscience of Europe after the Holocaust. Meir-Levi’s article is a necessary antidote to that malevolent ignorance.

Posted by melanie at June 24, 2005