Eretz Israel is our unforgettable historic homeland...The Jews who will it shall achieve their State...And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind. (Theodor Herzl, DerJudenstaat, 1896)

We offer peace and amity to all the neighbouring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The State of Israel is ready to contribute its full share to the peaceful progress and development of the Middle East.
(From Proclamation of the State of Israel, 5 Iyar 5708; 14 May 1948)

With a liberal democratic political system operating under the rule of law, a flourishing market economy producing technological innovation to the benefit of the wider world, and a population as educated and cultured as anywhere in Europe or North America, Israel is a normal Western country with a right to be treated as such in the community of nations.... For the global jihad, Israel may be the first objective. But it will not be the last. (Friends of Israel Initiative)

Tuesday 31 May 2011

The History Men: Truth versus Falsehood

Historical revisionism is becoming a lethal weapon of the Palestinian Authority.  You may recall that the map on the PA's London Embassy website shows the whole of Israel as "Palestine".   http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/05/paint-it-black-and-green-and-red-that.html

Pro-Palestinian groups in the West enthusiastically aid and abet historical revisionism, and what was conceived as the national liberation movement of the Jewish People is routinely presented as an ugly and unacceptable manifestation of European colonialism.

As with this poster, Israel's ill-wishers even stoop to appropriating travel posters designed for the Yishuv by refugee from Hitlerism Franz Krausz, as if those posters were the work of Arabs and in order to advance the notion that "Palestine" (incorporating all of Eretz Israel) was, and should again be, an autonomous Arab land.

Earlier this year, Bibi Netanyahu gave a trademark impressive speech in Jerusalem to a visiting contingent of European Friends of Israel.

As proves so often the case, he manifested his obviously deep and genuine feel for history.

In the course of his address, he noted:
"Now people say, well, you don't really have an attachment to this land.  We are new interlopers.  We are neo-crusaders.... [F]rom the place next to the Temple wall, the Western Wall from around the time of the Jewish kings, they found a signet ring, a seal of a Jewish official from 2700 years ago, and it has a name on it in Hebrew.  You know what that name is? Netanyahu.  Now, that's my last name.
 My first name, Benjamin, goes back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin the son of Jacob who with his brothers roamed these very hills.  So we have some connection with this land but we recognize that others live in it too.  We want to make peace with them but we have this basic millenial connection to this land. 
 Part of the campaign against Israel is the attempt to distort not only modern history, but also ancient history.  There was no Jewish Temple - did you hear that one?
Well, I'd like to know where were those tables that
Jesus overturned? Were they in Tibet? There's an attempt to rewrite
history - ancient and modern and to deprive the Jewish people of their
connection to their ancestral homeland ..."
Mahmoud Abbas is not averse to distorting history - as witness that despicable doctoral dissertation of his, completed in the Soviet Union in 1982 and published in book form a couple of years later as The Other Side of the Secret Relationship Between Zionism and Nazism.  Not only does it allege that Zionists, eager for as many victims of genocide as possible in order to advance their aims, were in cahoots with the Nazis, it suggests that the actual number of Jews who perished in the Shoah was perhaps less than one million.

 Disturbingly, this dissertation, with its obscene tissue of lies, has enjoyed wide circulation in the Palestinian Authority, forming the basis of Holocaust studies there.  See http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/143752

In Gaza on "Nakba Day," a fiery representative of Abbas deliversed the latter's speech that stated, with forked tongue: 
"National reconciliation [between Hamas and Fatah] is required in order to face Israel and Netanyahu. We say to him [Netanyahu], when he claims - that they [Jews] have a historical right dating back to 3000 years BCE - we say that the nation of Palestine upon the land of Canaan had a 7000 year history BCE. This is the truth, which must be understood and we have to note it, in order to say: 'Netanyahu, you are incidental in history. We are the people of history. We are the owners of history.'"
Comments Elad Benari:
"The Palestinian Authority leadership, while telling the world it supports peace talks with Israel, continues to say otherwise when talking to its people through its own television channels....
The canard that Palestinians are Canaanites was claimed by Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi tens of years ago in National Geographic and received with amusement. The Canaanites, as well as the other peoples mentioned in the Bible as living in the parts of the land of Israel, disappeared as distinguishable nations thousands of years ago. Except for the Jewish people, they are untraceable today.
... Abbas’ so-called history is a brazen distortion of known facts. Judean and Israeli history in the Land of Israel, says the report, dates back thousands of years and is documented by ancient Jewish and non-Jewish sources.
"Palestinians", however, is a term that has only recently begun to be used to identify Arabs in the region ...
There is no reference to a Palestinian-Arab nation in antiquity as Abbas claims. ... Islamic sources as well do not refer to Palestinians. In fact, the holy Muslim book, the Quran, refers to the people of Israel and to the destruction of their Temple in Jerusalem.'
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/144470

Read more: http://cifwatch.com/2011/05/29/the-myth-of-historically-arab-east-jerusalem/

Meanwhile, correspondents from that terrible twosome, The Guardian and Al Beeb, just happen to have been taking tours of the abandoned Arab village of Lifta [pictured], west of Jerusalem, with the same Arab guide, Yacoub Odeh, and - quelle surprise! - have slanted their reports accordingly.

As Simon Plosker observes:


'Both media outlets seem determined to bring the focus of the Arab-Israeli conflict back to the events of 1947/8 – a tactic employed by the Palestinians to present Israel as being “born in sin” and responsible for the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians and the creation of the refugee problem. [My emphasis]
The fact that one Yacoub Odeh is the former Lifta resident guiding the BBC’s Wyre Davies and the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood separately would suggest that this “tour” was a well-organized effort offered to the international media and eagerly picked up by those outlets sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative from 1948.'
 Harriet Sherwood has made serious errors, points out Plosker:  She wrote:
"Out of sight of Lifta's ruins, but built on its former farmlands are the Knesset (Israel's parliament), the supreme court, the Hadassah hospital, the Hebrew University and [Jerusalem's] central bus station."
 In fact, the Knesset was built not on Arab farnland but on a plot leased from the Greek Orthodox Church, while the other institutions referred to are located some distance from Lifta.
Read more and view video:  http://honestreporting.com/backspin-blog/
See also:http://www.oyvagoy.com/2011/05/30/the-lifta-question/ 

Al Beeb's Yolande Knell, also milks the lachrymose Lifta angle:
'Its 3,000 residents were forced out or fled in fighting that erupted before the creation of Israel in 1948, which Palestinians view as the "nakba" or catastrophe. They were not allowed to move back....'
Her online article comes complete with a photo - a mutely accusatory piece of propaganda, by the seem of it - of Israelis enjoying a picnic in Lifta, where there are plans for "a luxury housing project".

Ms Knell concludes with the observation that "the most contentious points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" are "the right of return and the struggle to control the historical narrative".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13373719

Like the Palestine Solidarty Campaign and similar bodies, as well as Al Grauniad, Al Beeb appears to be doing its best to ensure that the latter is a struggle that Israel loses.

2 comments:

  1. Like it or not, today's Palestinians are descendants of the Canaanites. BTW, migrants from the Arabian Peninsula arrived in what we know as Palestine around 3500 BCE

    As Professor Ilene Beatty, the late highly renowned historian/anthropologist and specialist on the Holy Land, put it: "[being of] Canaanite origin, Palestinians have priority; their descendants have continued to live there, which gives them continuity; and (except for the 800,000 dispossessed refugees [of 1948 (as determined by Israeli officials at the time), not including the hundreds of thousands subsequently expelled]), they are still living there, which gives them present possession. Thus we see that on purely statistical grounds they have a proven legal right to their land." (Ilene Beatty - Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan, 1957)

    Apparently, you are not aware that during the fifth century BCE, the "Father of History," Herodotus and other Greek and Latin scholars began referring to the Philistine coastland, and later the territory between it and the Jordan Valley as "Palestine." Early in their rule, the Romans referred to the region around Jerusalem as Palaestina and in turn, the Byzantines named the region or province west of the Jordan River, from Mount Carmel in the north to the Gaza Strip in the south, Palaestina Prima. The inhabitants (descendants of the Canaanites) gradually became known as Palestinians and soon after the seventh century CE, as Palestinian Arabs, regardless of religion. Over the years Arabic became the dominant language and although many Christians kept their faith (as did the great majority of the small Jewish population), Islam became the principle religion.

    When the Muslim Arabs arrived in Palestine (and liberated its Jewish population from Byzantine Christian oppression, as they would later in southern Spain when they freed Jews from Catholic oppression), they retained the administrative organization of the territory of Palestine as it had been under the Romans and later, the Byzantines. They named the territory Djund Filastin.

    European tourist books of the nineteenth century refer to "Palestine," as did Theodor Herzl in his correspondence and of course, the Balfour Declaration.

    Of course, this is all moot. However the continuous inhabitants refer to themselves ("Palestinians" being the accepted term), they are the indigenous people with uninterrupted roots going back nearly 6000 years and the true owners of Mandated Palestine.

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  2. Bottom line: The United Kingdom of Israel under Solomon and David (if they ever actually existed, i.e., no archaeological evidence or contemporaneous writing has been found that they did) lasted a mere 72 years, a grain of sand on the beach when compared to other peoples, including the Palestinians (descendants of the Canaanites) who have established civilizations in historic Palestine. You Zionists live in a make-believe world. Thankfully, your colonization of Palestine is in its death throes. Israel is an historical anoachronism, a blip in history. It will inevitably drown in a sea of Arabs.

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