Professorial Truths Regarding Palestinian Propaganda (updated: relevant video)

Well said, that wag!

In July this year, in a predictably vain attempt to dissuade the ALP (Australian Labor Party) conference from adopting such a motion, the ABC's Religion and Ethics website carried this article by Professor Alan Johnson of BICOM arguing against unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state.

Among the professor's many excellent points were these simple truthes:

'The inconvenient truth is that Israel accepted the case for Palestinian statehood long ago, but it refuses to commit national suicide. So it insists on negotiating three things with the Palestinians:

 genuine mutual recognition - the deal must create two states for two peoples, with Israel recognised as the homeland of the Jewish people, and Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinian people;

security guarantees - so the West Bank does not become a launching pad for a continued terror war on Israel; and

a commitment by the Palestinians that the deal is a final status agreement, or what is called the "end of conflict."

The Palestinians have so far refused to negotiate recognition. They will not accept that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people. They demand the full and untrammelled "right of return" for millions of Palestinian refugees, and their children and later descendants ad infinitum, which would mean the end of Israel and the creation of yet another Arab state, in which the Jews would have to take their chances as a minority. This is not an especially attractive prospect given the treatment of minorities throughout the Middle East.

Nor have the Palestinians negotiated Israel's legitimate security needs. Instead, the Palestinian Authority has entered a unity agreement with an unreformed and fascistic Hamas, which is committed to Israel's destruction. It is not enough to agree to demilitarization, as the proposers argue. In a collapsing Middle East, with Islamic State taking over in failed states, the ongoing security of the West Bank - the high ground that sits above Israel's population centres - is what must be negotiated.'

In response, the longtime Palestinian lobbyist in Australia, Ali Kazak, wrote this outrageous screed.

Its tone and thrust is exemplified by this despicable allegation: "[T]he aim of Zionism has been to colonise all of Palestine and parts of the neighbouring Arab states, and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people".

Now, another pro-Israel professor, the peerless Denis MacEoin, has written in characteristic fashion a masterly piece which demolishes Ali Kazak's structure to its very foundations.  Inter alia, he notes:

'As far back as 1906, the young Ben Gurion wrote that "The Jewish settlement is not designed to undermine the position of the Arab community; on the contrary, it will salvage it from its economic misery, lift it from its social decline, and rescue it from physical and moral degeneration. Our renaissance in Palestine will come through the country's regeneration, that is: the renaissance of its Arab inhabitants."

Throughout his life, Ben Gurion made many such comments, constantly pleading with the Arabs to live and work alongside the Jews to create a flourishing state. Why does Kazak mention none of these, but substitutes a falsified, mistranslated, and deceitful quotation to "prove" that the Jews were intent from the beginning on expelling the Arabs?

Written while a civil war launched by the Arabs still raged, and as five Arab nations prepared to invade the new state, Israel's Declaration of Independence reads in part:

We appeal - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East. 

.... In truth, there has been and still is a tiny minority of Zionists who cling to the fantasy of a Jewish state embracing the Biblical region from eastern Egypt to northern Arabia. But to present this as evidence that Zionists as a whole hold such views is deeply misleading. When I say "a minority," I really mean it. After 1967, a movement and political party named The Movement for Greater Israel emerged, and in 1969 it stood in a general election. It received 0.6% of the vote, below the electoral threshold of 1%, and collapsed.

Kazak weaves a fiction of malign Zionist aims to take over territories beyond the borders of Israel, when all the Jewish people as a whole ever wanted to do was have a state of their own.

By 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made the country's position clear when speaking to his cabinet: "Greater Israel is over. There is no such thing. Anyone who talks that way is deluding themselves." It is not hard to conclude that Ali Kazak is one of the deluded.

Kazak's fantasy about a Greater Israel is false, yet he does not so much as breathe a word about the most popular slogan used by Palestinians and their supporters abroad: "Palestine will be free From the river to the Sea." All Palestinian maps show this same thing: a Palestine stretching from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. The slogan and the maps show one thing: no Israel. To call for the extinction of a people and country is a threat of genocide, something the Jews of all people have never called for and will never urge.

The notion that all Zionists and Jews want to build a Greater Israel has disturbing echoes of one of the hoariest and most frequently dismissed myths of anti-Semitism: that the Jews control everything and have taken over everything from banking to the film industry, to all the wars and revolutions, even entire governments. This was an evil conspiracy theory constructed by the Russian secret police to justify their pogroms and later promulgated by the Nazis to explain their extermination of six million human beings. It is shameful even to hint at it.'

Update: This video of raucous Israel-haters outside the Egyptian Embassy in London yesterday deliciously proves the professor's point about the true aims of the "Free Palestine" crowd:

See what I mean?

Video credit: Seymour Alexander

Read Denis MacEoin's entire article here

Hat tip: Ian G.

Meanwhile, in Australia more pro-Palestinian state recognition propaganda afoot. Better have the corn plasters ready.

An absent-minded dictionary?