The Old "Israel Looted Palestinian Books" Canard Rears Its Ugly Head Again

I see that no less a personage than Dr Nabil Al-Arabi, secretary-general of the Arab League, has claimed at an Arab League function in Cairo attended by representatives of the International Council on Archives as well as by the Palestinian and Egyptian ministers of culture and an array of Arab intellectuals and officials, that "Israel has stolen 80,000 Palestinian books and manuscripts and kept them in its national libraries since 1948".

It's reported that

"Al-Arabi called for efforts to be made to regain archives stolen by imperialist powers with the aim of hiding the Arabic identity and forging its history, mainly the Palestinian history. He stressed the importance of maintaining the Palestinian identity and its manuscripts

He added that some Arab countries, including Algeria, Libya and Iraq are working to regain their archives, which also contains its histories. The Arab League is working on this in cooperation with the ICA.

 Abu Amr [Palestinian Minister of Culture Mr Ziad Abu Amr]said: "The occupation's measures, which have been taking place since the Nakba in 1948 to damage Palestinian culture, information centres, universities and archives of Palestinian institutions, are part of the efforts to hide the Arabic identity of Palestine."...'

As I noted in a couple of years ago, the canard that Israel deliberately misappropriated books belonging to the Palestinian Arabs has been a weapon in the Israel-haters' cachement for some considerable time.

It has gone the rounds of the Israel-demonising propaganda network, appearing, for instance,  here / and here and here

But as that 2012 post of mine declares, in 1948, in an article entitled "Arabs in Israel," Norman Bentwich, Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, noted in regards to the work of the Ministry of Minorities, set up to safeguard the welfare of Arabs (and other non-Jews) in the newly-proclaimed Jewish State:

 'Perhaps the most striking work in the Ministry is its effort to develop cultural life, in the midst of the uneasy truce, for the Arab population. It has already established some fifty primary schools in the towns and villages, with free education. A former Jewish Inspector of the Mandatory Education Department is in charge of the schools; another, an Oriental Jew, with a thorough knowledge of Arabic, assists him. The Ministry has also established one or two Arab clubs for reading and recreation, and has promoted a daily Arabic newspaper, El Yom (The Day). This is the first Arabic daily to appear in Israel. Several of the staff are Arabs, who have full freedom of expression; and some educated Arabs write to the Palestine Post, the English[-language] daily, voicing grievances about rent and employment, and the like.

 A remarkable cultural enterprise is the establishment in Jaffa of an Arab library, which includes close on 100,000 books and periodicals salvaged from private houses that were deserted and broken into during the fighting. It includes, too, some Arab manuscripts from the ninth and tenth centuries, which may have value for scholars. The books and manuscripts are being catalogued by a Jewish scholar of Baghdad. The library is housed in a private mansion of one of the richer Arabs of Jaffa, and there is a project of making it a cultural centre. The whole cost to the Government so far has been only a few hundred pounds.

In Jerusalem 30,000 books were similarly salvaged and handed over for safe-keeping to the [Hebrew] University of Jerusalem. It is likely that the owners of the books will come to identify their property and collect it back; but the action of the Ministry will have prevented looting and destruction, and it has received the appreciation of the Arab population.'

Does that look like deliberate plunder to you?  No, not to me, either.

Read more of the Bentwich article here

Since this looted books story is already being used as anti-Israel propaganda by the usual suspects, it's as well to be reminded that in Hebron in 1929 Jewish manuscripts, including notable ancient documents, were looted from Jewish homes and synagogues. It's possible that some of this loot surfaced among  Jewish manuscripts shown by Arab dealers to the Rockefeller Museum.  Furthermore Jewish homes and synagogues/yeshivot were looted in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1929 and 1936-38; during the latter period, there was a pogrom in the south Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talpiyot, and at least one important Hebrew writer residing there had his books vandalised and looted. (Hat tip: E.)

In For The Kill: Turning Americans against Israel after the Six Day War

"When Israel won her stunning victory in the Six-Day War of June 1967, the American public's reaction brought no joy to the Arab functionaries and sympathizers who had been trying, in a desultory way, to cultivate a body of pro-Arab sentiment in this country. Insofar as Americans had any opinion on the Middle East crisis at all-- and nearly one-half had none—they favored Israel over the Arab states in a ratio of nearly 14 to 1.
 
In moments of candor, Arab diplomats have since acknowledged that inept information methods had much to do with their failure to influence U.S. attitudes. Today, Arab propaganda is being stepped up in tempo and volume, and is becoming increasingly professionalized. (Four Arab governments--Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic—retain professional public relations counsel in this country.) The clumsy, unselective approaches of yesteryear are being replaced by more sophisticated techniques aimed at particular audiences— such as church groups, the student left, or the disaffected blacks."

Thus begins a report prepared in July 1969 for the American Jewish Committee that throws a fascinating light on how Arab propagandists reacted to the challenge of turning American public opinion against the Zionist Entity. 

Titled "Arab Appeals to American Public Opinion Today" the report continues: 

 "Israel clearly continues to enjoy vast good will in America today. Yet in the battle for Americans' minds, the Arabs who, after all, enjoy the same rights as do proponents of any other viewpoint, will no doubt make the most of their opportunities....

Up to the time of the Six-Day War, much Arab propaganda focused on Biblical and legal reasons against the existence of a Jewish state per se. Since then the emphasis has shifted to moral arguments against Israel as an actual entity. Israel is charged with heinous crimes against Arabs within and without her borders, and the Palestine refugee problem is brought up again and again.... [My emphasis here and below]

Official Arab propaganda in this country, as typified by the output of the Arab Information Center, differs quite markedly from Ameri can gutter anti-Semitism with its mythology of omnipresent plots and takeovers. Ostensibly appealing to reason and humanity rather than fear or hysteria, the official line proclaims that Arabs have nothing at all against Judaism and oppose only the "aggressive ideology" of Zionism.

A variety of pamphlets with titles like Zionism and the Bible argue that God did not promise Israel exclusively to the Jews. The old legal arguments, too, are still being hashed over: Britain, it is said, had no right to write the Balfour Declaration and betrayed prior agreements with the Arabs in doing so; President Truman was pressured by wealthy Zionists into approving the UN's Palestine partition plan of 1948; the Zionists, supported by the West, dispossessed the Palestinian people, and in defiance of the UN forced them to lead the desperate lives of stateless refugees.

But since 1967 these arguments have been supplemented by shriller claims. Israel's whole history is now depicted as a series of broken promises and aggressive acts. Even while exploiting the world's sympathy, it is alleged, Israel prevents peace in the Middle East and continues to violate the UN human rights conventions in her treatment of Arab refugees as well as her own Arab citizens. Israel, another accusation runs, has created a distorted image of the Arab by making the world see the Middle East through jaundiced Zionist eyes.

The favorite topic since 1967 has been the status of the Arab refugee, the issue most likely to elicit sympathy, and most easily interpreted in terms of "good guys" vs. "bad guys." Because the ranks of the displaced furnish many or most of the Arab terrorists bent on "liberating" their native soil, the press in the United States has been devoting greater and increasingly sympathetic atten-tion to the refugees. This, the Arab propagandists say, is the part of the emerging "reappraisal" of the Middle East situation which "Zionist control" of the news has supposedly prevented until now....'

This is a fascinating document, illuminating the situation that prevails today in the United States and indeed in other parts of the Western world, especially the English-speaking world.

What particularly interests me is the light the report sheds on the dissemination of anti-Israel propaganda within the Churches:

'An intensive campaign is underway to bring about what one Arab Christian leader has called a "Copernican mental change" in the attitudes of American churches toward Israel. In this campaign, the Arabs and their supporters employ not only anti-Zionism, but also religious anti-Semitism—from sophisticated theological arguments to Nazi slurs and medieval superstitions like the blood libel. Substantial headway has been made, especially among Protestant leaders.

Arab Christians, some under pressure from their governments, use their influence to undermine Western Christian support of Israel. So do American churchmen in the Middle East. A group of Protestant and Orthodox clergymen, operating from Beirut and New York, has prepared and widely distributed a "master strategy plan" calling, inter alia, for cooperation with existing pro-Arab groups and boy- cotts of tours to the Holy Land.

Clergymen, mostly Protestant, have set up national and local organizations to lobby before Congress and to sway public opinion through film showings, pamphlets and letter-to-the-editor campaigns. Perhaps the best known such group is Americans for Middle East Under-standing (New York)—a citizen organization headed by a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Humphrey Walz, which states that its aim is to create a better understanding of how Middle East Affairs affect the interests of the U.S. The group issues a bimonthly journal, The Link.

The Arabs' efforts among organized Christianity have been greatly stepped up since the Six-Day War and now constitute a comprehensive, systematic and well-financed strategy which makes earlier approaches to the churches appear amateurish by contrast. In June 1968, Metropolitan Philip Saliba, the Syrian Antiochian Orthodox Church's Archbishop of New York and North America, reportedly urged Arab nations to double their contributions for "information centers" in the U.S. to $20 million per year (Al Hayat, Beirut, May 28, 1968).

The desired "Copernican mental change" was recently defined by a Lebanese Orthodox leader, Gabriel Habib, who is the Middle East Secretary for the World Student Christian Federation and for the Youth Department of the World Council of Churches. He called for an end to the "scandalous association" of Christianity with Israel, whose existence he called "a new form of Western aggression or a crusade against the Arabs and Islam" (Ecumenical Press Service, December 19, 1968).

The World Council of Churches, a federation of 235 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox denominations, has been subjected to steady pressure. In the wake of the Six-Day War, seven Arab Christian patriarchs and clergymen, from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, called on the Council to condemn Israeli "aggression," and on the "conscience of the Christian West" to recognize that Israel should "cease to exist as a racial state" (June 19 and 27, 1967). The Council responded by sending its Associate General Secretary, Father Paul Verghese, then Bishop-elect of the Syrian Orthodox Church of India, to the Middle East. His mission, as he put it in his report, was to "express solidarity" with the Arabs, "ascertain ... the needs of suffering people," and interpret the "convictions and feelings" of Arabs to the Council.

To help sway Catholic opinion, •the head of the Egyptian Coptic Church, Patriarch Kyrillos VI, reportedly planned to visit Pope Paul VI in the spring of 1969, in a bid for a "unified stand" on the Arab cause and the "liberation" of Jerusalem (Religious News Service, January 8, 1969). The Patriarch's attitude toward Jews is typified by a statement he made at the time of the Second Vatican Council: "The Coptic Church proclaims the Jews' responsibility throughout the ages for crucifying Christ."....'

The report concludes: 

"The impact of all this is not readily measured. Thus far ... it would appear that among those Americans who take any interest in the matter at all, a majority nearly as overwhelming as it was just after the Six-Day War in 1967 remains favorable to Israel. Elsewhere in the Western World, too, Israel apparently retains the sympathies of the bulk of the population. But there are some signs of a shift in this attitude.

In the United States particularly, mounting disillusionment over Vietnam and growing pressures for neutralism may create new openings for Arab spokesmen. Champions of the Arab cause, both covert and official, can be expected to redouble their efforts in the months ahead, in a determined drive to wean Israel's friends among the American public from their present sympathies and to turn the uncommitted into supporters of the Arab hard line against Israel."

Read the entire document here
 (Hat tip: Y.S.)

UNESCO's Cancelled Exhibition Gets The Go-Ahead

Great news, contained in a circular the Simon Wiesenthal Center has sent out to its supporters; let's hope UNESCO means what it says this time:

'The Simon Wiesenthal Center announced today that its joint exhibition with UNESCO, “Book, People, Land - The 3,500 Year Relationship of the Jewish People With the Holy Land”, will open on June 11, 2014, at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The date was confirmed in an exchange of letters between Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO and Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean, Simon Wiesenthal Center [both pictured above, in 2012]. 

“It was simply ludicrous for the 22-Arab states that belong to UNESCO to attempt to torpedo the exhibition, just days before its opening, on the grounds that it interferes with Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to jumpstart the Middle East peace process. Our exhibition, vetted and approved by both the UNESCO and Wiesenthal Center’s teams, had nothing to do with the peace process,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier. 

“It is ironic, that while the Arab League was trying to kill this exhibition and all the attention was focused on Paris, the UN headquarters in New York is hosting an exhibit entitled, ‘Palestine’, based entirely on the Arab narrative, which was not criticized as an interference with Secretary Kerry’s mission.”

The Center wishes to thank the US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, Foreign Minister of Canada John Baird, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, B’nai Birth International, the CRIF, and our many supporters from all over the world for weighing in so strongly. 

The exhibition was written by Hebrew University Professor Robert Wistrich, and co-sponsored by the governments of Canada, Israel and Montenegro. Members of the exhibition’s honorary committee include: Elie Wiesel; Lord Carey of Clifton, former Archbishop of Canterbury; Boualem Sansal, Algerian author; and Professor Irwin Cotler, former Canadian Justice Minister.'

 Read more here

A Tale of Two Rivers: an Anglican vicar tells ...

Those who read Playboy "for the articles" may recall this libel from the mouth of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, in the September 1988 issue of the magazine:

Arafat: ".... Look at the slogans they [Israelis and Zionists] use: that the land of Israel is from the Euphrates to the Nile. This was written for many years over the entrance to the Knesset, the parliament. It shows their national ambition ... Do you know what the meaning of the Israeli flag is?"

Interviewer: "No."

Arafat: "It is white with two blue lines. The two lines represent two rivers, and in between is Israel. The rivers are the Nile and the Euphrates."

Declares the genocidally antisemitic Hamas Covenant, echoed by Hamas leaders:

"After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates" 

 Iran has also wallowed in the libel, as has its proxy, Hezbollah.

As seen on Elder of Ziyon blog here

In March last year, as Elder of Ziyon pointed out on his blog last Friday,  the libel was featured in a  Global Research article here:

'When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing war on Syria, not to mention the process of regime change in Egypt, must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East. The latter consists in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of an Israeli expansionist project.

“Greater Israel” consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates.

The Zionist project supports the Jewish settlement movement. More broadly it involves a policy of excluding Palestinians from Palestine leading to the eventual annexation of both the West Bank and Gaza to the State of Israel.

 Greater Israel would create a number of proxy States. It would include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Sinai, as well as parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia...'

 In a very competent entry regarding the Israeli flag, Wikipedia notes of the 'Greater Israel' canard:

'Both Zionist and anti-Zionist authors have debunked the claim that the stripes on the flag represent territorial ambitions. Daniel Pipes notes "In fact, the blue lines derive from the design on the traditional Jewish prayer shawl", and Danny Rubinstein points out that "...Arafat... added, in interviews that he gave in the past, that the two blue stripes on the Israeli flag represent the Nile and the Euphrates... No Israeli, even those who demonstrate understanding for Palestinian distress, will accept the... nonsense about the blue stripes on the flag, which was designed according to the colours of the traditional tallit (prayer shawl)..." Persistent critic of Israel and Zionism Israel Shahak is equally explicit. In his The Zionist Plan for the Middle East he states

 A good example is the very persistent belief in the non-existent writing on the wall of the Knesset of the Biblical verse about the Nile and the Euphrates. Another example is the persistent, and completely false declarations, which were made by some of the most important Arab leaders, that the two blue stripes of the Israeli flag symbolize the Nile and the Euphrates, while in fact they are taken from the stripes of the Jewish praying shawl (Talit). [My emphasis]

Saqr Abu Fakhr, an Arab writer, has also spoken out against this idea. He writes that the "Nile to Euphrates" claim regarding the flag is one of seven popular misconceptions and/or myths about Jews which, despite being unfounded and having abundant evidence refuting them, continue to circulate in the Arab world.'

A succinct explanation of the design of the flag was given as follows by a religious Jew on a forum where the canard had been raised (and run with):

"I hope you will take this answer as the truth it is and not pay attention to terrorist propaganda.

 The blue stripes in the flag are a reference to the blue stripes of the prayer shawl and the tzit[z]it (fringed garment traditionally worn under or over a shirt) which in turn infer the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky. In Jewish tradition the blue of the sight of the sky and the sea is supposed to bring us to an awareness of G-d's presence."

  To quote Elder of Ziyon here:

"Today, Arabs and antisemites are convinced that the "Greater Israel" plan is alive and well.

How does that jive with the fact that Israel has been doing nothing but giving land up since 1977?"  [My emphasis]

That's a question that Hassan Alkatib should have asked the Rev Stephen Sizer (about whom, incidentally, see a most interesting article by Dexter Van Zile here) when the two met up for a chin wag.

Alkatib, a British Muslim who makes documentaries that are hardly supportive of the Zionist Entity and used to be a reporter for Iran's propaganda outlet Press TV (on which Sizer has not infrequently appeared), blogs here.  Notwithstanding that one of his documentaries promotes Islam as "the final revelation" (which presumably means that Islam has superseded Christianity) Sizer in this video appears delighted to talk to him, the subject of the talk being Sizer's bête noire, Christian Zionism.

Now, the vicar has made a number of eyebrow-raising statements in his time, and he's true to form in the video.  I was, for example, amazed to hear him tell his attentive and receptive Muslim interviewer not once but twice in the course of the interview that kibbutzim were modelled on by the collective farms in Eastern Europe under Communism. 

Oh dear!  Has the vicar not heard of Bilu (an acronym based on a verse in Isaiah: Beit Ya'akov Lekhu Venelkha ("House of Jacob, Let Us Go Up" i.e. in the sense that to go to Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel, is to ascend)?   Does he not know that this movement, founded in the nineteenth century, established the first kibbutz and that the year was 1909, long before the Russian Revolution?

In response, to Alkatib's question as to whether Christian Zionists "see Muslims as a threat":

 "Sadly some do ..."

(I wonder why that is; could this sort of thing and this and this and  this have something to do with it?)

I could cite other eyebrow-raising replies to Alkatib, and indeed there were things that Sizer might have said to his interviewer but did not, as when Alkatib asked him: "Do you think Herzl was inspired by Nazi Germany ... having a country just for one race?"  A resounding condemnation of the mindset that prompted this question would have been nice; instead, it was not directly answered.

But it was when Alkatib asked Sizer about the idea of Greater Israel (from "the Nile to the Euphrates") and whether Christian Zionists really believe in it that I really sat up and took notice.  The vicar replied:

"Some Christian Zionists do argue that, yes they do."

And then came the bombshell:

"But it's ironic that the Israeli flag has two blue lines and a star between them.  They deny that but remarkably it does look like two rivers from the Nile to the Euphrates, but if you buy that ... Jerusalem's got to be the capital ..."  [My emphasis]

 But then I remembered this:

(Cross-posted on News and Views from Jews Down Under here)

Clown Coinage

Oh dear! Clownish it might be, but it's getting past a joke, this  ignorance – genuine or feigned – bedeviling the propaganda spewed out by the brainwashed westerners of the anti-Israel movement in their efforts to brainwash others.

We saw recently that Mick Napier, head honcho of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, is using a Mandate-era coin as propaganda.

Now, from another opponent of Israel, whose name I'll leave out with the observation only that he seems to be a Kiwi (no doubt some Aussies would say "Not so much a Kiwi, more a galah!"), comes another Arab propaganda piece featuring a Mandate-era coin, introduced as a prize exhibit for the absurd argument that there was indeed a sovereign country called Palestine and, by implication, for promoting the view that Israel should be replaced by a single state for Jews and Palestinian Arabs, including the Arabs who left their homes during Israel's War of Independence and the descendants of those Arabs.

We all know what that scenario would portend.

Do these western propagandists really think that interwar Palestine, or Eretz Israel as many Zionists prefer to term it, was devoid of Arab hostility towards Jews?

Have they not heard, for instance, of the Hebron Massacre of 1929?

Let's remind them of the words of an eyewitness:

‘I remember that I went up in the afternoon on the Friday [23 August] to serve the milk; I used to go on the road to Jerusalem on the main highway; nothing happened when I was walking, but when I was walking back I saw these little groups ... of about ten Arabs here and there, talking. And as I was nearing home, one of them threw a stone at me and hit me in the cheek, and of course I started screaming and ran to the house, and as I ran up the stairs my father opened the door, dragged me in and shut the door again quickly. “We are leaving, we are going to our [i.e. her] grandparents,” he said, which was only down the road actually...

We took few belongings; we didn’t have time.... [M]y father said we were going to the hotel, and sure enough we went through the back way and ran through the different yards, and got to the hotel and there were already different people there. There was an elderly couple that came on holidays ... and the doctor was upstairs, he was staying there; and a few of our friends came and then later I found out there were 33 souls staying there, my aunties and Uncle Sholem and his wife, and so on, and some friends. I’ll never forget, we locked all the doors, and they said we would be safer upstairs, so we all walked upstairs ...

There we were, Esther [her sister] and I, standing at this big window, upstairs in the hotel, and when we were looking out to another house not very far at all, and it was called the Yeshiva School... where Orthodox young men were learning the Torah ... that’s the house where they stayed, where they lived.

And ... we could see the Arabs – they had hardly any guns but there were these long swords – screaming “Kill the Jews, kill the Jews” in Arabic.

And first they opened the doors, and a few minutes later they came out and ... we could see the blood ... on those swords ... Anyway, the next thing, all of a sudden, the Arab who was the owner of the hotel – my grandparents were just running it, of course – and this wonderful man, this Arab, who was in his vineyard with his two wives ... heard apparently of the massacre that was going on, and came running up with his wives ... and said: “Come on, you are not safe here. Come down quickly.” He took us down the back steps to his home. It was one big room and off it were the bedrooms (and whatever other rooms), but we, all 33 of us, went into this room and sat down; and he locked the doors and put his two wives on guard outside the door....

[Eliezer Dan] Slonim was the bank manager [the local branch of the Anglo-Palestine Bank], and he had all these people working for him, and amongst them was a friend of his, an Arab, a great friend of his, working there with him. And these Arabs were running up the steps to his home and he came up and saw his friend and he said: “Thank G-d it’s you. Now I feel safe.” And the fellow took a gun and shot him.

Then the others ran in and they stuck a sword down his wife’s throat. The couple had two boys, so they killed one of them, but the other one miraculously survived. They had a neighbour, a very big fat woman, wearing these big, big clothes that were hanging down, and she lay down on top of the other child. His name was Binyamin Slonim, and he is still alive today, somewhere in Israel...

These Arabs went around and killed and killed and massacred. Our baker, our poor darling baker; they lit the primus stove, and they put his head on it, and another was found upside down in the toilet. The toilet was just a hole in the ground; and they just did atrocious things....

[W]e saw bodies lying in different parts of the road. We saw bodies lying on the ground and being picked up, and when we came to the big square in front of the police station, there were so many dead lying around and so many people sitting next to them howling, crying, moaning, holding their heads. It was a terrible picture: there were bodies and blood everywhere, and one poor woman, whose husband was on a stretcher, was on her knees and her dress was all red with blood and she was crying for her husband and the scene was just absolutely shocking.’

  (In the following video the name Slonim has been misspelled):

Have they (the western propagandists?) not heard of the Arab riots (with attendant atrocities) of 1936-37?

It seems they have swallowed the Arab narrative hook, line, and sinker.

Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer pointed out here that unlike 'the Jewish narrative – which dates the "Jewish-Arab conflict" as having begun in 1880', 

'The Palestinian Arab narrative [starts] its narrative from 1948 by characterising the conflict as the "Israeli-Arab Conflict"– thus allowing such narrative to completely ignore a host of critical events that occurred between 1917-1947, let alone the centuries before that.

This rejectionism is clearly evident in article 20 of the 1968 PLO Charter:

"Article 20: The Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Mandate, and everything that has been based on them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of their own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong."

The Palestinian Arab narrative conveniently ignores the fact that the two-state solution was first suggested in 1922 and actually proposed and rejected by the Palestinian Arabs in 1937, 1938 and 1947.

The Palestinian Arab narrative has no memory or remorse for the Arab riots in 1920 and 1929 that targeted and slaughtered Jews or the 1936-1939 Arab revolt which wrought similar havoc on Jews living in Palestine during those turbulent years.

Starting from 1948 the Arab narrative can avoid confronting the reality that Winston Churchill told a delegation of Palestinian Arabs leaders in 1921 urging him to halt Jewish immigration to Palestine:

"It is manifestly right that the Jews,who are scattered all over the world,should have a national centre and a National Home,where some of them may be reunited. and where else could that be but in the land of Palestine, with which for more than three thousand years they have been intimately and profoundly associated?"

The flawed Arab narrative also avoids accepting responsibility for the Arab pressure put on Great Britain to severely curtail Jewish immigration to Palestine between 1939 and 1945 - resulting in hundreds of thousands of Jews perishing at the hands of the Nazis when their lives might have been spared had Great Britain ignored such inhumane Arab demands.

The Arab narrative has always rejected - and will continue to reject - the will of the international community expressed in the 1920 San Remo Conference and the Treaty of Sevres, the 1922 Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the 1945 United Nations Charter.' [Emphasis added]

Here, by the way, is a video that features Arabs who want to live in Israel (hat tip: Jean Vercors):

The Wisdom Of Solomon: A Sydneysider On Terrorism's Dream Enemy

For all I know, some people might feel that their author gilds the lily, but these are surely essentially wise words from Australian Gil Solomon, which appear under the title "A Terrorist's Dream – To Have Jews As The Enemy".  Convinced they're worth sharing beyond the Antipodes, I've taken the liberty of reproducing them here from the invaluable antipodean source J-Wire.

Writes Gil Solomon: 

'It must be any Arab terrorist’s dream come true that they have Jews as their enemy.
 
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you can fire rockets by the thousands and finally receive a response you know will end prematurely and inconclusively. You face an Israeli enemy which, during a war, gives advance notice by flyers and phone calls to apartment residents that a specific building is being targeted, giving so called “innocent” civilians and yourselves enough time to escape with your life.
 
Recently a US drone targeted a known terrorist in Pakistan and according to media reports even after confirming the man’s wife and extended family were present, the missile launch went ahead killing the terrorist and nine of those present with him and not a peep from anyone. This should serve as an example of the blatant experiences Israel should highlight the next time she faces her accusers. No country on the face of the earth goes to the extent Israel does in trying to avoid civilian casualties but one must ask, what benefit has it gained?
 

If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you can fabricate stories of a supposed massacre (e.g. Jenin), knowing full well that nothing occurred but that it will cast dispersions on an enemy which foolishly states that it will investigate the claim and thereby, to the rest of the world, implies there may be something to the story. In this regard, if you are a terrorist you know that in respect to your Israeli enemy, that they have not a clue how to counter the Hasbara war you are waging against them and wouldn’t even know that Hasbara is a war.
 
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you will certainly know that her enemies can make the most outrageous and heinous statements, such as, according to media reports that “Jews are the offspring of pigs and apes”, knowing full well that the Israelis will still offer to sit down with you in talks with no preconditions! Not even the demand that the indoctrination of children in hate must stop.
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you will know that if captured, as in the case of case of Barghouti, a terrorist “with blood on his hands” sitting in an Israeli prison, you can still be given access to the world media!
 

If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you will rejoice in that country’s decision of allowing the Muslim Waqf to take control of the Temple Mount after the 1967 war, all for a dubious halachic ruling which is not universally accepted today. This will allow you to go on excavating under the Temple Mount with a bulldozer, destroying any remaining Jewish artefacts in order to rid the place of any trace of the first and second Temple periods and in the process build a mosque there for future proof of claim to the land.
 
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you will know that so successful is your propaganda, that your enemy will still be held responsible by the world media for so called settlement “expansion” even though it is clearly only building a new house or an extension to an existing home but within the boundaries of the existing settlement.
 

If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you will know that no nation in the Western world will call you to account for your ongoing perpetrated myths and lies.
 
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you know that your enemy will indulge your ludicrous and incessant claims and still be willing to sit down with you in good faith.
 
If you are a terrorist facing Israel, you should pray that your enemy will continue treating you as they do now, that is, not as any “normal” country would do. If your enemy was a “normal” country like Russia, China or the USA facing barrage after deadly barrage of missiles, you could rest assured that parts of the Gaza Strip and West Bank would have been reduced to rubble long ago.
 

Finally and most disgusting of all, if you are a terrorist facing Israel you will know that within the Jewish Diaspora, you will have countless numbers who have fallen for your propaganda, fallen for your attempts to rewrite history, who will flock to your side and denounce Israel for every step it takes in its defence. In short, you will be able to count on many of those who you call the “offspring of pigs and apes” who will defend your every move and pronouncement. If this is not obscene enough, these same “offspring of pigs and apes” will devise ways of bring economic hardship to Israel by such devious campaigns as a BDS.'

Isi Leibler On The Noxiousness Of Nakba Propaganda

I often describe Isi Leibler as "a prophet for our time", and it's a description well-merited.  For a cogent, concise article on the Nakba commemoration and its noxious implications, we need look no further than his latest column in the Jerusalem Post, of which I provide a taster below:

'No revisionist or post Zionist spin can plausibly deny that the War of Independence was an attempt by a coalition of Arab states to annihilate us. But as Goebbels used to say “Repeat the same lie again and again and ultimately people will believe it”.

 Recent years have witnessed successful efforts by increasing numbers of radical Israeli-Arabs, in conjunction with their kinsmen beyond Israel, to project into the public discourse a narrative which portrays their antecedents as innocent victims of a conflict which led to their dispossession and expulsion. They mourn the consequences of the War of Independence but suppress the fact it was their fathers who rejected the UN partition plan and embarked on a war of annihilation against Israel. Their approach is akin to Germans mourning the tragedy of their losses during World War ll, implying that it was a byproduct of Allied criminality rather than Nazi aggression.

It is understandable that Israeli-Arabs lament the fleeing and even expulsion of their kinsmen in the course of war. But in lieu of mourning their losses or commemorating humanitarian tragedies, their leaders are promoting hatred of the people amongst whom they live, garnering support for vengeance and delegitimization of the Jewish state....

Describing such activity as treasonable, shocking though it may sound, is justifiable. The Nakba commemoration operates in complete synchronization with the orchestrated global campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel. It is part of the new assault which seeks to suppress the reality that Israel fought in 1948 to defend itself against forces seeking its annihilation. It amounts to an attempt to delegitimize Israel by transforming public discourse about the rights and wrongs of the Arab-Israeli conflict to one in which “the injustice caused to the Palestinians” is defined as the source of the problem. If we fail to challenge and repudiate this false narrative, we do so at our peril and expose ourselves to immeasurably horrendous long term negative repercussions.'