David Singer: Abbas Dumps Trump, Embraces United Nations

Here's the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:

PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas signed his own suicide note after another blistering attack on
America in the United Nations Security Council on 20 February.
Abbas told the Security Council:

“The United States has contradicted itself and contradicted its own commitments and has violated international law and the relevant resolutions with its decision regarding Jerusalem. So, it has become impossible today for one country or State alone to solve a regional or international conflict without the participation of other international partners. Therefore, to solve the Palestine question, it is essential to establish a multi-lateral international mechanism emanating from an international conference and in line with international law and the relevant resolutions.”

Exiting the meeting immediately after this verbal barrage – Abbas did not hear US Ambassador to
the UN – Nikki Haley – giving him this serve:

“I will decline the advice I was recently given by your top negotiator, Saeb Erekat. I will not shut up. Rather, I will respectfully speak some hard truths. The Palestinian leadership has a choice to make between two different paths. There is the path of absolutist demands, hateful rhetoric, and incitement to violence. That path has led, and will continue to lead, to nothing but hardship for the Palestinian people. Or, there is the path of negotiation and compromise. History has shown that path to be successful for Egypt and Jordan, including the transfer of territory. That path remains open to the Palestinian leadership, if only it is courageous enough to take it.”

Haley was still smarting from Erekat's intemperate "shut up" outburst on 31 January when he 
also described Haley as "impudent" – whilst Abbas’s two hour anti-American diatribe on 14
January and Abbas’s refusal to meet American Vice-President Mike Pence also contributed to
Abbas's public dressing down.

Abbas is perfectly entitled to choose the United Nations path to pursue his agenda seeking to
create a second Arab State in former Palestine – in addition to Jordan which comprises 78% of
former Palestine. However he cannot possibly achieve that result facing a certain US veto in the Security Council.

Haley made Abbas's choices and America's intentions crystal-clear  – warning Abbas:

"You can choose to denounce the United States, reject the U.S. role in peace talks, and pursue punitive measures against Israel in international forums like the UN. I assure you that path will get the Palestinian people exactly nowhere toward the achievement of their aspirations. Or, you can choose to put aside your anger about the location of our embassy, and move forward with us toward a negotiated compromise that holds great potential for improving the lives of the Palestinian people. Putting forward old talking points and entrenched and undeveloped concepts achieves nothing. That approach has been tried many times, and has always failed. After so many decades, we welcome new thinking."

Choosing the United Nations over direct negotiations with Israel will disqualify the PLO from
participating in Trump’s proposed "ultimate deal" to end the Arab-Jewish conflict  – details of which
still remain shrouded in secrecy.

President Trump's "new thinking" could see Jordan and Egypt replacing the PLO in future
negotiations with Israel to determine the allocation of sovereignty between these three States in
Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza – the last remaining 5% of the territory of the Mandate
for Palestine still claimed by both Arabs and Jews. 

Abbas's "new thinking"  – claiming [here too] Palestinian Arabs are descended from the long-extinct
Canaanites – grossly insulted the Security Council's intelligence.

Abbas has committed political suicide, dumping Trump and embracing the United Nations.  Trump's
response will be far-reaching and the consequences dire for those whom Abbas purports to represent.

David Singer: United Nations' Fabricated Arab Narrative Deceives Academics

Here's another very important article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer concerning the duplicity of the United Nations, this time focusing on the twisted truth's dissemination in academic books, and the consequent pressing need for revision.

Writes David Singer:

The United Nations publication “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem 1917-1988” (“Study”) has deliberately misrepresented the actual wording of General Assembly Resolution 181 passed on 29 November 1947 – deceiving many academics who have disseminated the Study's false message.

The Study has been published by the Division for Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat for, and under the guidance of, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

The offending statement in the Study misleadingly declares: 

"After investigating various alternatives the United Nations proposed the partitioning of Palestine into two independent States, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish, with Jerusalem internationalized."

The actual wording of Resolution 181 stated: 

"Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, set forth in Part III of this Plan, shall come into existence in Palestine...."

The Study omits to mention that 78 per cent of Palestine had already become an independent Arab State in 1946 and been renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan.

The Study's claim that Resolution 181 called for an "independent Palestinian Arab State" was not accidental but deliberately done to deceive and mislead.

Resolution 181 had denied the existence of any distinctly identifiable Palestinian people in 1947.

The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine had also only spoken of the "existing non- Jewish communities in Palestine" in 1922.

"Palestinians" were first defined in the 1964 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Charter to mean Arab citizens normally resident in Palestine in 1947 and their descendants. Jewish and non-Arab Christian residents were excluded under this racist and apartheid definition.

The PLO also claimed that Palestine was the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people – even though Resolution 181 clearly did not.

That the Study deliberately changed the actual wording of Resolution 181 to advance these fictitious PLO claims – or perhaps others unknown - for spurious reasons – is scandalous.

This false rendition of Resolution 181 has been repeated verbatim in many books including:

1. Handbook of Ethnic Conflict: International Perspectives – Dan Landis and Rosita D Albert

2. Youth Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging – Madeleine Arnot and Sharlene Swartz

3. Bridges Over Troubled Waters  – Dahlia Moore and Salem Aweiss Richard Cummings PhD propagated this false statement during a lecture to the Arab Society of Princeton University on 21 February 2002.

This falsehood again appears in Shaping Foreign Policy in Times of Crisis: The Role of International Law and the State Department Legal Adviser written by Michael Scharf and Paul Williams. Their book grew out of a series of meetings with all ten of the living former U.S. State Department legal advisers from the Carter administration to that of George W. Bush.

Both authors are law professors and formerly served in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the US Department of State.

That two such eminent lawyers apparently accepted this official United Nations document as being unerringly accurate speaks volumes for those who have been similarly deceived because they didn't take the time to verify what they were disseminating.

Many other academics have swallowed this duplicitous Study hook, line and sinker to form hostile anti-Israel views  – especially regarding Israel's claims in Judea and Samaria  – geographical place names actually used in Resolution 181 and for 3000 years continuously until the Arabs renamed those areas the "West Bank" in 1950.

The Roman Empire used the same ploy in 135 AD – changing the name of its conquered province from "Syria Judaea" to "Syria Palestina”.

Change the name – change the game

Correcting this fabricated United Nations Arab narrative is urgently required.

Fergie (aka the Duchess of York) Condemns Israel's Anti-Terror Wall

On a visit to Bethlehem, Sarah Ferguson vows to propagandise for the Palestinians.

Pity she seems so ignorant of the case for Israel.

"My Late Mother Had A Passport Saying ..." (video)

A glorious day (afternoon, by the looks of it) in old London town.  Shoppers stroll past Marks & Spencer in Oxford Street.

 An Israel-hater, flanked by others if his kind, and repeating a mantra about "racism", exhorts the populace to "Boycott Marks & Spencer". 

Eventually (around 3:11) a petite female figure in a baseball cap takes the mike.  We've seen her before in footage by Alex Seymour.  And heard her too.

But this time she has a new message in her repertoire.  It's aimed at those people who claim "there was no such place as Palestine".

By which, I take it, she means all those dastardly types who point out time and time again (to all those anti-Israel ignoramuses who insist/imply/infer that there was once a sovereign entity called Palestine stolen by "the Zionists") that there was in fact no such sovereign entity.

All sorts of dodgy pieces of "evidence" have been advanced in support of the demonisers' false assumption, my personal favourite being the Palestine (Maccabi!) Football Team.  (And not only because it's an excuse to exclaim "Balls!")

Now, this little lady in the baseball cap adds one more to the murky mix:

"How come my late mother had a passport saying 'British Mandate Palestine'?"

Begorah!

To invoke a certain British comedian's catchphrase: "Some mothers do 'ave 'em!"

Bless.

David Singer: Palestine – France, Farce and Folly

Here's the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer, who writes:

France embarked on a journey to nowhere when it hosted 28 delegations in Paris for a ministerial meeting on 3 June marking the first phase of its initiative aimed at promoting peace in the Middle East. Amid the pomp and ceremony, photo opportunities and handshakes, the final communique revealed:

1. Support was reaffirmed for a just, lasting and comprehensive resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The conflict actually requiring resolution is the Jewish-Arab conflict going back to 1917 – well before Israel’s creation in 1948 – which still sees 20 Arab States today denying the Jews the legal rights vested in them by the Mandate for Palestine to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in its ancient biblical and historical homeland.

Only Jordan and Egypt have recognised and signed peace treaties with Israel.

The “Palestinians” were regarded as part of the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” by the League of Nations in 1922 and not recognized as a people by the United Nations in the 1947 Partition Plan.

The 1964 PLO Covenant is their birth certificate. PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s claim on 6 June that the “Palestinians” had a 5000 years old history is farcical.

 Paris remained blinded.

 2. A negotiated two-state solution was reaffirmed as the only way to achieve an enduring peace, with two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.

That “two-state solution” – first proposed in 1947  – was available at any time between 1948 and 1967, was again offered in 2000/1 and 2008 but was always rejected by the Arabs.

Flogging that dead horse is a waste of time.

The “two-state solution” envisioned by the League of Nations in 1922 and the Peel Commission in 1937 provides the best opportunity for peacefully resolving Jewish and Arab territorial claims in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza.

Guess the delegates were too busy quaffing champagne and tasting canapes to focus on other solutions than the artificially contrived, totally failed and utterly discredited 1947-2016 “two-state” solution.

3. Rebuilding trust and creating the conditions for fully ending the Israeli occupation that began in 1967 and resolving all permanent status issues through direct negotiations based on resolutions 242 (1967), 338 (1973), and also recalling relevant United Nations Security

Council resolutions and highlighting the importance of the implementation of the Arab Peace Initiative.

“Fully ending” the 1967 occupation means kicking 65,0000 Jews out of their homes. What were they thinking – and drinking?

Israel agreed to negotiate with the PLO under the 2003 Bush Roadmap only on the basis of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

Introducing new negotiating parameters now is incredibly fanciful.

4. Possible ways in which the international community could help advance the prospects for peace, including by providing meaningful incentives to the parties to make peace.

Direct negotiations between Israel, Jordan and Egypt would fit these objectives.

5. The participants highlighted the key role of the Quartet.

The Quartet lost its key role in July 2015 when:

 (i) The Quartet’s representative Tony Blair stood down with no replacement

 (ii) Blair’s office—the Office of the Quartet Representative (OQR) - was renamed the Office of the Quartet (OQ) and its stated mandate was expressed:

“to support the Palestinian people on economic development, rule of law and improved movement and access for goods and people, as they build the institutions and economy of a viable and peaceful state in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

Jews became persona non grata overnight as the Quartet’s previously independent non- partisan role was superseded.

 France’s follow-up international conference being organised before the end of the year promises further farce and continuing folly.

"Europe is Becoming Palestinianised": (video) [updated]

Wow, this guy is as articulate as he is handsome! 

I just couldn't resist posting this, his latest video (or should that be "vlog"?) here.

Yes, he's the wonderful Brian of London, who blogs at IsraellyCool, and whose devastating demolition of the lies that underpin a certain prizewinning speech has caused such a stir this past week.

Here he gives a little pep talk to the Jews of Europe.  "Europe is adopting dhimmitude before needing to ... The numbers are unfortunately with the enemy ..."

A song he plays warns "There's a new strain of the old lethal virus..."

Last week, Brian of London gave an interview on that certain prizewinning speech to Israeli English language talk show host Mottle Wolfe.  I deplore the title that Mr Wolfe gave to this video but I'm posting the video here because it shows yet again Brian of London's brilliance.  Brian also reminds the audience to sign his petition against Hate Speech in UK Schools, which is available here.

Update: Brian knocks it out of the ballpark again, with this riposte to Labour MP Wes Streeting, who sits for Ilford North, has denounced antisemitism in the Labour Party, yet insists that the speech is not antisemitic.

Meanwhile, in Slough, a lone tool of "Palestinianism" helps to demonise the Zionist Entity:
 

"The World Has Been Living With A Two-State Solution For Decades"

Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer, who of course is no stranger to regular readers of this blog, has long contended that "Jordan is Palestine".

That thesis is the raison d'être of his blog here

Now, in an important article, Geoffrey Clarfield and Salim Mansur have written a clear and cogent exposition of that view,  argued not only  by David Singer but by others.

Indeed, in their article the authors cite the opinion of another person who will be no stranger to readers of this blog, the Jordanian Palestinian politician and pundit Mudar Zahran, a Muslim friend of Israel and of secular democracy

Write Clarfield and Mansur, inter alia:

'Arab nationalism is dead. It lasted for 100 years and it has suddenly disappeared. In the former states of now war-torn Libya, Syria and Iraq, speaking Arabic now means nothing. However, being a member of a family, lineage or clan of either the Shia, Sunnis, Christians, Druze, Yazidi, Tuareg or Bedouin means everything.....

Yet the new Pope has just recognized yet another Arab state, “Palestine.” ....

Until the end of the First World War, most of the Arabic-speaking Middle East was under the authority of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The Turks lost their empire when they fought against the allies during the war. And so, after four centuries of subservience to the Turks, Christian and Muslim speakers of Arabic, longing for independence, created Arab nationalism, a political movement that mirrored the ethnic and linguistic nationalisms that were then transforming the landscape of 19th-century Europe.

In this new ideology, an “Arab” was someone who spoke Arabic. The largely Christian Arab proponents of this ideology hoped that as citizens of newly created secular states, they would finally be given the legal and political equality denied to them for centuries under Islamic law and Muslim rulers. And so, after the First World War, a number of “Arab” states were created by the League of Nations, such as Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. By the end of the Second World War, they had all gained their independence. 

Among these newly created states, there arose the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which became formally independent in 1946. Until then, it was legally part of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, implemented on trust from the League of Nations by the British government....

Jordan is a 20th-century British invention, dreamed up in the 1920s, for the peoples living in what Britain illegally hived off from the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1923. Until 1946 its British administrators called it just that — Eastern Palestine. 

No one reads the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine document anymore. But according to international law, it is still valid. It is the legal basis for the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. Its provisions still stand, because all of the legal pronouncements of the League were subsequently recognized as binding, when the United Nations was created after the Second World War. 

In 1923 the British arbitrarily violated the Mandate, morally and legally, by creating the “Emirate of Jordan” in Eastern Palestine. The British announced that this was a “temporary” measure, which they quietly and quickly made “permanent.” Jews were no longer allowed to live there....

The name, the “Hashemite” Kingdom of Jordan, makes reference to the fact that its ruling tribe, the Hashemis, were imported by the British from outside of Jordan in the Hejaz (what is now western Saudi Arabia). The Hashemis rule Jordan today as the Saudis do Arabia, claiming the name of the country by right of tribal conquest and occupation, but in their case with the connivance of the British, who unilaterally lopped off 70 per cent of mandated Palestine, and gave it to them as their compensation for their tribal revolt against the Turks during the First World War.... 

Today the majority of the country’s inhabitants are largely Muslim Arabs who now think of themselves as Palestinians. Before the Mandate, they had no national identity and like that of Jordan, there is no record of a self-defined, self-declared Palestinian national identity in any historical document before the early to mid-20th century....

The Jewish state of Israel lies west of the Jordan River and has sovereignty over that territory by historical and legal right. There is no “occupation.” If the Israeli government decides to give back some of this land in a territory-for-peace deal, it will have done so knowing it is sacrificing part of its historic homeland to hostile Islamic expansionists, not to “a people without a land,” for the Arabs of Palestine, that is the Palestinians, are a majority in Eastern Palestine.

The world has been living with a two-state solution for decades....The majority of Jordanians are Palestinians living in Mandated Palestine. There can be no peace without the recognition of this simple ethnographic truth. The Pope should know this.'

Read the full article here 

Meanwhile, in the UK, the usual big and bigoted show bizz egos try to work their usual Boycott mischief:

Moulin Stooge: "Another Little Nugget To Be Used Against Israel's Propaganda"

Vraiment! What dunderheads some of the Israel-hating brigade are.

They seem to think that Palestine was once an autonomous Arab state, which of course it never was.

And to "prove" it, as we've seen on this blog from time to time,  they've offered a jumble of exhibits, ranging from maps with "Palestine" printed on them to coins and stamps issued by the Mandate authority to advertisements for Mandate-era "Palestinian Airways" to travel posters, newspapers and the orchestra of  the Yishuv to photos of  the pre-war Palestinian soccer team (another Yishuv initiative, composed of, er, Jews).

Now, some of the Israel-hating brigade are over the windmill, having discovered that French writer Alphonse ("Lettres de mon moulin") Daudet mentioned "Palestine" as long ago as – mon dieu! – 1869!

And they of course have been keen to share this fabulous Zionist myth-busting find with others.

Here, for instance, is just one of the "shares" currently doing the rounds on social media:

 

Well, that "little nugget" sure ain't gold.

Somebody's been "seeing queer things" alright, and it's not only the person in Daudet's story.

When will the dunderheads and dupes of the anti-Israel movement realise that Israel's "propagandists" are not denying that the existence of a place dubbed "Palestine".

They are denying the historical existence of Palestine as an autonomous entity.

They are pointing out that the Roman conquerors renamed Judea "Palestine" as a deliberate measure to undermine Jewish ties with that land.

 And they are now pointing out that, when Daudet was writing, Palestine indeed existed, and existed  as it had been for hundreds of years, a backward province of the Ottoman Empire.

Once again, anti-Israel propagandists have proved only the validity of the old adage "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

'She Also Exposed The Big Lie Which Tells Of A "Zionist Invasion" Of A Supposedly Arab Country': A seminal author remembered

 "My goal is to shed light on those same facts and relationships that were hidden from me, and to give this book to others who made the same mistakes that I did."

So explained Joan Peters (pictured), author of From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, who died recently.

You have to be over a certain age to remember Joan Peters' book, published by Harper & Row, and the sensational reception it had.  The year was 1984, and it debunked the received wisdom regarding the history and demography of the land called Palestine, which led, inevitably, to controversy and attempts to discredit her conclusions.

The fruit of her researches surprised Joan Peters herself, for although Jewish herself (she was born Joan Friedman in Chicago in 1936) she really only became interested in the subject while covering the Yom Kippur War for CBS and was, it seems, inclined towards the Palestinian Arab cause when she started on her book.

Discussing her work, the prominent scholar Dr Daniel Pipes has observed, inter alia:

'Although the Jews alone moved to Palestine for ideological reasons, they were not alone in emigrating there. Arabs joined them in large numbers, from the first aliyah in 1882 to the creation of Israel in 1948. "The Arabs were moving into the very areas where Jewish settlement had preceded them and was luring them." Arab immigration received much less attention because both the Turkish and British administrators (before and after 1917, respectively) took little interest in them....

As a result, officials in Palestine counted only a small percentage of the Arab immigrants. British records for 1934 show only 1,734 non-Jews as legal immigrants and about 3,000 as illegals. Yet, according to a newspaper interview in August 1934 with the governor of the Hauran district in Syria, "In the last few months from 30,000 to 36,000 Hauranese had entered Palestine and settled there." In 1947, British officials had counted only 37,000 Arabs as the aggregate of non-Jewish immigrants in Palestine since 1917—hardly more than had come from one district of Syria in less than one year alone.

Non-Jewish immigrants came from all parts of the Middle East, including Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Transjordan (as Jordan was once known), Saudi Arabia, the Yemens, Egypt, Sudan, and Libya. Thanks to British unconcern, Arab immigrants were generally left alone and allowed to settle in Mandatory Palestine. So many Arabs came, Miss Peters estimates, that "if all those Jews and all those Arabs who arrived in ... Palestine between 1893 and 1948 had remained, and if they were forced to leave now, a dual exodus of at least equal proportion would in all probability take place. Palestine would be depopulated once again." ....

What took hundreds of thousands of Arabs to Palestine? Economic opportunity. The Zionists brought the skills and resources of Europe. Like other Europeans settling scarcely populated areas in recent times—in Australia, Southern Africa, or the American West—the Jews in Palestine initiated economic activities that created jobs and wealth on a level far beyond that of the indigenous peoples. In response, large numbers of Arabs moved toward the settlers to find employment.

The conventional picture has it that Jewish immigrants bought up Arab properties, forcing the former owners into unemployment. Miss Peters argues exactly the contrary, that the Jews created new opportunities, which attracted emigrants from distant places. To the extent that there was unemployment among the Arabs, it was mostly among the recent arrivals....

The data unearthed by Joan Peters indicate that Arabs benefited economically so much by the presence of Jewish settlers from Europe that they traveled hundreds of miles to get closer to them.

In turn, this explains why the definition of a refugee from Palestine in 1948 is a person who lived there for just two years: because many Arab residents in 1948 had immigrated so recently. The usual definition would have cut out a substantial portion of the persons who later claimed to be refugees from Palestine.

Thus, the "Palestinian problem" lacks firm grounding. Many of those who now consider themselves Palestinian refugees were either immigrants themselves before 1948 or the children of immigrants. This historical fact reduces their claim to the land of Israel; it also reinforces the point that the real problem in the Middle East has little to do with Palestinian-Arab rights.'  [Emphasis added, here and below]

Nadav Shragai now notes:

'....[Joan Peters] slaughtered the sacred cow known as "the Palestinian refugee problem" by revealing just how the United Nations altered the criteria for gaining refugee status in order to exacerbate the problem well beyond its proper dimensions. Peters discovered that the U.N.'s changing requirements for being listed as a Palestinian refugee essentially turned them into something else, something far different from other refugees in distant crises.

Peters even offered proof that many of the Palestinian refugees that earned special status in the eyes of the U.N. were never even residents of prestate Israel "from time immemorial," contradicting a long-standing Palestinian claim. Instead, these were immigrants who had only arrived quite recently.

There were many who followed in Peters' footsteps. They backed up her facts, but she was the first to bring them to light. Peters was the first to challenge the underlying assumptions of Palestinian wretchedness and refugee status. ...

The debate that was sparked by Peters' book has never been more relevant since it laid the foundations for later works of research on the subject of refugee status. Prior to the "birth" of the Palestinian matter, the customary definition of refugee was an individual who was forced to leave their residence from time immemorial due to war, hostile actions, or expulsion.

The U.N.'s alternate definition of refugee, which was applied solely to the Palestinians, states that a refugee is anyone who lived in the area that currently encompasses the State of Israel for a period of two years prior to the founding of the state in 1948. The Arab League, which was the driving force behind the newly reconfigured definition, managed to significantly inflate the number of refugees. Indeed, many of the refugees who fled or were expelled from the country did immigrant to prestate Israel during the British Mandate period.

Ze'ev Galili, a veteran Israeli journalist, often used his newspaper column to cite Peters' work. He even had a hand in the reissuance of her book in the early part of the previous decade.

"Not only did Peters expose the bluff of the criteria for refugee status," he said, "but she also exposed the big lie which tells of a 'Zionist invasion' of a supposedly Arab country, even though it is known that the First Aliyah consisted of Jews coming to an empty country, while a very significant percentage of the Arab population in 1948 were immigrants who came here after the advent of Zionism."...

Peters found that the Arab population grew in proportion to the rising Jewish presence in the country. Indeed, the economic prosperity generated by the budding Zionist enterprise, particularly in the latter stages of the 19th century, spurred internal Arab migration from Transjordan and the highlands (the traditional areas of Arab settlement in Palestine). It also invited illegal Arab immigration from all over the Middle East. Arabs settled along the coastal plain and the Shfela region, both areas that were inhabited primarily by Jews.

Peters' conclusion was clear: Most of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 who fled the coastal area were not, as the Palestinians claim, inhabitants of the land "from time immemorial," but instead were recent newcomers. They were not refugees. Instead, they were economic migrants who eventually would return to their original homes after the founding of the state....

The number of documents that Peters unearthed was tremendous. Her prolific research was also a source of confusion. Some disagreed with the numbers she cited in her research, but even her critics had a difficult time contradicting what was painfully obvious -- hundreds of thousands of Arabs had settled in the heart of Jewish-populated areas. When they were expelled, they were given the status of refugees, even though they had not been here "from time immemorial.".... 

Read  the entire article here

"Disappearing Palestine": A graphic guide to the lies of the anti-Israel set

We've all seen them, that set of four maps regularly trotted out by the BDS movement and other enemies of Israel.

Well, to counter the lies and distortions, see this great graphic below, by StandWithUs:

Read more here, here and here

A Partial Victory for Truth and Justice

Remember the bold-as-brass misleading travel ad about which I posted in January?  The one that claimed that Palestine extends from the river to the sea?  Reminder: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/01/travellers-tall-tale-palestine-lies.html

Well, the adjudication has finally been done by the Advertising Standards Authority, and a partial victory for truth and justice is the outcome.

To quote Honest Reporting:

'The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has finally issued its ruling following many complaints. While the ASA did not agree with all of the issues raised by us and a number of other organizations, it did, however, rule the advert to be misleading on the following grounds:

We considered, however, that the line “From the famous cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus, and Gaza … Palestine lies between …” suggested that the situation and recognition of those cities as being part of Palestine was universally accepted. Because that was not the case, we concluded that the ad was misleading.

The ASA concluded:

The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Travel Palestine to ensure their ads did not suggest that it was universally accepted that locations were part of Palestine when that was not the case.

So it seems that the ASA is consistent in its view that while Jerusalem may not be part of Palestine, it is also not part of Israel. Unsurprising considering that the ASA previously, in an appalling decision, forced the Israel Government Tourist Office to withdraw an ad that featured Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, effectively banning Israel from including the Western Wall in any tourism advertising.'

Read more here: http://honestreporting.com/travel-palestine-ad-watchdog-rules-against/

A Traveller’s Tall Tale – “Palestine lies between the Mediterranean Coast and the Jordan River”. This false advertising should be protested

We’re becoming all too familiar with the fabrications that the so-called Palestinians (known as Arabs until Arafat’s clever rebranding of them) are the “indigenous people” of Israel, and that Jesus was a "Palestinian". We’re all too familiar, as well, with the impression spread by propagandists, be they deliberately malicious or naively ignorant, that Palestine (in truth a neglected province of the Ottoman Empire and then under a British Mandate) was an autonomous state snatched by Zionists.

And now another step in today’s ruthless campaign of undermining and delegitimising the sovereign state of Israel has been taken in the form of a mendacious advertisement from the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities that’s appeared in Traveler, an American magazine in the National Geographic stable.

This brazen distortion of reality misleads in several ways. It implies that Palestine is a sovereign country of which Jerusalem is an integral part, and that the country extends from the Jordan to the Mediterranean – from the river to the sea, to quote the notorious much-used Israel-delegitimising chant. It effectively dupes the unwary traveller by promoting sites and facilities that are not, in fact, in the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

In 2009, a poster (pictured below) for the Israeli Government Tourist Office appeared in London Underground Stations. Under the headline “Experience Israel” and superimposed on the image of a boy snorkelling near dolphins, was the text "Few countries pack so much variety into such a small space as Israel. The energy and excitement of Tel Aviv and the rich cultural experiences of the Dead Sea and Jerusalem with the sun and relaxation of Eilat make Israel the ideal multi-centre break".

Complaints swiftly followed the poster’s appearance – 600 to Transport for London and 444 (two of those from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Jews for Justice for Palestinians) to the Advertising Standards Authority. The complainants objected to the advertisement’s implication that Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights were internationally recognised as part of Israel.

Their complaint was upheld, the Advertising Standards Authority banning the advertisement from being used again “in its current form” and stating: “We noted that the map showed border lines for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but we also noted that those border lines were faintly produced and difficult to distinguish on the map itself. We understood that the borders and status of the occupied territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights were the subject of much international dispute, and because we considered that the ad implied that those territories were part of the state of Israel, we concluded that the ad was misleading.”

Thanks in no small way to the PSC's briefing of its members, that poster was in fifth place in the Advertising Standards Authority’s list of Top 10 Most Complained About Ads of 2009. Only one other in the list had the complaints against it upheld.

What, I wonder, will be the fate of the false advertising in Traveler.

The Zionist Federation of the UK suggests that people complain here: http://www.asa.org.uk/Complaints/How-to-complain.aspx

For although Traveler is an American magazine, the Advertising Standards Authority is empowered to stop copies of foreign magazines in the UK from running advertisements against which it rules – irrespective of where the media’s proprietorship is based.

You can see a larger version of the offending ad here, by clicking on the image that appears:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm5wWaN1oW3PBYQJvvB380wuvjj-EMro6ZS1QOpc59gRnxWoeyUKDaEwZZK7sx-hE0SvT3rAjq8FqXIIXq91yNVWN6IGUwudPyINzmKsz7-Fy4ycD3SWneXvOmTYMOMlOv6OhgXhHrJwYJ/s1600/palestine-ad.jpg