You can support a Palestinian state without lying — so why do they?
Their goal is genocidal. They are fanatical maniacs who try to hide it.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The “pro-Palestinian” movement’s propaganda campaign is incredibly effective.
It has been so efficacious that many people, including powerful decision-makers, believe these lies.
Two lies rankle me the most: that Israel and the disputed territories are the Palestinians’ ancestral homeland, not that of the Jews, and that the Palestinians want their own state next to Israel.
These lies are unnecessary to make a case for Palestinian statehood. Someone with half a stegosaurus’ brain can make a case for a Palestinian state without resorting to a single lie.
So, when someone tells these lies, it is for the nefarious and dastardly purposes of delegitimizing Israel as a state and dehumanizing Jews.
Given that these lies are so easy to disprove, only morons and bad actors could believe them. I have time for neither.
Let us start with the lie that Palestinians — who are Arabs — are indigenous to the area that today is the State of Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
It is sheer stupidity. It is as if these liars are unaware that Palestinians are Arabs, who come from Arabia, and that Jews come from a place called Judea, where kingdoms stood for centuries. Arabs come from Arabia and Jews come from Judea; it is complex stuff, I know.
The history is well-known to those who have chosen to read it honestly, so I will cover it only briefly here.
In 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, announcing its support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire and the Jews’ ancestral home.
After World War One, the League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations) partitioned the Ottoman Empire’s territory in the Middle East. These were given to Britain and France as mandates (France received a Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon), meaning they were to be turned into nation-states when they were ready to self-govern.
British Mandatory Palestine comprised what is now the State of Israel, including Gaza and the West Bank, and Jordan (formerly Transjordan, which was cut out of the mandate in 1921). Palestine was sparsely populated. The British census of Palestine in 1922 recorded a population of 757,182 — including the military and foreigners (78 percent Muslim, 11 percent Jewish, and 9 percent Christian).
About 80 percent of the Arabs were peasants, semi-nomads and Bedouins. A second census in 1932 recorded a population of 1.03 million (73 percent Muslim, 17 percent Jewish, and 9 percent Christian). By way of comparison, Israel and the Palestinian Territories today have a combined 14 million people.
Migrant Jews, through consortia, began buying land for their state (though Jews had been buying land since the 1800s). Many Arabs sold their land to Jews, delighted to get such prices for swamp land. By 1947, Jews owned 463,000 acres in Palestine, of which 45,000 acres were bought from the mandatory government, 30,000 acres from churches, and 387,500 from Arab landowners.
This Jewish immigration — and their turning of swamp and desert into orange groves — created a booming economy. Arabs from Egypt and Syria poured in to take advantage of the boom. Jewish immigration was capped in this period, while Arab immigration was unrestricted. In between the two world wars, the Jewish population increased by 470,000, while the non-Jewish population rose by 588,000.
Discord grew as Jewish and Arab nationalist movements awakened. This was part of a global trend of nationalist movements emerging as Europe’s empires fell.
The Arab revolt from 1936 to 1939 in Palestine and the Jewish insurgency from 1944 to 1947 in Palestine were part of this wider global nationalist phenomenon.
The carve-out of Transjordan gave about 78 percent of British Mandatory Palestine to the Arabs, with the remaining 22 percent to become a Jewish state. Jordan is a Palestinian Arab state. The Jews accepted this. The Arabs did not. Arab attacks on Jews started small, but grew in intensity, including the infamous Hebron massacre in 1929.
Other Jewish settlements attacked included Bnei Yehuda in 1920; Kfar Saba, Jaffa, and Petah Tikvah in 1921; Kfar Uria, Rahama, Hartuv, Hulda, Motza, and Poria in 1929; and Ben She’an in 1936, among many more. Many of these settlements were rebuilt. Arab attacks on Jews predate the State of Israel’s creation, never mind any so-called “occupation.”
Also in 1936, the British Peel Commission concluded co-existence was impossible and proposed again splitting Palestine (now just 22 percent of the original mandate) into two states, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem as an international city. The UN passed a partition plan. The Jews accepted this, but the Arabs did not.
It was the first of at least six Israeli offers for Palestinians to create their own state based on a two-state solution. The others included 1947 (the UN Partition Plan for Palestine), 1967 (the end of the Six-Day War), the 1990s (the Oslo Accords), 2000 (the Camp David Summit), 2005 (Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza), and 2008 (improved version of the Oslo Accords). On each occasion, the Palestinians rejected peace.
To put it simply, the Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel and have maintained a continuous presence there for thousands of years. However, since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, they rarely held a majority or enjoyed political sovereignty until the founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948.
Arab traders, warriors, farmhands, missionaries, and Diaspora Jews arrived in the area known as “Palestine” from the 1800s onwards, when Zionists made the desert bloom as they recreated Israel.
So, the Palestinians are not indigenous to Israel — and it is ignorant and absurd to say otherwise.
Many Palestinians and their families, however, have been there a long time and consider it their home, feel a connection to the place, and would like to keep living there. That is a perfectly reasonable position to hold and it requires no lies.
So, why do they bother with the lies?
They lie because my neat version above tells only half the story. The Palestinians do want to keep living there, as they claim, but there are a few minor details they leave out. They want to live there in their own Palestinian state after having destroyed Israel and gotten rid of all the Jews.
Their goal is genocidal. They are fanatical maniacs who try to hide it.
Despite enough evidence to sink an aircraft carrier that Jews are indigenous, the Palestinians persist with their lie of indigeneity and accuse the Jews of being the invaders.
I do not know what kind of community you grew up in, but this kind of thing was generally frowned upon when I was a boy.
How anyone could support the Palestinian “cause” once they know the facts is a mystery. It speaks to a moral crisis in the West where many people do not know good from evil.
The Palestinians’ pretense that they want their own state, as opposed to destroying the State of Israel, is the second lie that sends me into a choleric rage.
The Economist magazine recently wrote of the Palestinians “yearning for a homeland” without mentioning they wanted this in place of Israel, not beside it. That is tantamount to repeating the lie.
I have great respect for The Economist and consider it among the world’s best-edited publications. Yet, even it prints this propagandistic nonsense. If the publication has a weakness, it is its Middle East coverage. The masthead fails to understand the region at all, which I suspect is due to the magazine’s obsession with European liberalism, the wrong tool with which to analyze the Middle East.
The sociopathic jihadists in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are entirely honest about their objective to annihilate Israel, but the media fails to see how them wanting genocide is a big deal. It is surreal.
The Palestinian Authority, by contrast, is deliberately vague about its position. It talks about governing a Palestinian state, and many Western countries and the good-for-nothing United Nations supports it.
Yet, the Palestinian Authority still does not recognize Israel or its right to exist. It wants to destroy Israel but is politically astute enough not to announce this clearly, so it retains international support despite its genocidal goals (and sometime because of them).
Again, the lie is that the Palestinians want to live beside Israel, not in place of it.
The Palestinian Authority insists it is ready to run a Palestinian state, when it cannot even run Area A of Judea and Samaria. To be fair, the Palestinian Authority’s dictatorial leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is second to none one when it comes to cronyism, corruption, and nepotism, which are core skills for an Arab leader.
Given the Palestinians have rejected at least a half-dozen peace offers, only an idiot of cosmic proportions or a deranged crackpot could believe the Palestinian Authority’s claim to want its own state is somehow innocent of genocidal intent.
There are many other lies in the Palestinian arsenal, such as Israel being imperialist, Jews being white, and Israel being an apartheid state, but it is two lies above that are the most pestiferous because it is so easy to show that they are untrue.
Many people who repeat these lies know full well they are lies and spread them for political purposes. These liars are among our planet’s most evil and despicable people.
Lebanon is an apartheid state against Palestinians, who are second-class citizens monstrously discriminated against by the Lebanese government. This, of course, is never mentioned by Western "pro-Palestinian" activists, whose only goals are to slander Jews and justify the murder of Jews.
You don't go far back enough. Arabs have always been going in and out of the area, but starting in 1831, large numbers of Arabs began permanent relocation. For example, after Egypt’s conquest of Palestine in 1831, 6,000 Egyptian peasants moved to Palestine with their families. Thousands more moved in during the rest of the century, to the point that, by 1900 at least 85 - 90 % of the non-Beduin Muslim residents were immigrants or descendants of immigrants. The German Philip Baldensperger, observed in 1913 that “we find entire villages of Egyptians all along the plains of the Philistines, from the river of Egypt [i.e., the Nile]* to Jaffa, – descendants of those of 1831, and who continue unmixed.” Other ethnologists, seeking to study the native population, had many of the same complaints. During WWI and up until 1847, waves of Arab immigration continued unchecked.