The Palestinians' Myth

By Jeff Jacoby 
The Boston Globe

December 6, 2001

    A common misconception about Arab terrorism against Israel is 
that it is committed in an effort to derail the "peace process."  
President Bush echoed that fiction on Sunday when he commented on 
a wave of ghastly attacks that had just killed 26 Israeli civilians 
and maimed scores of others.

    "Clearly there are some in the world who do not want us to 
achieve peace in the Middle East," he said.  "They will use violence 
and terror to disrupt any progress that's being made."

    That gets it exactly backward.  Palestinian terrorists do not 
blow up crowded Israeli pizzerias because they want to provoke 
Jerusalem into abrogating the Oslo accords and abandoning the 
policy of "land for peace." On the contrary: The Palestinian 
leadership uses terrorism to *accelerate* the Oslo process -- to 
render Israelis so desperate and demoralized that they will make 
even deeper concessions, surrender even more land, and struggle
even harder to make peace with their enemies.

    Yasser Arafat's Potemkin arrests this week notwithstanding, his 
Palestinian Authority is as wedded to terrorism as Hamas and Islamic 
Jihad are.  All three share the same goal: the elimination of Israel.  Hamas and
Islamic Jihad say so explicitly; Arafat is a bit coy.  When speaking 
to Western audiences, he confines his demands to the disputed 
territories and Jerusalem.  But with Arab audiences he is blunt: 
"The struggle will continue," he vows, "until all of Palestine is 
liberated."  And as the maps, emblems, and rhetoric of the 
Palestinian Authority make clear, "all of Palestine" means all of 
Israel.

    Strip away the rhetoric, and the Arab war against Israel is 
based, above all, on hatred of Jews.  That is as true today, when 
an Arafat-appointed sheik promises "blessings to whoever saved a 
bullet to put in a Jew's head," as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, 
when the Jews of Hebron were massacred and the mufti of Jerusalem 
sang Hitler's praises.

    But it is not so easy to strip away the rhetoric.  To justify 
their violence and irredentism, Arab propagandists have developed 
an elaborate mythology about a stolen homeland, an ancient 
Palestinian nation, and a cruel expulsion at the hands of the Jews.  
And they have repeated it so often and so loudly that much of the 
world has come to believe it.

    A small vignette: While attending the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee's national convention in 1991, 
I stopped at a booth selling historic Palestinian artifacts.  
This was two years before Oslo -- Arafat was still in Tunisia and 
there was as yet no Palestinian Authority -- and I can remember the 
wistfulness with which the merchant showed me the old postage stamps 
marked "Palestine."

    "These were issued in Jerusalem," he told me, "when Palestine 
was ours -- before the occupation."

    There was the myth in a nutshell: Palestine used to belong to 
the Palestinians, who ruled it from their capital in Jerusalem 
until the Jews swarmed in and drove them out.  That is the root of 
all the violence and grief, and until the Palestinians can return 
to their homeland, the violence and grief will go on.

    The truth is rather different.

    The truth is that there was never an Arab country of Palestine, 
and Palestinian Arabs were never a nation.  The truth is that 
Jerusalem was never the capital of any Arab state or province.  
The truth is that in all of recorded history, only one people has 
ever made Palestine west of the Jordan a sovereign nation-state 
with Jerusalem as its capital: the Jews.

    So closely was Palestine associated with Jews, in fact, 
that in the years before Israel's birth, those who spoke of 
"Palestinians" were usually referring to the region's Jewish 
residents.  Arab leaders *rejected* the notion of a unique 
Palestinian Arab identity, insisting that Palestine was merely a 
part of "Greater Syria."

    Not that they saw Palestine as much of a prize in any case.  
Until the Zionist enterprise got underway, Palestine was stagnant 
and mostly barren. Its Arab population was small and declining.  
With Jewish development, however, came economic opportunity and 
better living conditions; these in turn attracted huge numbers of 
Arab immigrants from beyond Palestine's borders.

    But if the Arabs didn't consider themselves Palestinians, they 
nevertheless ended up with most of Palestine.  When the Ottoman 
Empire was broken up after World War I, the Allies carved a raft 
of new Arab countries from its territory, reserving only Palestine 
to fulfill their promise of a Jewish national home.  But in 1922, 
Great Britain severed the 77 percent of Palestine that lay east of 
the Jordan River and created yet another Arab country -- today's 
Jordan.

    The Arab myth of an ancient homeland stolen by Jews is dramatic 
and affecting, but it is still a myth.  *Three-fourths of historic 
Palestine is sovereign Arab territory, and has been barred to Jews 
for 80 years.* Arabs displaced by war from one part of Palestine 
have always had the rest of Palestine to resettle in -- if only 
their Arab brethren would permit it.

    The Jews, meanwhile -- the real Palestinians -- try to live on 
just the sliver of land that lies between the river and the sea.  
But even that is too much for their neighbors, who cannot abide a 
Jewish state of any size.  On the day it was born, they tried to 
wipe it out.  They have been trying ever since.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.