As if uprooted Palestinians had not suffered enough, WorldNetDaily owner Joseph Farah editorialized last week that Arab nations should invite Palestinians into their countries as citizens to start their lives over. Palestinians, all three million of them, should leave Israel forever. (wnd.com, Joseph Farah’s “Here’s My Mideast Peace Plan”)
Farah is serious. He persists in reflecting the Zionist lie that Arabs never had a significant national presence in Israel—and thus have no real claim to stay in Palestine or reclaim the land they fled in 1948.
Here are some of Farah’s latest misinformation and half-truths.
Farah: “There has never been an actual country called Palestine in the history of the world.”
Fact: Just three years before the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the Arab population in Palestine, including Christian Arabs, was counted at 634,133. For at least a century, they yearned for national freedom denied by Ottoman Turkish rulers. Hoping for independence, Palestinians, along with the Arab world, allied with the British under Lawrence of Arabia. He promised them independence if they helped defeat the Turks, allies of the Germans. [Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule of 1916–18 – ed.]
Much to the shame and regret of Lawrence, his promise to Palestinian Arabs was betrayed, starting with the secret 1915 Sykes-Picot Treaty and the Balfour Declaration which granted Britain rights to oversee creation of a Jewish state within Arab territory.
After 30 more years of Arab protest (and riots) against Zionist expansion, the United Nations set October 1, 1948 as the date for establishment of a Palestinian state. This came to nothing after Israeli terrorist organizations massacred innocent Arabs at Deir Yassin and assaulted other Arab cities and towns, eventually driving 800,000 Palestinians into UN-run concentration camps.
The Palestinians never had their longed-for nation, but only because of Zionist betrayal by the West. It is not because the Palestinians lacked the numbers or vision to have created one, either after World War I or World War II.
Farah: “…If you scratch beneath the surface of a so-called ‘Palestinian,’ you will usually find a family lineage that takes you back to an ancestral homeland in one of these countries.”
Fact: Palestinian ancestry goes back to the Canaanites and Abraham and his son Ishmael, father of the Arabs. Many Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and other ethnic influences contribute to Palestinian genetics. It is true the general Muslim/Arab conquest in the 7th century A.D. provided the dominant genome of the modern Palestinian. But well before significant Zionist occupation of Palestine, in 1890, a population of 431,800 Palestinian Muslim Arabs occupied the land. Only 42,900 Jews were present. This preponderance of Arabs over Jews in virtually all cities continued until Israeli statehood in 1948. This makes a lie of Farah’s next statement.
Farah: “The rest of what we euphemistically call ‘Palestine’ today was set aside as a homeland for the majority of people referring to themselves as ‘Palestinians’ at the time — Jews.”
Fact: According to this, the British and League of Nations in 1917 considered Jews a majority in Palestine and delegated Jordan the homeland for all “Palestinians.” What utter falsehood! Every statistic from that period shows that virtually all cities and towns averaged at least 98 percent Arab. The exception was Haifa, a Zionist stronghold. Even in 1948 Arabs outnumbered Jews 2 to 1 in Jerusalem.
Farah: “Interestingly, there was no call for ‘Palestinian’ statehood, until the territory, historically part of the ancient state or nation of Israel, was captured by re-born state of Israel during the Six-Day War.”
Fact: The Arab call for statehood led the British to grant the Palestinians this dream if they would help defeat the Turks. The Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem exhaustively considers emergent Palestinian political parties which, after British betrayal in 1917, passionately worked toward statehood. Though plagued by dissension, they were united by the need to hold back ever-increasing Zionist expansion. They hoped to establish permanent boundaries of a Palestinian state, forever granting Palestinian Arabs autonomy and legal means to halt what they recognized as Zionist takeover.
It was Zionist terrorism that ended the United Nations’ willingness to ratify the Palestinian state. Just weeks before it would have happened, Jewish terrorists exploded in violent blood-letting. This provoked Arab military invasion from Jordan and Syria to assist their beleaguered Palestinian brethren. After the “Jewish War of Independence,” the Palestinian population was lessened by 800,000, with Israelis now occupying nearly most of what is modern Israel.
Yet Farah perversely says such mistreated Arabs should have no compensation for what they lost—”Palestine” should only be possessed by those who drove Arabs from their ancestral homes, businesses, farms, and orchards. The land today, Farah asserts, should not suffer the indignity of being carved up for the sake of illegitimate “Palestinians.”
Farah: “Does it really make sense to carve up the only Jewish state in the world with a land mass the size of New Jersey—less than 1 percent to create yet another Arab country out of whole cloth?”He says it is not the Israelis but the Arab countries which should now harbor three million Palestinians, again uprooted to an uncertain future. Farah holds Israel blameless for the existence of millions of Palestinians in concentration camps for the past 63 years. Instead, he says the Arabs are to blame. “The Arab world has purposefully oppressed their stateless cousins in refugee camps and occupation long enough.”
Fact: Farah is not advocating force to persuade Palestinians to accept hypothetical invitation by Arab countries. What is dangerous, however, is that he holds up the Palestinians as essentially without rights to stay in Palestine; the ideal solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not learning to live together but complete removal of the offending race. It is dangerous to popularize mass removal of any people. Why? Because, ultimately, such “ethnic cleansing” can only be realized through coercion. […]
