Palestinian Affairs: Blazing battles : Utah IMC

Abbas was in Jordan earlier this week when his advisers phoned him urgently to inform him that Hamas's Interior Minister, Said Siam, was threatening to use force to prevent Palestinian policemen from demonstrating in various parts of the Gaza Strip against unpaid salaries. The protests, seen by Hamas as part of a "mutiny" designed to bring down their government, began late last week. Hundreds of policemen, accompanied by heavily armed Fatah militiamen, went on a rampage in the streets, shooting into the air and attacking government institutions.

Abbas chose to ignore warnings from his advisers that Siam's decision could trigger bloody clashes and claim the lives of many people. He reportedly told his aides that he did not believe Siam would order the Hamas "executive force" to open fire on the protesters. As such, Abbas added, "I see no need to return immediately to Ramallah."

Abbas's main argument was that Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, with whom he has close ties, had promised him that he would do his utmost to avoid civil war. As it later turned out, Abbas was wrong in his assessment, as he was wrong about the September 11 agreement that he claimed he had reached with Haniyeh on the formation of a national unity government. Then, Abbas emerged from a meeting with Haniyeh to break the "good news" that Hamas had finally accepted the Arab peace plan of 2002, which implicitly recognizes Israel's right to exist alongside a future Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem.

Abbas even went as far as to claim that Hamas had agreed to abide by all previous agreements with Israel after the formation of the unity government. Buoyed by the coalition agreement, Abbas flew to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly meeting and to brief world leaders, including US President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on the alleged change in Hamas's position.

Yet, even before Abbas's arrival in the US, Hamas leaders and spokesmen strongly denied that they had agreed to recognize Israel or agreements with it. Their statements seriously embarrassed Abbas, making him appear as if he did not know what he was talking about. World leaders who met with and heard from him about the ostensible change in Hamas's policies confronted him with excerpts that contained the denials of Hamas leaders.

"The president [Abbas] was so embarrassed by what Hamas did to him while he was in the US," recounted a senior PA official. "They actually did everything to undermine his credibility, and thus sabotaged his efforts to persuade the international community to resume financial aid to our people."

For weeks, Abbas has stubbornly resisted pressure from his senior aides and many Palestinian officials to use his powers and fire the Hamas-led government. Each time they told him that there was no chance that Hamas would ever accept his demands, Abbas retorted that he needed more time to try to convince the Islamic movement that the only way to resolve the crisis in the Palestinian Authority was to endorse a lenient approach that would appease the US and the rest of the international community. "He kept saying, 'Give me two more weeks and you will see that Hamas will comply,'" said a PLO executive member.

IN THE context of his efforts to put pressure on Hamas to change, Abbas last week flew to Qatar, one of the few Arab countries that maintain good relations with Hamas's overall leader, Khaled Mashaal, who is said to be the main obstacle on the road to the establishment of a Fatah-Hamas government. In the end, the Abbas-Mashaal meeting did not take place, because Mashaal rejected Abbas's demand that he apologize for accusing the PA chairman, earlier this year, of conspiring with the enemies of the Palestinians against the democratically elected government.

On Wednesday, Abbas once again issued his famous two-week ultimatum to Hamas. At a meeting with Rice, he told her that he was determined to dismiss the Hamas-led government and form a new government that would recognize Israel and honor all the agreements between the Palestinians and the Israelis. And later that day he made it clear that the talks with Hamas over the unity government had failed, and that he had no intention to meet with Haniyeh in the near future.

It's not clear, then, why he has also asked for another two weeks. No one in Abbas's inner circle believes that the next two weeks will see Hamas making dramatic changes in its ideology and policies. "The president is wasting his time at the expense of the people, who are suffering as a result of the severe financial crisis," said a respected newspaper editor in Ramallah. "Today it's clear to all that there is no other alternative but to fire the Hamas government and call early elections."

Abbas's aides, meanwhile, have stepped up their pressure on him to stop hesitating and to take real measures to resolve the crisis. They pointed out that Rice assured Abbas during their meeting this week that the US would stand behind him and his Fatah party if he chose to get rid of the Hamas-led government. The US, they added, does not share Abbas's view that Hamas can be transformed, which is why the Americans want him to dismiss Haniyeh's government. Washington also promised to reward Abbas and his Fatah party with millions of dollars and weapons should he embark on such a course.

However, Abbas's main concern is not wanting to be seen by his constituents as a pawn in the hands of Israel and the US. The bloody clashes that took place on "Black Sunday" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip - which claimed the lives of 12 people and left more than 150 wounded - are only a taste of the dangers that lie ahead. Today he is well aware that an extreme measure such as firing the government would undoubtedly result in civil war.

When Nazis were driven out of Greece, Greek commies and Greek monarchists battled each other for conrole of Greece. But noone says thier fighting ment it was wrong to drive the Nazis out of Greece.

And like the battles in Greece, interloapers choose sides in Fatah's battle with Hamas. Fatah gets the Zionist enabler support because fatah was willing to appease Zionist occupation of 5/6 of Palestine. But Zionists only accelerate thier theft of Palestinian lands after Oslo. And the appeasment party (Fatah) got booted out.

do it for me.

Judea and Samaria were usurped from the Jews in a bloodsoaked murder crusade in the first half of last century. Since 1967 the ZIonists have been merely reacting to this ethnic cleansing. The ZIonist enmity toward the genocide practicing Palestinians is no less justified than the animosity the Dutch underground harbored toward the Nazi occupier during WWII.

These are disputed territories. Scapegoating the Zionists and Jews doesn't do it for me. Neither does inventing a fictitious Palestinian history that tries to supplant the real Palestinians, the Jews.

http://palestinefacts.org/pf_faq_palestine.php

How did the Zionists acquire land in Palestine?

Note: Land in Israel is often measured in hectares (1 acre = approx. 0.4 hectare, 1 hectare = approx. 2.5 acres) or dunams (dunam = approx. .25 acre, acre = approx. 4 dunams). There are 640 acres in a square mile. See Conversion for more information.

Redemption of land in Eretz Israel, much of which had fallen into neglect under foreign rule, began in the mid-1850s with the first attempts to enable Jews to live productively in Ottoman Palestine without reliance on the "old yishuv" model of overseas support. Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) made the first known land purchase by someone from outside the region in 1855: 10 hectares (250 acres) of orange groves in Jaffa, under a newly-made arrangement with the Sultan allowing these first-ever purchases. Other private acquisitions followed, and by 1882, some 2,200 hectares had been purchased by Jews. Although several of the first Zionist villages (moshavot) were built on this land, the areas were not contiguous and the idea of using land purchase to prepare for Jewish sovereignty was far in the future. Each purchase entailed a cumbersome bureaucratic procedure vis-à-vis the local Turkish authorities, which, in the final declining phase of the Ottoman Empire, were either hostile to or uninterested in Jewish holdings in the sparsely populated backwater province that Palestine had become. Nearly all land was owned by the state (and was passed on to subsequent sovereigns) or by private and public entities through title or leasing arrangements. This state of affairs, coupled with the frequent need to resort to bribery in official dealings, gave the Jewish purchases a clandestine complexion that would recur in subsequent years.

Although the creation of the Jewish National Fund was originally proposed by Judah Alkalai in 1847 it had to wait until the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1901 to become a reality. The Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemeth LeYisrael) was established to buy land in Palestine for reclamation and Jewish settlement. In its first decade, the JNF built a worldwide fundraising organization based on sale of stamps, collection "Blue Boxes" in homes and schools and solicitation of donations. In the spring of 1903, JNF acquired its first parcel of land: 800 acres in Hadera. Other modest purchases were made in 1904 and 1908 in Lower Galilee, Judea, and the Lake Kinneret region, and two forms of settlement that would prove crucial in the land-acquisition enterprise were pioneered there: the cooperative (moshav) and the collective (kevutsa, later kibbutz).

From the start, the organization focused on greening the land through the planting of trees. JNF got involved in tree planting for many reasons, including as a way to fulfill the Biblical commandment. In order to solidify ownership of land purchased by JNF on behalf of the Jewish community, and in accordance with prevailing laws of the day, trees were planted whenever a new piece of land was purchased. In 1908, the first JNF trees were planted at Hulda: olive trees in memory of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism. In 1920, JNF expanded its role to help reclaim the swamps of Palestine. There quickly followed afforestation efforts. Since 1920, millions of trees have been planted in Israel by the Jewish National Fund.

Baron Benjamin (Edmond James) de Rothschild (1845-1934) enlisted in this cause after being petitioned by the leaders of Rishon Lezion, one of the First Aliya villages. His patronage embraced 12 settlements at all three levels of land redemption: purchase, reclamation and economically viable settlement. To make these possible, he established an administration that, although staffed in part by condescending officials who evoked the independent-minded settlers' resentment, institutionalized all three aspects of land redemption. The best-known settlements sponsored by Rothschild are Metulla, Zikhron Ya'akov, Rishon Lezion, and Rosh Pina. Metulla (est. 1896) is an example of a purchase that had the further advantages of controlling water sources and establishing the northern limit of Jewish settlement. In 1900, Rothschild transferred the settlements, their agricultural enterprises, and 25,000 hectares of land to the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA, est. 1891), which he continued to support in various ways.

In a military biography of Moshe Dayan, the early Zionist activity is described this way:

"Using Rothschild's money, these Jews purchased land from absentee Turkish landlords. To the Arab tenant farmers, the transfer of land from Turkish to Jewish ownership was of little consequence since the Jews rehired them as agricultural workers."
By the time Israel became a state in 1948, JNF owned 12.5 percent of all the land of Israel on which 80 percent of Israel's population now lives. With this ownership came the responsibility of transforming the land into a beautiful and fertile area that would be a suitable home for the new state.

Personal experiences with the difficulties and triumphs of land acquisition in the Emek Jezreel valley of Israel in the period from 1891 to the 1920s are documented in great detail in this memoir published in 1929. Interesting passages include:

"It was not only the fertility of these plains [Emek Jezreel] that attracted the [sic], but also the fact that these were the only regions where it was possible to purchase a large stretch of land from a single owner, while the remainder of Palestine was broken up into small parcels belonging to many individuals..."

"[It was not easy for Hankin] to reach this agreement to a low price, for even then [1891] speculators of all kinds were surrounding the land owners and attempting to frustrate his efforts by offering a higher price. But Hankin enjoyed the confidence of the Arabs, so that he succeeded in overcoming the competition of the speculators."

"...The Turkish Government refused to authorize the sale, even though official permission was applied for ... by a Jew, Efraim Krause, who was a Turkish citizen."

"In 1921 it was impossible to find a Jewish purchaser for one of the finest and best situated orange plantations in Palestine (although it was offered at an exceedingly low price), so that it had to be sold to an Arab."
Shlomo Gravetz of the Jewish National Fund says: "Throughout the history of land reclamation by Jews in Eretz Yisrael, the Arabs have always claimed that the Jews were throwing them off their land. In 1932 the High Commissioner appointed the Bentwich Committee to investigate these claims, and out of 700 purchases of Arab property, the committee did not find one case in which the Jews had acted immorally."

http://palestinefacts.org/pf_early_palestine_zionists_land.php

What is the history of other countries in the Middle East? Read http://palestinefacts.org/pf_faq_palestine_other_countries.php

What was the impact of the Zionists on Palestine?

In the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, a litany of Christian travelers - Siebald Rieter and Johann Tucker, Arnold Van Harff and Father Michael Nuad, Martin Kabatnik and Felix Fabri, Count Constantine Francois Volney and Alphonse de Lamartine, Mark Twain and Sir George Gawler, Sir George Adam Smith and Edward Robinson - found Palestine virtually empty, except for Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Safed, Shechem, Hebron, Gaza, Ramleh, Acre, Sidon, Tyre, Haifa, Irsuf, Caesarea, and El Arish, and throughout Galilee towns - Kfar Alma, Ein Zeitim, Biria, Pekiin, Kfar Hanania, Kfar Kana and Kfar Yassif. To stay, these Jews had submitted to innumerable conquerors, taxes, pogroms and degradation. But they stayed. In 1799, Palestine was still so much in need of people that Napoleon Bonaparte championed a full-scale return of Jews.

In the early 19th century, Palestine was a backward, neglected province of the Ottoman Empire. Travelers to Palestine from the Western world left records of what they saw there. The theme throughout their reports is dismal: The land was empty, neglected, abandoned, desolate, fallen into ruins.

In Jerusalem, all reports and journals of travelers, pilgrims and government representatives during these years, repeatedly record the poverty, filth and neglect and the desolate nature of the countryside. Early photographs show lepers in rags and dilapidated buildings. Jerusalem was surrounded by marauding bands of Bedouin Arabs and had to close her gates at nightfall and reopen them at first light, a practice that was similar in Biblical times.

Some quotes from the writings of these visitors before modern times:

Nothing there [Jerusalem] to be seen but a little of the old walls which is yet remaining and all the rest is grass, moss and weeds. [English pilgrim in 1590]

The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population. [British consul in 1857]

There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent [valley of Jezreel] -- not for 30 miles in either direction... One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. ... For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee ... Nazareth is forlorn ... Jericho lies a moldering ruin ... Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation... untenanted by any living creature... A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds ... a silent, mournful expanse ... a desolation ... We never saw a human being on the whole route ... Hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil had almost deserted the country ... Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery Palestine must be the prince. The hills barren and dull, the valleys unsightly deserts [inhabited by] swarms of beggars with ghastly sores and malformations. Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes ... desolate and unlovely ... [Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1867]
Remarkably, there are photographs dating to the 19th century and early 20th century that document the development of Palestine from the desolate, pre-Zionist landscape reported by travelers to the green and productive land that Jewish immigrants created there. This web site has 460 photographs and lithographs of the period, some never before available to the public. They show how the industrious Zionists made the lightly-populated land productive and able to support the great increases in Jewish and Arab numbers that came to Palestine in the following decades.

Winston Churchill was British Colonial Secretary when he visited the Middle East in the winter of 1920-1921. Anti-Semitic elements in the British government tried to assert that the Jews were not needed to develop Palestine. Churchill replied:

Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps towards the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been quite content to dwell—a handful of philosophic people—in wasted sun-drenched plains, letting the waters of the Jordan flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea."
In 1924, a few months after becoming Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Elwood Mead (namesake of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam) published a highly favorable review of Jewish settlements in Palestine based on his visits there in 1923. His article, "New Palestine," praised the Zionists accomplishments and plans, a publicity coup. Mead blamed Islam, Ottoman governance, and Arab culture for the demise of Roman irrigation systems that, according to Mead, once supported "lands flowing with milk and honey." Mead was a consultant to Chiam Weizman offering his expertise to maximize the return on investment of the extensive investments in irrigation, land reclamation, and water supplies in the Zionist areas based on Mead's extensive experience in the American West.

After the Arab riots in 1929, Mead wrote to the British High Commissioner that Jewish colonists had produced "a marvelous transformation" in the Palestinian landscape. Mead noted that in his visits to Palestine he had seen nothing "to indicate that the Arab was injured." Moreover, the Jewish example of "what modern finance and equipment can do, coupled with the sympathetic interest of the government is bringing him out of the hopeless inertia that misgovernment and oppression of centuries past have created .... " Jewish settlers in Palestine were not only reclaiming the land, they were elevating living standards for the Arab population and assisting the British government.

In his report to the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Transjordan for the year 1925, the British High Commissioner wrote:

Fuel-power stations for the generation of electrical light and energy have been established at Haifa and Tiberias by the [Jewish] Palestine Electric Corporation, Limited. This increase in commercial activity, in building enterprise and new industrial developments is due almost entirely to Jewish capital and the entry during the year of an immigrant class with money to invest.
During this period a significant shift of population took place as Arabs and others from all over the Middle East moved to the areas of Zionist cultivation and development. The organizational and technical skills of the Jewish settlers, their access to outside capital, and their sheer hard work created an economic boom that created opportunity for Arab workers, particularly in contrast to the stagnant conditions elsewhere in the region. This has been documented by many, following the much-criticized but basically sound work of Joan Peters in her book From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab–Jewish Conflict Over Palestine. The central findings are that:

As far back as 1893, the Jews not only were already far from being a small minority in the areas where they had settled, but were the largest single group there (if one divides the non-Jewish population into Muslim and Christian), and

Substantial immigration of Arabs to Palestine took place during the first half of the twentieth century; from 1893 to 1947 while the Palestinian Arab population slightly more than doubled in areas where no Jews were settled, it quintupled in the main areas of Jewish settlement.
These findings are supported with an array of demographic statistics and contemporary accounts, the bulk of which have not been questioned by any reviewer.

http://palestinefacts.org/pf_early_palestine_zionists_impact.php

The Myth Of The Palestinian People

“Palestinians doubt Blair can deliver,” announces the BBC. “Four Palestinians die in West Bank,” reports CNN. “IDF demolishes building used by Palestinian gunmen,” announces Israel’s government run Channel 1 News. The modern media is filled with stories about the Palestinians, their plight, their dilemmas and their struggles. All aspects of their lives seem to have been put under the microscope. Only one question never seems to be addressed: Who are the Palestinians? Who are these people who claim the Holy Land as their own? What is their history? Where did they come from? How did they arrive in the country they call Palestine? Now that both US President George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (in direct opposition to the platform he was elected on) have come out in favor of a Palestinian state, it would be prudent to seek answers to these questions. For all we know, Palestine could be as real as Disneyland.

The general impression given in the media is that Palestinians have lived in the Holy Land for hundreds, if not thousands of years. No wonder, then, that a recent poll of French citizens shows that the majority believe (falsely) that prior to the establishment of the State of Israel an independent Arab Palestinian state existed in its place. Yet curiously, when it comes to giving the history of this “ancient” people most news outlets find it harder to go back more than the early nineteen hundreds. CNN, an agency which has devoted countless hours of airtime to the “plight” of the Palestinians, has a website which features a special section on the Middle East conflict called “Struggle For Peace”. It includes a promising sounding section entitled “Lands Through The Ages” which assures us it will detail the history of the region using maps. Strangely, it turns out, the maps displayed start no earlier than the ancient date of 1917. The CBS News website has a background section called “A Struggle For Middle East Peace.’’ Its history timeline starts no earlier than 1897. The NBC News background section called ‘’Searching for Peace’’ has a timeline which starts in 1916. BBC’s timeline starts in 1948.

Yet, the clincher must certainly be the Palestinian National Authority’s own website. While it is top heavy on such phrases as “Israeli occupation” and “Israeli human rights violations” the site offers practically nothing on the history of the so-called Palestinian people. The only article on the site with any historical content is called “Palestinian History - 20th Century Milestones” which seems only to confirm that prior to 1900 there was no such concept as the Palestinian People.

While the modern media maybe short on information about the history of the “Palestinian people” the historical record is not. Books, such as Battleground by Samuel Katz and From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters long ago detailed the history of the region. Far from being settled by Palestinians for hundreds, if not thousands of years, the Land of Israel, according to dozens of visitors to the land, was, until the beginning of the last century, practically empty. Alphonse de Lamartine visited the land in 1835. In his book, Recollections of the East, he writes "Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw no living object, heard no living sound…." None other than the famous American author Mark Twain, who visited the Land of Israel in 1867, confirms this. In his book Innocents Abroad he writes, “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely…. We never saw a human being on the whole journey.” Even the British Consul in Palestine reported, in 1857, “The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population…”

In fact, according to official Ottoman Turk census figures of 1882, in the entire Land of Israel, there were only 141,000 Muslims, both Arab and non-Arab. This number was to skyrocket to 650,000 Arabs by 1922, a 450% increase in only 40 years. By 1938 that number would become over 1 million or an 800% increase in only 56 years. Population growth was especially high in areas where Jews lived. Where did all these Arabs come from? According to the Arabs the huge increase in their numbers was due to natural childbirth. In 1944, for example, they alleged that the natural increase (births minus deaths) of Arabs in the Land of Israel was the astounding figure of 334 per 1000. That would make it roughly three times the corresponding rate for the same year of Lebanon and Syria and almost four times that of Egypt, considered amongst the highest in the world. Unlikely, to say the least. If the massive increase was not due to natural births, then were did all these Arabs come from?

All the evidence points to the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. In 1922 the British Governor of the Sinai noted that “illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria.” In 1930, the British Mandate -sponsored Hope-Simpson Report noted that “unemployment lists are being swollen by immigrants from Trans-Jordania” and “illicit immigration through Syria and across the northern frontier of Palestine is material.” The Arabs themselves bare witness to this trend. For example, the governor of the Syrian district of Hauran, Tewfik Bey el Hurani, admitted in 1934 that in a single period of only a few months over 30,000 Syrians from Hauran had moved to the Land of Israel. Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted the Arab influx. Churchill, a veteran of the early years of the British mandate in the Land of Israel, noted in 1939 that “far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied.”

Far from displacing the Arabs, as they claimed, the Jews were the very reason the Arabs chose to settle in the Land of Israel. Jobs provided by newly established Zionist industry and agriculture lured them there, just as Israeli construction and industry provides most Arabs in the Land of Israel with their main source of income today. Malcolm MacDonald, one of the principal authors of the British White Paper of 1939, which restricted Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, admitted (conservatively) that were it not for a Jewish presence the Arab population would have been little more than half of what it actually was. Today, when due to the latest “intifada” Arabs from the territories under 35 are no longer allowed into pre-1967 Israel to work, unemployment has skyrocketed to over 40% and most rely on European aid packages to survive.

Not only pre-state Arabs lied about being indigenous. Even today, many prominent so-called Palestinians, it turns out, are foreign born. Edward Said, an Ivy League Professor of Literature and a major Palestinian propagandist, long claimed to have been raised in Jerusalem. However, in an article in the September 1999 issue of Commentary Magazine Justus Reid Weiner revealed that Said actually grew up in Cairo, Egypt, a fact which Said himself was later forced to admit. But why bother with Said? PLO chief Yasir Arafat himself, self declared “leader of the Palestinian people”, has always claimed to have been born and raised in “Palestine”. In fact, according to his official biographer Richard Hart, as well as the BBC, Arafat was born in Cairo on August 24, 1929 and that’s where he grew up.

To maintain the charade of being an indigenous population, Arab propagandists have had to do more than a little rewriting of history. A major part of this rewriting involves the renaming of geography. For two thousand years the central mountainous region of Israel was known as Judea and Samaria, as any medieval map of the area testifies. However, the state of Jordan occupied the area in 1948 and renamed it the West Bank. This is a funny name for a region that actually lies in the eastern portion of the land and can only be called “West” in reference to Jordan. This does not seem to bother the majority of news outlets covering the region, which universally refer to the region by its recent Jordanian name.

The term “Palestinian" is itself a masterful twisting of history. To portray themselves as indigenous, Arab settlers adopted the name of an ancient Canaanite tribe, the Phillistines, that died out almost 3000 years ago. The connection between this tribe and modern day Arabs is nil. Who is to know the difference? Given the absence of any historical record, one can understand why Yasser Arafat claims that Jesus Christ, a Jewish carpenter from the Galilee, was a Palestinian. Every year, at Christmas time, Arafat goes to Bethlehem and tells worshippers that Jesus was in fact “the first Palestinian”.

If the Palestinians are indeed a myth, then the real question becomes “Why?” Why invent a fictitious people? The answer is that the myth of the Palestinian People serves as the justification for Arab occupation of the Land of Israel. While the Arabs already possess 21 sovereign countries of their own (more than any other single people on earth) and control a land mass 800 times the size of the Land of Israel, this is apparently not enough for them. They therefore feel the need to rob the Jews of their one and only country, one of the smallest on the planet. Unfortunately, many people ignorant of the history of the region, including much of the world media, are only too willing to help.

It is interesting to note that the Bible makes reference to a fictitious nation confronting Israel. “They have provoked me to jealously by worshipping a non-god, angered me with their vanities. I will provoke them with a non-nation; anger them with a foolish nation (Deuteronomy 32:21).”

On second thought, it may be unfair to compare Palestine to Disneyland. After all, Disneyland really exists.