Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu is having a good visit. The tide is turning his way. He had a very good visit and speech to Congress yesterday. He said :
“…our conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state; it's always been about the existence of the Jewish state. This is what this conflict is about….In recent years, the Palestinians twice refused generous offers by Israeli prime ministers to establish a Palestinian state on virtually all the territory won by Israel in the Six Day War. They were simply unwilling to end the conflict. And I regret to say this: They continue to educate their children to hate. They continue to name public squares after terrorists. And worst of all, they continue to perpetuate the fantasy that Israel will one day be flooded by the descendants of Palestinian refugees. My friends, this must come to an end.”
Each of the above statements is objectively true and verifiable. The offers of a Palestinian state were in 1993 and 2000, not to mention Israeli acceptance, but Arab refusal, of the 1947 partition, along substantially the same lines as are today being discussed.
The teaching of Jew-hate amongst Palestinian children is widely reported, eg MEMRI.
The “”right of return” question is deeply emotional, but also deeply wrong to assume that the grand and great-grand children of the original refugees (many of whom left of their own accord in the Arab-instigate war, or at the behest of the Arab militaries) should be granted right of return, which would annihilate the Jewish state. At most there are under 80,000 of original “refugees” who might be granted right of return, not the nearly 5 million descendants.
Back to Bibi:
“So I say to President Abbas: Tear up your pact with Hamas! Sit down and negotiate. Make peace with the Jewish state. And if you do, I promise you this: Israel will not be the last country to welcome a Palestinian state as a new member of the United Nations; it will be the first to do so.”
Hear! Hear!
Except that the Palestinian leadership has no ears to “listen, listen”.
Note: I say “leadership”, for it seems clear that the Palestinian people have been gravely misused and misled by their “leadership”. That is the real Nakba [*]- - the “tragedy” – that Palestinians have been pawns of their own leadership and the leaders of neighbouring Arab countries. At the individual Palestinian level, it is likely that they could have accepted and got on with their Israeli neighbours quite well, thank you.
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[*] The official Nakba site says that “… [1948] saw mass deportation of a million Palestinians from their cities and villages, massacres of civilians, and the razing to the ground of hundreds of Palestinian villages”. This is simply, objectively and by scholarship on both sides – Arab and Israeli – wrong. Yet it is simple and powerful, a credible the “narrative” that has gained ground, especially amongst the left of the world, who take this at face value and hence see Israel as the villain, murderers, colonialists, “cruel Israelis” as our very own near-centenarian Elsie Tu claims.
All, all of it, wrong, wrong, wrong….
It is beyond reasonable dispute -- based on census figures, authoritative reports, eyewitness accounts, and simple arithmetic -- that the myth of displacement by the European Jewish refugees of a large, table long-term Muslim population that had lived in that part of Palestine for centuries is demonstrably false. Even many Arab intellectuals acknowledge the mythical nature of this claim. As the Palestinian leader Musa Alami said in 1948, "The people are in great need of a 'myth' to fill their consciousness and imagination". King Abdullah of Jordan also recognised that the story of Jewish displacement of local Palestininans was a fictional one, acknowledging that "the Arabs are as prodicgal in selling their land as they are in ... weeping about it". [King Abdullah, My Memoirs, Completed, Longman, London, 1978, p88-89]
It is beyond reasonable dispute -- based on census figures, authoritative reports, eyewitness accounts, and simple arithmetic -- that the myth of displacement by the European Jewish refugees of a large, table long-term Muslim population that had lived in that part of Palestine for centuries is demonstrably false. Even many Arab intellectuals acknowledge the mythical nature of this claim. As the Palestinian leader Musa Alami said in 1948, "The people are in great need of a 'myth' to fill their consciousness and imagination". King Abdullah of Jordan also recognised that the story of Jewish displacement of local Palestininans was a fictional one, acknowledging that "the Arabs are as prodicgal in selling their land as they are in ... weeping about it". [King Abdullah, My Memoirs, Completed, Longman, London, 1978, p88-89]
