The Myth of Arab Palestine

[Nannette]

by Sarah Honig

In 1705 Eusebio Kino earned much scorn when he claimed to have crossed from Mexico into California without getting his feet wet. According to contemporary scholarly opinion, it couldn't be done. True, many vintage navigational charts documented evidence from explorations conducted as early as 1539 to the effect that California was part of America's mainland. But prevailing intellectual fashion decreed otherwise.

For nearly two centuries, leading mapmakers depicted California as an island, regardless of ample proof to the contrary. Kino's truth was unwelcome and hotly disputed. In 1711 England's foremost cartographer, Herman Moll, insisted that "California is undoubtedly an island. Why, I have had in my office mariners who sailed around it."

So much for ostensibly trustworthy incontrovertible evidence, like that furnished by actress Vanessa Redgrave in a Jerusalem press conference recently when she asserted that Israeli soldiers routinely and deliberately fire into Gazan classrooms, aiming for pupils' heads.

Her calumny, like Moll's spurious geography, gained resonance. The more falsehoods are repeated, the more convincing they sound and the more de rigueur they become. Facts aren't readily allowed to interfere with trendy opinion.

Accounts of Kino's overland journey were dismissed, as are reminders that there never was an independent Arab entity in Palestine, that Palestine is merely a Roman name invented to rile defeated Jews, that it was a European import adopted by 20th-century Arabs (who mispronounced it) in order to wrest the narrow sliver of land Jews could call their own.

The myth of plundered Palestine was born after Arab aggression lost the Arabs more land in 1967. No one cares that the PLO had been founded three years before that. No one asks which Palestine Arafat sought to liberate prior to the onset of awful occupation.

No one wants to know why Israel was forced into the so-called occupation. No one wants to recall that Israeli leaders had offered to cede everything. No one wants to admit that they were spurned because Arabs refused to forgo their "inalienable right" to inundate the Jewish state.

It's not bon ton to realize that the struggle isn't about the liberation of "occupied Palestine" but about the attempted annihilation of Israel. Indeed, Israel's continued existence is no longer perceived as a righteous cause by forward thinkers like Redgrave. In their topsy-turvy reality, the victim takes the blame.

It was no surprise in the aftermath of the Beslan bestiality to see Redgrave superciliously pontificating in televised discussions. She and fellow panelists resorted to euphemisms when alluding to the identity of those who forced hundreds of captured children to undress, denied them water, and executed grown-ups in front of their horrified eyes before setting off explosives. It's politically incorrect to emphasize the identity of "revolutionary desperados" who shot no less than 46 bullets into the back of one 12-year-old girl.

INSTEAD OF speaking of Muslim and Arab terrorists, most media comment referred to "hostage-takers," "separatists," "attackers" and the by-now-standard "militants." Calling a spade a spade isn't enlightened.

Uninitiated visitors from Mars could easily conclude that the villain of the piece was Putin and that Beslan's juveniles paid the expected price for his benighted policies. Oppressed and frustrated Chechen underdogs were left with no viable option but to butcher youngsters. It's natural for an aggrieved party to commit atrocities. The only way to preempt more of the same is to evince sensitivity and tolerance towards potential mass murderers.

This is all too familiar to Israeli ears. We're often told that had we not successfully defended ourselves, we'd be terror-free. (We also wouldn't be here.) The postulate that despair triggers terror isn't questioned. No nation had ever been as humiliated, tortured, and bloodied as the Jews during the Holocaust. No nation ever had as much justification for revenge.

Nevertheless, outraged Jewish survivors didn't storm German schools and massacre the Nazis' progeny.

Moreover, it's different strokes for different folks. Jews are expected to obligingly turn the other cheek. The right to rage seems an exclusive Muslim preserve. High-minded advocates stand ever ready to whitewash psychotic Islamic violence exported worldwide - even via the comfortably-off Saudi guests in America who crashed into the Twin Towers or well-heeled British-born Pakistanis who blew up Mike's Place in Tel Aviv.
Modern Molls would rather disseminate fraudulent claims than admit that Muslim emigres don't wish to integrate into host countries but to transform them. These aren't downtrodden altruists. They're expansionist fanatics.

They could ignite World War III.

Unflappable intellectual heirs of capricious cartographers won't acknowledge this. Spain's King Ferdinand VII only appeared to reimpose rationality with his royal edict of 1747 proclaiming that "California is no island."

In fact, spirits of departed deniers of California's continental connection still accompany today's danger-deniers on the voyage of the Good Ship Lollipop around mythical islands in the vast sea of utopian goodwill.

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He who is merciful with the cruel, will end-up being cruel to the merciful
- Kohelet Rabba 7:16