Shabbat shalom!
We are on vacation this week, so I am re-posting a guest substack. But before I get to that, here is some convincing and irrefutable evidence of “apartheid in Israel”: A Jewish doctor tends to the Muslim Arab Bedouin hostage freed by the Israeli IDF, a hostage whose freedom from terrorist butchers is now celebrated by all of Israel.
The following guest post is from Nachum Kaplan’s “Moral Clarity” substack. Kaplan is a media consultant, journalist and commentator. He has 25 years international media experience and held senior international roles at Reuters and IFR.
After reading Kaplan’s short summary of Palestinian – Israeli history, I spent hours investigating his historical references and came across some interesting discoveries. The first was how dramatically different the UN, Wikipedia and Jewish Voice for Peace versions of history differ from the commonly accepted narrative of Jews and Israelis regarding “Nakba”, the founding myth of the Palestinian people. The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. A little history here: the term Nakba was first used in an Israeli context in a pamphlet written by Syrian professor Constantin Zureiq on August 5, 1948, as the war was still raging. Surprisingly, in that pamphlet, Zureiq does not refer to the Nakba as something Israelis perpetrated on the Arabs, but as a self-inflicted and humiliating wound caused by the Arabs themselves! Zureiq, no Jew-loving Zionist for sure, believed Arabs should take responsibility for their own mistake. In his own words: “When the battle broke out, our public diplomacy began to speak of our imaginary victories, to put the Arab public to sleep and talk of the ability to overcome and win easily — until the Nakba happened….. We must admit our mistakes …. and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the disaster that is our lot”. It wasn’t until the terrorist organization, Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat (who overtook the PLO) in 1968, that the term Nakba was used to rebrand the Palestinian plight, leading to the declaration of May 15 as a national day of commemoration.
Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. To be sure, around 700,000 Arabs either left on their own accord, were told to leave by neighboring Arab countries, or were forced out by the Israeli army, and probably not treated very well in the process, leaving behind their homes and valuables. And there is some evidence that in the fog of what was a defensive war for Israel, some atrocities (Deir Yassin, eg) were committed on both sides. Many Palestinians appealed for help to the same Arab countries that told them to leave, and were denied any help, or rights, and many were stuffed into refugee camps. Lebanon denied them citizenship, and even to this day, do now allow Palestinians to work in several of their industries. What many forget, or gets brushed over, is that after the war, Jews were ethnically cleansed from Morocco, Yemen, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, and Egypt, many leaving behind their homes and possessions to find their new homes in the land of Israel.
The UN and JVP’s distorted and often fictitious references to Nakba were not surprising, given their long history of Jew hating and blatant anti-semitism. But the Wikipedia misinformation was a bit of a surprise. The Wikipedia story relies a lot on historian Ilan Pappe’s account, who according to a New Republic article, at best is one of the world’s sloppiest and lazy historians whose narrative is usually just outright wrong, or at worst, one of the most dishonest, or a combination of both.
I found this work by the Jewish Virtual Library to be most helpful in debunking some of the common myths perpetrated by the UN and others regarding the history of Palestinian refugees.
Now here is Nachum’s post:
The Palestinian refusal to take responsibility for their actions and plight.
The Israel-Hamas War follows a depressingly familiar pattern. The Palestinians declare war or commit heinous acts, then pretend that they are innocent victims when faced with the consequences. This refusal to accept responsibility is why the Palestinians have nothing to show for their 80 years of conflict with Israel.
In 1948, the day after Israel declared independence, five Arab states (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq) declared war on Israel and lost. Both Israel and the Arabs gained and lost territory in this war and the borders of British Mandatory Palestine were redrawn.
It is in the fighting that about 700,000 Arabs, not yet calling themselves Palestinians, fled, and could not return because the Arabs lost the war they started. This is the so-called Nakba (Catastrophe), the Palestinian founding myth.
Some of these Arabs escaped to flee the fighting, and some were displaced, but the vast majority fled on Arab leaders’ instruction. They were told to flee and that they could return after the Arab armies had massacred the Jews and killed the nascent Jewish state, which, of course, did not happen.
The Arabs caused the Palestinian refugee crisis, first by telling them to flee and then, when they lost the war, by putting them in refugee camps rather than granting them citizenship (unlike Israel, which absorbed the 800,000 Jewish refugees expelled from Arab states in actual ethnic cleansing).
Israel subsequently made the Arabs in its state citizens, while Jordan ethnically cleansed Jews from Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem in a nasty piece of history that no one ever talks about because facts are so passe and the world does not mind crimes against Jews.
If the Arabs had not attacked Israel, there would have been no Palestinian refugees.
The Arabs have never taken responsibility for this. Instead, they built a fictional narrative worthy of Tolkien that Israel’s creation displaced them. They have been nurturing this lie for eight decades and got most of the world to believe it.
There was never a Palestinian nation, or people, just Arabs who just happened to live in British Mandatory Palestine. As those who get their knowledge from history books and not TikTok know, they never started calling themselves Palestinians until around 1968. This was when, having failed to defeat Israel at war, they developed a new strategy of pretending they were an occupied and dispossessed people.
It is fair to say that there exists today a group of people called the Palestinians, but what defines them? What makes them distinct from the people of Syria and Egypt, from where they mostly hail?
What binds them is their hatred of Israel, their desire to eradicate it, their refusal to acknowledge what really happened in 1948, and – above all else – their refusal to take responsibility for their plight since. A lack of sense of agency may be thedefining Palestinian characteristic.
While 1948 marked the beginning of this national character flaw, they have built upon it with dispiriting regularity.
The 1967 Six-Day War is another example. The region’s Arab armies again tried to eradicate Israel and got trounced in six days as Israel achieved one of history’s greatest military victories.
In this war, Israel took Judea and Samaria back from Jordan, which – for those averse to history books – had illegally occupied and annexed the region after the 1948 War. If a country starts a war, and then loses land that it was illegally occupying, then that is too bad.
Losing is the risk you take when you start a war; one with genocidal rather than territorial gains at that. My sympathy for genocidal warmongers is in short supply. In a morally sane universe, so would everyone else’s.
The Palestinians – in a delusion worthy of a psychotherapy conference – somehow decided that they were the victims of Israeli occupying Judea and Samaria. They have steadfastly refused to accept that their plight is mostly their fault. Much of the world has enabled this delusion by agreeing that Israel is occupying Judea and Samaria illegally.
Anyone who does not know what actually happened should stop basking in their ignorance and invest in a new pair of reading glasses.
Unable to destroy Israel in war, the Palestinians turned to terror. So convinced of their own victimhood, they launched the Intifada, a bloodthirsty six years from 1987 to 1991. This prompted Israel to deploy 80,000 troops to quell the terrorist and violent unrest, about which the Palestinians then complained.
Yet again the Palestinians unleashed violence on Israel, refused to accept responsibility for it, then cried to the credulous international community that they were the victims of Israeli military aggression and occupation.
This led to the Oslo Accords in 1993, a series of agreements aimed at providing Palestinian self-determination and a pathway to a Palestinian state – the so called two-state solution.
Naturally, the Palestinians ultimately rejected this because it did not give them what they wanted, which was Israel’s annihilation. The Palestinians then launched the homicidal Second Intifada from 2000-2005, producing a fierce Israeli response, after which the Palestinians again complained about Israeli military occupation.
For the slow people in the class, Israel’s military occupation is a response to Palestinians terror, not the cause of it. The Palestinians and their dim-witted supporters in the West do not accept this because avoiding accountability is the Palestinian national trait, to the extent one can call a cluster of Islamists terrorists a nation.
Following this were 20 years of rocket attacks on Israel from the Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza, terror attacks in Judea and Samaria by corrupt, and crony-ridden Palestinian Authority (PA), and attacks from Hezbollah, another Iranian terror proxy in the failed state of Lebanon.
This culminated in Hamas’ unspeakably evil attack on Israel on October 7 – the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust in the most sadistic and psychologically disturbed ways possible – sparking the Israel-Hamas War.
True to form, the Palestinians – supported by many morally stunted governments and
activiststerror supporters in the West – have again managed to convince themselves that they are the victims of Israeli aggression, a precise inversion of the truth.This is far from a comprehensive list of Arab and Arab Palestinian abdication of all responsibility. There was the Second Arab-Israeli War, the Yom Kippur War, the two Lebanon wars – every one of which the Arabs started – and too many terror attacks to mention.
Even since the Oslo Accords, when the PA gained day-to-day government of much of Judea and Samaria and Gaza, the Palestinians have messed it up and blamed the Jews.
Hamas took over Gaza and turned it into a Jihadist terror state, while the PA built a kleptocracy in Judea and Samaria and continues to fund and carry out terror as a matter of policy. Even as they were self-governing, they were blaming Israel for their woes. It is complete moral abandonment.
Imagine what would have happened if the Palestinians, instead of building the world’s most extensive and sophisticated terror network, had put their efforts into state-building and bettering the lives of Palestinians.
I jest, of course. It is almost impossible to imagine such a thing because the Palestinians’ refusal to accept any responsibility for the mess they have made, or for cleaning it up.
The obstacles to peace between Israel and the Palestinians have nothing to do with borders, states, or constitutional arrangements. It is the Palestinian refusal to live with Jews, and their pathological dishonesty about the starring role they have played in their own demise.
Western countries bear significant responsibility, too, as does the wider Arab and wider Muslim world. They have never asked the Palestinians to stand up and take responsibility for their own destiny, and they have joined them in blaming all their woes on Israel.
The West has betrayed the Palestinians with the bigotry of low expectations. Through ill-monitored aid and infirm foreign policy, they have enabled Palestinian uselessness and contributed to Palestinian misery.
If Israelis and Palestinians are ever to find peace, a Palestinian cultural change is needed. They must be willing to live with Jews, abandon their professional victimhood, and start taking responsibility for their own future.
It would help if the West recognized this, but it will not. It is too consumed by its own antisemitism, itself a sick feature of Western culture, to see what has really gone on and is going on.
Have a great weekend everyone! And hey, let’s be careful out there!
Brad out.
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