Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 20
The “Israel-Palestine Conflict” is a propagandistic construct that obstructs peace
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The world’s greatest philosophers disagree on many things but on one subject they are united – words matter.
Language can influence our perception of the world. The “Israel-Palestine conflict” is a classic example of a wilfully world-limiting, blinkered vision of reality. For it is a matter of historical fact there is no Israel-Palestine conflict. If that statement startles you, look at the evidence.
In the early years of modern political Zionism in the late nineteenth century, there were sporadic Arab attacks (mostly criminal rather than political in nature) on the returning Jewish immigrants as well as on the longstanding (mainly religious) Jewish residents of Eretz Israel (“Palestine”). But the large-scale conflict was ignited in 1920 by Haj Amin al Husseini, self-appointed leader of the Arabs of the emergent Mandatory Palestine, Arab nationalist and unabashed, Hitler-adoring antisemite. This obnoxious character, revered today by the PLO elite as a great Palestinian patriot, exploited his appointment by the British to the influential position of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to incite anti-Jewish violence. [1]
Wasn’t Husseini merely trying to secure self-determination for the Palestinian Arabs? On the contrary, he was a pan-Arabist who saw Greater Syria, including Palestine, as the launchpad for a resurgent Arab nation. A Palestinian (Arab) state (in addition to the one that was rustled up by the British east of the Jordan in 1922) could have been created at least twice on Husseini’s watch (and many times subsequently) but that was far from most Arab minds. The main motivation for violence against the Jews arose from a far darker source.
The Arab world didn’t confront first Zionism and then Israel to support the Palestinians but to vent hostility to Jews. Antisemitism has long played a central role in the “pro-Palestinian” movement. The leaders of the two most prominent Palestinian political/terrorist organisations today, the Iranian-backed militias Hamas and Hezbollah, are explicitly antisemitic, just as their predecessors were, all the way back to the Mufti and the Nazi-admiring Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.
Throughout the British Mandate period right up until the UN partition resolution of 1947, Husseini and his friends did all in their power to frustrate the will of the League of Nations to enable the re-establishment of the Jewish national home. Jewish self-determination was pitched against Arab determination to stop it at any price, even at the cost of forfeiting a Palestinian Arab state in western Palestine.
In May 1948, after several months of civil war, David Ben Gurion declared Israel’s independence. The next day, five Arab armies attacked and attempted to snuff out the single flickering candle of Jewish hope in the wake of the collective trauma of the Shoah. Zionism’s adversaries were not just Palestinians but the entire Arab world. Israel won that war, thus saving the Jewish people from a further catastrophe within three years of the liberation of Auschwitz. But her enemies’ annihilationist fervour hadn’t dimmed.
Although both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were now firmly in Arab hands, there was no demand for a Palestinian state. The reason? Because the prime aspiration of all Israel’s neighbours was to snuff out the hated “Zionist entity” as rapidly as possible. The status of the Palestinian Arabs was of little interest to Israel’s foes until they realised that they could weaponise the Palestinian refugees – that the Arab war of extermination against the Jews had caused – against Israel.
When Egypt’s President Nasser provoked the war of June 1967, yet another Jewish Nakba loomed. On this occasion, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and even Pakistan joined the attempt to eliminate the Jewish state. Further wars and terrorist campaigns ensued, most involving non-Palestinian actors. As Israeli journalist Matti Friedman [2] explains: Palestinians have made up a small number of the combatants facing the country…Israeli soldiers faced Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Iraqis. Today Israel’s most potent enemy is the Shiite theocracy in Iran, which is more than 1,000 miles away and isn’t Palestinian (or Arab). The gravest threat to Israel at close range is Hezbollah on our northern border, an army of Lebanese Shiites founded and funded by the Iranians…A threat of a lesser order is posed by Hamas, which is Palestinian but was founded as the local incarnation of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, affiliated with the regional wave of Sunni radicalism, kept afloat with Qatari cash and backed by Iran.
There are several seriously damaging consequences, beyond historical inaccuracy, of subsuming this complex and multifaceted array of threats to Israel under the wholly inadequate “Israel-Palestine” rubric.
First, it casts Israel as the oppressor and the Palestinians as the victims. In this framing, Israelis are more numerous, stronger and wealthier than the Palestinians – that is its primary purpose. The strategy works: Palestinians garner global sympathy and political support (as well as generous funding), while Israelis are cast as heartless villains deserving nothing but moral condemnation and pariah status.
Second, it implants the notion in the minds of the uninformed that Palestine is a real geopolitical entity. In reality, "Palestine" is a fictional version of disputed territory, one that promotes the Palestinian Authority’s bogus claim to have achieved sovereignty while simultaneously (and illogically) accusing Israel of illegitimately occupying the self-same Palestinian land. (Fact-check: despite repeated Israeli offers to establish a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza in the context of a peace treaty, such an entity does not exist and pretending that it does will not make it happen sooner. Equally specious is the UN-brokered phrase Occupied Palestinian Territories that is tossed around as though neither the 1993-5 Oslo Accords nor the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza happened).
Third, it can be exploited to project a negative image of domestic Israeli society. Renowned English children’s author Michael Morpurgo [3] spoke recently on BBC radio of his visit to an Israeli school “in a village where Palestinians and Israeli children grow up together” [sic], a confused demographic taxonomy in which the Israel-Palestine paradigm is parachuted into Israel itself in a manner that implies an ethnically defined normative division (apartheid anyone?) between Israelis (aka Jews) and Palestinians (aka Arabs). (For the record, Michael, fewer than 1 in 1o Israeli Arabs self-identify as Palestinians [4]).
Fourth, and perhaps most seriously, it leads to the discredited analysis that all roads to peace in the Middle East run through Ramallah, thereby granting the Palestinians a veto over Israeli attempts to improve relations with her neighbours (the Kerry doctrine) [5]. Only be “solving” the Israel-Palestine conflict (through concessions squeezed out of Israel as the stronger party), posits this theory, can a wider peace be achieved. The absurdity of this assumption has been spectacularly exposed by the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel and four Arab states in 2020.
Am I asserting that there is no conflict whatsoever between Israelis and Palestinians? Of course not, that would be ludicrous. It exists, is real and lethal for both sides. Like most myths, it contains a kernel of truth but it has been amplified far beyond the bounds of veracity. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute represents just one corner of a much wider and more dangerous argument between Israel and several of her Middle Eastern neighbours. To see the full picture, a much wider-angle lens is needed.
The phrase “Israel-Palestine conflict” is not merely a flawed or inadequate descriptor of a century-old dispute but a propagandistic construct that portrays the Goliath Israel intent on crushing underfoot the Palestinian David. This is a deliberate inversion of the facts intended as a trap for the unwary; all who are genuinely interested in helping to promote peace should resolutely decline to fall into it.
Wittgenstein was right, words matter. Language dictates thought. Politicised language causes misunderstanding, and that is a recipe far more rather than less violence.
Lord Buddha said: Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace. What is that one word? It’s unclear but here’s a wild guess that might just fit the bill in the context of the Middle East. It’s short, sweet and powerful.
Truth.
1. Karsh E. Palestine Betrayed. Yale University Press, London, 2010.
2. Friedman M. There is no Israel-Palestine conflict. New York Times, 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/opinion/israeli-palestinian-conflict-matti-friedman.html
3. Michael Morpurgo. A Point of View. BBC Radio 4, 2021.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000t77x
4. Slepkov N, Fuchs C, Rosner S. 2020 Pluralism Index. Jerusalem, Jewish People Policy Institute, 2020.
5. Ryvchin A. Collapse of the Kerry Doctrine and End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Newsweek 2 November 2020.
https://www.newsweek.com/collapse-kerry-doctrine-end-arab-israeli-conflict-opinion-1543790
