Truths, facts and facts on the ground

In 1991, negotiations started officially and unofficially between the Palestine Liberation

Organisation (and the Palestinians associated with it) and the Israeli government.

At the time, Israel had occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza

Strip for the previous 24 years.

Today, 20 years later, Israel and President Obama insist that the only way to bring about

peace, and presumably end the Occupation, is to continue with negotiations. It is unclear

if what Obama and Israel are claiming is that Israel needs 24 years of negotiations in order

to end its 24-year occupation of Palestinian land, so that by the time the occupation ends,

it will have lasted for 48 years.

This of course is the optimistic reading of the Israeli and US positions; the reality of the

negotiations and what they aim to achieve, however, is far more insidious.

The negotiations have been based on specific goals to end certain aspects of the Israeli

relationship to the Palestinians, namely some of the parts introduced since the 1967 war

and the occupation, and the beginning of exclusive Jewish colonial settlement of these

territories.But what always remains outside the purview of negotiations is the very core

of the Palestinian-Israeli relationship, which the Palestinians are told cannot be part

of any negotiations.

These off-limits core issues include what has happened since 1947-1948, including the

expulsion of 760,000 Palestinians, the destruction of their cities and towns, the confi-

scation and destruction of their property, the introduction of discriminatory laws that

legalise Jewish racial, colonial and religious privilege and deny Palestinian citizens of

Israel equal rights and reject the right of the expelled refugees to return.

Yet, this core, which the Israelis summarise as Israel’s right to be, and to be recognised

as,

a “Jewish” state, is what is always invoked by the Israelis themselves as central to

beginning and ending the negotiations successfully and which the Palestinians, the

Israelis insist, refuse to discuss.

But the core issues of the question of the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis

have always been based on the agonistic historical, geographic and political claims of the

Palestinian people and the Zionist movement. While the Palestinians have always based

their claims on verifiable facts and truths that the international community agreed upon

and recognised, Israel has always based its claims on facts on the ground that it created

by force and which parts of the international community would only recognise as “legitimate”, retroactively.

How is one then to sift through these competing notions of truths and facts on the one hand,

and facts on the ground, on the other?

The core issues of the US and Israeli agenda were best articulated in the speeches delivered

by Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the United Nations (UN) last month in

response to the PLO’s bid for statehood at the UN. It is there where both Netanyahu and Obama invoked what they called “truths” and “facts” to assert Israeli facts on the ground. As I will show,

their strategy is engineered to convert Israeli facts on the ground from antonyms of truths and

facts to synonyms with them.

The first ‘fact’

Netanyahu echoes Obama by listing this first “fact” as the first “truth,” or rather by making sure that “the light of truth will shine” at the UN through his words: “It was here in 1975 that the age-old yearning of my people to restore our national life in our ancient biblical homeland … was … branded … shamefully, as racism.” He added later “and we will know that [the Palestinians are] ready for compromise and for peace … when they stop denying our historical connection to our ancient homeland.”Let me begin with what Zionists and the US have defined as the first “fact”, which is by definition not open to any doubt or question. Obama insists: “These facts cannot be denied. The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland.”

Now, this insistence that the first fact, nay the first truth, that Palestine is the historic homeland of modern European Jews who resided in Europe and not of the Palestinian people who lived in it for millennia, turns out to be neither factual nor truthful, though it indeed remains the primary and first claim made by Zionism and anti-Semitism.

The claim relies on anti-Semitic notions propagated initially by the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and later by secular anti-Semitism, both of which insisted that modern European Jews were blood and genetic descendants of the ancient Hebrews respectively, which is precisely how eighteenth century European philology’s reference to Jews as “Semites” would soon be transformed in the hand of political and racial anti-Semitism by the late nineteenth century from a “linguistic” category into a “racial” and biological one.

It is based on these anti-Semitic claims – that millenarian Protestants, secular anti-Semites, and Zionists called for the “restoration” of European Jews to the alleged homeland of their alleged ancestors.

The uncontroversial academic and historical facts that European Jews are descendants of European converts to Judaism from the centuries before Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century are unquestionable axioms in academic scholarship, including by Zionist historians.

No respected historian of European Jewry has ever argued that European Jews, or for that matter Moroccan, or Iraqi, or Yemeni Jews, were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. All respected scholars recognise them as descendants of converts to Judaism.

But even if the wildest genetic fantasies of anti-Semites and Zionists of Jews as a “race” were “proven”, would this make ancient Palestine, where the ancient Hebrews cohabited with other ancient peoples, the historic land of modern European Jews?

And even if one were to commit oneself to the science-fiction of Christian biblical archaeology which accompanied European colonialism in the nineteenth century and on which Israeli archaeology continues to be based, would that mean that modern Jews, now posited as direct genetic and biological descendants of the ancient Hebrews could claim the land where the ancient Hebrews lived with the Canaanites among other myriad groups as their own exclusive national domain and take it from its inhabitants who lived in it for millennia?

Could anyone today, except genocidal racists, link Germanic populations to an Aryan origin that started in northern India and based on that link, argue that northern India is the ancient homeland of all German-speaking people to which they must return and evict the current inhabitants of the land as nothing but recent interlopers in the land of the White Aryans?

These fantastical scenarios are precisely what Obama and Netanyahu tell us are undeniable facts and truths.

Indeed they both insist on them being the first fact, the very first indubitable principle of Zionism, which they want to impose on the international community and on the Palestinians!

The second “fact”

Obama’s second fact is asserted with a rhetorical flourish: “Let’s be honest: Israel is surrounded by neighbours that have waged repeated wars against it … These facts cannot be denied.”

But these also are not facts at all. Not even Israeli historians of Israel’s wars agree with them. But Israeli politicians and ideologues of course do. In his UN speech, Netanyahu himself echoes Obama’s words by telling us that Israel is threatened by its neighbours, that it is “surrounded by people sworn to its destruction and armed to the teeth by Iran” and enjoins presumably the American part of his audience at least not to “forget that the people who live in Brooklyn and New Jersey are considerably nicer than some of Israel’s neighbours.”

These racist overtones aside, the academic and historic record shows us however that it was Zionist forces who have waged war against the Palestinians in the wake of the 1947 Partition Plan starting on November 30, 1947.

By May 14, 1948, when Israel declared itself a state, it had expelled 400,000 Palestinians from their homes and was capturing their lands and territories, which were assigned to the Arab state. When three (not five!) Arab armies invaded Zionist-held Palestine on May 15, 1948, they were intervening to stop the expulsion of the Palestinian people and to protect their lands from being taken over by Zionist forces. At the end of the war, they failed miserably at their task. Israel was able to expel another 360,000 Palestinians and to capture half the territories of the Arab state adding them to the Jewish state.

• In 1956, Israel invaded Egypt along with Britain and France. This was in addition to intermittent but continuous cross border raids into the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egyptian-held Gaza over the decades to come.

• In 1967, Israel invaded Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and occupied their territories and all of the remaining lands of Palestine.

• In 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded their own territories (Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights), which Israel had earlier occupied, in an attempt to reclaim them but failed. They did not invade Israel itself.

• In 1978, in 1982, and in 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon killing tens of thousands of people.

• In 2008-2009, Israel invaded Gaza.

These are the undeniable facts that the international community and historians and the actual documentary record proves. As such, Israel was never invaded by its neighbours, except in 1948 – which was an attempt to stop Israel’s invasion of Palestinian territory and the expulsion of Palestinians.

That Israel won the majority of these wars cannot change the facts that it initiated them and that it has been the aggressor on its neighbours since even before its establishment in 1947. Indeed, Israel would launch raids on Iraq in 1981 and on Tunisia in 1985, neither of which was an immediate neighbour and without the slightest military provocation from either.

That Israel and the Zionist movement have been the aggressor in the region for the past century are the undeniable facts.

That Obama wants to assert that Israelis were victims of their neighbours is nothing short of imposing a fact on the ground by sheer American rhetorical and political power unrelated to real events. Obama’s invocation of honesty here turns out to be nothing short of a call for outright dishonesty.

But this “fact” for Obama derives from the “first fact”, namely, if European Jews have the right to colonise Palestine, expel the Palestinians, confiscate their lands, occupy them and discriminate against them by virtue of the first fact of their bogus historic claim, then any Palestinian or Arab resistance to the Zionists’ murderous campaigns is nothing short of aggression on Jews.