by Col (Res.) Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen
The PA’s public diplomacy is based on manipulation: it takes advantage of the ignorance and superficial historical knowledge of the rest of the world about the Israeli-Arab conflict to implant an invented history.
Mahmoud Abbas presents Saudi King Salman with framed copy of the Zionist newspaper
The Palestine Post, image via Israellycool
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,625, July 5, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Palestinian-Arab
propaganda machine incessantly fuels aggressive anti-Israel campaigns.
The PA’s public diplomacy is based on manipulation: it takes advantage
of the ignorance and superficial historical knowledge of the rest of the
world about the Israeli-Arab conflict to implant an invented history.
The Jewish State may have committed a historic misjudgment by selecting
the name “Israel,” as the choice has damaged the state’s strategic
interests.
The never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
one of the world’s most intractable and explosive disputes, causing
heightened emotion and bloodshed in the Middle East and around the
globe. In many cases, terrorist groups, including ISIS and al-Qaeda,
have dedicated their spectacular terror attacks to the cause of
Palestine and the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
Israel is widely viewed as the villain responsible
for the plight of the 1948 “refugees,” as well as the “brutal
oppression” of the Palestinian people in the “occupied territories.”
Palestinian-Arab propaganda fuels non-stop anti-Israel campaigns,
primarily under the BDS umbrella, that support and reinforce this
twisting of history. (BDS is the modern version of the near-forgotten
“Arab League Boycott” formally declared on December 2, 1945.)
The Zionist movement and later the state of Israel
are misrepresented as colonial forces bent on expelling the indigenous
inhabitants of Palestine and depriving them of their rights in order to
establish a foreign entity to be populated by an influx of immigrants
from foreign states. The mouthpieces for these stories never say a
single word about the millenarian link of the Jewish people to the Land
of Israel (or Palestine as it came to be known since Roman times), and
flatly deny the validity of the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917
ratified by the League of Nations mandate in 1922 calling for the
establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
The UN Partition Plan of November 29, 1947, paved
the way for the establishment of the state of Israel. It also
crystallized the Arabs’ determination to destroy the nascent Jewish
state by force. As bluntly expressed by then Secretary-General of the
Arab League Azzam Pasha: “This will be a war of extermination and a
momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres
and the Crusades.”
By 2020, the Palestinian Authority had come to be
internationally recognized as the entity destined to ultimately emerge
as the Palestinian State, based on a two-state solution. Yet Mahmoud
Abbas, the PA’s president, categorically rejects every aspect of
President Trump’s “Deal of the Century” and is pushing a propaganda
campaign with the slogan “Disappearing Palestine.”
At a special Arab League meeting in Cairo on
February 1, 2020, Abbas displayed blatantly misleading propaganda maps
of “historic Palestine” under the provocative heading “Palestine Loss of
Land.” They included the Palestine mandate map, the Partition map of
1947, the June 1967 lines, and “Trump’s Projected Plan,” with
“Palestinian land” shown to diminish continuously over the decades. This
performance was a typical manipulation that took deliberate advantage
of the ignorance and superficial historical knowledge of most of the
rest of the world about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The maps were a form
of optical illusion designed to implant the false impression that
Palestine was an entirely Arab state throughout human history that was
literally stolen by the Jews.
This completely distorted version of history is
the cornerstone of the BDS movement. With the Palestinian leadership’s
and the BDS movement’s help, it is persistently reinforced in
international thinking about the conflict and has had a substantial
impact on policy making, mainly in Europe and Asia. This has resulted in
the broad adoption of a consistently anti-Israel standpoint. Israeli hasbara finds itself helpless to correct past failures in public diplomacy.
At times, efforts by the Palestinians to reinforce
their baseless version of history backfire. On June 20, 2016, Abbas
went on an official visit to Saudi Arabia. While there, he gave the
Saudi monarch a framed copy of the old daily The Palestine Post.
The gesture was meant to reinforce the Palestinian narrative, but did
exactly the opposite. As Israeli PM Netanyahu noted at the time,
“Mahmoud Abbas this week gave the Saudi king a copy of The Palestine Post as a gift. Abbas apparently didn’t know that The Palestine Post was a Zionist newspaper that changed its name to The Jerusalem Post and is still published today, in Jerusalem our capital.”
The assertion that the Palestinians are the
indigenous inhabitants of this land is central to their dispute with
Israel. This claim is repeated regularly by the Palestinians and almost
never challenged. In a recent speech, Abbas said: “Our narrative says
that we were in this land since before Abraham. I am not saying it, the
Bible says it. The Bible says, in these words, that the Palestinians
existed before Abraham. So why don’t you recognize my right?” Saeb
Erekat, the PA’s chief negotiator, said: “I am the son of Jericho… the
proud son of the Netufians and the Canaanites. I’ve been there for 5,500
years before Joshua Bin Nun came and burned my hometown Jericho.”
This is all invented history.
One might well wonder why Israel, which faced
several genocidal assaults and is constantly the target of terror
attacks, is viewed by so many around the world not as a victim but as an
aggressor. In other words, how is it that the world has been so ready
to believe that when it comes to Palestinian terror, the ends justify
the means?
One answer might lie in the thinking of Prof.
Martin Kramer, who published an impressive article on the eve of modern
Israel’s 72nd birthday. In his piece, entitled “1948: Why the
name Israel?”, Kramer discusses the difficult decision the nascent
state had to make about choosing a name. He notes that the selection of
the name “Israel” was made by David Ben-Gurion almost at the last
minute, just before the official ceremony at which Israel was proclaimed
an independent state on May 14, 1948. Other names had been proposed and
considered, but they were rejected by Ben-Gurion.
A press report from September 30, 1937, quotes
Ben-Gurion thus: “Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) for us stands for
the whole country rather a part of it”. This was perhaps why Ben-Gurion
couldn’t live with the name “Palestina-Aleph-Yud,” though that was the
official Hebrew name of the entire country under the British mandate.
Ben-Gurion was known for his deep fondness for the
Hebrew language. He wrote: “Hebrew is the cultural cement while the
land is the material cement for the renewing nation”. His exclusion of
the use of the name “Palestine” for the Jewish State might be explained
by his desire to give it the Hebrew name by which it had been known
since biblical times.
On this point, it is worth noting an official
document from May 1948 issued by The People’s Administration, Israel’s
cabinet-in-waiting, in which it debated the question of translating the
name “Israel” into Arabic. This body reached the conclusion that the
state’s name in Arabic should be “Israel,” just as it was in Hebrew,
rather than “Palestine.”
One of the arguments in favor of this decision was
that “it [is] possible that a future Arab state in the Land of Israel
will be named Palestine, so confusion might occur.” This thinking
displayed not only a very early manifestation of political correctness
but historical foresight as well, as the Arab League had unequivocally
rejected the Partition Plan and therefore was not party to UNGA
Resolution 181, which designated the establishment of an Arab state
(alongside its Jewish counterpart) in mandatory Palestine.
The UN’s official manner of referring to the
conflict in the Middle East was generally consistent until the early
1960s: it used the name “Palestine” for the territory and “Arabs”—not
“Palestinians”—for the refugees. This could indicate that when referring
to the Palestine question, the UN considered Israel the equivalent of
mandatory Palestine.
It was not until May 28, 1964—the date on which
the PLO was established—that the name “Palestine” was adopted, one might
even say stolen, by an Arab entity committed to the complete
abolishment of the Jewish state. This objective was clearly manifested
in articles 1 and 2 of the Palestinian Charter (1968) as follows:
- Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.
- Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is arguable that
Ben-Gurion’s insistence on using the biblical name “Israel” for the
young Jewish state—and the accompanying negation of the mandatory
official name of this geographical piece of land—was short-sighted and
overly driven by a messianic spirit.
The Jewish leadership’s voluntary disengagement
from the name “Palestine” created a vacuum that was eventually filled by
representatives of the Arab “refugees,” who redubbed their constituency
“Palestinian Refugees”.
This is by no means the only case of a dispute
over the selection of a country’s name. The most recent instance is the
Greece-Macedonia conflict, which reached the brink of all-out war over
the name Macedonia. That name is sensitive for the Greeks, who have a
province of the same name. In January 2019, the two sides reached a
compromise in which the former Macedonia was renamed the Republic of
North Macedonia.
A similar ticking bomb concerns the historic
China-Taiwan conflict, which has lasted since 1949. Taiwan, officially
named the Republic of China (RoC), is currently run by the Democratic
Progressive Party (DPP), which claims it is an independent country.
China considers Taiwan a renegade province that must be united with the
mainland, by force if necessary. Beijing rebuffs all Taiwanese
initiatives to omit the linkage to China by officially adopting the name
Taiwan, and reads such attempts as provocations.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-palestinians-terminology/
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