The widespread use of the term “Nakba” today is another example of the brazen but successful strategy of deceit developed by Arafat and his PLO, with the help of the USSR in the 1970’s, to create a fictitious people whose “struggle for liberation” would legitimize his genocidal intentions and his commitment to terrorism. And, amazingly, one of Arafat’s own adjutants, Zahir Muhsein, a member of the Palestinian National Council’s Executive Committee, tells us so.
“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”[vii]
By recasting his terror war as a war of independence, and the invented “Palestinian people” as hapless victims of the “Nakba” of Israel’s fictitious colonialist ethnic cleansing, Arafat foisted upon the world a pseudo-history, a reframing of reality, with heart-rending terminology and gut-wrenching imagery: a history which, even in the shadow of last century’s Nazi Holocaust of 17,000,000 innocent civilians[viii], 6,000,000 of them Jews, seeks to whitewash the evil and legitimize the crime of genocide.
His successors in Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority carry on his pernicious tradition, to which more and more of our mainstream media and academia fall prey.
Notes:
[i] Syrkin, Marie, “Palestinian Nationalism: Its Development and Goal,” in Curtis, Michael, Neyer, Joseph, Waxman, Chaim, and Pollack, Allen, The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), p. 200.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Cited by Syrkin in “Palestinian Nationalism,” supra n. i, p. 201.
[iv] for a brief survey of Zureiq’s writings and nationalistic ideology see http://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-2005-1-page-35.htm.
[v] Meir-Levi, David, Big Lies, David Horowitz Freedom Center, 2005; and cf. also Morris, Benny, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israel War, Yale University Press, 2008; reviewed by David Margolick in “endless war,” New York Times, April 5, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Margolick-t.html. Morris states in this new assessment of the Arab refugee issue that ethnic cleansing and expulsion were never a part of the Zionist program. Many Arabs left their homes of their own accord and many more were encouraged by Arab apocalyptic radio broadcasts.
[vi] Idem, History Upside Down, Encounter Press, 2007, pp. 31ff .
[vii] Dorsey, James, “Wij Zijn alleen Palestijn om politieke reden,” Trouw, 31 March 1977. James Dorsey was a British Journalist but his interview with Zahir Muhsein was published only in Trouw, an Amsterdam weekly. It is not available on line but is referenced frequently on line at, inter alia:
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