Facts and Fables: The Arab-Israeli Conflict

By Clifford A. Wright. Kegan Paul International, 1989. 239 pp. List: $22.95; AET: $19 for one, $22.95 for two.

Reviewed by John Dirlik

Caller: The reason Palestinians don't have a country today is the fault of the Arabs and not Israel. When Israel was created Arab leaders told the Palestinians to leave their homes so as to make room for the Arab armies that were going to come and drive the Jews into the sea and...

Talk show host: That's right. I've been saying for years that the main problem in the Middle East is that the Arabs and the Palestinians don't want to have any Jews living with them. So there is no way you can reason with people like that.

—Segment of the Rush Limbaugh radio talk show, Feb. 6, 1991

The most formidable weaponry at Israel's disposal is not found in its military arsenal but in the effectiveness of its army of apologists in the West.

Using the propaganda equivalents of Scud missiles—poor in accuracy but high in psychological impact—Zionists have scored successive media hits by relentlessly firing volleys of half-baked truths and outright lies about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Abetted by an accommodating press that reports Israeli claims with the investigative instinct of a tape recorder, some of the most outrageous fables have become accepted as undisputed facts.

Facts and Fables—even though it is largely an update of a 1978 out-of-print work entitled Commentaries on Recurrent Themes of Zionist Propagandaon Palestine—is nevertheless a timely and useful book. Well researched and amply documented, it demolishes 17 of the most common myths still being used today to justify Israeli excesses and belittle Palestinian grievances.

One of the myths that has gained wide acceptance is that the Palestinian exodus of 1948 was largely a result of radio broadcasts by Arab leaders urging Palestinians to evacuate their homes to "make room" for the Arab armies on their way to liberate Palestine. This particular myth has been laboriously propagated by Zionists precisely because if the Palestinians can be portrayed as having voluntarily left their land rather than having fled or been expelled, then it can be easier to argue that they have forfeited their rights to return.

Conveniently overlooked are the facts. In 1961 the Irish journalist Erskine Childers conducted a thorough examination of American and British monitoring records of all Middle East radio broadcasts during the war period. He concluded that "There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from any Arab radio station inside or outside Palestine." On the contrary, Childers found evidence of Arab broadcasts urging Palestinians to stay and defend their homeland against the Zionist invaders.

Another myth tackled by Facts and Fables is Israel's claim to democracy and the supposedly equal rights enjoyed by its Arab population. Beside the absurdity of describing as democratic a country that denies the right to vote to nearly one third of the population it controls (the 1.8 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories), Arabs in Israel are subjected to systematic and state sanctioned discrimination. For example, 93 percent of the land in Israel-much of it expropriated from the Arabs-is controlled by the quasi-governmental Jewish National Fund which forbids the sale of land to "non-Jews."

Orwellian "Return"

Particularly infuriating to Palestinians is the Orwellian-named Law of Return that encourages Jews worldwide who have never set foot in Israel to "return" and receive instant citizenship, while the Palestinian natives expelled from Palestine and now languishing in refugee camps are prevented from ever seeing their homes again.

One myth that could have been more adequately dealt with in Facts and Fables is the prevalent sentiment in the West that Arabs have been historically anti-Semitic (in the European and Jewish usage), thus explaining their unwillingness today to live in peace with the Jews of Israel. The fact is that the Arab and Muslim world has traditionally been much more accepting of a Jewish presence in its midst than its European counterpart.

It is perhaps revealing that what became known as the Golden Age of Judaism-an era when Jewish culture flourished and reached its peak-occurred not in Israel or Europe but in 8th- to 11th-century Muslim Spain. During that period and the following centuries, large numbers of Jews fleeing European persecution took refuge in Arab countries, where they found the tolerance and hospitality that was denied to them in most of the "civilized" world.

The seeds of hatred between Arab and Jew were only sown in the 1920s, when Arabs recognized that the goal of Zionism in Palestine was not coexistence but domination and territorial expansionism. (As early as 1919, the World Zionist Organization presented to the Paris Peace Conference its proposal for the site of a Jewish homeland. The maps submitted clearly show that the national home envisaged by the Zionist founding fathers included not only what was to become Israel within its 1948 and even 1967 borders, but also the south of Lebanon as far as Sidon, areas of Syria beyond the Golan Heights, and both banks of the Jordan River).

Although Zionist leaders accepted in principle the 1947 UN Partition Plan that divided Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, they did not relinquish their dream of eventually conquering all the lands they claimed constituted biblical Israel.

In 1937, David Ben-Gurion, who would later become Israel's first prime minister, declared that "the acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan ... We shall accept a state with fixed boundaries today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspiration are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor can limit them."

It is clear that the Arab refusal to accept the UN Partition Plan was not motivated by anti-Semitism but by justifiable indignation at the forceful implantation in its midst of a foreign colony with ambitious territorial designs.

What is especially revealing is that while Western powers could so generously carve up Palestine to create a home for Jews fleeing Nazi oppression, they themselves were doing everything possible to limit the entry of Jewish refugees into their borders.

Now that the war in the Gulf is over and the question of Palestine removed from the backburner, supporters of Eretz Israel will undoubtedly resuscitate many of the deceptive arguments that have until now served them so well. Facts and Fables is one resource that can be helpful in rebutting them.

John Dirlik, a free lance writer from Montreal, Quebec, writes on Canadian and Middle East affairs. Images and Reality: Palestinian Women Under Occupation and in the Diaspora and Facts and Fables: The Arab-Israeli Conflict are available from the AET Book Club.