Torah is truth. The Talmud teaches us, though, that truth can be withheld for the sake of peace (Yevamot 65b). Thus, when G-d tells Abraham that his wife didn’t believe she would give birth, he omits the fact that Sarah said, “My husband is too old” – lest it cause friction between husband and wife (Rashi, Bereishit 18:10-15).
In Islam, deception is allowed on a greater scale. Mohammed, revered as “The Prophet” by Muslims, actively practiced duplicity. He said, “Allah willing, if I take an oath and later find something else better than that, then I do what is better and expiate my oath” (Sahih Bukhari 7:67:427).
Truth is not a tenet of Islam – which perhaps explains how the very basis of the modern battle against Israel can be based on a lie: the lie of “Palestine.”
No one believed this lie originally. When I visited the town of Pardes Hanna in Israel, a former resident introduced me to a building constructed in 1958 by Arab workers from Nazareth. He recalled how they responded when they were called Palestinians by a Jew: “Ana la Falasteen! Ana Arab! Enta Falasteen! – I’m not a Palestinian! I’m an Arab! You are a Palestinian!”
The appellation “Palestine” comes from the Philistines, a people that settled along the coast of the southwestern Levant and constituted a thorn of oppression to the ancient Hebrew tribes. Like so many other ancient peoples, they eventually vanished. Centuries later, in 135 CE, the Roman Emperor Hadrian – in his insane quest to erase any trace of Judaism from the land of Judea – renamed the country “Palaestina.”
As an employee of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Sha’i ben-Tekoa monitored UN voting patterns on the Arab-Israeli conflict and discovered that not until 1970 – three years after the Six-Day War – did a UN General Assembly resolution make reference to a “Palestinian people.” This discovery ultimately spawned his monumental work: Phantom Nation: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace.
The “Palestinians” are an invention, a tool of Arab propaganda. Ben-Tekoa writes, “In the Qur’an, there is no mention of a place called Palestine…at no time in the twelve centuries of Muslim rule over Jerusalem did Muslims ever administer a jurisdiction/country that they called Falastin.”
It’s actually rather absurd to believe that a nation exists that cannot pronounce the name of its own homeland. There is no “p” in Arabic; a “Palestinian” must therefore pronounce the name of his own supposed homeland “Falastin.”
Most Arabs in Israel today are not actually originally from the area. As Joan Peters demonstrates in From Time Immemorial, they came as migrant laborers from countries such as Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. The British allowed massive, illegal Arab immigration into Palestine in the pre-state years hoping it would result in a subtle, cancerous demographic takeover by Islam.
In 1948, the migrants vacated Palestine to make room for friendly Arab forces who promised them booty from the soon-to-be-dead Jewish communities. Well, that didn’t work out, and the Arab aliens never returned. Consequently, the UN set up temporary refugee shelters which attracted indigent Muslims who were anxious to fraudulently declare themselves refugees to get free food, free medical care, and free schooling.
It was this mass of humanity that became the monstrous propaganda tool that Arab countries use against Israel so that they can paint it as an evil, oppressive empire.
The myth of a “Palestinian people” grows ever stronger as the world has falls prey to this lie. As the Nazi propaganda demon Joseph Goebbels, yemach shemo, declared: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.“ And so the Arab countries continue to repeat it – for deceit in the name of Islam is a glorious duty.
Unfortunately, the Jewish world – including the Zionist media – also falls victim to this mass hypnosis. So let us all remember that there never was a “Palestinian people” nor an “ancestral Palestine.”
Jews, remove your blinders! Then rip the blindfolds from the eyes of the world!