10 Myths about Israel

By Ilan Pappe

Myth: The Jews Were a People Without Land

The claim .. is that Palestine was a land without people, goes hand in hand with the claim that the Jews were a people without a land...

The myth insists that the Jews who arrived in 1882 were the descendants of the Jews expelled by the Romans around 70 CE. The counterargument questions this genealogical connection. Quite a hefty scholarly effort has shown that the Jews of Roman Palestine remained on the land and were first converted to Christianity and then to Islam. ...

A powerful theological and imperial movement emerged [in 18820s Britain], that would put the return of the Jews to Palestine at the heart of a strategic plan to take over Palestine and turn it into a Christian entity..

Lord Shaftesbury a leading British politician and reformer.. campaigned actively for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. His arguments for a greater British presence in Palestine were both religious and strategic... Shaftesbury realized that it would not be enough to support the return of the Jews, and they would have to be actively assisted by Britain in their initial colonization. Such an alliance should start, he asserted, by providing material help to the Jews to travel to Ottoman Palestine...

Shaftesbury’s gentle lobbying of Palmerston proved successful. For political reasons, more than for religious ones, Palmerston too became an advocate for Jewish restoration. Among other factors that came into play in his deliberations was the “view that the Jews could be useful in buttressing the collapsing Ottoman Empire, thus helping to accomplish the key object of British foreign policy in the area.”..

This moment of British establishment enthusiasm for the idea of restoration should properly be described as proto-Zionism.. [This] contemporary ideology.. had all the ingredients that would turn [the] ideas into the future justification for erasing and denying the basic rights of the indigenous Palestinian population...

The first British consulate in Jerusalem opened in 1838. Its brief included informally encouraging Jews to come to Palestine, promising to protect them, and in some cases attempting to convert them to Christianity. The most well- known of the early consuls was James Finn (1806–72), whose character and direct approach made it impossible to conceal the implications of this brief from the local Palestinians. He wrote openly, and was probably the first to do so, about the connection between returning the Jews to Palestine and the possible displacement of the Palestinians as a result...

Finn was stationed in Jerusalem between 1845 and 1863. He has been lauded by later Israeli historians for helping Jews to settle in their ancestral land, and his memoirs have been translated into Hebrew. He is not the only historical figure to have appeared in one nation’s pantheon and in the rogues’ gallery of another. Finn detested Islam as a whole and the notables of Jerusalem in particular...

[Then] in many ways, the strategic imperial impulse of Britain to use the Jewish return to Palestine as a means of deepening London’s involvement in the “Holy Land” coincided with the emergence of new cultural and intellectual visions of Zionism in Europe. For both Christians and Jews, therefore, the colonization of Palestine was seen as an act of return and redemption. The coincidence of the two impulses produced a powerful alliance that turned the anti-Semitic and millenarian idea of transferring the Jews from Europe to Palestine into a real project of settlement at the expense of the native people of Palestine. This alliance became public knowledge with the proclamation of the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917—a letter from the British foreign secretary to the leaders of the Anglo-Jewish community in effect promising them full support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

[Some also say] Palestine was an empty land [when Jews 'came back']. In this story, by 1800 Palestine had become a desert, where farmers who did not belong there somehow cultivated parched land that was not theirs. The same land appeared to be an island, with a significant Jewish population .. . Every passing year the land became more barren, deforestation increased, and farmland turned to desert.

Promoted through an official state website this fabricated picture is unprecedented. .. Quite a few [researchers], such as David Grossman (the demographer not the famous author), Amnon Cohen, and Yehoushua Ben-Arieh, have indeed successfully challenged it. Their research shows that, over the centuries, Palestine, rather than being a desert, was a thriving Arab society—mostly Muslim, predominantly rural, but with vibrant urban centers

Myth: Zionism is Judaism

The new post-1904 fixation on Palestine as the only territory in which Zionism could be implemented was reinforced by the growing power of Christian Zionism in Britain and in Europe. Theologians who studied the Bible and evangelical archeologists who excavated “the Holy Land” welcomed the settlement of Jews as confirming their religious belief that the “Jewish return” would herald the unfolding of the divine promise for the end of time. The return of the Jews was the precursor of the return of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead. The Zionist project of colonizing Palestine was well served by this esoteric religious belief. However, behind these religious visions lay classical anti-Semitic sentiments. For pushing Jewish communities in the direction of Palestine was not only a religious imperative; it also helped in the creation of a Europe without Jews. It therefore represented a double gain: getting rid of the Jews in Europe, and at the same time fulfilling the divine scheme in which the Second Coming was to be precipitated by the return of the Jews to Palestine (and their subsequent conversion to Christianity or their roasting in Hell should they refuse)

The interpretation of the Bible as the divine justification for Zionism helped the socialists to reconcile their adherence to the universal values of solidarity and equality with the colonization project of dispossession. Indeed, since colonization was the main goal of Zionism, one has to ask what kind of socialism this was. After all, in the collective memory of many, the golden period of Zionism is associated with the collectivist, egalitarian life embodied in the establishment of the Kibbutz. This form of life lasted long after Israel was founded and it attracted young people from all over the world who came to volunteer and experience communism in its purest form. Very few of them realized, or could have known, that most of the Kibbutzim were built on destroyed Palestinian villages, whose populations had been expelled in 1948 ...

Israeli educational textbooks now carry the same message of the right to the land based on a biblical promise. According to a letter sent by the education ministry in 2014 to all schools in Israel: “the Bible provides the cultural infrastructure of the state of Israel, in it our right to the land is anchored.” Bible studies are now a crucial and expanded component of the curriculum—with a particular focus on the Bible as recording an ancient history that justifies the claim to the land. The biblical stories and the national lessons that can be learned from them are fused together with the study of the Holocaust and of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. There is a direct line from this 2014 letter back to the evidence given by David Ben-Gurion in 1937 to the Royal Peel Commission (the British inquiry set up to try to find a solution to the emerging conflict). In the public discussions on the future of Palestine, Ben-Gurion waved a copy of the Bible at the members of the committee, shouting: '... our right to Palestine does not come from the Mandate Charter, the Bible is our Mandate Charter.' ...

Something else happened in the period between November 29, 1947 (when the UN Resolution was adopted) and May 15, 1948 (when the British Mandate ended) that helped the Zionist movement to better prepare for the days ahead. As the end of the Mandate approached, the British forces withdrew into the port of Haifa. Any territory they left, the military forces of the Jewish community took over, clearing out the local population even before the end of the Mandate. The process began in February 1948 with a few villages, and culminated in April with the cleansing of Haifa, Jaffa, Safad, Beisan, Acre, and Western Jerusalem. These last stages had already been systematically planned under the master plan, Plan D, prepared alongside the high command of the Haganah, the main military wing of the Jewish community. The plan included the following clear reference to the methods to be employed in the process of cleansing the population:

"Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously..

Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state"

How could the small Israeli army engage in large-scale ethnic cleansing operations while, from May 15, also being confronted with regular forces from the Arab world? First of all, it is noteworthy that the urban population (apart from three towns: Lydd, Ramleh, and Bir Saba) had already been cleansed before the Arab armies arrived. Second, the rural Palestinian area was already under Israeli control, and the confrontations with the Arab armies occurred on borders of these rural areas not inside them. In one case where the Jordanians could have helped the Palestinians, in Lydd and Ramleh, the British commander of the Jordanian army, Sir John Glubb, decided to withdraw his forces and avoided confrontation with the Israeli army. Finally, the Arab military effort was woefully ineffective and short lived. After some success in the first three weeks, its presence in Palestine was a shambolic story of defeat and hasty withdrawal. After a short lull towards the end of 1948, the Israeli ethnic cleansing thus continued unabated ...

Yet within weeks of the joint signature on the White House lawn [of 93 Oslo Accord], the writing was on the wall. By the end of September, the Accord’s vague principles had already been translated into a new geopolitical reality on the ground under the terms of what was called the Oslo II (or Taba4) agreement. This included not just partitioning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between “Jewish” and “Palestinian” zones, but partitioning further all the Palestinian areas into small cantons or Bantustans. The peace cartography of 1995 amounted to a bisected series of Palestinian zones that resembled, in the words of quite a few commentators, a Swiss cheese.

Once this program became clear, the decline of the negotiations was swift ...

Myth around The Oslo Accord

In May 2001, [W] appointed Senator Robert Mitchell as a special envoy to the Middle East. Mitchell produced a report ... [where] he blamed Ariel Sharon for provoking unrest by visiting and violating the sacredness of the al-Aqsa mosque and the holy places of Islam.

In short, even the disempowered Arafat realized that the Israeli interpretation of Oslo in 2000 meant the end of any hope for normal Palestinian life and doomed the Palestinians to more suffering in the future. This scenario was not only morally wrong in his eyes, but would also, as he was well aware, strengthen the hand of those who regarded the armed struggle against Israel as the only way to liberate Palestine. At any given moment, Israel could have stopped the Second Intifada, but the army needed a show of 'success'; only when this was achieved through the barbaric operation of 'Defensive Shield' in 2002 and the building of the infamous 'apartheid wall' did they succeed temporarily in quelling the uprising ...

Myths On Gaza

Hamas became a significant player on the ground in part thanks to the Israeli policy of encouraging the construction of an Islamic educational infrastructure in Gaza as a counterbalance to the grip of the secular Fatah movement on the local population.

In 2009, Avner Cohen, who served in the Gaza Strip around the time Hamas began to gain power in the late 1980s, and was responsible for religious affairs in the occupied territories, told the Wall Street Journal, 'the Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.'