from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 08 Sep 2009 07:11 PM PDT

Myth 1: "Israel was created because Europe felt guilty
about the Holocaust."

This left wing myth has been widely repeated, most recently
by Desmond Tutu. While blatantly false on a level that even the most
serious anti-Israel historian can recognize, it persists because its
function is to delegitimize as the product of post-war colonial guilt,
rather than longstanding Israeli national aspirations.

Israel was not created in 1947. By 1947, Israel already was a
functioning country with a language, culture, agriculture, universities,
newspapers and military forces which proved capable of defending against
the armies of several Arab nations. The only thing that happened after the
Holocaust was a UN vote in 1947 was for a partition plan that was never
implemented because the Arab world instead chose to try and destroy
Israel. Israel however would have declared independence and fought for its
own survival, with the same exact outcome, regardless of UN Resolution
181. This vote is often described as creating Israel, but it was more
accurately an attempt to settle the borders of Israel that failed because
of Arab genocidal hostility that expressed itself not only toward Israel,
but toward the Jews living in Arab lands.

Nor did post-war European
colonialism create Israel. Britain, which was the colonial power in the
region, was against Israel's independence and abstained in the UN vote.
The majority of votes for Resolution 181 came from non-European countries,
primarily in Latin America and Eastern Europe, such as Bolivia, Brazil,
Panama, Peru and Poland, Ukraine and the Soviet Union. 7 European
countries voted Yes, most of them Northern European states such as Sweden
and Denmark, which experienced only a limited impact of the Holocaust. 12
Latin American countries voted Yes. Twice the number. And all of them
countries that had their own national aspirations and had fought against
colonialism.

Post-Holocaust guilt was not the reason Resolution
181 passed. Less than a third of the 33 votes came from countries where
the Holocaust had taken place. The reasons were varied and different. Some
Latin American countries identified with Israel's national aspirations and
some sought economic ties. Truman was influenced by the desire for Jewish
votes in an upcoming election. The Soviet Union wanted to sabotage
Britain's colonial program. The motives of different countries were varied
and complex. Iran for example voted against the resolution and yet became
the second country to recognize the new State of Israel.

Left wing
activists may insist that Resolution 181 was a racist act, but in fact
half the countries who voted for it were non-white, and most of the
countries who voted for it were non-European. Therefore the myth that
Israel was created after the Holocaust by guilty Europeans, a myth that
has been bandied about by everyone from Desmond Tutu to Wallace Shawn to
Barack Obama is just that, a myth. Israel would have existed regardless of
the Holocaust or UN Resolution 181, which was voted for primarily by
non-European countries in any case. Those who repeat the myth are
therefore demonstrating either extreme ignorance or extreme deceptiveness.

Myth 2: "European Nations
Gave the Jews a Land Already Inhabited by a People."

This is one of the more common myths that seeks to strike
at the legitimacy of the creation of the modern state of Israel, and
treats the Jews as a foreign body within the land. This is a continuation
of the anti-semitic stereotypes of the Jews as eternal wanderers and
eternal foreigners.

The fact of the matter is that Jews had an
ongoing presence in the land going back thousands of years, that was only
interrupted by massacres and expulsions, after which the Jews population
would once again attempt to reestablish itself. Greek, Roman, Arab and
Ottoman colonialism expelled Jewish populations and attempted to replace
them with their own populations in order to gain a foothold in the land.
Unlike them however the Jews remained the land's indigenous
population.

Throughout history Jews struggled to achieve
independence with armed revolts from Roman and Byzantine rule. The last
such revolt took place somewhat more than a thousand years before the
creation of the modern State of Israel, rather than two thousand as most
people believe. Jewish attempts to revive the State of Israel were
repeatedly and brutally suppressed, in at least one case by outright
genocide. Nor was that the only genocide that Jews in Israel
experienced.

Nevertheless attempts at a fledgling Jewish state
continued even after the Crusader genocide of the Jewish population in the
1500's with an attempt to create a Jewish autonomous territory under Selim
I by Don Yosef Nassi, as Lord of Tiberias. Further negotiations for the
creation of a Jewish state continued in the 18th and 19th centuries. After
Ottoman obstinacy made it clear that statehood was hopeless, Jewish
freedom fighters in the form of the NILI group and the Jewish Legion aided
in the British conquest of the region hoping to receive their own state.

While indeed much of the population of Israel came from outside
the land, that was because thousands of years of massacres and warfare had
depopulated the area. When Western observers visited Israel in the 19th
century, they found that the land was barren and had a low population,
both Jewish and Arab. In fact Israel was so sparsely populated, that its
entire population in 1850, a mere 350,000 people, could fit into modern
day Tel Aviv with room to spare. This is all the more striking when you
consider that we are talking about a territory several times the size of
modern day Israel.

Alphonse de Lamartine visited Israel in 1835 and
wrote; "Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw indeed no living object,
heard no living sound, we found the same void, the same silence ... as we
should have expected before the entombed gates of Pompeii or Herculaneam a
complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways, in the
country ... the tomb of a whole people". 30 years Mark Twain wrote, "There
is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent – not for thirty
miles in either direction. ...One may ride ten miles (16 km) hereabouts
and not see ten human beings."

In 1857 the British Consul James
Finn wrote a book called Byeways in Palestine that chronicled his journeys
across the region. In his introduction he wrote rather prophetically,
"These notices will show that the land is one of remarkable fertility
wherever cultivated, even in a slight degree—witness the vast wheat-plains
of the south; and is one of extreme beauty—witness the green hill-country
of the north; although such qualities are by no means confined to those
districts... Thus it is not necessary, it is not just, that believers in
the Bible, in order to hold fast their confidence in its predictions for
the future, should rush into the extreme of pronouncing the Holy Land to
be cursed in its present capabilities. It is verily and indeed cursed in
its government and in its want of population; but still the soil is that
of “a land which the Lord thy God careth for.” There is a deep meaning in
the words, “The earth is the Lord’s,” when applied to that peculiar
country; for it is a reserved property, an estate in abeyance, and not
even in a subordinate sense can it be the fief of the men whom it eats up.
(Numb. xiii. 32, and Ezek. xxxvi. 13, 14.) I have seen enough to convince
me that astonishing will be the amount p. viiiof its produce, and the
rapidity also, when the obstacles now existing are removed."

Finn
repeated this theme when writing to the Earl of Clarendon, "the country is
in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest
need is that of a body of population." That population would and did have
to come from abroad.

Two generations later in 1920, after the
British conquest, the Arab population had hardly doubled. Yet in only a
generation after that it had reached 1.3 million, primarily from Arab
immigrants to Israel from Egypt attracted by growing Jewish industry.
Those immigrants would in turn make up the bulk of the "Palestinian cause"
with prominent Palestinian Arabs such as Yasser Arafat and Edward Said
stemming from Cairo. Then there was the Lebanon born original chief of the
Palestinian Liberation Organization, Ahmed Shukairy.

Cairo, unlike
Jerusalem, had been a booming center under the Ottoman Empire, with a
bulging population. From the 1880's to the 1930's, Cairo's population
tripled. The resulting stresses vastly overpopulated the area leading to
the extreme slum conditions that European visitors would often describe.
And part of that excess population came Israel's way.

While Jewish
immigration to Israel was visible, Arab immigration was invisible,
requiring only that a Syrian or Egyptian get on a donkey and ride in the
right direction. But the rising role of Israel produced both Arab and
Jewish immigration to the land, for economic and political reasons.

Those same critics of Israel did not and do not object to Arab
immigration, even though it was part of a colonizing process that
displaced the native Jewish population. Instead they show their double
standard by objecting only to Jewish immigration. Ironically enough today
it is the Arab migration to Europe that occupies the countries of many of
those same critics as the newfound populations begin taking over countries
that "already have a people."

In Australia and elsewhere, Muslim immigrants has already begun
laying out a new history, claiming that the land belonged to them all
along. In France, the riots have been described as a French Intifada. Both
processes demonstrate how ethnic and national groups can create a
mythology of ownership from square one in countries where they never had
much of a presence. That same mythology is behind the claim that the
Palestine territory administered by the Romans was actually some sort of
unique Arab nationality whose rights have been denied.

Europeans
did not "give" Israel a land already inhabited by the Arabs. The Arabs
were simply one of the regional populations, and were in the majority
because they had conquered and displaced local populations. And while
there are numerous oppressed indigenous populations in the Middle East,
including the Assyrians, the Kurds, the Copts, the Gypsies of the Middle
East (the Dom), the Azeri and the Zoroastrians. Arab Muslims are not on
that list except in the minds of Western liberals. Instead Arab Muslims
rule all but two countries in the Middle East and 99 percent of the
region. 11 million square kilometers to Israel's 20,000.

Myth 3. "The Creation of Israel Denied the National
Rights of the Palestinian People"

Palestine is a region, not an Arab nationality. It is not
an Arab word, but a corruption of a word meaning Philistine. At no time
has there been a Palestinian Arab kingdom, state or political entity,
until it was created by Israel as part of a treaty with Arafat.
Palestinian nationhood is a fraud that none of the Arab powers who endorse
it believe, as they themselves proved when they annexed or ruled the land
that would become the so-called "Occupied Territories", once Israel
recaptured it in the Six Day War in 1967. Over two decades, no Palestinian
state was ever created when Judea, Samaria and Gaza were in the hands of
Egypt and Jordan. Only after two major military defeats caused the Arab
powers to abandon future wars with Israel, did they decide to endorse that
particular bit of mythology.

Furthermore it was the Arab powers who
rejected the 1947 UN Partition plan that would have created two states,
one Jewish and one Arab. It was the Arab side that rejected the plan and
chose war, and then urged Arabs in Israel to leave so that they would be
out of harm's way when the Jews were driven into the sea, thereby creating
the refugee camps. If anyone denied the "National Rights of the
Palestinian People", it was the Arab powers. But then the national rights
card has always been a fraud, as can be demonstrated when the PLO's
founding chairman, Ahmed Shukairy, proclaimed in the UN in 1956, "It is
common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria". The PLO
did not call for a state until after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 made it
clear that brute force alone would not allow the regional Arab powers to
seize Israel by force.

Since 1992 when the PLO received an autonomous
territory, it has made no serious effort to actually run a country.
Instead virtually all of its resources have been poured into its militias
which it has used to carry out terrorism against Israel, and its
propaganda corps which tours the world complaining about Israel. That is
because none of the so-called Palestinian leaders have any interest in
actually creating a state, as Clinton finally discovered to his shame and
humiliation when Yasir Arafat turned down his grand 99 percent peace plan.
If the Egyptian and Jordanian Arabs camped out in Israel's backyard
actually wanted to exercise their "National Rights", they could have done
so over the past 17 years. Instead all they've done is try to kill
Israelis on behalf of their Arab and Persian backers. After billions of
dollars in international aid, the only thing that works in the Palestinian
Authority are the AK-47's.

Time and time again there were repeated
opportunities to create a Palestinian state. Whether it was in 1947 by
accepting UN Resolution 181, or in 1948 through 1967 at the hands of the
Arab powers, or in 1992 through 2009 in cooperation with Israel and the
US-- there were nearly four decades in which a Palestinian state could
have been created. Compare that to the mere 25 years of the so-called
Occupation from 1967 to 1992 by comparison. The reason there is no
"Palestinian State" is because no one actually wants one. Palestinian
Nationalism has as much substance as any piece of wartime propaganda. Its
one and only goal is to rally Arabs, Muslims and fellow travelers to
complete the goal that was frustrated in 1947-- the destruction of
Israel.

Myth 4. "Israel is an Artificial Entity and Racist Jewish
State."

The same "European Imperialist Colonialists" whom left wing
historians and activists pretend to despise, even though they themselves
are nothing more than another generation of the same, turned most of the
Middle East into Arab Muslim states, creating artificial countries such as
Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the latter ruled by a failed Saudi royal family,
named after historical nations. Yet somehow none of the historians and
activists object to any of these countries, they object only to Israel.
Somehow condemning the Kurds, Assyrian Christians, Copts and the region's
numerous other minorities to be ruled by intolerant Arab rulers is
perfectly acceptable in their book.

The myth of Arab Muslim
victimhood is cheap propaganda stemming from the failed Arab attempt to
destroy Israel and drive its Jewish population "into the sea." It is
funded by the wells of oil money flowing from wealthy Arab Muslim
dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia, and perpetuated by leftist activists
repeating an Anti-Israel Soviet line, which is itself an outdated relic
from the Communist support of Arab Nationalist dictatorships in Egypt,
Syria and Iraq.

Israel offers more freedom to its citizens and
non-citizens than every Arab state in the region. That is why African
migrants try to make their way through Egypt to get to Israel. Israel
hosts believers from many of the persecuted religions in the region, most
notably the Bahai. It has given shelter to a wide variety of peoples from
around the world, even down to the Vietnamese boat people. All of them get
along, except for Arab Muslims, whose anger is driven by their belief that
only they should be able to rule in Israel, as in every other part of the
Middle East.

If leftist activists really wish to agitate on behalf of
oppressed and displaced peoples in the Middle East, perhaps instead of
following the despicable example of Human Rights Watch in panhandling for
Saudi money with which to slander Israel, they should take a look at the
situation in trendy fashionable Dubai, a country where most of the
population consists of guest workers who are treated as slaves and who die
by the thousands. Or perhaps to Iran, where a Persian Muslim minority
rules over an Azeri majority, and suppresses their culture, langauge and
national aspirations. And then there is the matter of an independent
Kurdish state and the rights of the Kurdish people to reclaim Kirkuk,
after Saddam's ethnic cleansing. There is the plight of the Copts in
Egypt, who are denied basic human rights.

But instead the left
continues to pander to the irrational bigoted demands of the region's Arab
Muslim majority to suppress the region's only non-Muslim state, in favor
of yet another Arab Muslim country. That blatant disregard for the rights
of anyone who is not an Arab Muslim is precisely the reason why the Jews
of Israel had to fight for national independence. It is likely why the
Kurds in Iraq will have to fight for independence as well.

The cult of orientalism insists that only Arab Muslims have national rights in
the Middle East. Israel serves to deny that, and to instead proclaim the
national rights of the indigenous population of Israel, a country and a
people that predate Arab colonialism, and will outlive it as well.