Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has aroused the ire of all the worst people in the world by enunciating a simple truth that has been widely obscured and is frequently misunderstood or dismissed out of hand without looking at the evidence. Smotrich said Sunday: “There is no such thing as Palestinians because there is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” Predictably, Old Joe Biden’s handlers and other Leftists are enraged, but in this case once again, they are on the wrong side of the truth.
National Security Council (NSC) spokesman John Kirby said Monday: “We utterly object to that kind of language. And It’s extremely unhelpful to — again — trying to de-escalate the tensions and trying to find a viable two-state solution going forward. We don’t want to see any rhetoric, any action or rhetoric — quite frankly — that can stand in the way or become an obstacle to a viable two-state solution, and language like that does.”
Kirby wisely didn’t say that Smotrich’s assertion was false, but the NSC mouthpiece may be the last person in the world who still believes there can be a “two-state solution” with the two nations, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace. Islam’s jihad imperative precludes that, but Kirby and the entire foreign policy establishment are committed to ignoring and denying that, so it’s no surprise that his statements would demonstrate no awareness of it.
The European Union, meanwhile, was much angrier than Kirby, saying in a statement that it “firmly deplores yet another unacceptable comment by Minister Smotrich,” and declare that such statements should not be “tolerated.” Smotrich’s words, raged the EU, were “wrong, disrespectful, dangerous and counterproductive in a situation which is already very tense. We call on the Israeli government to disavow those comments and to work together with all the parties involved to defuse tensions.” Defusing tensions would be great, but doing so on the basis of falsehoods is not going to work in the long run. Despite the EU’s rage, what Smotrich said was actually correct.
Smotrich said: “Who are the Palestinians? I am Palestinian.” He noted that before the founding of the State of Israel, the Jews in the Holy Land were known as “Palestinians.” Meanwhile, “the Palestinian nation has existed for less than one hundred years.” Smotrich issued a challenge: “I ask you who was the first Palestinian King, what language do they have, was there ever a Palestinian coin. Is there a Palestinian history or culture? There isn’t. There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation… They created a fictional nation and then worked for their fictitious rights to the Land of Israel just to battle against the Zionist movement. That is the historical truth and the biblical truth. That is the truth and there is no alternative.” Indeed.
Smotrich concluded: “This truth needs to be heard by the Arabs in Israel. This truth needs to be heard by the Jewish people in Israel who have gotten confused. This truth needs to be heard in the Elysee and in the White House. This truth must be heard by the whole world because this is the truth.” Yes, it is. In 1948, when the modern State of Israel was founded, the Arabs of the area were offered a state also and rejected it. But no one called them “Palestinians.” The “Palestinian” nationality had not yet been invented.
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In the 1960s, however, the KGB and Yasir Arafat created both these allegedly oppressed people and the instrument of their freedom — the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Ion Mihai Pacepa, who had served as acting chief of Cold War-era Communist Romania’s spy service (Pacepa later authored many articles for PJ Media), later revealed what happened: “The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for ‘liberation’ organizations.” For Arafat to head the PLO, he had to be a Palestinian. The KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth. PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein explained the strategy more fully in a 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw:
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.
Meanwhile, Western authorities never seem to ponder why so many attempts to achieve a negotiated peace between Israel and the “Palestinians,” whose historical existence everyone by now takes for granted, have all failed. The answer, of course, lies in the Islamic doctrine of jihad.
“Drive them out from where they drove you out” (Qur’an 2:191) is a command that contains no mitigation and accepts none. It is yet another historical myth that the Israelis drove the “Palestinians” out of the land, but it has taken root and borne bitter fruit. Bezalel Smotrich is to be commended for hacking through all these lies and repeating unwelcome and forgotten truths.
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