Israel : Truths, facts and facts on the ground

Much of the international support that Israel receives is based on several lies it tells and re-tells as "facts". Joseph Massad Last Modified: 27 Oct 2011 11:03 inShare10 Email Print Share Feedback

President Obama has repeated and endorsed the lies that Israel's government  insists are "facts" [GALLO/GETTY] In 1991, negotiations started officially and unofficially between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (and the Palestinians associated with it) and the Israeli government. At the time, Israel had occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip for the previous 24 years. Today, 20 years later, Israel and President Obama insist that the only way to bring about peace, and presumably end the Occupation, is to continue with negotiations. It is unclear if what Obama and Israel are claiming is that Israel needs 24 years of negotiations in order to end its 24-year occupation of Palestinian land, so that by the time the occupation ends, it will have lasted for 48 years. This of course is the optimistic reading of the Israeli and US positions; the reality of the negotiations and what they aim to achieve, however, is far more insidious. The negotiations have been based on specific goals to end certain aspects of the Israeli relationship to the Palestinians, namely some of the parts introduced since the 1967 war and the occupation, and the beginning of exclusive Jewish colonial settlement of these territories.But what always remains outside the purview of negotiations is the very core of the Palestinian-Israeli relationship, which the Palestinians are told cannot be part of any negotiations. These off-limits core issues include what has happened since 1947-1948, including the expulsion of 760,000 Palestinians, the destruction of their cities and towns, the confiscation and destruction of their property, the introduction of discriminatory laws that legalise Jewish racial, colonial and religious privilege and deny Palestinian citizens of Israel equal rights and reject the right of the expelled refugees to return. Yet, this core, which the Israelis summarise as Israel's right to be, and to be recognised as, a "Jewish" state, is what is always invoked by the Israelis themselves as central to beginning and ending the negotiations successfully and which the Palestinians, the Israelis insist, refuse to discuss. But the core issues of the question of the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis have always been based on the agonistic historical, geographic and political claims of the Palestinian people and the Zionist movement. While the Palestinians have always based their claims on verifiable facts and truths that the international community agreed upon and recognised, Israel has always based its claims on facts on the ground that it created by force and which parts of the international community would only recognise as "legitimate", retroactively. How is one then to sift through these competing notions of truths and facts on the one hand, and facts on the ground, on the other? The core issues of the US and Israeli agenda were best articulated in the speeches delivered by Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the United Nations (UN) last month in response to the PLO's bid for statehood at the UN. It is there where both Netanyahu and Obama invoked what they called "truths" and "facts" to assert Israeli facts on the ground. As I will show, their strategy is engineered to convert Israeli facts on the ground from antonyms of truths and facts to synonyms with them.Read More The first 'fact' Even Netanyahu has no genealogical connection to the ancient Hebrews [GALLO/GETTY] Let me begin with what Zionists and the US have defined as the first "fact", which is by definition not open to any doubt or question. Obama insists: "These facts cannot be denied. The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland." Netanyahu echoes Obama by listing this first "fact" as the first "truth," or rather by making sure that "the light of truth will shine" at the UN through his words: "It was here in 1975 that the age-old yearning of my people to restore our national life in our ancient biblical homeland ... was ... branded ... shamefully, as racism." He added later "and we will know that [the Palestinians are] ready for compromise and for peace ... when they stop denying our historical connection to our ancient homeland." Now, this insistence that the first fact, nay the first truth, that Palestine is the historic homeland of modern European Jews who resided in Europe and not of the Palestinian people who lived in it for millennia, turns out to be neither factual nor truthful, though it indeed remains the primary and first claim made by Zionism and anti-Semitism. The claim relies on anti-Semitic notions propagated initially by the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and later by secular anti-Semitism, both of which insisted that modern European Jews were blood and genetic descendants of the ancient Hebrews respectively, which is precisely how eighteenth century European philology's reference to Jews as "Semites" would soon be transformed in the hand of political and racial anti-Semitism by the late nineteenth century from a "linguistic" category into a "racial" and biological one. It is based on these anti-Semitic claims - that millenarian Protestants, secular anti-Semites, and Zionists called for the "restoration" of European Jews to the alleged homeland of their alleged ancestors.Continued