Twisting Facts About Israel and "Palestinians": Who's David and Who's Goliath? Academics Need a History Lesson No Longer Bastions of Critical Thinking

Nadene Goldfoot
How many people realize that both Jews and Arabs living in Israel before 1948 were called "Palestinians?"  The Jewish family that lived on our block in Portland, Oregon, the Padrows, were Palestinians from Tel Aviv.  He was not only a druggist but dentist as well, and their son, Ben, wound up teaching at Portland State in Speech and Drama.  Ben was the editor of the Jewish Review for several years as well.  Their daughter, Joan, was my playmate and friend.  While in grammar school she was tested and found to be the brightest in the school.  What brought them to Portland?  Probably Arab uprisings in 1929 and a brother living in Portland already who was teaching Hebrew. 

Both the Jews and the Arabs were given a chance to have their own country, and the Jews accepted the offer.  The piece of land they were offered turned out to be much smaller than what they had been promised originally by the British, but they took what they could.  The Arabs, on the other hand, refused.  They refused because they wanted it all.  They wanted it all because they didn't want the Jews to have any, and they wanted what they had.  It wasn't important to them to have a country, anyway.  They had only wanted jobs. 

It was the Jews who needed their own homeland.  They had been wanderers for 2,000 years after losing this very land to the Romans, and life for them for 2,000 years was not very nice.  It ended with the Holocaust where 6 million were slaughtered, but that was not known to the leaders to who accepted the offer from the British, though they knew at the time that many Jewish lives had been  lost because they didn't have their own land. 

Jews are the smallest religious group of the major three religions.  Jews make up only less than 1% of the total world population.  They are almost extinct.  Israel, created May 14, 1948, came into being as a haven for these remaining Jews.  Germany almost carried out their vile goal of their extermination.  Now it seems that the Muslims, especially Iranians,  are trying to continue with that goal.  After all, Arabs were on the same side in WWII.

The "Palestinians" are telling the world that they are the underdog by saying that Israel is the Goliath and that they are the David.  Leave it to them to borrow from Jewish history such terms.  They've been claiming Jewish artifacts and holy sites in Israel as theirs as well.  In fact, their mosque, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, is built over the Jewish Temple.  It's their custom to do such things to declare dominence.

The intelligencia have been succored into believing such a tale being that little Israel has up to date weaponry and the Arabs up to the past few years have not.  Because of this and that the Jews regard  all life as precious has brought about few deaths for Israel while there have been more deaths on the Palestinian side.  That's because of their low regard for  life, shown by putting their missile launchers amid their own civilians.  Then they acheive the goal of garnishing negative publicity for those "terrible Israelis if their civilians are killed." 

Talk about Goliath!  The Muslims, who all  help the Palestinians, have 22 states just in the area of the Middle East.  In total, there are at least 48 Muslim majority states in the world; 49 if you count the "Palestinians" of Judea, Samaria and Gaza who are not the state of Palestine as yet because of their own negativity.  There are over 1 billion Muslims in the world.   Egypt's population alone has 79,089,650 or more today.  Israel has 7,590,758. Of these, 1.4 million are Israeli Arab citizens.

 About 311,100 Jews live in Judea and Samaria, 18,100 live in the Golan Heights and  186,929 live in East Jerusalem.  New York City has about 8,008,278 people.  Tel Aviv-Yafo has 3.219 million, Haifa has 1.027 milllion and Jerusalem, the capital, has 768,000.  We're lucky if we have 6 million Jews, the very number we lost in the Holocaust and the same number that Moses led out of Egypt to the Promised Land.

The land making up Israel is 10,840 sq miles. That includes Judea and Samaria.  Without it the land is only 8,000 square miles.  It's slightly smaller than New Jersey .  Only 17% of the land is arable.  It's 260 long, 60 miles at the widest, and 3 to 9 miles at the narrowest.  This is a very small piece of real estate.   California has 160,222 sq miles. 

As for the Palestinians, 200,000 to 570,000 Arabs needlessly left their homes when their Arab co-horts attacked Israel in 1948 so as not to be in the way of the victorious Arab armies in their planned massacre of the Jewish defenders.  Their leaders told them to leave.  When they did not win, these same people were told to remain in refugee camps.  Some had only been in the area for 2 years or less.  If they had been here for 2 years, they were deemed "refugees" by the British who were keeping the records.  Needless to say, these same British were  quite anti-Jewish.  The Arabs had come to the Jewish sites looking for work.   160,000 Arabs had not fled, and they have become the Arab citizens.  200,000 had left. 

From 1949 to 1950 , 700,000 Jews living in Arab countries such as Yemen were driven from their homes and fled to Israel.  Israel assisted them in getting there and this was called "Operation Magic Carpet".  Israel immediately found room for them and got them settled and helped. 

What used to be a center for learning has become a political time bomb.  I'm talking about universities, where  academic freedom is now a one-way street.  Only those with "correct opinions" may be heard.  Protests against Israel qualifies as "academic "speech," but not for those defending Israel.  Students are learning that America is the big Satan and Israel the little Satan. 

Palestinians and their sympathizers are violating the same free speech rights they demand.  Examples are Israeli generals and politicians who have been threatened in Europe that they will be sued for crimes against humanity; IDF veterans (practically every male and female Israeli) disinvited from academic panels, and now pro-Israel professors that are accused on "intimidating" pro-Palestinian student groups.  Suddently, truth is intimidating. 

This has happened just recently at U of California at San Diego on 29th February 2012.  Divestment from Israel was finally  defeated, something the Palestinians were pushing.    They wanted to divest from GE and Northop Gruman for supplying parts of Apache Helicopters sold to Israel.  Israel was violating Palestinian human rights and thus expanding the occupation, they told people.  Never mind that it was they who were attacking Israel with missiles, mortars and rockets and that the helicopters were thus saving Jewish lives as a defense against slaughter!  A majority group were actively silencing pro-Israel professors with intimidation and legal threats.  It's a new low to happen on American campuses.  Efforts to exercise free speech and push back are being criminalized as "intimidation." 

Since Israel's inception, Israel has had to be defensive to exist.  It is constantly being attacked.  Israel has never started a war.  Israel has always wanted peace, while its neighbors want not only a piece of Israel's land but the whole state.  So far, little David's (Israel) slingshot finds its mark in defense while Goliath (Palestinians) isn't smart enough to live and let live without being the bully. 

Resource: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4203449,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemenite_Jews

Newt Gingrich Echos Golda Meier's Words on so called "Palestinians"

BY VICTOR SHARPE—

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Nothing could attest to that fact more than the Israel-Arab conflict, which in reality is the Israel-Islamist conflict.

This is not a territorial dispute between Israel and those Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, though it is framed as such. No, the stark reality of the Muslim war against the Jewish state is rooted in one fundamental fact; namely the unchangeable refusal by Muslims to ever accept a non-Islamic nation in territory once conquered in the name of Allah, even if that nation – the Jewish nation – precedes Islam by millennia.

Peace overtures and endless territorial concessions by tiny Israel to the giant Muslim and Arab world have been, and are, as worthless as a thirsty soul in the desert staggering towards an inviting but delusional mirage.

Back in 1976, Prime Minister Golda Meir visited Britain and was asked what needed most to be done for her country in combatting the relentless challenge to Israel’ survival by a hostile media. Her answer was: “Tell the people the basic facts about Israel and Israel’s case over and over again.” She also said, “There are no such people as Palestinian Arabs.”

Speaker Newton “Newt” Gingrich bravely and forthrightly echoed Golda Meir’s words, albeit 35 years later; but better late than never. It was crucial in Golda Meir’s time to pronounce the truth about the invented Arab people who call themselves Palestinians, but even more vital today. The world must be told the facts – not the myths – for it is fast succumbing to a veritable anti-Israel propaganda blitzkrieg, believed in by legions of the confused and gullible who worship at the false altar of moral equivalence and liberal kumbaya.

Those who see clearly accept that Israel’s Muslim neighbors will never be able to reconcile themselves with a non-Muslim state unless Islam reforms itself, and it cannot do that without self-imploding.

Since 1973, when the same Muslim-Arab world attacked Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, members of the “religion of peace” have sensed a growing opportunity to destroy Israel, root and branch. Even now, Iran’s mullahs and the devil-clown, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, call not only for the destruction of the embattled Jewish state but for the extermination of Jews worldwide.

In this they echo the same call by Gaza’s Hamas rulers; the junior partner of the Muslim Brotherhood. For such words not to be condemned utterly by nation states reveal the moral decay so prevalent in the world today; just 66 years since the Holocaust ended.

Entire books have been written about the basic facts of Israel’s place in the family of nations as both a state and a people. Their purpose has been to explain why Israel and its people claim the right to an independent state in a small corner of the Middle East; roughly one quarter of the geographical area known as Palestine and a territory that has never been an independent state by that name in all of recorded history; certainly never an Arab state.

Newt Gingrich finally and bravely set the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons when he showed that historical correctness trumps the world’s pathetic obsession with so-called political correctness. He said it right: “The Palestinians are an invented people.”

It is Judea and Samaria (known by its Jordanian Arab name, the West Bank) which now a hostile world wishes to snatch from Israel and give to those Arabs who fraudulently call themselves Palestinians. This will create an anti-Israel terror state within the ancient Jewish patrimony and biblical heartland.

It is passing strange that the world calls the tiny territory by its Jordanian Arab name, the West Bank, even though the Jordanian Arab Legion illegally occupied it for a mere 19 years from 1948 until 1967. And the same world now ignores that immense Jewish history stretching over millennia when it was known as Judea and Samaria, preferring to use an artificial Arab description of the western bank of the River Jordan. This is clearly an anti-Jewish bias by a sick world.

If a terror entity called Palestine emerges, Israel will be reduced to less than 10,000 square miles – much less than one hundredth of the surrounding Arab world which enjoys a land mass of some 5,000,000 square miles – and that does not include the vast territory of the non-Arab Muslim world, including Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

The basic facts, which should be self-evident, need to be repeated again and again as Golda Meir urged nearly 40 years ago. Perhaps the following is the most basic and pernicious falsehood leveled at the reconstituted Jewish state. It is predictably made by a hostile Muslim and Arab world but it is echoed by their useful idiot supporters in the West.

The charge is this:

After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, the Jews lost their country and forfeited any right to it by going into exile for nearly 2,000 years.

The answer:

Indeed, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple ended with appalling loss of life. But the Jews maintained a continuous presence in their homeland and it is this continuity which gives them an absolute, inalienable right of self-determination, historically, spiritually and politically in the reconstituted Jewish state.

In AD 132, the charismatic Jewish hero, Simon Bar Kochba, rallied his countrymen against continued Roman persecution and another war of liberation – the second Jewish uprising – was launched against Rome. His Jewish warriors freed large areas of the homeland from the Roman yoke, just as Jewish fighters under Judah Maccabee had similarly freed the homeland from Greco-Syrian occupation in 165 BC, liberating Jerusalem and the Holy Temple and giving the world the festival of lights, Hanukah, which every year falls on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev.

Bar Kochba (known as Son of the Star) also liberated Jerusalem but the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, who wanted to build a giant temple to the god, Jupiter, in place of the Holy Temple, sent an army of 35,000 soldiers against the Jewish warriors. After a three year desperate struggle, the Jewish resistance ended at the fortress of Betar. It is estimated that in the ensuing Roman repression some 500,000 Jews were either killed or sent into slavery throughout the Empire.

Even after this second catastrophe, the Jews nevertheless remained an absolute majority in the land up until the 5th century AD and they were the most important single community up until the Arab conquest under the new banner of Islam in the 7th century.

In 1099 the Crusaders arrived outside Jerusalem, having massacred thousands of Jews along their way from Flanders, through the Rhineland, and on to the Holy Land where both Jews and Muslims were killed. They had come to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Muslims. On July 15th, 1099, after enduring a six week siege, the “Franks” broke into the city and the entire Jewish population of Jerusalem was forced into the chief synagogue, the building set on fire, while the Crusaders marched around it singing, “Christ we adore thee,” in a diabolical accompaniment to the screams of the men, women and children burning alive. The bloodbath temporarily ended when Emperor Henry 1V protested to Pope Clement 111 at the abhorrent behavior of those irregular bands of crusaders who had committed the atrocities.

In the ensuing centuries, during which the land was invaded by successive alien conquerors, the Jews maintained themselves in whatever numbers they could sustain. In fact they re-founded the holy Jewish city of Tiberius in Galilee three separate times. In the 16th century, some 15,000 Jews lived in another holy Jewish city, Safed, in Upper Galilee; a center of Jewish mysticism known as kabbalah.

Throughout the dark centuries of exile, Jewish pilgrims and refugees returned again and again to restore the ancestral Jewish homeland. Jewish prayers and festivals recited and celebrated in synagogues throughout the Diaspora, then as now, are based in large part upon the agricultural cycle of ancient Israel: Another testament to the inextricable links to the Land of Israel within the Jewish faith.

In the 1850s the first Jewish agricultural villages were established in what was then largely barren, neglected and empty territory under Turkish Ottoman occupation. By 1844 the Jews constituted the largest community in their eternal Jewish capital, Jerusalem.

In that year, according to the Prussian Consul, there were 7,120 Jews, 5,000 Muslims, and 3,390 Christians in Jerusalem. Even before the State of Israel was re-established in 1948, Jerusalem was primarily a Jewish city with 100,000 Jews out of a total population of 165,000. Many of the non-Jews were not Arabs at all but Europeans, Americans, Ethiopians and other Christians.

The assertion that Jewish ties to the ancestral homeland came to an end in 70 AD is utterly without foundation. It has remained unbroken since Abraham, the first Jew, came to Hebron, the other Jewish holy city, and purchased a burial plot for his wife, Sarah and for his son, Isaac, his grandson, Jacob and their wives: the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Jewish people, most of whom are buried in Hebron.

The truth then is that Jews always maintained a continuous presence in their own land despite the depredations of a succession of alien occupiers. There is an absolute continuity between the Israel of the Bible and the Israel of today.

It is the same land, the same people, the same language, the same God, the same prophets, the same holy Book. There has never been a time in the last 35 centuries when there haven’t been Jews living in Israel, sometimes as a sovereign nation, sometimes as isolated enclaves occupied by an enemy power.

And when Jews have been few in number inside Israel itself, they have nevertheless continued to pray for its welfare daily, to pray daily for their return to nationhood, to recount the Biblical promises, and to pray for a quick return.

This is continuity par excellence. This is a basic fact and Newt Gingrich, to his credit, articulated it for all to hear. Why is this important? Because part of the Big Lie of today is to deny Jewish continuity in its ancestral, aboriginal, and biblical homeland and to falsely consider the Jews illegitimate newcomers to the land who can legitimately be pushed out.

Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of the trilogy, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
http://www.lulu.com/

USA Froze AID to Palestinians

Nadene Goldfoot
Since August, 1/3 of aid from the USA has been frozen since August, which is a response to Abbas going to the UN in a bid for statehood.  The US Congress put a block on transferring $200 million to the Palestinians. 

The Palestinians think this is unfair.  They're crying that this is unjustified. They are saying that the money was to go to humanitarian and development projects and are calling it a collective punishment.  They really don't live in the real world realizing that the USA is almost bankrupt and that money should be used at home for their own humanitarian and development projects.  The Palestinians were begged not to go to the UN to declare their state without recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.  That would mean stopping the attacks of missiles and mortars upon it.  Money is wasted on the Palestinians as it just goes for these weapons to use on Israel.  No, the Palestinians thumbed their noses at the USA, so they can expect no money. 

Reference: http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=240095