Palestine did exist, no matter how Zionists quibble over terminology

by Martin Odoni

It is terrifying how moral failings can vanish from an ideologue’s thoughts by a mindset that one might think has little to do with zeal – pedantry.

A frequent feature of Zionism’s desperate attempts to justify the existence of Israel is to pretend that what was displaced to make room for it – Palestine – never existed. It is perhaps a little self-defeating doing this, because in doing so Zionists are acknowledging the real reason Israel has opponents. Not “anti-Semitism,” as is their reflex claim, but objection to the dispossession of an entire population of innocent people.

But in any event, the lie is shocking. It essentially denies the existence of millions of people across many generations, both in the old Ottoman Empire, and in the British Mandate Territory that followed the Empire’s break-up. That is not far removed from the way Josef Stalin would airbrush from photographs former allies he had betrayed to seize control of the Communist Party of the USSR.

One of the most egregious exponents of this Doublethink is our repugnant old enemy, David Collier. A Zionist anti-Arab racist of the most repellent order, he has no hesitation in trying to deny Palestine’s existence, probably as much on the basis of wishful thinking as on exclusive deceit.

Collier is a profound racist who will deny the history of an entire people just to give the illusion of legitimacy to Israel

Of course, Zionists are careful in how they word their denial of history. The precise words technically make what they are saying accurate, but in a way that completely misleads anyone who is new to the subject. Misleading people is the same as telling lies, just in a way that will get past the courts.

The reality is that Palestine definitely did exist. Collier is technically correct to say that it never existed as a country. But he is lying when he tries to convince everyone that it was made up, or that it was only invented to fight Israel. A liar telling a lie to prop up another lie.

Now Palestine was a region of the Ottoman Empire. It was never independent, but it was still a contiguous region, one with every potential to become a country without any need for the influx of Jews from Europe. Whether it had a state of its own or not is completely unimportant in this. It was still a homeland for a very well established society and culture dating back hundreds of years. The fact they never had a state of their own does not make that history any less real. Indeed, it sounds like the Zionists are trying to punish the Palestinians for being among the victims of Turkish Imperialism, by denying their existence at all. Other colonies of the Turks and of the British were liberated. The Zionists want the Palestinians annihilated, even the memory of them being a people at all.

The Zionist hope is that any claim to legitimacy of the Palestinians to their own homeland will vanish through quibbles about their precise status as a region or as a country. But that is nonsense. The claim, such as it is, that Zionists have over the Holy Land as a home is that the Israelites of Biblical legend supposedly lived there thousands of years ago. The evidence that that Israel was even real is heavily-disputed. But more than that, there is no evidence that this was ever a ‘state’ in its own right, and moreover, it would have been a part of the Roman Empire. Its status was much the same as Palestine’s in the 1940s.

Lord Arthur Balfour essentially saw Jews as a disease in Europe’s body-politic, and Zionism as a way to offload them

As I pointed out in one of the very first articles on this blog, originally written in 2004, an archaic claim of this type is unenforceable. If the Jewish people are entitled to Palestine, then the Welsh are entitled to all of England, and so the United Kingdom must cease to exist as tens of millions of English people are deported overseas. Similar in the USA. European descendants in their hundreds of millions would have to be forced out to make way for the true native ‘Red Indian’ population. And if the United Kingdom and the United States both cease to exist, that removes about nine-tenths of Israel’s own ‘life-support,’ in money and weapons supplies.

So Israel does not want its own rules enforced on any other situation; the unsquarable circle. That is the problem with Israel’s own historic claims; they are based on a naive idea that what happened to the Israelites is somehow unique. In reality, study the history of any land, you will find populations other than the present ones living there at some point or other.

There is an irony in this, which is that the beginning of the creation of Israel, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, is treated in Israel as almost a kind of Holy Writ, as hallowed in Israel as the Declaration of Independence is in the USA. Arthur Balfour, himself something of an anti-Semite, set it all in motion with a letter he sent on behalf of the UK Foreign Office to the Zionist Federation.

Palestine may not have been an independent country, but it was a culture and a people, and the creators of Israel were obliged to protect it. They ignored that obligation, and that is why modern Zionists try to pretend it was not real.

If Collier thinks that Palestine is a retroactive invention to discredit Israel’s existence, perhaps he could explain why it is mentioned in Israel’s ‘birth certificate’? Or why it explicitly commits to protecting the rights of non-Jewish people there? Does Collier think Balfour somehow plucked a concept from the future? And for what purpose, if Balfour was in favour of creating Israel?

And how was George Orwell writing about Palestine in 1945?

Collier is a liar. A hateful, racist liar.