By: Brian Grodman
A shocking new book reveals facts that every American – and every citizen of the free world – should know, but few do. In The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, historian and Islam expert Robert Spencer shows how from the instant it came into being, and even before that, the State of Israel, far from being the aggressive violator of human rights of UN myth, has been the target of gratuitous and unprovoked violence by Arab Muslims – the “Palestinians,” who, as Spencer demonstrates in this book, have no actual existence as a people with a distinct ethnicity, language or culture.
These and other facts Spencer marshals in The Palestinian Delusion will surprise many, especially the young Americans who are involved in the BDS movement, in the mistaken belief that it is a justified and righteous response to Israeli wrongdoing. Spencer explains that the “Palestinians” were invented in the 1960s to distract from the fact that the Jewish State was a tiny sliver of land surrounded by huge and hostile Arab states. Before that, it was the name of a region, not of a people, like Staten Island or Compton. The name “Palestine” is ancient, but had never been attached to anything but a region: it was given to the land of Judea (i.e., land of the Jews) by the Romans in 134 AD, when they expelled the Jews from their ancient homeland. To rub salt in the wound, they renamed the land after the Jews’ Biblical enemies, the Philistines.
Spencer points out that just one hundred years ago, “the word ‘Palestinians’ was more often applied to Jews than to Muslim Arabs.” Not only that, but “some Arabs rejected the term, explaining: ‘We are not Palestinians, we are Arabs. The Palestinians are the Jews.’” The Palestinian Delusion shows that the claim – also false – that Jews stole Palestinian land actually predates the creation of the Palestinian people itself. The Arab Higher Committee called for the Arab Muslims of Palestine to leave the area in 1948, so that the Arab states could crush the Jewish state without hurting Arab civilians. The plan was that they would be able to return home in a matter of weeks. Instead, the Arab states lost the war, and began claiming that Israel existed on stolen land
It wasn’t until a couple of decades later that the Arab Muslims of the region began to refer to themselves as the Palestinian people. As Spencer demonstrates, even some of their central figures – Yasser Arafat, Edward Said – were really from somewhere else. In 1977, a leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) actually admitted it: “The Palestinian people does not exist.” The creation of the Palestinian people is one of the biggest propaganda victories in history, as their existence is now taken for granted.
That is not the only explosive revelation in this book. Spencer provides a brisk recounting of how the vaunted peace process began, with startling accounts of what really happened during the negotiations for the Camp David and Oslo Accords. He shows the bad faith on the Arab Muslim side that characterized these negotiations from the beginning, especially Camp David, where Egyptian President Anwar Sadat took cruel advantage of a naïve and credulous Jimmy Carter, with both men browbeating and manipulating Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin into giving Egypt everything it demanded, in exchange for almost nothing but promises.
Spencer shows that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama followed in Carter’s footsteps, with no less naivete and credulity toward the Palestinians – and no less thinly veiled animosity toward Israel.
The Palestinian Delusion contains much more as well. He delves into the truly nauseating depth of Palestinian hatred for Jews and Israel, showing how even Palestinian children of the youngest ages are inculcated with venomous and even genocidal Jew-hatred. The book also reveals the duplicity of the Palestinian grievance factory, which fabricates wrongdoing supposedly committed by the Israeli Defense Forces, and has been dismayingly successful in swaying world opinion (and in particular the United Nations) in doing so. And there is much more: the Palestinian Authority’s “Pay for Slay” program giving money to jihad terrorists and their relatives, the pocketing of a great deal of aid money by Palestinian leaders, and how Donald Trump changed the entire game when he moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
Even if you are familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have been following the “peace process” for years, there is a great deal in Robert Spencer’s The Palestinian Delusion that you’ll see in this book for the first time, and will enhance your admiration for Israel in being able to survive against such prohibitive odds. The Palestinian Delusion is a much-needed antidote to the disinformation about the Jewish State that prevails almost everywhere today.
Brian Grodman has written for the Jewish Advocate and the Zionist Organization of America.
