Newt’s Invented History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Gingrich’s Serial Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds

by Jeremy R. Hammond

December 13, 2011

The Republican presidential candidates are falling all over themselves competing for who can be the most “pro-Israel”, with Newt Gingrich taking the game to a whole new level last week when he said in an interview with The Jewish Channel that Palestinians were an “invented” people. When asked whether he considered himself a Zionist, Gingrich responded (his emphasis):

Well, I believe that the Jewish people have the right to have a state, and I believe that the commitments that were made at the time—remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons, we have sustained this war against Israel now, since the 1940s, and it’s tragic.

Shall we take that as a “Yes”? During the ABC News Republican debate in Iowa on December 10, Gingrich defended his comments by saying:

Is what I said factually correct? Yes. Is it historically true? Yes. Are we in a situation where every day rockets are fired into Israel while the United States—the current administration—tries to pressure the Israelis into a peace process. Hamas does not admit the right of Israel to exist and says publicly, “Not a single Jew will remain.” The Palestinian Authority Ambassador to India said last month, “There is no difference between Fatah and Hamas, we both agree Israel has no right to exist.” Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools. They have textbooks that say, “If there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?” We pay for those textbooks through our aid money. It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts and stand up and say, “Enough lying about the Middle East.”

Unfortunately, Newt Gingrich isn’t someone who has the guts to stand up and tell the truth, preferring instead with utmost hypocrisy to repeat numerous lies about the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Where to begin? Gingrich’s comment that the Palestinians are an “invented” people is not new. It’s simply a reiteration of old Zionist propaganda, dating back to before Israel even existed.

Prince Faysal with Chaim Weizmann,

Chaim Weizmann, in a letter to Lord Arthur Balfour, wrote in May 1918 to say how the only guide to resolving the growing conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine was through applying what he called “the democratic principle”. Since “the brutal numbers operate against us, for there are five Arabs to one Jew”, Weizmann wrote, the “present state of affairs would necessarily tend towards the creation of an Arab Palestine, if there were an Arab people in Palestine”. His meaning was not that there were no Arabs inhabiting the land—he had just acknowledged they were a large majority—but that they didn’t meet the criteria for a “people”, and thus that their right to self-determination could be denied to them under the colonialist application of “the democratic principle”.

In 1936, David Ben-Gurion, head of the Labor faction of the Zionist movement, similarly declared that “there is no conflict between Jewish and Palestinian nationalism because the Jewish Nation is not in Palestine and the Palestinians are not a nation.” His meaning, of course, was that Palestine was not “Palestine”, but the “Jewish Nation”, which belonged not to the Arabs but entirely to the Jews, the minor problem of the Arabs constituting the majority and possessing most of the land being of no consequence, since the colonialist “democratic principle” could be applied.

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir more famously remarked in 1969, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”

The basic logic of Gingrich’s argument about Palestine being part of the Ottoman Empire follows much along the same principle. Since the Arab inhabitants of the land never exercised sovereignty over Palestine as an independent nation before, this logic dictates, we may therefore continue to reject their right to self-determination today. Gingrich is effectively reiterating the same racist and colonialist “democratic principle”.

In the debate, Gingrich added:

The fact is the Palestinian right of return is based on a historically false story. Somebody ought to have the courage to go all the way back to the 1921 League of Nations mandate for a Jewish Homeland, point out the context in which Israel came into existence—and “Palestinian” did not become a common term until after 1977. This is a propaganda war in which our side refuses to engage, and we refuse to tell the truth while the other side lies, and you’re not going to win in the long run if you’re afraid to stand firm and stand for the truth.

Would that Gingrich would stand for the truth, instead of lying and repeating Zionist propaganda. He claimed to be speaking “as a historian”, but his narrative is a fiction from start to finish. The truth is that the inhabitants of Palestine were known as “Palestinians” long before Israel was established. An example has already been shown, in the above quote from Ben-Gurion, who elsewhere described the Arab revolt of 1936 as “an active resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard as a usurpation of their homeland by the Jews” (emphasis added). Notice in this usage, “Palestinians” refers specifically to the Arabs, even though the term was also used to refer to native Jewish inhabitants.

Shall we dare to go back to the Palestine Mandate? We first must go back even further, to the document known as the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Lord Balfour said in a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a representative of the Zionist movement:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….

It’s worth noting that President Wilson established a commission to examine the question of Palestine, headed by Henry Churchill King and Charles R. Crane. The King-Crane Commission report of 1919 observed, with regard to the British policy, that the creation of a Jewish state would constitute “the gravest trespass upon the ‘civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’” In their discussions with Zionist representatives, “the fact came out repeatedly … that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine”. The report concluded that if the principle of self-determination was to rule, the will of the people of Palestine must be respected, and the great majority of the population was “emphatically against the entire Zionist program.”

The British government elucidated on its policy in the Churchill White Paper of June 1922, which emphasized that the Balfour Declaration had not aimed “to create a wholly Jewish Palestine”, but that the “Jewish National Home” they envisioned would be “in Palestine” (emphasis added). The paper stated further that “all citizens” of Palestine “in the eyes of the law shall be Palestinian”—notice we again find the term Gingrich says didn’t come into use until 1977. The paper went on to describe its vision of what amounted to autonomous Jewish communities existing within a greater state of Palestine.

The League of Nations issued its Palestine Mandate the following month, July 1922. Although the Covenant of the League of Nations stated that the wishes of the population of occupied territories “must be a principle consideration in the selection of the Mandatory”, the Palestinians were not consulted. The Zionist Organization, on the other hand, was. In issuing the Mandate, the League of Nations included the wording that Britain “should be responsible for putting into effect the [Balfour] declaration”, the terms of which were repeated.

British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon objected strongly to the Mandate. He recognized that while his government officially did not support the establishment of a Jewish state, its policy effectively furthered that Zionist goal. “The Zionists are after a Jewish State with Arabs as hewers of wood and drawers of water,” he said. “So are many British sympathizers with the Zionists.”

That category included Lord Balfour, who had once declared to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis, “I am a Zionist”, and who admitted that despite Western rhetoric about democracy and self-determination, “in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country”.

Continuing, Curzon pointed out that British policy consisted of “flagrant” contradictions and blasting the hypocrisy of the Mandate. “Acting upon the noble principles of self-determination,” he said, the League of Nations “then proceed[ed] to draw up a document which … is an avowed constitution for a Jewish State.” In the British Parliament, Lord Sydenham, in a reply to Balfour, admonished that “the harm done by dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country … may never be remedied”. The injustice done to the Arabs would “start a running sore”, he presciently proclaimed, “and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

One widely propagated myth about the conflict is that Israel was created by the United Nations. While this belief is extremely popular, it is categorically false. The truth is that the report of the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine explicitly acknowledged that its majority recommendation to partition Palestine was a rejection of the Arabs’ right to self-determination. The General Assembly’s own ad-hoc committee appointed to further review UNSCOP’s majority recommendation rejected it as “contrary to the principles of the [U.N.] Charter”. The U.N., the committee observed, could not “deprive the majority of the people of Palestine of their territory and transfer it to the exclusive use of a minority in the country … in complete disregard of the wishes and interests of the Arabs of Palestine.”

Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent political analyst whose articles have been featured in numerous print and online publications around the world. He is the founder and editor of Foreign Policy Journal (www.foreignpolicyjournal.com), an online source for news, critical analysis, and opinion commentary on U.S. foreign policy. He was a recipient of the 2010 Project Censored Awards for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. Read more articles by Jeremy R. Hammond.
http://www.jeremyrhammond.com

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