• POINT 1: We, the Palestinians, are defenseless, powerless people who have been victims of the powerful Zionists. We have had no options in the 60-year Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim distorts history. Palestinians were neither powerless nor defenseless between 1880 and 1948. From 1920 on, they organized political parties and were active, aggressive agents in determining the history of the region. Unfortunately, their leadership chose to fight the British, the Jews and their own political rivals instead of building the infrastructure for a state.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestine Arab Congress began in 1920, the Supreme Muslim Council was established in 1921. Amin al-Husseini became the leader of the Palestinian Arabs when he was elected President of the Council in 1922 and appointed Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921. [1]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Mufti "taught his followers to regard the mandatory as an infidel tyranny in alliance with other, Jewish non-believers. His influence was given political expression in the Palestine Arab party, founded in 1935…..Associated with the Husseinis were several mayors and leaders of the Haifa and Jerusalem branches of the Palestine Arab Workers Society. The faction also organized its own paramilitary group, al-Futuwwa…" [2]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Mufti and his followers instigated riots and massacres against the Jews in 1920, 1921 and 1929 and unleashed the violence against the British and the Jews, known as the Arab Revolt, between 1936 and 1939.(*) "…daily outrages and other instances of grave disorders have continued unabated, and after a careful review of the whole situation, His Majesty's Government are satisfied that the campaign of violence and threats of violence, by which the Arab leaders are attempting to influence the policy of His Majesty's Government, cannot be allowed to continue…." British Report to the League of Nations, "Palestine and Trans-Jordan for the Year 1936." (**) [3]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The 1936-39 Arab Revolt that the Mufti instigated turned into a civil war between competing political groups and feuding clans, effectively crippling instead of building the infrastructure for a state. "…the rebellion seemed now to be turning into a struggle between the two Arab political parties: The Mufti's faction…and the Nashashibis, who hoped to get the power away from them…" Professor H.H. Wilson of Bir Zeit College 1938 (*) In the three years, the Mufti killed an estimated 3,000 of his opponents. (**) [4]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinians were neither defenseless nor powerless during the Mandate years. The British Mandatory authorities were attentive to Palestinian demands and repeatedly tried to meet them.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: After the 1920-21 riots, Britain clarified its policy in the 1922 White Paper and began to set some restrictions on open Jewish immigration as defined in the Mandate itself. "This White Paper also established a new principle as a factor for determining an immigration quota of Jews to Palestine. The White Paper confirmed the right of Jewish immigration but stipulated that this should not exceed the economic absorptive capacity of the country, an arbitrary standard that gave the British wide latitude to limit the influx of Jews." [5]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In response to Palestinian demands, the British authorities placed stricter and stricter limits on Jewish immigration. In the 1939 British White Paper, they limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 for the next five years and any future immigration would be subject to Arab approval. In addition, land sales to Jews were forbidden in 95% of Palestine. [6]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is at present a state of apprehension on both sides….The Arabs are afraid that the Jews will completely dominate the country….The Jews, equally, are afraid that the great and really remarkable constructive work which they had already done in Palestine will be cut short or terminated…and that the Arabs seek to drive them out of Palestine or reduce them to an inferior status of barely tolerated aliens in Palestine, under Arab domination. I honestly believe that both these fears are baseless….It is the desire of the British Government to find a solution, consistent with their fundamental dual obligation, and they regard those obligations equally as obligations of honour. It is my confident belief that we can dissipate those fears, and do justice to both parties." Report of the Mandatory to the League of Nations, December 31 1936 [7]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The British government willingly met with and considered the grievances and demands of the Arab leadership in Palestine throughout the years of its authority. In 1936, for example, Palestinian officials met repeatedly with British authorities. British Report to the League of Nations, "Palestine and Trans-Jordan for the Year 1936." [8]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In fact, many of the British were frankly prejudiced in favor of the Arabs against the Jews. "We [British and the Arabs] are partners in adversity on this question. A Jewish state is no more in our interest than it is in the Arabs…" Sir John Troutbeck, Head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo. 1947 [9]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Zionists were certainly not powerful during the Mandate years (1922-1948).. Zionists had a growing community, but they were prohibited from developing a military, their population was half the size of the Palestinians and no foreign nations supported their efforts, particularly as Nazism spread in the 1930's. Israel would not develop its economic and military strength until well after the 1948 War.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Jews were not powerful in terms of population. In 1921, Jews were about 11% of the total population (76,000 in a total of 700,000) (*) and in 1947, Jews were about 33% of the total population (600,000 out of a total of 1.8 million).(**) [10]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The British did as much, if not more, to help the Palestinian Arabs develop political institutions as they did for the Zionists, but their efforts were frustrated. "The [Shaw] Commission admitted, however (on page 128), that all the efforts of the Government with a view to satisfying the Arabs had been of no effect owing to the fact that the Arabs would only agree to autonomy in a form which would render the international obligations assumed by Great Britain null and void." Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, 16th (Extraordinary) Session June 30 1930 [11]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinians have not been helpless, defenseless victims. Throughout the history of the conflict, they have had the support and backing of other Arab nations and of nations hostile to the West.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian Arabs got help from Arab countries: During the 1936 disturbances, "[T]he Arab Higher Committee were in constant communication with Their Majesties King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Ghazi of `Iraq, the King of the Yemen, and His Highness the Amir Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. On the 8th October the Committee received a communication from King Ibn Saud and on the 9th October from King Ghazi and the Amir Abdullah….[who pleaded for an end to violence but who said]…'You may rest assured that we will continue our endeavours to help you.'" British Report to the League of Nations, "Palestine and Trans-Jordan for the Year 1936." [12]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian Arabs got help from European powers hostile to Britain and America: The Mufti of Jerusalem received millions of dollars from Nazi Germany and Italian fascists for his violence against the Jews between 1936 and 1939. The German SS provided financial and logistical support for anti-Semitic programs in Palestine. [13]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arab states helped found the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 and have continued to give money, material and support to Palestinian resistance of Israel. [14]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arab states launched wars against Israel in 1948, 1967, 1973.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arab states maintained hostile, belligerent actions against Israel including economic boycotts, interruption of sea, air, road and ail communications, diplomatic quarantine, virulent anti-Israel propaganda campaigns, and constant border terrorism. [15]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim distorts history. Palestinians have had options, but they have repeatedly rejected compromise solutions that would have established an Arab state alongside a Jewish state-in 1937, 1947, 1969, 1979 and 2000. Had they accepted the United Nations Partition plan in 1947, their Arab state in Palestine would now be 57 years old. But in each case, they rejected the compromises and chose war or violence instead. In contrast, Israel accepted or actually proposed each compromise solution.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Governments of the Arab States emphasize, on this occasion, what they have already declared before the London Conference and the United Nations, that the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State…" Statement by the Arab League States, May 15, 1948 [16]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It's likely…that [the plan for compromise] is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight…You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you." Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha 1947 [17]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians don't have a state because they have had "an all or nothing policy," unlike the Zionists. "The Zionists never demanded the impossible….Our leadership….enabled the Zionists to succeed at every opportunity…by rejecting every proposal for compromise, rejecting proposals to give it a state on most of the land of Palestine…" Tawfiz Abu Bakr, Palestinian columnist, 2003 [18]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Because of "this irrational nihilist behavior [of Palestinians about accepting compromise], "Haj Amin Al-Husseini…rejected the settlement offered him by the Peel Commission in 1937…Then, he repeated his mistake by rejecting the Partition Plan that this time would have given 55% to the Jews and the rest to Palestine…." Al-'Afif Al-Akdhar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [19]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle….is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [20]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who was an intermediary in the negotiations, called Arafat's refusal to accept the 2000 Camp David offer "a crime against Palestinians, in fact against the whole region." (New Yorker interview March 24, 2003)
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar, editor Jubran Tuweini wrote, "Once again, we realize that the Arabs are their own worst enemy - just as the worst enemy of the Palestinian cause is the Palestinians, who have endorsed a policy of refusal and fundamentalist extremism as a way of behavior. How many times have they already served Israel with their deeds? How many times has the behavior of these groups already saved Ariel Sharon and his government?" December 24 2003 [21]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The liberal-leaning Hazem Abd Al-Rahman wrote in his Al-Ahram column:"… Are these scum of the earth [Palestinians who attacked the Egyptian Foreign Minister] capable of accomplishing something for the Palestinian people? It is reasonable to assume that they, like the supporters of suicide bombings, are the first to damage the Palestinian cause, and are bringing death upon the Palestinian people…" December 24 2003 [22]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: On the liberal Arab website Elaph, Egyptian columnist Sami Buheiri wrote: "[T]he rabble majority of the Arab and Palestinian street today….refuse to accept any kind of a peace agreement with Israel... It is they who applaud the bus and restaurant bombings in order to destroy any spark of hope for peace... They are Arab nationalists who have failed completely in all their wars with Israel and in all attempts to achieve peace with Israel, because they were not serious, and they were not men - neither in fighting nor in peacemaking..." [23]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim distorts history, is full of self-pity and is an effort to avoid responsibility for the Palestinians' own mistakes.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Indeed, one of the characteristics of the Palestinian national movement has been the Palestinians' view of themselves as perpetual victims of others-Ottoman Turks, British officials, Zionists, Americans-and never to appreciate that they are, at least in large part, victims of their own mistakes and iniquities. In the Palestinian Weltanschauung, they never set a foot wrong; their misfortunes are always the fault of others. The inevitable corollary of this refusal to recognize their own historical agency has been a perpetual Palestinian whining-that, I fear, is the apt term-to the outside world to save them from what is usually their own folly." Historian Benny Morris [24]
      
      
• POINT 2: The Nakba was inflicted on Palestinians by the Zionist movement in 1948. We were innocent victims of Israel's expulsion policy.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Nakba was not inflicted on Palestinians. Arab and Palestinian leaders began a full-scale war against the Jews to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state. While some Palestinian Arabs did prefer partition, their leaders did not. The Palestinians were not helpless victims. They were agents who chose war and lost.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It's likely…that [the plan for compromise] is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight…You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you." Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha 1947 [25]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[W]e would rather die than accept minority rights" in the portion that was to become a Jewish state." Hajj Amin al-Husseini. 1947
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "We are solidly and permanently determined to fight to the last man against the existence in our country of any Jewish state, no matter how small it is…If such a state is to be established, it can only be established over our dead bodies." Jamal al-Husseini, Vice President of the Arab Higher Committee, the effective government of the Palestinian Arabs. November 1947 [26]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: If the Partition Resolution passed, the Arabs would drench "the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of Arab blood." Jamal Husseini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman. 1947 [27]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs are determined to wage war with the same determination and force as during the Crusades." King Ibn Saud Message to President Truman 1947 [28]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "You will achieve nothing with talk of compromise or peace. For us there is only one test, the test of strength….We will try to rout you. I am not sure we will succeed, but we will try. We succeeded in expelling the Crusaders, but lost Spain and Persia, and may lose Palestine. But it is too late for a peaceable solution." Abd al-Rahman Azzam, Secretary General of the Arab League, to delegation of Zionists. September 1947 [29]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Nakba was not inflicted on Palestinians. If the Palestinians and Arab states had accepted the UN's compromise proposal calling for a Jewish state alongside an Arab state, there would have been no nakba and today there would be no refugees and a Palestinian Arab state would be 57 years old. Zionists had accepted this compromise. Arab and Palestinian leaders had angrily rejected it.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Naqba was a result of the war Arab and Palestinian leaders had initiated. The aggressors bear responsibility for the consequences of that war.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously…." Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee during the 1948 War. Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. [30]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he creation of the refugee problem…was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians-and in their wake, the surrounding Arab states-had launched." Historian Benny Morris [31]
      
      
• POINT 3: Israel robbed us of our state in 1948.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: There was no state to rob. No independent Arab or Palestinian state had ever existed in Palestine.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: After Rome conquered the Jewish state in 135 AD, successive empires ruled the area for the next 1900 years and Palestine ceased to be a distinct political entity.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine from 1517 to 1917-18 …never made it a separate, distinct administrative district." Its boundaries kept shifting. Parts of it were attached to Damascus, parts to Beirut and parts were independent. [32]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestine was not a state but simply "a geographical name of rather loose application…." It did not have " a boundary by which Palestine can be separated exactly from the rest of Syria in the north, or from the Sinaitic and Arabian deserts in the south…" Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911 p. 600).
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs maintained that their country belonged to themselves and that they had been masters in it for fourteen centuries. Great Britain, in authorising the establishment of a National Home, had disposed of a country which did not belong to it. This claim was particularly open to refutation. It was not in accordance with most elementary facts of ancient history in Palestine. It would be enough to point out that Palestine had belonged before the war to the Ottoman Empire. The country had been conquered, not by Arabs of Palestine, but by the Allies, and had finally been ceded to the Allies and not to the Arabs. Since 1517, Palestine had been under the rule of the Turks. There could be no reference, therefore, to an Arab nation in Palestine, nor could it be claimed that the territory formed part of the patrimony of that nation." Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, 16th (Extraordinary) Session June 30 1930 [33]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab leaders did not recognize the existence of a distinctive Palestinian political entity let alone a state.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is no such country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented!….Our country for centuries was part of Syria." Local Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, to the Peel Commission in 1937. [34]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history. Absolutely not." Arab-American historian Philip Hitti of Princeton University, Testifying to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry,. 1946. [35]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[P]rior to the First World War…Palestine was included in the Ottoman Empire as part of the Province of Syria….Politically, the Arabs of Palestine… were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity." Representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the UN General Assembly, May 9 1947.United Nations Records of the Meeting of the First Special Assembly [36]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." Ahmed Shuqeiri, later chairman of the PLO, to the UN Security Council, May 31 1956. [37]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinian Arabs made no effort to create the institutions for a state during the Mandate period.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "During the entire mandatory period, Arab leaders had refused to cooperate with the British in any scheme of national autonomy as long as the Jews were similarly included…The Arabs possessed nothing comparable to the Jewish quasi-state. At no time had the Supreme Moslem Council or the Arab Higher Committee ever served as more than organs for propaganda or violence. Neither organization had provided administrative training or governmental experience." Historian Howard Sachar [38]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "As regards the parts of Palestine under Arab control, no central authority exists and no independent Arab State has been organized or attempted….The Partition Plan presumed that effective organs of state government could be more or less immediately set up in the Arab part of Palestine. This does not seem possible today in view of the lack of organized authority springing from Arab Palestine itself…. There now exists in Palestine a form of partition, though an Arab State for which the Partition Plan provided has not materialized…." UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Secretariat General Report July 30, 1949. [39]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab leaders' refusal to compromise cost them the state the UN had offered them in the 1947 Partition Resolution.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: In "the parts of Palestine under Arab control….no independent Arab state has been organized or attempted. This situation may be explained….by Arab unwillingness to undertake any step which would suggest even tacit acceptance of partition…." UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Secretariat General Report. July 30, 1949 [40]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It's likely…that [the plan for compromise] is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight…You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you." Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha [41]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians don't have a state because they have had "an all or nothing policy," unlike the Zionists. "The Zionists never demanded the impossible….Our leadership….enabled the Zionists to succeed at every opportunity…by rejecting every proposal for compromise, rejecting proposals to give it a state on most of the land of Palestine…" Tawfiz Abu Bakr, Palestinian columnist, 2003 [42]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Because of "this irrational nihilist behavior [of Palestinians about accepting compromise], "Haj Amin Al-Husseini…rejected the settlement offered him by the Peel Commission in 1937…Then, he repeated his mistake by rejecting the Partition Plan that this time would have given 55% to the Jews and the rest to Palestine…." Al-'Afif Al-Akdhar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [43]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle….is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [44]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab governments, not Israel, robbed the Palestinians of the opportunity to create a state after the 1948 War.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Jordan captured the West Bank in the 1948 War. Egypt captured Gaza. They controlled these areas for 19 years, but neither country was interested in the development of an independent Palestinian state. Israel had nothing to do with these policies. . Instead, they instituted repressive regimes, keeping the population in poverty and without political rights.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab governments would have robbed Palestinians of a state even if they had won the war. They wanted the territory for themselves.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "If the United Nations decided to partition Palestine, Abdullah [King of Jordan] explained, he frankly preferred to annex the Arab sector to his kingdom." King Abdullah, 1947 [45]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Mufti and Kuwatly [the Syrian president] want to set up an independent Arab state in Palestine with the Mufti as its head. If that were to happen I would be encircled on almost all sides by enemies…My forces will therefore occupy every place evacuated by the British." King Abdullah of Jordan, 1947.(*) The king had told the Arab League that "under no circumstances would he countenance a Palestinian government, with or without the Mufti." Oct. 14, 1947 (**) [46]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Syrians…were determined to seize as much as they could of northern Palestine." Historian Howard Sachar [47]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Arab war plan changed in conception and essence from a united effort to conquer parts of the nascent Jewish state and perhaps destroy it, into a multilateral land grab focusing on the Arab areas of the country." Historian Benny Morris [48]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "When Egypt and Syria (and Jordan) fought Israel, it was as part of their own scramble for leadership of the Arab world. They never really did battle for Arab Palestine. They used anti-Zionism as a prop in their own political pyrotechnics. Had the outside Arabs ever won a war against Israel, Palestine would have been carved up by the victors, and its name would have evaporated into history. (This is just about what happened when the West Bank was annexed by Jordan and the Gaza Strip was policed by Egypt.)" Martin Peretz [49]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Indeed, had the Jewish State lost the war, its territory would not have been handed over to the Palestinians but rather divided among the invading forces, for the simple reason that none of the Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation." Historian Efraim Karsh [50]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he most likely arrangement seems to be Eastern Galilee to Syria, Samaria and Hebron to Abdullah, and the South to Egypt, and it might well end in annexation of this pattern. The center remains uncertain." High Commissioner Cunningham to Colonial Secretary Creech Jones on the most likely outcome of the early stages of the 1948 War. February 1948 [51]
      
      
• POINT 4: We had a peaceful, stable, egalitarian society that the Zionists destroyed.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: There was nothing peaceful, stable or egalitarian about the society that existed in Palestine when the Zionists began arriving in the 1880's or when the world community set up the Palestine Mandate after World War I.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population," British consul James Finn noted in 1857. [52]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Palestine of the early 1800's was hardly less than an administrative shambles. Centuries of Turkish indifference and misgovernment had encouraged recurrent warfare between local pashas and had permitted Bedouin robber band to terrorize the country's 400,000 inhabitants. Trade was minimal. The entire region was…stunted in its growth by the depredations of tax farmers, by army recruitment, forced labor, drought, and locusts." Historian Howard Sachar [53]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The area suffered from severe underpopulation and was facing even more depopulation in the 19th century because of economic stagnation, the lack of civic order and the oppressive Ottoman system. There were barely 260,000 Arabs in 1882 in what today is Israel and the Territories, an area that had supported approximately 5 million people in the 1st century AD.. [54]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The country was…and is now, underdeveloped and under-populated. The methods of agriculture are, for the most part, primitive; the area of land now cultivated could yield a far greater product. There are…large cultivable areas that are left untilled. The summits and slopes of the hills are admirably suited to the growth of trees, but there are no forests. Miles of sand dunes that could be redeemed, are untouched." Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine to the League of Nations, June 1921. [55]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The local population was often transient and was being displaced by social and economic developments.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Few individuals…die in the same village in which they were born. Families are continually moving from one place to another….in a few years…they fly to some other place where they have heard that their brethren are better treated." --early 19th Swiss-German explorer, John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land, (1822) reprinted 1983, p. 299 [56]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In certain parts of the country, "land is going out of cultivation and whole villages are rapidly disappearing…the local population extirpated." H.B. Tristam, The Land of Israel: A Journal of Travels Through Palestine, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1865, p. 490
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering over the high seas in every direction. His native soil could not retain a hold on him…." Sherif Hussein, guardian of the Islamic Holy Places in Arabia in Al-Qibla, March 23, 1918 [57]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]housands.[of small farmers].during the period 1880-1920 moved from the rural areas to the towns or other villages, as a result of debts, a multiplicity of heirs, famine or other causes unconnected to Jewish land purchases." Historian Benny Morris [58]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, " Vast land-holdings, in amounts exceeding five thousand dunams or more, were accumulated in large part owing to fellaheen indebtedness. This [indebtedness] was mostly caused by poor crop yields and unproductive methods of land use. Merchants, rural shaykhs and notables, and urban professionals gradually amassed areas of land as financial investments." [59]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: As modernization began after World War I, rural people left the countryside for opportunities in the growing cities, a pattern also occurring in America and Europe. As Benny Morris observed: "[T]here was a growing shift of population from the countryside to urban shantytowns and slums; to some degree this led to both physical and psychological divorce from the land." [60]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestine had an almost feudal structure with the few rich notable lording it over the mass of fellahin (peasants).
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Almost 80% of the Palestinian Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads and Bedouins. [61]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "As a result of economic and social processes that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century, large parts of the rural population had been rendered landless by the 1940's….Moreover, 70 or 80percent of the people were illiterate….the Arab economy in Palestine had failed to make the shift from a primitive, agricultural economy to a preindustrial one." Benny Morris [62]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab civilization of Palestine is based on the clan; leadership resides in a small group of influential families, and it is almost impossible for the son of an Arab fellah to rise to a position of wealth and political influence. Arab agriculture in Palestine is traditional, and improvement is hampered by an antiquated system of land tenure. The Arab adheres to a strict social code far removed from the customs of the modern world…" Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Chapter 6, 1946 [63]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs are divided politically by the personal bickerings of the leaders, which still center round the differences of the Husseinis and their rivals; and socially by the gap which separates the small upper class from the mass of the peasants-a gap which the new intelligentsia is not yet strong enough to bridge. Consequently they have developed no such internal democracy as have the Jews." Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Chapter 6, 1946 [64]
      
      
• POINT 5: No other people has suffered the ignominy of becoming refugees and being forced off their own land.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinians were not helpless victims suddenly invaded and expelled by a hostile military force. Palestinian and other Arab leaders launched the war of aggression that created their predicament.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously…." Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee during the 1948 War. Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. [65]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he creation of the refugee problem…was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians-and in their wake, the surrounding Arab states-had launched." Historian Benny Morris [66]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinians are not the only people who have become refugees. Quite the reverse is true. At the very time they became refugees, tens of millions of other people had also become refugees because of ethnic hostilities and wars. The Palestinians comprised less than 2% of the world's 50 million refugees of the last century.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Wars have a bad history of displacing residents. I doubt whether millions of Germans will ever get back any of their land in what is now eastern France and western Poland. Thousands of Russians have been finding themselves increasingly unwanted in the Baltic states. Will Ionian Greeks-residents of the Western coast of Turkey since the 11th century BC-ever return to their homes after the brutal expulsions of the 1920's? Millions of Islamic Pakistanis and Indian Hindus find themselves living in artificial countries in which they were not born." Historian Victor Davis Hanson. May 2002
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1923, after the Greek-Turkish War, 2 million Greeks who had been Turkish citizens relocated to Greece. 500,000 Turks who had been Greek citizens relocated to Turkey. Immovable property left behind was seized by the respective governments and used to resettle the incoming refugees.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: After World War II, 13 million Germans were expelled from eastern and central Europe, where many had lived for centuries. They were relocated into the new, smaller borders of Germany. These refugees received no compensation for the property they left behind.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1948, when India was partitioned into Pakistan and India, 8 million Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan for India while 6 million Muslims fled India for Pakistan. The international community offered no assistance.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Nine million Koreans (from the partition of Korea), 900,000 refugees from the conflict in Viet Nam (1954)….thousands of Turkish refugees from Bulgaria; 440,000 Finns separated from their homeland by a change of frontier, 450,000 refugees from Arab lands….these form the tragic procession of the world's refugee population in the past two decades. In every case but that of the Arab refugees …the countries in which the refugees sought shelter have facilitated their integration." Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, 1958 [67]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinian Arabs were not the only refugees created by the 1948 War. Close to a million Jews who had lived in Arab countries suffered the ignominy of being expelled and forced out of nations in which they had lived for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. By 1958, 450,000 Jews had been forced to leave their homes in Arab lands. By the early 1960's, the total number of Jews forced to leave reached 850,000.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is another aspect of the Middle East refugee problem that is also frequently ignored. It is necessary to remember that concurrently with the perpetuation of the Arab refugee problem more than 400,000 Jews have been forced to leave their homes in Iraq, the Yemen, and North Africa….[T]hey were forced to leave their homes against their will and to abandon, in the process, all that they possessed. The latest addition to their number are the 20,000 Jews for whom life has become impossible in Egypt." 1957 (This is before more Jews fled the Middle East .) Dr. Elfan Rees, "Century of the Homeless Man," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. [68]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Jews of the Arab states were driven out of their ancient homes [and] shamefully deported after their property had been commandeered or taken over at the lowest possible valuation…This is true for the majority of the Jews in question." Sabri Jiryis, Israeli-Arab lawyer in Al-Nahar (Beirut) May 15, 1975 [69]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Iraq "took a series of steps, including anti-Semitic legislation, against its Jewish population. This began with a 1948 amendment to the Penal Code of Baghdad, adding Zionism to other ideologies and behavior (communism, anarchism, and immorality) whose propagation constituted a punishable offense. Laws in 1950 and 1951 deprived Jews of their Iraqi nationality and their property in Iraq, respectively…. Similar patterns…. existed in other Arabic-speaking countries, including Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan." Historian Ya'akov Meron [70]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Beginning in 1948, Israel absorbed 650,000 of these Jews from Arab countries who fled their countries, leaving their possessions behind. [71]
      
      
• POINT 6: It is because of Israel's uncompromising position that we are the only modern refugees who have remained refugees through three generations.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: It is Arab states and the PLO-not Israel-who are responsible for the prolonged plight of the Palestinian refugees. Arab nations intentionally have kept the refugee issue from being resolved. They have actively prevented Palestinian absorption and resettlement in other host countries.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it an open sore, as an affront to the UN and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die." Ralph Galloway, former Director of UNRWA, August 1958 [72]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The history of UNRWA has been a clinical study in frustration. No Agency has been better led or more devoutly served but the organized instransigence of the refugees and the calculated indifference of the Arab states concerned have brought all its plans to nought…The net result is that relief is being provided in 1957 to refugees who could have been rehabilitated in 1951 with 'home and jobs' without prejudice to their just claims." Dr. Elfan Rees, Century of the Homeless Man, Carnegie Endowment for Peace, November 1957. [73]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The official attitude of the (Arab) host countries is well known. It is one of seeking to prevent any sort of adaptation and integration…." Research Group for European Migration, 1957 [74]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Unlike refugees in other parts of the world, the Palestine refugees are no different in language and social organization from the other Arabs. Resettlement therefore would be in a familiar environment. If the local governments are unwilling to tackle the problem except on their own terms there is little incentive for outside governments to continue financial support. Original humanitarian impulse which led to the creation and perpetuation of UNRWA is gradually being perverted into a political weapon." Report of Special Study Commission to the Near East and Africa by the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, May 19, 1958 [75]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "We refuse to talk about the resettlement of refugees [where they are currently living] because this is a crime….It is the Palestinians' right to return to their homeland." Yasser Arafat, Al-Quds (Palestinian newspaper) September 11, 1999 [76]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Arab governments have frequently offered jobs, housing, land and other benefits to Arabs and non-Arabs, excluding Palestinians. For example, Saudi Arabia chose not to use unemployed Palestinian refugees to alleviate its labor shortage in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Instead, thousands of South Koreans and other Asians were recruited to fill the job." Mitchell Bard [77]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: With the exception of Jordan, Arab countries have actively prevented Palestinians from becoming citizens even when the Palestinians have been residents for two or more generations and have gainful employment.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Syria. "There are 626,532 registered refugees with UNRWA in Syria….[T]hey are partially integrated but are still classified as refugees" and cannot become citizens. [78]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Egypt. When Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip between 1948 and 1967, the refugees were "denied employment or citizenship in Egypt itself.(*) Approximately 50,000 Palestinian refugees live in Egypt today. They must report to a local police station every month and are treated as second-class citizens. (**) [79]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The 387,043 Palestinians in Lebanon have been denied integration into Lebanese society and have been denied citizenship. [80]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Gulf States refused to grant citizenship to Palestinians who work and live there. When the PLO supported Iraq in the first Gulf War, Kuwait simply expelled 300,000 Palestinians who had lived there, in some cases for three generations. [81]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab state have refused to assist Palestinian refugees in order to use their plight as a weapon in the battle against Israel.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The official attitude of the [Arab] host countries is well known. It is one of seeking to prevent any sort of adaptation and integration because the refugees are seen as a political means of pressure to get Israel wiped off the map or to get the greatest possible number of concessions." Research Group for European Migration, 1957 [82]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The fact is that the Arab states have for ten years used the Palestine refugees as political hostages in their struggle with Israel. While Arab delegates in the United Nations have condemned the plight of their brothers in the refugee camps nothing has been done to assist them in a practical way lest political leverage against Israel be lost." Chairman of the Near Eastern Subcommittee of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1957 [83]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it an open sore, as an affront to the UN and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die." Ralph Galloway, former Director of UNRWA, August 1958 [84]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Since 1948 Arab leaders…have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is…criminal." King Hussein of Jordan, 1960 [85]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The refugees would "be utilized during the following years by the Arab states as a powerful political and propaganda pawn against Israel." Historian Benny Morris . [86]
      
      
• POINT 7: Our people suffer unspeakable conditions in squalid refugee camps because of Israel.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel has no control over how Palestinian refugees are treated. Fifty-percent of the refugees still living in UNRWA refugee camps are located in the Arab countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Israel has no control over the policies of these countries. They have kept the refugee camps in deplorable conditions, particularly in Lebanon.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live." PA Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, (Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2003), 1976. In Falastin a-Thaura, March 1976
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arab armies "forced them [the Palestinians] to emigrate and leave their homeland and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettoes in which the Jews used to live." PA Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2003.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: For the 387,043 Palestinian refugees, " The rejection of tawteen, literally the "implantation" of Palestinian refugees, has led Lebanon's resurgent government to oppose all policies and actions that could be construed as facilitating or accepting Palestinian integration. Unlike Palestinian refugees in Syria and Jordan, Palestinians in Lebanon do not have the right to work and are denied access to the Lebanese health care services and other social services. Palestinian children may not attend Lebanese schools. The Lebanese government also restricts building in and around the Palestinian refugee camps, relegating many refugees to live in substandard housing in over-crowded and unsanitary conditions." US Committee for Refugees [87]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab countries refused to cooperate with economic development programs created by the international community that would have created new farms and infrastructure in their nations. Palestinians could have been settled in these areas.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "UNRWA directors came up with specific and well-funded employment programs for the emirgres in neighboring Arab lands. The Arab governments immediately shot these proposals down, allowing the money to be spent on relief, nothing more." Howard Sachar [88]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Between 1953 and 1956, at the request of President Eisenhower, I undertook to negotiate with these States (Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) a comprehensive Jordan Valley development plan that would have provided for the irrigation of some 2225,000 acres…But in October 1956 it was rejected for political reasons at a meeting of the Arab League…." US Ambassador Eric Johnston 1957 [89]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab countries have refused to take financial responsibility for the refugees and the camps. Instead, they have let the international community shoulder the financial responsibility for UNRWA which provides welfare for the refugees.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Traditionally, the USA has been the largest donor, followed by the European Commission. However, in terms of donations relative to population size and GDP per capita, the Scandinavian countries, Canada and the Netherlands top the list." UNRWA Website [90]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab states and the PLO actively obstructed Israel's efforts to improve conditions and housing for the Palestinian refugees when it controlled the Territories between 1967 and 1992.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: When Israel offered work to Gaza refugees after 1967, Yassir Arafat and the PLO carried out guerilla attacks "against Arabs and their families who sought work in Israeli enterprises. Thus, in the first year after the June War, over a thousand Arab men, women and children were wounded by guerrilla assaults, and 219 were killed." Historian Howard Sachar [91]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel tried to improve the living conditions of Palestinians in the refugee camps within its administration. It tried to build better housing for the Palestinian refugees and to raze the hovels in which they had been living, Arab states led the UN General Assembly in denouncing Israel's efforts and "calls upon Israel to desist from further destruction of refugee shelters and from further removal of refugees from their present place of residence." UN General Assembly Resolution 2792 December 6 1971 [92]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Seventeen years later, the General Assembly was still condemning Israel's humanitarian efforts to improve Palestinian living conditions. The General Assembly "Reiterates strongly its demand that Israel desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestine refugees in the Gaza Strip and from the destruction of their shelters….[because it would be] a violation of their inalienable right of return." UN GA Resolution 41/69, Section E December 3, 1986 [93]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The General Assembly "calls once again upon Israel to abandon those plans and to refrain from any action that leads to the removal and resettlement of Palestine refugees in the West Bank and from the destruction of their camps." UN GA Resolution 41/69, Section J, December 3, 1986 [94]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The PA has had jurisdiction over the refugee camps in Gaza since 1994 and in the West Bank since 1996. It has done nothing to improve the lot of the Palestinian refugee camps.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Journalist Netty Gross visited Gaza in 1998 and asked an official why the camps there hadn't been dismantled. She was told the Palestinian Authority had made a 'political decision' not to do anything for the more than 400,000 Palestinians living in the camps until the final-status talks with Israel took place." Jerusalem Report, June 27, 1991 [95]
      
      
• POINT 8: We have been oppressed since1967 by Israel's brutal occupation.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel's policies in the Territories between 1967-1993 were the opposite of brutal oppression. Israel built up and developed the Territories and gave freedoms, rights and opportunities to Palestinians that Jordan had denied them during its 19-year rule. Palestinians may not have wanted to be under Israeli rule, but they flourished during it.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The Arab population grew and grew even faster than the Israeli population during Israel's administration. In 1967, there were 954,898 Arabs in the Territories; by 1995 there were 2,534,604. [96]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Life expectancy soared from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 while infant mortality plummeted from 60 per thousand live births to 15 per 1000 and childhood diseases disappeared due to systematic Israeli programs to eradicate them. [97]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Territories became the fourth fastest growing economy in the world in the 1970's due to Israeli investment in business, industry and infrastructure and to the opening of its borders to labor. Unemployment dropped from an average of 40% or more to below 5%. [98]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel fostered educational development, building 7 universities and 20 community colleges for the Palestinians. Illiteracy dropped from 50% to 30% just between 1967 and 1980. By 1990, only 14% of adults over age 15 were illiterate. [99]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel gave freedoms and civil rights to the Palestinians that they had never known before.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel offered political and civil freedoms, including freedom of association, trade unions, civic organizations and opposition parties, none of which had been allowed under Jordan. It also established freedom of the press, even for newspapers hostile to Israel, giving the Palestinians the freest press in the Arab world. [100]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "They [Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank] don't know what freedom is. If anyone over there dared to say one word against Hussein, they would throw him into prison. They don't believe that I can go to Dizengoff Square and shout at the top of my voice against Golda Meir without anything happening to me." Member of the village council of J'at, an Israeli-Arab village. 1970 [101]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Israel launched something entirely new, the first authentically Palestinian administration the local Arabs had ever known. Under Israeli auspices, departments were established for West Bank agriculture, education, posts and telegraphs, commerce and industry. As they operated these departments, the Israelis dealt exclusively with local civil servants…." Historian Howard Sachar [102]
      
      
    • Question: Given the message of your talk, can you explain why Fadal Tahabub, a member of the Palestinian Council and a resident of East Jerusalem, estimated that "close to 70% of the Arab residents [of Jerusalem] want to remain under Israeli rule…." instead of under Palestinian Authority rule when the possibility was discussed in the peace negotiations in 2000.? ( "Some Arabs Prefer an Israeli-Run Jerusalem," Washington Post, 7/25/00) Or why Zuhair Hamdan, a prominent leader of the Su Baher neighborhood, got 10,000 signatures from Arabs of Jerusalem who preferred not to be transferred to Arafat's governance? (*) Could it be that life under Israeli governance is not as bad as you depict it? [103]
      
      
• POINT 9: The world has ignored us and our plight.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Just the opposite is true. In fact, this charge is an insult to the world community given all it has done to help Palestinians. They have received more international attention, headlines, media coverage, scholarly research, diplomatic initiatives and financial support than any other comparable group in the world despite the small size of the territory involved-Israel is about the size of New Hampshire-and the small number of Palestinians.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Arab countries have lent support to Palestinian insurgents since the 1948 War. Egypt sponsored the formation of the PLO in 1964; Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Iran have funded and armed Palestinians; though Israel has withdrawn from Lebanon, Hezbollah still supports the Palestinians' effort to destroy the Jewish state.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestinian-Israeli conflict routinely gets headline billing in international media outlets over even more newsworthy and important nations like Russia, China and Great Britain, and "American news organizations usually have more correspondents in Israel than in any country except Great Britain." [104]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The world community has given the Palestinian refugees welfare since 1950 through UNRWA. No other refugee group has become a permanent ward of the international community. In 2000, UNRWA's budget was $293,207,000. The oil rich states supplied only 2.19% of the funding. The European Union supplied 18%. The US was again the biggest donor by far at 31%. [105]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The world community and especially the United States have expended enormous amounts of time and made strenuous diplomatic efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, from the UN efforts in 1947 to the Rogers Plan in 1969, the Camp David Accords in 1978, the Schultz Plan in 1988, the Baker Plan in 1989, the Oslo Accords, and the Clinton-Barak plans in 2000.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Arabs in Palestine were hardly ignored during the Palestinian Mandate. Just the reverse was true. The British repeatedly listened to and tried to accommodate Arab demands. They progressively acceded to more and more of those demands even though doing so violated the terms of the Mandate. Their White Papers, issued after each episode of major Arab riots, kept restricting Jewish immigration.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: After the 1920-21 riots, Britain clarified its policy in the 1922 White Paper and began to set some restrictions on open Jewish immigration as defined in the Mandate itself. "This White Paper also established a new principle as a factor for determining an immigration quota of Jews to Palestine. The White Paper confirmed the right of Jewish immigration but stipulated that this should not exceed the economic absorptive capacity of the country, an arbitrary standard that gave the British wide latitude to limit the influx of Jews." [106]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: After the 1929 Arab riots, Britain issued the Passfield White Paper, acceding to Arab demands by setting more restrictions on Jewish immigration. "On the critical question of immigration, the sentiments of the paper were against a generous policy towards the Zionists. The Zionist movement mounted a major campaign against the White Paper and in a letter made public, during February 1931, British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, promised Chaim Weizmann what amounted to its abrogation." [107]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: After the 1936-39 riots, Britain issued the MacDonald White Paper which severely restricted Jewish immigration despite the plight of Jews in Europe, restricted Jewish land purchasing rights, and called for the establishment of a unitary Arab-dominated state. They had reneged on the Mandate stipulations to keep Arab states on their side in the war that was coming. World War II started the same year. [108]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Arabs in Palestine were not ignored or forgotten during the Mandate period or in 1947. In fact, they were offered a state in 1937 and 1947. They rejected the offers.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: The United Nations has given special treatment, financial aid and attention to the Palestinians since 1949. In the 1970's, it set up departments whose sole function is to publicize the Palestinian cause.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: While one UN body handles all the world's refugee problems, the Palestinian refugees have had one UN department devoted just to them since 1949, UNRWA. Unlike other refugees who were resettled, three generations of Palestinians have continued to receive this UN welfare. In 1993, UNRWA spent $306 million. (At http://www.domino.org/UNISPAL.NSF/ )
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The PLO was given special observer status at the UN in 1974, the first and only group to be accorded this status;(*) the UN has annually passed resolutions in support of Palestinians since 1974, and established a Division for Palestinian Rights and a special "International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People" in 1977. (GA Resolution 32/40 at http://www.un.org/partners/civil_society/m-qpales.htm ) [109]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The UN has established at least six permanent administrative units just for the Palestinians-more than for any other world group, including UNISPAL whose purpose is to "heighten international awareness of the Question of Palestine." (At http://www.domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/ )
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Since the Oslo Accords, the international community has poured money into the Palestinian Authority, making it the highest per capita aid transfer in the history of foreign aid.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The World Bank's . "…level of assistance in the three years since the Intifada is at an extraordinary high level…It's a level of something over $300 (£160) per capita. According to our calculations, that is the highest per capita aid transfer in the history of foreign aid anywhere." Nigel Roberts, World Bank official in the Territories. February 29 2004 [110]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1993, at the first donor's conference, Europeans and Arabs joined together in order to help the emerging [Palestinian] state. The Europeans took their mission seriously, as seriously as they take only their agricultural subsidies. The enormous sums, of at least 4.1 Billion Euros that have flowed to Palestine, don't include grants from individual European countries….Since 2001, the EU has been providing 10 million Euros a month to the PA." German newspaper Die Zeit, June 7 2002 [111]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinians have hardly been ignored. Yassir Arafat has been a prominent figure in the media for 35 years and he has received diplomatic recognition and accolades from the world community. No other leader of a stateless people has ever received this kind of recognition.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1968, Yassir Arafat appeared on the cover of Time Magazine with a cover story about him and his movement. December 13, 1968 [112]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arafat was invited to speak to the UN General Assembly on November 13, 1974, where he received a standing ovation. He got this warm reception despite the fact that he was an avowed terrorist still committing terrorist acts and committed to destroying one of the UN member states, Israel. [113]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Once the UN recognized the PLO as a permanent NGO (non-governmental organization) in 1975, Yassir Arafat became a prominent world figure.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Yassir Arafat was awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 1994 which he shared with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. [114]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: During President Clinton's administration, Yassir Arafat "paid more visits to the White House than any other foreign leader." [115]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The national Palestinian entity was visited by many presidents, headed by Clinton and Chirac, and most of the world's prime ministers and foreign ministers." Amin Al-Mahdi in Al-Hayat (London) September 9, 2002 [116]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: International heads of state have repeatedly received Yassir Arafat. After the collapse of the Camp David Summit, Arafat traveled to 20 countries to get support for the Palestinians, including Europe's capitals, Moscow and Beijing. [117]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The European Union has given continual attention and financial support to the PA, donating approximately 10 million dollars a month.
      
      
• POINT 10: We are a small, defenseless people at the mercy of a brutal superpower, Israel.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim is an attempt to paint the Palestinians as helpless victims without options. But they are not. They have made choices throughout the last 65 years, all of them rejecting compromises that would have created a Palestinian Arab state alongside a Jewish state.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It's likely…that [the plan for compromise] is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight…You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you." Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha 1947 [118]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians don't have a state because they have had "an all or nothing policy," unlike the Zionists. "The Zionists never demanded the impossible….Our leadership….enabled the Zionists to succeed at every opportunity…by rejecting every proposal for compromise, rejecting proposals to give it a state on most of the land of Palestine…" Tawfiz Abu Bakr, Palestinian columnist, 2003 [119]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Because of "this irrational nihilist behavior [of Palestinians about accepting compromise], "Haj Amin Al-Husseini…rejected the settlement offered him by the Peel Commission in 1937…Then, he repeated his mistake by rejecting the Partition Plan that this time would have given 55% to the Jews and the rest to Palestine…." Al-'Afif Al-Akdhar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [120]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle….is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [121]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar, editor Jubran Tuweini wrote, "Once again, we realize that the Arabs are their own worst enemy - just as the worst enemy of the Palestinian cause is the Palestinians, who have endorsed a policy of refusal and fundamentalist extremism as a way of behavior. How many times have they already served Israel with their deeds? How many times has the behavior of these groups already saved Ariel Sharon and his government?" December 24 2003 [122]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The liberal-leaning Hazem Abd Al-Rahman wrote in his Al-Ahram column:"… Are these scum of the earth [Palestinians who attacked the Egyptian Foreign Minister] capable of accomplishing something for the Palestinian people? It is reasonable to assume that they, like the supporters of suicide bombings, are the first to damage the Palestinian cause, and are bringing death upon the Palestinian people…" December 24 2003 [123]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: On the liberal Arab website Elaph, Egyptian columnist Sami Buheiri wrote: "[T]he rabble majority of the Arab and Palestinian street today….refuse to accept any kind of a peace agreement with Israel... It is they who applaud the bus and restaurant bombings in order to destroy any spark of hope for peace... They are Arab nationalists who have failed completely in all their wars with Israel and in all attempts to achieve peace with Israel, because they were not serious, and they were not men - neither in fighting nor in peacemaking..." [124]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Today, Israel does have one of the most powerful militaries in the world, but it is has shown repeatedly that it is willing to support a Palestinian state in exchange for an end to terrorism and an acknowledgement of its right to exist as a Jewish state.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1923, Britain cut off 4/5 of the Palestine Mandate and made it an exclusively Arab state, today known as Jordan. Zionists and today Israel accept this severance of land that was to be "closely settled by Jews" according to the Palestine Mandate. . [125]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "In terms of territory, Transjordan represented a full four-fifths of the original Mandatory Palestine… [the British hoped] the Arabs would now wave their claim to the remaining fifth." Historian Benny Morris [126]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Zionists accepted the Peel Commission's 1937 plan and the United Nations 1947 Plan (Resolution 181) to partition Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab state.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel tried to negotiate directly with local Palestinian leaders between 1967-1969 to establish autonomy in the West Bank.(*)In 1968, West Bank leaders and Israel began negotiating for Palestinian autonomy. "The negotiations continued…and focused on establishing autonomy for the whole area or at first in the Ramallah-Bethlehem-Hebron areas…By July 1968, agreement had almost been reached…Though these negotiations were being held in secret…[Jordan learned of them]…[T]he Prime Minister of Jordan went on radio in Amman, revealed the whole story and warned and threatened all the leaders on the West Bank to stop." Major General Rephael Vardi, Military Leader in the Territories 1967-1977(**) [127]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel offered autonomy to the Territories in an exchange of letters attached to the Camp David Accords that established peace between Egypt and Israel in 1979. [128]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel offered the Palestinians a state with the Oslo Accords in 1993. By 1996, Israel had deployed from all major Palestinian population centers and 98% of Palestinians were self-governing under the Palestinian Authority.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel offered the Palestinians a state on 100% of Gaza, 97% of the West Bank with a land exchange that would bring the total area to 100% and a shared capital in Jerusalem at Camp David in 2000 and Taba in 2001. Dennis Ross, US Envoy to Camp David and Taba, Egypt. [129]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel has developed one of the strongest militaries in the world, but it is not brutal and has exercised enormous restraint in combating the terrorist campaign unleashed by the Palestinians, in part because the Israeli army has one of the strictest rules of engagement of any country in the world.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Consider Israel's action in the Jenin refugee camp in May 2002. Despite its overwhelming firepower superiority to the terrorists hiding in the city, the Israeli army fought house to house in a booby-trapped and extremely crowded refugee camp in order to minimize the loss of civilian lives. The army could have flattened the city from afar without losing a single soldier but instead lost 23 of its own soldiers in what was described as the fiercest fighting the IDF saw in 20 years. Few countries besides Israel faced with such open hostility and constant terrorism would take such risks to its own soldiers when eliminating terrorists in populated areas with so relatively few civilian casualties. [130]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel, with its "giant but largely useless army, merely responds [to the intifada], usually with great restraint, given the moral and international political shackles under which he labours. And he loses on CNN because F-16s bombing empty police buildings appear far more savage than Palestinian suicide bombers who take out 10 or 20 Israeli civilians at a go." Historian Benny Morris [131]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel could have used the same tactics America has been using in Afghanistan and Iraq-aerial bombardment to spare the lives of soldiers and to be victorious quickly. Israel has not chosen such tactics in order to spare civilian lives.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Jordan put down the Palestinian uprising in its borders in 1970, and in just one month, killed more Palestinians than Israel has killed in 50 years of conflict. How can you then say that Israel uses indiscriminate force and uses the full might of its military? [132]
      
      
    • Question: We all acknowledge that Israel has one of the strongest militaries in the world and could, in a few brief sorties, effectively end all resistance. Why do you think Israel hasn't used the full force of its military? For public relations? For moral reasons? Tactical reasons? What do you think Palestinians would have to do to provoke a full-scale response?
      
      
• POINT 11: We use suicide bombing because it is the weapon of the weak. It is our legitimate armed resistance against the Occupation.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Suicide bombing is not a weapon of the weak, but rather an attack against the weak, innocent and defenseless. Suicide bombers don't target military installations or military personnel. They target children and babies, the young and the old. They are "crimes against humanity."
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Since the Intifada began on September 29, 2000, terrorists have successfully carried out 104 suicide bombings against Israelis. They attack centers crowded with children and civilians-restaurants, public buses, discos, shopping malls-and have killed 409 people. Ninety-percent of the dead (370) have been civilians. [133]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Suicide bombings are crimes against humanity and cannot be justified under any circumstances, including "resistance to occupation."
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "[N]o violations by the Israeli government, no matter their scale or gravity, justify the [Palestinian] killing of…civilians. The obligation to protect civilians is absolute and cannot be set aside…The attacks against civilians by Palestinian armed groups are widespread, systematic and in pursuit of an explicit policy to attack civilians. They therefore constitute crimes against humanity under international law. They may also constitute war crimes…." Amnesty International. November 7, 2002 [134]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The assertion that international law imposes no constraints on the means used to fight occupying powers runs counter to one of the most basic rules of international humanitarian law. In the words of the ICRC, the most authoritative interpreter of international humanitarian law, ''whenever armed force is used the choice of means and methods is not unlimited." (60) International humanitarian law sets out standards of humane conduct applicable to both state forces and armed groups." Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross. November 7, 2002 [135]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab spokespeople have condemned suicide bombing as self-destructive and a crime against religion, human values and hopes for peace.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Suicide bombings targeting civilians have not and will never bring victory to anyone. They bring only greater hostility in return, greater determination to crush those behind such terror. They are the weapon of the defeated, of the embittered, of those who regard human life as worthless, of those who live on hate. They are no foundation for peace or justice." "Stand Up to Evil," Arab News editorial May 16 2003 [136]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "This indifference to human pain, considering their blood to be cheap, being contemptuous of their lives and expropriating their future on the altar of the naïve illusion of 'liberating Palestine to the last grain of soil' expresses a hallucinatory paranoia that views murder and suicide as goals in themselves, and the kind of identity beloved by those who hunger for power and blood [who] despise religious values as well as the values of the world." Tunisian columnist Al-Afif Al-Akhdhar. July 14, 2002 [137]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Suicide bombings are not a response to frustration and despair. They are a tactical strategy that is orchestrated, financed and supported by Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and other terrorist groups.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian terrorists themselves have denied any link between clinical psychological symptoms and their attacks. As stated by one such terrorist, "This is not suicide. Suicide is selfish, reflects mental weakness. This is istishad (martyrdom or self-sacrifice in the service of Allah)." Irwin J. Mansdorf. April 15, 2003 [138]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The goal is instilling fear in the enemy. "Battles for Islam are won not through the gun but by striking fear in the enemy's heart." Anwar Aziz, who blew himself up in an ambulance in Gaza in 1993. [139]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: When terrorist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad talked about a Hudna (truce) in the summer of 2003, they clearly knew that they could halt suicide bombings and other attacks if they wanted to. The attacks clearly were not the work of emotionally overwrought individuals. They were orchestrated and organized.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Suicide bombers do not act independently. Hamas and Islamic Jihad-and now Fatah as well-control it. They recruit, train and dispatch suicide bombers and make the videocassettes of their last statements that will be broadcast throughout the Arab world. "The Palestinians I talked to said that they believed Yassin was worried not just that Hamas would lose its near monopoly of control over suicide bombing once the Fatah movement joined in; he also feared that suicide bombing would get out of hand and no longer serve a clear political purpose. So maintaining control over the people who actually dispatch the suicide bombers is a concern not just of Arafat but of Hamas as well." Avishai Margalit, New York Review of Books, January 16, 2003. [140]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[F]amilies of shehada (suicide bombesr) receive substantial financial rewards, mainly from Gulf countries and especially from Saudi Arabia, but also from a special fund created by Saddam Hussein." Avishai Margalit, New York Review of Books, January 16, 2003. [141]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Suicide bombing is not the weapon of the weak. It is a strategy widely supported in the Palestinian community and earns the suicide bomber instant fame and posthumous glory.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: There are "marches and celebrations after each attack…." reports David Brooks in the Atlantic Monthly in June 2002. [142]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian society turns suicide bombers into heroic martyrs, naming streets, playgrounds and children's summer camps after them, plastering posters of them throughout the Territories, replaying their martyrdom videos on TV, and even selling 2002 Suicide Bomber calendars displaying the faces of all the dead bombers and Hamas' spiritual leader, Sheikh Yessin. Even the Nazis did not single out or honor those who slaughtered Jews. (London Observer Dec. 16, 2001) [143]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Why doesn't a single one of the leaders…expressing joy and ecstasy on the satellite channels every time a young Palestinian man or woman sets out to blow himself or herself up-send his own son?" (Abu Saber M.G., the grieving father of a suicide bomber, in a letter to Al Hayat (London) October 1, 2002. [144]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian children grow up in a culture in which suicide bombers are rock stars, sports heroes, and religious idols rolled into one…suicide bombing has become phenomenally popular. According to polls, 70 to 80% of Palestinians now support it." (Atlantic Monthly June 2002 ) [145]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Gaza City's walls "are shrines to suicide bombers and the death toll they have inflicted on the Israeli occupiers. Many of the city's mosques are plastered with 'martyrdom' posters extolling the deeds of suicide bombers….Even the Sbarro attack, where most of the victims were young children, is celebrated with news photos of the aftermath," according to the London Observer (12/16/01). [146]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Families celebrate the "weddings" between the martyrs and dark-eyed virgins in paradise. "Announcements that read like wedding invitations are printed in local newspapers so that friends and neighbors can join the festivities." (Atlantic Monthly June 2002 ) [147]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians promote Paradise Camps-"summer camps in which children as young as eight are trained in military drills and taught about suicide bombers." Atlantic Monthly June 2002 [148]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Suicide bombing is not a weapon of the weak no is it a response to closures and other anti-terrorist measures. It is a weapon of revenge. No other oppressed people of modern times have harbored and enacted such revenge on their "oppressors."
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinians are retaliating now not only for yesterday's closure but for the Nakba as well. But that is not a sufficient explanation. The peoples of Africa were oppressed by the European powers no less than the Palestinians were oppressed by us, but nevertheless I don't see African terrorism in London, Paris or Brussels. The Germans killed far more of us than we killed the Palestinians, but we aren't blowing up buses in Munich and Nuremberg. So there is something else here, something deeper, that has to do with Islam and Arab culture." Benny Morris, January 2004 [149]
      
      
• POINT 12: If it weren't for Israel's Occupation, we would have a thriving economy and a free, democratic society.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: During the Palestine Mandate (1920-1948), the Arabs and the Jews were both occupied by Britain. During this period, Israel built the infrastructure for a future democratic state. The Palestinian Arabs, working under similar if not better conditions because of British support for them, did not. They squandered the opportunity to create a proto-state.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Palestine Arabs have at present no will of their own. Neither have they ever developed any specifically Palestinian nationalism. The demand for a separate Arab state in Palestine is consequently relatively weak." Count Folk Bernadotte, UN Envoy to Palestine, 1948 [150]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "By 1947, much of the Palestine Arab population had only an indistinct, if any, idea of national purpose or statehood…..[O]n the whole, save for the numerically small circle of the elite, the Palestinians were unready for the national message…Palestine Arabs, still caught up in a village-centered…political outlook, by and large completely lacked…a clear concept of the nation and of national belonging….Most Palestine Arabs had no sense of separate national or cultural identity to distinguish them from, say, the Arabs of Syria, Lebanon or Egypt." Historian Benny Morris. [151]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "During the entire mandatory period, Arab leaders had refused to cooperate with the British in any scheme of national autonomy as long as the Jews were similarly included…The Arabs possessed nothing comparable to the Jewish quasi-state. At no time had the Supreme Moslem Council or the Arab Higher Committee ever served as more than organs for propaganda or violence. Neither organization had provided administrative training or governmental experience." Historian Howard Sachar [152]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "As regards the parts of Palestine under Arab control, no central authority exists and no independent Arab State has been organized or attempted….The Partition Plan presumed that effective organs of state government could be more or less immediately set up in the Arab part of Palestine. This does not seem possible today in view of the lack of organized authority springing from Arab Palestine itself…. There now exists in Palestine a form of partition, though an Arab State for which the Partition Plan provided has not materialized…." UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Secretariat General Report July 30, 1949. [153]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: During Israel's administration of the Territories (1967-1994), it fostered economic, social and political developments for the Palestinians.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The Territories became the fourth fastest growing economy in the world in the 1970's due to Israeli investment in business, industry and infrastructure and to the opening of its borders to labor. Unemployment dropped from an average of 40% or more to below 5%. [154]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel fostered educational development, building 7 universities and 20 community colleges for the Palestinians. Illiteracy dropped from 50% to 30% just between 1967 and 1980. By 1990, only 14% of adults over age 15 were illiterate. [155]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel offered political and civil freedoms, including freedom of association, trade unions, civic organizations and opposition parties, none of which had been allowed under Jordan. It also established freedom of the press, even for newspapers hostile to Israel, giving the Palestinians the freest press in the Arab world. [156]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "They [Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank] don't know what freedom is. If anyone over there dared to say one word against Hussein, they would throw him into prison. They don't believe that I can go to Dizengoff Square and shout at the top of my voice against Golda Meir without anything happening to me." Member of the village council of J'at, an Israeli-Arab village. 1970 [157]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Israel launched something entirely new, the first authentically Palestinian administration the local Arabs had ever known. Under Israeli auspices, departments were established for West Bank agriculture, education, posts and telegraphs, commerce and industry. As they operated these departments, the Israelis dealt exclusively with local civil servants…." Historian Howard Sachar [158]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians cannot blame their failures on Israel, only on themselves. Between 1994 and 1996, Israel's occupation of the Palestinian people effectively ended. The Palestinian Authority has had autonomy and control over 98% of the Palestinian people and control of the governmental infrastructure. Instead of building a prosperous state and developing democratic institutions, Yassir Arafat did just the opposite. His misgovernment has brought the state to the verge of ruin.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Edward Said, a Palestinian nationalist and political activist, denounced "Arafat's tyrannical regime" in 1997. [159]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestinian Legislative Council denounced Arafat's "rule for corruption, cronyism, lost opportunities, lost dreams, lost lives…." New York Times September 14, 2002. [160]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "No minister can appoint a driver or delivery boy in his ministry without the president's consent. Things depend solely on the president…..There is only one institution and that is the institution of the presidency, which has no law or order and is based on bribing top officials." Mu'awiya Al-Masri, Palestinian Legislative Council member from Nablus. August 2002 [161]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Few Palestinians are more keenly aware of the corruption and repression of Yasir Arafat's administration than is Raji Sourani. As Gaza's premiere human rights lawyer, Sourani has seen his countrymen arrested arbitrarily, beaten in captivity, held for months without trial and denied the right to a basic defense in court." New Republic June 6, 2002 [162]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Arafat should quit his position because he is the head of a corrupt authority. There is no point for him to remain in politics, especially as the Al-Fatah group has accused him of being responsible for all the tragedies in Palestine. Arafat has destroyed Palestine. He has led it to terrorism, death and a hopeless situation. Arafat has also divided the country, as Saddam Hussein divided Iraq, heaping humiliation on the nation." Ahmed Al-Jarallah, Editor-in-Chief, Arab Times, July 18 2004 [163]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It may be time for Yasser Arafat to fall on his sword or leave. The situation in Palestine is bad and getting worse. It is too easy to blame it one more time on Israel and the usual suspects -- the West, the Arabs, the others. But if you listened to Palestinians, they are saying their president for life -- Yasser Arafat -- is the problem along with his cronies who rule them, rob them and impoverish them." Youssef M. Ibrahim, Gulf News, July 20 2004 [164]
      
      
• POINT 13: Israel's aggression in 1948 robbed us of our state.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: There was no state to rob. No independent Arab or Palestinian state had ever existed in Palestine.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: After Rome conquered the Jewish state in 135 AD, successive empires ruled the area for the next 1900 years and Palestine ceased to be a distinct political entity.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine from 1517 to 1917-18 …never made it a separate, distinct administrative district." Its boundaries kept shifting. Parts of it were attached to Damascus, parts to Beirut and parts were independent. Historian Benny Morris [165]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestine was not a state but simply "a geographical name of rather loose application…." It did not have " a boundary by which Palestine can be separated exactly from the rest of Syria in the north, or from the Sinaitic and Arabian deserts in the south…" (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911 p. 600).
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs maintained that their country belonged to themselves and that they had been masters in it for fourteen centuries. Great Britain, in authorising the establishment of a National Home, had disposed of a country which did not belong to it. This claim was particularly open to refutation. It was not in accordance with most elementary facts of ancient history in Palestine. It would be enough to point out that Palestine had belonged before the war to the Ottoman Empire. The country had been conquered, not by Arabs of Palestine, but by the Allies, and had finally been ceded to the Allies and not to the Arabs. Since 1517, Palestine had been under the rule of the Turks. There could be no reference, therefore, to an Arab nation in Palestine, nor could it be claimed that the territory formed part of the patrimony of that nation." Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, 16th (Extraordinary) Session June 30 1930 [166]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab leaders did not recognize the existence of a distinctive Palestinian political entity let alone a state.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is no such country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented!….Our country for centuries was part of Syria." Local Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, to the Peel Commission in 1937. [167]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history. Absolutely not." Arab-American historian Philip Hitti of Princeton University, Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry,. 1946. [168]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestine was part of the Province of Syria….politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity." Representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the UN, submitted to the General Assembly in May 1947.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." Ahmed Shuqeiri, later chairman of the PLO, to the UN Security Council, May 31 1956. [169]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinian Arabs made no effort to create the institutions for a state during the Mandate period.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "During the entire mandatory period, Arab leaders had refused to cooperate with the British in any scheme of national autonomy as long as the Jews were similarly included…The Arabs possessed nothing comparable to the Jewish quasi-state. At no time had the Supreme Moslem Council or the Arab Higher Committee ever served as more than organs for propaganda or violence. Neither organization had provided administrative training or governmental experience." Historian Howard Sachar [170]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "As regards the parts of Palestine under Arab control, no central authority exists and no independent Arab State has been organized or attempted….The Partition Plan presumed that effective organs of state government could be more or less immediately set up in the Arab part of Palestine. This does not seem possible today in view of the lack of organized authority springing from Arab Palestine itself…. There now exists in Palestine a form of partition, though an Arab State for which the Partition Plan provided has not materialized…." UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Secretariat General Report July 30, 1949. [171]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab leaders' refusal to compromise cost them the state the UN had offered them in the 1947 Partition Resolution.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: In "the parts of Palestine under Arab control….no independent Arab state has been organized or attempted. This situation may be explained….by Arab unwillingness to undertake any step which would suggest even tacit acceptance of partition…." UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Secretariat General Report. July 30, 1949 [172]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Governments of the Arab States emphasize, on this occasion, what they have already declared before the London Conference and the United Nations, that the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State…" Statement by the Arab League States, May 15, 1948 [173]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It's likely…that [the plan for compromise] is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight…You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you." Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha [174]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians don't have a state because they have had "an all or nothing policy," unlike the Zionists. "The Zionists never demanded the impossible….Our leadership….enabled the Zionists to succeed at every opportunity…by rejecting every proposal for compromise, rejecting proposals to give it a state on most of the land of Palestine…" Tawfiz Abu Bakr, Palestinian columnist, 2003 [175]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Because of "this irrational nihilist behavior [of Palestinians about accepting compromise], "Haj Amin Al-Husseini…rejected the settlement offered him by the Peel Commission in 1937…Then, he repeated his mistake by rejecting the Partition Plan that this time would have given 55% to the Jews and the rest to Palestine…." Al-'Afif Al-Akdhar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [176]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle… is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [177]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar, editor Jubran Tuweini wrote, "Once again, we realize that the Arabs are their own worst enemy - just as the worst enemy of the Palestinian cause is the Palestinians, who have endorsed a policy of refusal and fundamentalist extremism as a way of behavior. How many times have they already served Israel with their deeds? How many times has the behavior of these groups already saved Ariel Sharon and his government?" December 24 2003 [178]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The liberal-leaning Hazem Abd Al-Rahman wrote in his Al-Ahram column:"… Are these scum of the earth [Palestinians who attacked the Egyptian Foreign Minister] capable of accomplishing something for the Palestinian people? It is reasonable to assume that they, like the supporters of suicide bombings, are the first to damage the Palestinian cause, and are bringing death upon the Palestinian people…" December 24 2003
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: On the liberal Arab website Elaph, Egyptian columnist Sami Buheiri wrote: "[T]he rabble majority of the Arab and Palestinian street today….refuse to accept any kind of a peace agreement with Israel... It is they who applaud the bus and restaurant bombings in order to destroy any spark of hope for peace... They are Arab nationalists who have failed completely in all their wars with Israel and in all attempts to achieve peace with Israel, because they were not serious, and they were not men - neither in fighting nor in peacemaking..." [179]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab governments, not Israel, robbed the Palestinians of the opportunity to create a state after the 1948 War.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Jordan captured the West Bank in the 1948 War. Egypt captured Gaza. They controlled these areas for 19 years, but neither country was interested in the development of an independent Palestinian state. Israel had nothing to do with these policies. [180]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab governments would have robbed Palestinians of a state even if they had won the 1948 War. They wanted the territory for themselves.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "If the United Nations decided to partition Palestine, Abdullah [King of Jordan] explained, he frankly preferred to annex the Arab sector to his kingdom." King Abdullah, 1947 [181]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Syrians…were determined to seize as much as they could of northern Palestine." Historian Howard Sachar [182]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Arab war plan changed in conception and essence from a united effort to conquer parts of the nascent Jewish state and perhaps destroy it, into a multilateral land grab focusing on the Arab areas of the country." Historian Benny Morris [183]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Indeed, had the Jewish State lost the war, its territory would not have been handed over to the Palestinians but rather divided among the invading forces, for the simple reason that none of the Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation." Historian Efraim Karsh [184]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he most likely arrangement seems to be Eastern Galilee to Syria, Samaria and Hebron to Abdullah, and the South to Egypt, and it might well end in annexation of this pattern. The center remains uncertain." High Commissioner Cunningham to Colonial Secretary Creech Jones on the most likely outcome of the early stages of the 1948 War. February 1948 [185]
      
      
• POINT 14: We Palestinians were not responsible for the Holocaust, yet western powers made us pay the price for it. We were told to give up our nation to the Jews in the 1947 Partition Plan.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians did not have to pay a price or give up their homeland. For the first time in their history, they were given the opportunity to create a state. They rejected this offer.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestine within its present borders, following a transitional period of two years from I September 1947, shall be constituted into an independent Arab State, an independent Jewish State, and the City of Jerusalem…." UNSCOP Report 1947 Part A # 1 [186]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs rejected the United Nations Partition Plan so that any comment of theirs did not specifically concern the status of the Arab section of Palestine under partition but rather rejected the scheme in its entirety." ….." UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Secretariat General Report July 30, 1949. [187]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians were partially responsible for the Holocaust. Their leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, actively collaborated with Hitler's efforts to liquidate world Jewry.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1941, the Mufti of Jerusalem fled to Germany where he served as a consultant on the "Jewish Question." He tried to persuade Hitler and other Nazi leaders to extend their anti-Jewish program to the Arab world. After visiting Auschwitz, he expressed his hope to "employ the same method" to "solve the problems of the Jewish element in Palestine and other Arab countries." [188]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Mufti of Jerusalem received millions of dollars from Nazi Germany and Italian fascists for his violence against the Jews between 1936 and 1939. The German SS provided financial and logistical support for anti-Semitic programs in Palestine. [189]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours.'" Mufti of Jerusalem, Memoirs [190]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians were partially responsible for the Holocaust. They widely supported the efforts of the Nazis and the Mufti to liquidate world Jewry.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: When the Prophet Mohammed's birthday was celebrated in May 1937 with German and Italian flags on display, Arab newspapers hailed this demonstration as a "significant gesture of sympathy and respect…with the Nazis and Fascists in their trials at the hands of Jewish intrigues and international financial pressure…" [191]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Haj Amin al-Husseini's "popularity among the Palestinian Arabs and within the Arab states actually increased more than ever during his period with the Nazis," according to his biographer. In 1948, the National Palestinian Council elected him Chairman though he was then a wanted war criminal. [192]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Edward Said, America's foremost spokesman for the Palestinian cause, believes that the Mufti "…represented the Palestinian consensus, had the backing of the Palestinian political parties that functioned in Palestine and was recognized in some form by Arab governments as the voice of the Palestinian people." [193]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinian leaders were indirectly responsible for the number of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust. They repeatedly used terrorism and political pressure on the British Mandate authorities to close Palestine to Jewish immigration. The British effectively yielded to their demands in the 1939 White Paper, sealing the fate of death for millions of Jews in Europe.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "[A]ccording to their [Arab] demands, Palestine was to become an Arab state immediately, no more Jewish immigrants were to enter the country, the status of every Jew who had immigrated since 1918 was to be reviewed."1939 [194]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The White Paper "sealed off Palestine as a haven for all but an insignificant fraction of Jewish refugees, and this at the moment when European Jewry faced a mortal threat to its continued physical survival…Only a minority of the Arab leaders, Abdullah among them, publicly admitted that Britain's concessions to Arab demands were acceptable-indeed, even more than they had dared anticipate." Historian Howard Sachar [195]
      
      
• POINT 15: Palestinians have suffered just as the Jews suffered during the Holocaust. Both are seminal phenomenon in the consciousness of their people; both were helpless victims; and both had the same kind of pain inflicted on them.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Holocaust and the Nakba are not remotely comparable. Drawing a parallel between the two events grossly distorts history and is morally irresponsible and repugnant.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Nakba probably is the seminal phenomenon in Palestinian identity since the seeds of Palestinian national consciousness began to form only after 1920, largely in opposition to Zionism. The 1948 refugees had lost their homes and their local culture had been disrupted, but they identified with their Arab neighbors, shared their language, religion and culture and could have been absorbed had these nations been willing to grant them citizenship as Jordan did.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian Arabs have at present no will of their own. Neither have they ever developed any specifically Palestinian nationalism. The demand for a separate Arab state in Palestine is consequently relatively weak." Count Folke Bernadotte, UN Representative to Palestine. 1948 [196]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestine was not a state but simply "a geographical name of rather loose application…." It did not have " a boundary by which Palestine can be separated exactly from the rest of Syria in the north, or from the Sinaitic and Arabian deserts in the south…" (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911 p. 600).
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is no such country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented!….Our country for centuries was part of Syria." Local Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, to the Peel Commission in 1937. [197]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history. Absolutely not." Arab-American historian Philip Hitti of Princeton University. 1946. [198]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestine was part of the Province of Syria….politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity." Representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the UN, submitted to the General Assembly in May 1947.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." Ahmed Shuqeiri, later chairman of the PLO, to the UN Security Council.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: In contrast, for the Jews, the Holocaust is not the "seminal phenomenon" in their consciousness. The seminal event in Jewish history dates back to Biblical times and Jewish history continued, uninterrupted, for the next 3000 years. The Holocaust was one of the more tragic events in Jewish history-but so were the Jewish expulsions and defeats by the Babylonians, by the Romans and by Christian Spain.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians were not helpless victims. They chose to go to war and mounted a full-scale military attack against the Jews in 1947. In contrast, the Jews were helpless victims. They did not arm and initiate violence against Germany or against any of the other European nations where they lived. Rather, the German Reich adopted a policy of exterminating every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe. Jews were not surrounded by friendly nations that could give them refuge or supply them with armies and arms to defend themselves.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Holocaust and the Nakba were not similar in terms of the pain inflicted. Jews did not just lose their homes and national identity. Jews during the Holocaust had no options. They were dispossessed, raped, enslaved, tortured and 6 million were slaughtered, 2/3 of European Jewry.
    
    
• POINT 16: Israel must show remorse and apologize for the suffering it has caused the Palestinian Arab refugees.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel has no reason for remorse or apology. If anyone should apologize and show remorse, it is the Arab leaders who defied the UN partition recommendation and launched the 1947 War that created the refugee problem. Had they accepted partition, today an Arab Palestinian state, situated alongside the Jewish state, would be 57 years old.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab states and the PLO-not Israel-are responsible for the plight of the refugees and should show remorse and apologize, not Israel. Arab nations have intentionally kept the Palestinian refugee issue from being resolved. They have actively prevented Palestinian absorption and resettlement in other host countries.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it an open sore, as an affront to the UN and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die." Ralph Galloway, former Director of UNRWA, August 1958 [199]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The history of UNRWA has been a clinical study in frustration. No Agency has been better led or more devoutly served but the organized instransigence of the refugees and the calculated indifference of the Arab states concerned have brought all its plans to nought…The net result is that relief is being provided in 1957 to refugees who could have been rehabilitated in 1951 with 'home and jobs' without prejudice to their just claims." Dr. Elfan Rees, Century of the Homeless Man, Carnegie Endowment for Peace, November 1957. [200]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The official attitude of the (Arab) host countries is well known. It is one of seeking to prevent any sort of adaptation and integration…." Research Group for European Migration, 1957 [201]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Unlike refugees in other parts of the world, the Palestine refugees are no different in language and social organization from the other Arabs. Resettlement therefore would be in a familiar environment. If the local governments are unwilling to tackle the problem except on their own terms there is little incentive for outside governments to continue financial support." Report of Special Study Commission to the Near East and Africa by the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, May 19, 1958 [202]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "We refuse to talk about the resettlement of refugees [where they are currently living] because this is a crime….It is the Palestinians' right to return to their homeland." Yasser Arafat, Al-Quds (Palestinian newspaper) September 11, 1999 [203]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Arab governments have frequently offered jobs, housing, land and other benefits to Arabs and non-Arabs, excluding Palestinians. For example, Saudi Arabia chose not to use unemployed Palestinian refugees to alleviate its labor shortage in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Instead, thousands of South Koreans and other Asians were recruited to fill the job." Mitchell Bard [204]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab states have refused to assist Palestinian refugees in order to use their plight as a weapon in the battle against Israel. The Arab states, not Israel, owe the Palestinian refugees an apology for how callously they have used them. Israel has had no control over their policies.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The fact is that the Arab states have for ten years used the Palestine refugees as political hostages in their struggle with Israel. While Arab delegates in the United Nations have condemned the plight of their brothers in the refugee camps nothing has been done to assist them in a practical way lest political leverage against Israel be lost." Chairman of the Near Eastern Subcommittee of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1957 [205]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it an open sore, as an affront to the UN and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die." Ralph Galloway, former Director of UNRWA, August 1958 [206]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Since 1948 Arab leaders…have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is…criminal." King Hussein of Jordan, 1960 [207]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The refugees would "be utilized during the following years by the Arab states as a powerful political and propaganda pawn against Israel." Historian Benny Morris [208]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: 'All the Arab countries want to keep this problem looking like an open wound' to keep world attention focused on Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, said Ana Liria-Franch, regional representative in Cairo for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees." AP story December 30, 2003 [209]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab states, not Israel, owe the Palestinian refugees an apology. Since 1949, Arab countries, except for Jordan, have programmatically marginalized the Palestinians and made their lives miserable.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Hisham Yousseff, spokesman for the 22-nation Arab League, acknowledged that Palestinians live 'in very bad conditions,' but said the policy is meant 'to preserve the Palestinian identity. If every Palestinian who sought refuge in a certain country was integrated and accommodated into that country, there won't be any reason for them to return to Palestine,' he said." AP story December 30, 2003 [210]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In Egypt: "We can't own a house, land or get a loan from the bank despite the fact that I was born here and have no idea what is Palestine." 35-year-old Ahmed Mahmoud Zahar, born in Egypt to an Egyptian mother and married to an Egyptian. AP story December 30, 2003 [211]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In Egypt: Palestinians have no right to become citizens even if they have an Egyptian parent, were born in Egypt, are married to Egyptians and have children who were also born in Egypt. When Egypt announced in September 2003 that it would grant nationality to children of Egyptian mothers married to foreigners, it did not allow Palestinians to be included. AP story December 30, 2003 [212]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Lebanon: " For 55 years now, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have been oppressed and robbed of their most basic civil rights….a degrading life…." Ibrahim al-Shayeb, who lives in the Ein el-Hilew refugee camp and works for the PLO's media office. AP story December 30, 2003 [213]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Lebanon: Severe restrictions on employment and banned from 72 areas of employment, including medicine and engineering. Denial of access to social services, including schools and health care. No right to become citizens or have legal status. AP story December 30, 2003 [214]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Lebanon: No right to own property. Lebanon's Parliament tabled a proposal to allow Palestinians a limited right to property ownership in October 2003. Reuters Report Nov 3 2003 [215]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Libya: No right to become citizens. 30,000 Palestinians abruptly deported in 1995-6 because Moammar Ghadhafi opposed the peace accords signed between Israel and Arafat. AP story December 30, 2003 [216]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Kuwait: No right to become citizens. 300,000 to 450,000 Palestinians abruptly expelled after the 1st Gulf War because Palestinians had sided with Iraq. Many had been living in Kuwait for three generations. AP story December 30, 2003 Palestinians that remain "live under strict surveillance and enjoy only very limited rights." Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs Report 2000 [217]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Jordan: Palestinians are discriminated against as the government has moved to "Jordanize" jobs in the army and other sensitive areas like state radio, television, and the Interior Ministry. AP story December 30, 2003 [218]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab states, not Israel, should feel remorse and make apologies for perpetuating their penurious living conditions. When Israel launched major projects to improve the lives of Arab refugees in the Territories by offering jobs or constructing new housing for them and demolishing their squalid housing, the PLO and UNRWA angrily protested. They persuaded the UN General Assembly to repeatedly pass Resolutions that denounced Israel's humanitarian efforts.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: When Israel offered work to Gaza refugees after 1967, Yassir Arafat and the PLO carried out guerilla attacks "against Arabs and their families who sought work in Israeli enterprises. Thus, in the first year after the June War, over a thousand Arab men, women and children were wounded by guerrilla assaults, and 219 were killed." Historian Howard Sachar [219]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: When Israel built better housing for the Palestinian refugees and tried to raze the hovels in which they had been living, Arab states led the UN General Assembly in denouncing Israel's efforts and "calls upon Israel to desist from further destruction of refugee shelters and from further removal of refugees from their present place of residence." UN General Assembly Resolution 2792 December 6 1971 [220]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The General Assembly "Reiterates strongly its demand that Israel desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestine refugees in the Gaza Strip and from the destruction of their shelters….[because it would be] a violation of their inalienable right of return." UN GA Resolution 41/69, Section E December 3, 1986 [221]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The General Assembly "calls once again upon Israel to abandon those plans and to refrain from any action that leads to the removal and resettlement of Palestine refugees in the West Bank and from the destruction of their camps." UN GA Resolution 41/69, Section J, December 3, 1986 [222]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Since 1994, the Palestinian Authority has had jurisdiction over the refugee camps in the Territories. It has actively refused to improve the plight and status of the refugees in order to use them as a political weapon in its battle against Israel.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestinian Legislative Council voted to prohibit refugees from participating in PA elections. "The Supreme National Committee for the Protection of the Right of Return - announced yesterday that it opposes the participation of the refugee camps in the local elections that are expected to take place in the Palestinian territories. The committee justified its objection as protecting the unique status of the refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, considering them testimony to the crime that the occupation state made against our nation for 56 years. The committee warned of the dangers of integrating the refugee camps into the urban housing units..." Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 29, 2004 [223]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel owes no apology. It has acknowledged the Palestinians national aspirations and tried to help them fulfill those aspirations in the Oslo Accords and Camp David Summit. In doing so, Israel has offered them more than any other nation, Arab or Western, has ever offered them.
    
    
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinian Arabs should stop blaming others and begin to take responsibility for their actions and apologize for their chronic rejectionism, and for the death, war and suffering they have inflicted on Israelis and on themselves?
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Indeed, one of the characteristics of the Palestinian national movement has been the Palestinians' view of themselves as perpetual victims of others-Ottoman Turks, British officials, Zionists, Americans-and never to appreciate that they are, at least in large part, victims of their own mistakes and iniquities. In the Palestinian Weltanschauung, they never set a foot wrong; their misfortunes are always the fault of others. The inevitable corollary of this refusal to recognize their own historical agency has been a perpetual Palestinian whining-that, I fear, is the apt term-to the outside world to save them from what is usually their own folly." Historian Benny Morris [224]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians don't have a state because they have had "an all or nothing policy," unlike the Zionists. "The Zionists never demanded the impossible….Our leadership….enabled the Zionists to succeed at every opportunity…by rejecting every proposal for compromise, rejecting proposals to give it a state on most of the land of Palestine…" Tawfiz Abu Bakr, Palestinian columnist, 2003 [225]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Because of "this irrational nihilist behavior [of Palestinians about accepting compromise], "Haj Amin Al-Husseini…rejected the settlement offered him by the Peel Commission in 1937…Then, he repeated his mistake by rejecting the Partition Plan that this time would have given 55% to the Jews and the rest to Palestine…." Al-'Afif Al-Akdhar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [226]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle….is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [227]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar, editor Jubran Tuweini wrote, "Once again, we realize that the Arabs are their own worst enemy - just as the worst enemy of the Palestinian cause is the Palestinians, who have endorsed a policy of refusal and fundamentalist extremism as a way of behavior. How many times have they already served Israel with their deeds? How many times has the behavior of these groups already saved Ariel Sharon and his government?" December 24 2003 [228]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The liberal-leaning Hazem Abd Al-Rahman wrote in his Al-Ahram column:"… Are these scum of the earth [Palestinians who attacked the Egyptian Foreign Minister] capable of accomplishing something for the Palestinian people? It is reasonable to assume that they, like the supporters of suicide bombings, are the first to damage the Palestinian cause, and are bringing death upon the Palestinian people…" December 24 2003 [229]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: On the liberal Arab website Elaph, Egyptian columnist Sami Buheiri wrote: "[T]he rabble majority of the Arab and Palestinian street today….refuse to accept any kind of a peace agreement with Israel... It is they who applaud the bus and restaurant bombings in order to destroy any spark of hope for peace... They are Arab nationalists who have failed completely in all their wars with Israel and in all attempts to achieve peace with Israel, because they were not serious, and they were not men - neither in fighting nor in peacemaking..." [230]
      
      
• POINT 17: Israel oppresses us because we are people of color and Israelis are white Europeans.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim grossly distorts reality. Palestinians do not look different from and are racially little different from the average Israeli. Palestinians only look different than the Israelis of color-the African and Asian Israelis. The conflict is not about color or race.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: 55% of Jewish Israelis are Jews who emigrated from Middle Eastern countries, that is either Jews who had not left the Middle East after the Roman defeat in the first century or Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and who settled in Arab countries.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "As a meeting point of Asia, Europe, and Africa, Israel is a melting pot of religions, nationalities, temperaments, and ideologies, and although Hebrew and Arabic are the official languages, many European languages are also widely spoken." Entry on Israel, Organization of American States, Office of External Relations, 2002 [231]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Israel is home to a widely diverse population from many ethnic, religious, cultural and social backgrounds. A new society with ancient roots, it is still coalescing and evolving today. Of its 6.4 million people, 77.8 percent are Jews, 17.3 percent are Arabs (mostly Muslim) and the remaining 4.9 percent comprise Druze, Circassians and others not classified by religion." Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2003 [232]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israeli citizens come from over 100 countries and include people of every color of skin and racial background--Latin Americans, Arab Jews, Asian Jews and Black African Jews from Ethiopia.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: If racism does play a role in the conflict, it is the Palestinians' and Arab culture's endemic racism-anti-Semitism.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Depictions of Jews in Arab and Muslim media are akin to those of Nazi Germany, and medieval blood libels, including claims that Jews use Christian and Muslim blood in preparing their holiday foods-have become prominent and routine." Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp, Jeanne Kirkpatrick Open Memorandum April 24, 2002 [233]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The "Jews "were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about…They were behind World War I and were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate…and they were behind World War II." "The Zionist plan is limitless….Their plan is embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Hamas Charter Articles 22 and 32 [234]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Allah the almighty has called upon us not to ally with the Jews or the Christians, not to like them, not to become their partners, not to support them, and not to sign agreements with them." Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, Friday sermon broadcast by the PA on October 13, 2000. [235]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian leaders and preachers, guided by history and religion, have traditionally seen the Jews as an inferior race whose proper place was as an abased minority in a Muslim polity; and the present situation, with an Arab under Jewish rule, is regarded as a perversion of nature and divine will." Benny Morris [236]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "In Palestine the Arab reaction to Zionism was shaped from the start by cognitive dissonance. The Jews had always been seen as 'children of doom'-hapless, helpless victims. The Zionists did not fit that image, but the Arabs long refused to adjust their perception to the reality. Some still refuse, which is one reason why Arabs prefer to see Israel as the creature of some outside power: it makes everything more understandable." Historian David S Landes, Commentary Magazine, February 1976.
      
      
• POINT 18: Jewish underground terrorist groups such as Haganah, Irgun and the Stern Gang had the mission to terrorize the Palestinian street, destroy villages and slaughter entire Palestinian families.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Just the reverse is true. This was the goal of Palestinian armed groups, not Jewish defense groups. The Palestinian armed groups, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini who became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, initiated Arab terrorism in the British Mandate period. They repeatedly led riots and pogroms against the Jews in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1933 and 1936-39 (when 415 Jews were killed).
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The 1920 and 1921 riots "was begun by the Arabs and rapidly developed into a conflict of great violence between Arabs and Jews, in which the Arab majority, who were generally the aggressors, inflicted most of the casualties….The fundamental cause of the riots was a feeling among the Arabs of discontent with, and hostility to, the Jews…." British Government's Haycraft Commission of Inquiry into the 1920-21 Arab Riots. [237]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he causes of the outbreaks of 1920 and 1921 [and] of 1929 and 1933…[and 1936] …were similar in character to the four previous outbreaks…As in 1933, it was not only the Jews who were attacked, but the Palestine Government." British Peel Commission Report, 1937 [238]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: During the Peel Commission hearings to investigate the causes of the 1936 disturbances, "Haj Amin emphasized that the 400,000 Jews then domiciled in Palestine were more than the country could absorb. When asked by Peel if this did not mean that in an independent Arab Palestine some Jews would have to be removed, the Mufti replied: 'We must leave all this to the future.' Other Arab witnesses made the same point, although rather less obliquely." Historian Howard Sachar [239]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Mufti of Jerusalem supported Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic program. The Mufti of Jerusalem received millions of dollars from Nazi Germany and Italian fascists for his violence against the Jews between 1936 and 1939. The German SS provided financial and logistical support for anti-Semitic programs in Palestine. [240]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: During the 1933 and 1936-39 Arab revolts, Palestinians also attacked and sabotaged the British in a pattern of terrorism, long before the Jews began to direct any animosity to the British.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: In the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, "…British patrols also were cut down by snipers, the new airport at Lydda was burned, troop trains were derailed, and the oil line from Mosul to Haifa was badly damaged. As the killings and sabotage increased, so did British reprisals….From July to November 1938…perhaps 16,000 local and imported guerillas were engaged in the insurrection, and they succeeded almost completely in paralyzing civil authority outside the nation's larger cities and in the Jewish agricultural areas. All interurban transportation was prohibited at night, as Arab infiltrators laid mines and explosives along roads and highways." Historian Howard Sachar [241]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There have been widespread acts of murder and other outrages by [Arab] gangs of armed terrorists. Apart from attacks in which British soldiers, airmen and police as well as many Arabs and Jews have lost their lives, the activities of these armed gangs have included repeated attempts to disorganize the means of communication, cutting of telegraph and telephone wires, derailing of trains, and attempts to prevent roads from being used by traffic. Considerable material damage has been done seriously affecting the economic life of the country and several attempts have been made to damage and set fire to the oil pipe-line between Haifa and `Iraq." Report by His Majesty's Government to the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Trans-jordan 1936 [242]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: At no time did the Haganah, Irgun or the Stern Gang develop a policy to terrorize Palestinians or destroy villages and slaughter Palestinians. Quite the contrary. Jewish defensive forces were formed to protect Jews from Arab terrorism, not to terrorize Palestinians. The Haganah, a grassroots Jewish militia, formed in 1920 to protect Jews from the Arab violence unleashed that year, not to attack Arabs. Jews felt that the British authorities were not providing sufficient protection for them. The Haganah was committed to acting with restraint against Arab attacks. (http://palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_riots_1920-21.php )
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The Hagnah's stated purpose was "to safeguard the national and social content of popular defence in this country". [243]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: A small group split off from the Haganah in 1931 to form the Irgun precisely because it did not accept the Haganah's policy of "restraint" as opposed to "retaliation" against Palestine's Arabs. [244]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Haganah, a development from the earlier Jewish defense organizations against Arab terrorism, has grown into a military organization ….Though it has in general exercised a policy of restraint and refrained from acts of terrorism, it was implicated in the Jewish violence at the end of 1945 directed against the Government's efforts to prevent illegal immigration. The Irgun Zvai Leumi, the secret military organization of the Revisionists, is a smaller, less well-armed, but more radical body which, since 1943, has engaged in an intermittent series of robberies and extortions to produce funds and of bombing attacks upon Government buildings, transport and police installations" Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, 1946 Chapter 4 [245]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Even the Irgun was never committed to "slaughtering" Palestinians. It was composed of a small group of Haganah commanders who formed their own splinter group in 1931 because they disagreed with the Haganah's policy of restraint instead of retaliation against Arab terrorism which returned with a vengeance in 1929. The mainstream Jewish government nonetheless condemned their retaliatory measures.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "It should be noted that Jabotinsky [head of the Irgun] was greatly troubled by the issue of restraint and retaliation. He was opposed to acts of reprisal which claimed innocent lives, but at the same time understood that the havlaga [restraint] policy was turning the Yishuv into a community of cowards, and that the Arabs and British perceived it as a sign of weakness." [246]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: When the Stern Gang (Lehi) formed and split off from the Irgun in 1940, its goal was NOT to attack Arabs, but rather to fight against the British. Stern split from the Irgun because the Irgun believed that fighting Germany took precedence over trying to alter British policies.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Stern claimed that the fight against the British should continue, even though Great Britain was at war with Germany. To his mind, as long as the British ruled Palestine, they were the main foe and had to be driven out of the country. For [David Raziel,leader of the Irgun later killedin Iraq] on the other hand, the Germans were the arch enemy of the Jewish people, and he argued that no impediments should be placed in the path of the British as long as they were fighting Hitler."
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "We must draw the necessary conclusions without wavering. There can no longer be a truce between the Hebrew nation and youth and the British administration of Eretz Israel, which is betraying our brethren to Hitler. Our nation will fight this regime, fight to the end." Lehi statement, 1944 [247]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: When Lehi, the Irgun and the Haganah joined forces in the Hebrew Resistance Movement in 1945, their target was not Palestinians, but rather the British government which refused to alter its restrictive immigration policies so Holocaust survivors could settle in Palestine.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The Hebrew Resistance Movement's agreement included:

      a. The Haganah organization has entered upon a military struggle against British rule.
      b. The Irgun and Lehi will not implement combat plans without the approval of the command of the United Resistance.
      c. The Irgun and Lehi will carry out combat missions assigned to them by the command of the United Resistance Movement [248]
      
      

    • Supporting Evidence: "Immigration was the key. Even to a maximalist like Ben Gurion, assurance of free immigration was more important than statehood. If, as late as 1946, [British Prime Minister] Bevin had managed to devise a scheme for keeping Palestine with the Commonwealth and simultaneously assuring the unhampered flow of refugees from Europe, Ben-Gurion and the Agency Executive would have acquiesced." Historian Howard Sachar [249]
      
      
• POINT 19: Palestine was a nation with a national identity, political institutions and vibrant culture before the Zionists came.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: After Rome conquered the Jewish state in 135 AD, successive empires ruled the area for the next 1900 years and Palestine ceased to be a distinct political entity.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine from 1517 to 1917-18 …never made it a separate, distinct administrative district." Its boundaries kept shifting. Parts of it were attached to Damascus, parts to Beirut and parts were independent. Historian Benny Morris [250]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestine was not a state but simply "a geographical name of rather loose application…." It did not have " a boundary by which Palestine can be separated exactly from the rest of Syria in the north, or from the Sinaitic and Arabian deserts in the south…" (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911 p. 600).
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab leaders did not recognize the existence of a distinctive Palestinian political entity let alone a state.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is no such country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented!….Our country for centuries was part of Syria." Local Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, to the Peel Commission in 1937. [251]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history. Absolutely not." Arab-American historian Philip Hitti of Princeton University. 1946.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestine was part of the Province of Syria….politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity." Representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the UN, submitted to the General Assembly in May 1947.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." Ahmed Shuqeiri, later chairman of the PLO, to the UN Security Council.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Palestinians had never had a sense of national identity or unity.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi reported that only after WWI was there "the emergence of a Palestinian identity where a few decades before no such thing existed" and even then, it developed only slowly among the upper classes." [252]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Most serious historians point …to the 1920s and 1930s as the time when the Arabs of Palestine began thinking of themselves as a people separate from those of Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan…." But "Palestinian "nationalism" was propounded in a narrow circle of educated upper-class and middle-class families…." Historian Benny Morris 2003 [253]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: As late as 1911, the Encyclopedia Brittanica reported that the area known as Palestine had so many "ethnological groups" that it was hard to write concisely about the area's ethnology because "no less than 50 languages were spoken."
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Customs between Arab areas were so similar that the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations adopted a resolution that stated: "We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds." 1919 [254]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he sympathy of the Palestinian Arabs with their kinsmen in Syria had been plainly shown….Both peoples clung to the principle that Palestine was part of Syria and should never have been cut off from it." Peel Commission 1937 [255]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Even at the time of the Partition Resolution, Palestinians still had not developed a sense of national identity or unity.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Palestine Arabs have at present no will of their own. Neither have they ever developed any specifically Palestinian nationalism. The demand for a separate Arab state in Palestine is consequently relatively weak." Count Folk Bernadotte, UN Envoy to Palestine, 1948 [256]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "By 1947, much of the Palestine Arab population had only an indistinct, if any, idea of national purpose or statehood…..[O]n the whole, save for the numerically small circle of the elite, the Palestinians were unready for the national message…Palestine Arabs, still caught up in a village-centered…political outlook, by and large completely lacked…a clear concept of the nation and of national belonging….Most Palestine Arabs had no sense of separate national or cultural identity to distinguish them from, say, the Arabs of Syria, Lebanon or Egypt." Historian Benny Morris. [257]
      
      
• POINT 20: "The Arabs want to push Israel into the sea." "This is another racist statement we often hear. The "Arabs" are not a monolithic bloc."
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: It is not 'racist' to say that Arabs want to push Israel into the sea. The Arab leadership of Egypt, Syria, and the Palestinians said they would "push the Jews into the Sea". In 1948, 1967, and 1973, they attempted to make good on that promise. The phrase fell out of favor during the peace process, but is now being revived.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "It does not matter how many [Jews] there are. We will sweep them into the sea." - Azzam Pasha, Arab League Secretary General, 1948 [258]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "We shall never call for nor accept peace. We shall only accept war. We have resolved to drench this land with your (Israel's) blood, to oust you as aggressor, to throw you into the sea." - Hafez Assad, Syrian Defense Minister, later Syrian president. May 24, 1966
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "In 1967, the mood in the Middle East was ugly," Shuster reports. "Israel, independent since 1948, was surrounded by Arab states dedicated to its eradication. Egypt was ruled by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a firebrand nationalist whose army was the strongest in the Arab Middle East. Syria was governed by the radical Baathist Party, constantly issuing threats to push Israel into the sea." - The Mideast: A Century of Conflict, NPR [259]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The PLO's first leader was an Egyptian, Ahmed Shuquieri. He inaugurated the organization's famous slogan about "driving the Jews into the sea." [260]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "To use words that some people no longer like to use today: 'We will throw Israel into the sea.' This phrase, by the way, is the truth." - Dr. 'Adel Sadeq, chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists Association and head of the Department of Psychiatry at 'Ein Shams University in Cairo. April 23, 2002 [261]
      
      
    • Question: It would be nice if you were right and that not ALL Arabs wish to push Jews into the sea. Could you please identify an Arab state, an Arab leader, or an active political Arab group that has NOT called for the destruction of the Jewish state and has reprimanded others for calling for its demise?
      
      
    • Question: You claim that it is 'racist' for supporters of Israel to point out that, "Arabs want to push Israel into the sea." Isn't it a bigger problem that for years Arab leaders said, "We will push you into the sea."? Isn't it a bigger problem that when Palestinians were polled by their own NGO's, 59% said they should continue terrorist attacks against Israel even if they did get a state in the territories along with a resolution to the refugee crisis?
      
      
    • Question: You claim that Israelis are playing a racist card when they point out that, "Arabs want to push us into the sea." I don't understand why this troubles you, in light of the fact that Arab leaders said they would, "push Israel into the sea" for years. Israelis hear Arafat when he crows about a "Phased Plan" to "liberate Palestine from the River to the Sea." They know that Palestinians' own public opinion polls show 59% would support terrorism against Israelis even after they are granted statehood and refugee settlement.
      
      
    • Question: You claim that Israelis are playing a racist card when they point out that, "Arabs want to push us into the sea." Yet, you have consistently said that Israelis (don't want peace, seek to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian State, or whatever…) Why are Israelis racist for believing Arab leaders, when for decades they promised to push the Jews into the sea? Why is their assertion about Arabs worse than your assertion about Israelis who for years have shown in large numbers a willingness to (make peace, facilitate the establishment of a Palestinian State, or whatever…)
      
      
    • Question: When Israelis say "Arabs want to push us into the sea," they are quoting Arab leaders like Nasser and Assad, yet you claim they are expressing racism. If you are concerned about racism, why not condemn the Palestinian Authority? According to a Palestinian Institute poll in 2004,, 60% of 12th grade students in its schools "expressed unwillingness to chose a friend not of their religion" and 24% did "not welcome the idea of friendship with others, who have a different skin color."(*) Why not condemn the Palestinian Authority whose eighth grade textbooks explain racism by saying, "Mankind has suffered from this evil both in ancient as well as in modern times, for, indeed, Satan has, in the eyes of many people, made their evil actions appear beautiful…Such a people are the Jews."(**)? [262]
      
      
    • Question: You claim that it is 'racist' for supporters of Israel to point out that, "Arabs want to push Israel into the sea," but Arab heads of state like Nasser in Egypt and Assad in Syra and the leadership of the PLO used this phrase for years. We didn't make it up. Besides, what else are we supposed to believe when Palestinians' own polls show that they would support terrorism against Israelis even after they are granted statehood and refugee settlement?
      
      
• POINT 21: "Now they [the Palestinians] say they've recognized Israel's right to exist. Why don't Israelis do the same?"
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The claim that the Palestinians have accepted Israel is simply untrue. Although the Oslo accords required the PLO to revise the Palestinian National Covenant so that it no longer calls for the destruction of Israel, it has never done so.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian National Charter, Article 19: "The establishment of Israel is fundamentally null and void." Article 15: "[We call for] the liquidation of the Zionist presence in Palestine." Article 9: "Armed Struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine." [263]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "We have no intention of changing or nullifying the Covenant, rather, we will adhere to it until our last breath since it embodies the essence of our demands." - Tayseer Qaba, deputy chairman of the Palestine National Council, September 19, 1995. [264]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The text of the Palestinian National Covenant remains as it was and no changes whatsoever were made to it." - Fatah, Research and Thought Department, "The Palestinian National Covenant: Between Renewal and Being Frozen," Fatah Publication #8, April 1996. [265]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The PLO Covenant continues to exist, because the PNC was never convened to ratify the changes that were proposed in the past, particularly because no legal committee was appointed to draft the necessary change." - Salim Za'anoun, Chairman of the Palestinian national Council, February 2, 2001.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinians refused to make even symbolic gestures of conciliation. It did not revoke the Palestinian National Charter, which calls for the dismantling of 'the Zionist entity' though it had pledged to do so in 1990's." - Benny Morris [266]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Arafat has been like Lucy with the football, treating the rest of the world as Charlie Brown. He and the PNC keep telling everyone they've changed the charter, without actually changing it." - James Woolsey, Former CIA Director. [267]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The claim that the Palestinians have accepted Israel is simply untrue. If they had accepted the existence of Israel, Arafat would have accepted the offer at Camp David.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: If that were the case, they would have accepted Clinton's proposal to end the conflict in 2000 with the creation of a viable Palestinian state. According to U.S. envoy Dennis Ross, who was present at the meeting, the offer would have ended the conflict by giving the Palestinians all of Gaza, a contiguous 95% of the West Bank and 2% land compensation from within Israel. [268]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The claim that the Palestinians have accepted Israel is simply untrue. Palestinians would relinquish the "right of return" if their intentions were to accept Israel's existence. The right of return would create a de facto Arab state where Israel stands.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "If refugees return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist." - Egyptian President Nasser, September 1, 1961
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Any discussion aimed at a solution of the Palestine problem which will not be based on ensuring the refugees' right to annihilate Israel will be regarded as a desecration of the Arab people and an act of treason" (Beirut al Massa, July 15, 1957). Resolution of the 1957 Refugee Conference at Homs, Syria.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The claim that the Palestinians have accepted Israel is simply untrue. Palestinian Public opinion polls consistently show that the vast majority of Palestinians believe they should be fighting for the obliteration of Israel.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: In a 2002 Poll taken at Najah University in Nablus, "87% of Palestinians surveyed were in favor of continuing terror attacks," and, "87.5% were in favor of 'liberating all of Palestine'." [269]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In a random sample of 1199 Palestinians conducted by JMCC Public Opinion Polls in September of 2002, 64.3% of Palestinians supported suicide bombings against civilians and 43% of Palestinians believed the goal of the current Intifada should be the elimination of Israel. [270]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israeli Public Opinion Polls consistently show that Israelis want peace and are willing to give up the West Bank, Gaza and most of the settlements to achieve it. That this has not happened is only a testament to the Israeli public's rational fear of withdrawing unilaterally, without any guarantees of security and in the midst of a terrorist war.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: f, "The Terror stops and Arafat does not rule the Palestinian Authority any more," 64% of Israelis would support the establishment of a Palestinian state, 61% would support the evacuation of settlements in Gaza, and 55% would support the evacuation of settlements in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Ma'ariv poll, December 6, 2002. [271]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israelis were deeply committed to the peace process and developed a culture of peace when Oslo began. The Palestinians did not.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: From school curriculums to pop culture and music, the peace movement gained enormous popularity in Israel following the signing of Oslo and subsequent peace offers, up to the 2000 Taba offer of all of Gaza and a contiguous West Bank as a Palestinian state. In contrast, the Palestinian Authority used the time after Oslo to accumulate illegal arms and prepare the Palestinian people for war, resulting in the unprecedented wave of terrorism since 2000. [272]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In Israeli textbooks, "Islam, the Arab culture and the Arabs' contribution to human civilization are presented in a positive light. No book calls for violence or war. Many books express the yearning for peace between Israel and the Arab countries," according to the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace in 2001. [273]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In PA authorized textbooks, "There is no attempt to encourage reconciliation with Israel. Israel is presented exclusively as inhumane and greedy...The struggle for the liberation of Palestine is presented mainly as a military one. ...the Feda'I and Shahid are praised as the spearhead of this struggle....Jihad continues to be glorified and martyrs praised, with special attention given to the martyrs of Palestine," according to the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace in 2001. [274]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "We are teaching the children that suicide bombs make Israeli people frightened and we are allowed to do it… We teach them that after a person becomes a suicide bomber he reaches the highest level of paradise." - Palestinian "Paradise Camp" counselor speaking to BBC interviewer. [275]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Since the British Mandatory period, Zionist and Israeli leaders accepted compromise proposals that envisioned the Palestinians and the Jews dividing the land between them. Arab leaders consistently rejected them and demanded the obliteration of Israel.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The Zionist movement accepted Britain's Peel Commission partition plan in 1937 that would have set up a small Jewish state alongside a larger Palestinian state. The Arabs rejected it.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel accepted the United Nations Partition Plan in 1947 (Resolution 181) that would have divided Palestine into a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state. The Arabs rejected it.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel tried to set up Palestinian self-government and autonomy in the Territories between 1967 and 1969 after the 1967 War. The Arabs rejected it. [276]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel offered the Palestinians autonomy in the Camp David Accords of 1979 as part of its peace plan with Egypt in the "Attached Letters" to the agreement, March 26, 1979. [277]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel offered the Palestinians a state with the Oslo Accords in 1993. By 1996, Israel had deployed from all major Palestinian population centers and 98% of Palestinians were self-governing under the Palestinian Authority.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel accepted President Clinton's plan to establish a Palestinian state on 97% of the West Bank and Gaza with a shared capital in 2001; And again, the Arabs rejected it. [278]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle….is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [279]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: When an Arab country was willing to reach out its hand in peace, Israel has been willing to relinquish captured land and dismantle settlements in the interests of peace.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel made peace with Egypt in 1979 and returned the whole Sinai, 91% of the land it had captured during the 1967 War.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel had discovered oil in the Sinai and set up the industrial infrastructure to extract it. It turned this heavy industrial infrastructure over to Egypt.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel dismantled its settlements in the Sinai over the protest of many of the Jewish residents. The Israeli government offered a huge sum of money to the residents to induce them to leave. Ariel Sharon finally was sent to dismantle the community of Yamit whose residents had built a corner of the Sinai into "a green and prosperous agricultural adjunct of Israel" and who were especially resistant. Historian Howard Sachar [280]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: When Jordan was willing to make peace in 1994, Israel made peace and returned disputed land in the fertile Jordan River Valley.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Most recently, Israel proved its willingness to help create a Palestinian state in 2000 when Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak accepted the proposals at Camp David, Taba, and Washington. Unfortunately, then, as now, the Palestinians rejected the proposal, demanded a formula that would destroy Israel, and returned to violence.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: According to U.S. envoy Dennis Ross, who was present at the meeting, the offer would have ended the conflict by giving the Palestinians all of Gaza, a contiguous 95% of the West Bank and 2% land compensation from within Israel. [281]
      
      
• POINT 22: For 50 years, they [Israel] have worked tirelessly, with the support of US leaders and the media, to make it appear that it is the Palestinians and Arabs who are responsible for all the Arab-Israeli Wars and hostilities.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel-with or without the support of the US-has not had to work to show that Arabs and Palestinians are responsible for the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict. Arab leaders have always proudly announced their responsibility for the wars.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: 1948 War: "The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We do not deny this. We told the whole world we were going to fight." Jamal Huseeini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman, to the UN Security Council, April 16, 1948 [282]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: 1948 War: "The Egyptian government has declared in a cablegram to the President of the Security Council on 15 May that Egyptian armed forces have entered Palestine and it has engaged in 'armed intervention' in that country. On May 16 I received a cablegram from the Arab League making similar statements on behalf of the Arab states. I consider it my duty to emphasize to that this is the first time since the adoption of the [UN] Charter that Member states have openly declared that they have engaged in armed intervention outside their own territory." Trygve Lie, UN Secretary General, Report to UN Security Council, May 16, 1948 [283]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: 1967 War: "The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel…to face the challenge, while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation. This act will astound the world. Today they will know that the Arabs are arranged for battle, the critical hour has arrived. We have reached the stage of serious action and not declarations." King Hussein of Jordan, May 30, 1967 [284]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: 1967 War: "Our forces are now entirely ready…to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland…the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation." Hafez Assad, Syrian Defense Minister and later President of Syria. [285]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: 1973 War: "The Yom Kippur started at noon, October 6, 1973, with the combined assault of the Egyptian and Syrian military forces against Israeli forces on the Suez Canal in the south and the Golan Heights in the north. With the declared intention of avenging the disgrace of 1967, Arab forces surprised the unready Israelis and won a number of initial victories." [286]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel-with or without the support of the US-has not had to work to show that Palestinians refuse to compromise and to reject violence.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "'A summit's purpose,' Clinton said, 'is to have discussions that are based on sincere intentions and you, the Palestinians, did not come to this summit with sincere intentions.'" - Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel's Chief Negotiator in Camp David, Ma'ariv, April 6, 2001. [287]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Both Barak and Clinton were prepared to do what was necessary to reach agreement. [...] Can one say the same about Arafat? Unfortunately, not-and his behavior at Camp David and afterward cannot be explained only by his suspicions that a trap was being set for him." - Dennis Ross, US Envoy to the Middle East. [288]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Israelis moved more from the position they had. [...] I would be making a mistake not to praise Barak because I think he took a big risk. And I think it sparked, already, in Israel a real debate, which is moving Israeli public opinion toward the conditions that will make peace. So I thought that was important, and I think it deserves to be acknowledged." - President, William J. Clinton [289]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "He did not negotiate in good faith; indeed, he did not negotiate at all. He just kept saying no to every offer, never making any counterproposals of his own, What they [Arafat and his colleagues] want is a Palestinian state in all of Palestine," says Barak. "What we see as self-evident, [the need for] two states for two peoples, they reject. Israel is too strong at the moment to defeat, so they formally recognise it. But their game plan is to establish a Palestinian state while always leaving an opening for further 'legitimate' demands down the road." - Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel, Party to Camp David negotiations, 2002 [290]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Fundamentally I do not believe he [Yasser Arafat] can end the conflict… For him to end the conflict is to end himself."- Dennis Ross, Former US Envoy to the Middle East. [291]
      
      
    • Question: Observers and participants of the 2000 Camp David summit all assert that Yasser Arafat never even offered a counter-proposal to Israeli Prime Minister Barak's proposals. In fact he even rejected every offer for joint sovereignty on the Temple Mount, claiming that it had no significance to Jews. Ms. Ashrawi, this is the most holy place in the Jewish religion. US Mediator, Dennis Ross even states, "[Prime Minister Barak] was prepared to make decisions; Arafat was not. I believe he is capable of launching the process, but he is not capable of concluding it.(*)" How does this indicate that Arafat was ready for compromise with Israel? [292]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Even Arab spokesmen condemn Arafat for refusing Clinton and Barak's offer at Camp David.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who was an intermediary in the negotiations, called Arafat's refusal to accept the Camp David offer "a crime against Palestinians, in fact against the whole region." (New Yorker interview March 24, 2003)
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Our leadership….enabled the Zionists to succeed at every opportunity…by rejecting every proposal for compromise, rejecting proposals to give it a state on most of the land of Palestine…" Tawfiz Abu Bakr, Palestinian columnist, 2003 [293]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Because of "this irrational nihilist behavior [of Palestinians about accepting compromise], "Haj Amin Al-Husseini…rejected the settlement offered him by the Peel Commission in 1937…Then, he repeated his mistake by rejecting the Partition Plan that this time would have given 55% to the Jews and the rest to Palestine…." Al-'Afif Al-Akdhar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [294]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle….is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [295]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Yasser Arafat and other members of the PA have made it clear that they are responsible for the continuing violence. Israel has not had to persuade anyone of this fact. PA leaders openly say that Palestinian violence and terrorism are justified because Israel refuses to accede to all their demands. They pay terrorists and suicide bombers and encourage them to be regarded as martyrs-not as murderers who are sabotaging the chances for peace.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: There are "marches and celebrations after each attack…." reports David Brooks in the Atlantic Monthly in June 2002. [296]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian society turns suicide bombers into heroic martyrs, naming streets, playgrounds and children's summer camps after them, plastering posters of them throughout the Territories, replaying their martyrdom videos on TV, and even selling 2002 Suicide Bomber calendars displaying the faces of all the dead bombers and Hamas' spiritual leader, Sheikh Yessin. Even the Nazis did not single out or honor those who slaughtered Jews." (London Observer Dec. 16, 2001) [297]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Why doesn't a single one of the leaders…expressing joy and ecstasy on the satellite channels every time a young Palestinian man or woman sets out to blow himself or herself up-send his own son?" (Abu Saber M.G., the grieving father of a suicide bomber, in a letter to Al Hayat (London) October 1, 2002. [298]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian children grow up in a culture in which suicide bombers are rock stars, sports heroes, and religious idols rolled into one…suicide bombing has become phenomenally popular. According to polls, 70 to 80% of Palestinians now support it." (Atlantic Monthly June 2002 ) [299]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Gaza City's walls "are shrines to suicide bombers and the death toll they have inflicted on the Israeli occupiers. Many of the city's mosques are plastered with 'martyrdom' posters extolling the deeds of suicide bombers….Even the Sbarro attack, where most of the victims were young children, is celebrated with news photos of the aftermath," according to the London Observer (12/16/01). [300]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Families celebrate the "weddings" between the martyrs and dark-eyed virgins in paradise. "Announcements that read like wedding invitations are printed in local newspapers so that friends and neighbors can join the festivities." (Atlantic Monthly June 2002 )
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians promote Paradise Camps-"summer camps in which children as young as eight are trained in military drills and taught about suicide bombers." Atlantic Monthly June 2002 [301]
      
      
• POINT 23: The Geneva Accord fails to recognize the right of the 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel to live in a democratic state for all its citizens: Jews and Palestinians.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: There was no need for the Geneva Accords to mention this right. The Israeli-Arabs already have it. They live in the democratic state of Israel which grants equal political, civil and human rights to all its citizens, even according to Palestinians.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel is a multiethnic, multiracial state with freedom of religion and civil rights for all its citizens. Israelis come from over 100 countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Israel has 15 sanctioned religions and 20% of Israelis are not Jews. They have equal rights and protections as in any democracy.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Since polls were first taken in 1996, Palestinians have consistently rated Israel's democracy as the one they most admire in the world, according to the Palestinian Center for Palestine Research and Studies. "Every year Israel has been the top performer, at times receiving 80% approval. The American system has been the next best [67% in 1999], followed by the French…." Center for Palestine Research and Studies. [302]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: I "remain constantly amazed by the high standards of the [Israeli] legal system." Raji Sourani, Director of Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, 2003. [303]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "I envy them [Israelis and their democracy] and desire a similar regime in my future state. It is true that I am appalled by the culture of curses and profanities in the Israeli political arena, but I respect the democratic discussion, debate, decision, the sovereignty of law, and the freedom of the press…" Columnist Ata Al-Qemari, in Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam, May 22, 1999. [304]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Israel has proved that for fifty years its real power is in its democracy, guarding the rights of its citizens, applying laws [equally] to the rich and poor, the big and small…and in the participation of the nation in the development of institutions according to ability and efficiency and not according to closeness to [the ruler]…." Columnist Dr. Talal Al-Shareef, Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds, May 27, 1999. [305]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Election Day is a national holiday, and free transportation is provided to polling booths. Voter turnout often reaches 97%. Israeli Foreign Ministry [306]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Even Arab commentators have praised Israel's democracy.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Israel has proved that for fifty years its real power is in its democracy, guarding the rights of its citizens, applying laws (equally) to the rich and the poor, the big and the small…" - Dr. Talal Al-Shareef, Al-Quds, May 27, 1999. [307]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "I am also envious of … the simple Israeli citizen who can, with one ballot deposited into a small wooden box, humiliate one leader and raise another … I envy them and desire a similar regime in my future state … I respect (their) democratic discussion, debate, decision, the sovereignty of law and freedom of the press." - Columnist Ata Al-Qemari, Al-Quds, May 1999. [308]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Netanyahu, who was nicknamed 'King of Israel', fell out of power and within half an hour relinquished leadership of his party … such elections are the result of a democratic regime that accepts change (by means of) elections as the basis of governeance." - Dr Ali Al-Jirbawi, Al-Ayyam, May 22, 1999. [309]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Just as American has set up special programs to ensure the rights of its minorities, so Israel has set up special programs, including affirmative action programs, to ensure that Arab-Israelis do not suffer from discrimination.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The ministerial committee on Arab affairs…approved a plan [for] narrowing the gaps between the Jewish and Arab sectors. The plan included affirmative action for Arabs in the civil service…..The plan calls for appointing at least one Arab to the board of every government company within a year, as well as giving preference to Arab candidates for promotion in the civil service. It also extends an earlier development plan for the Arab sector, approved by Ehud Barak's government, for another two years." Haaretz, August 20 2003 [310]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The new Geneva Accord also failed to mention that the Palestinians living in a future Palestinian state should have the right to live in a democratic state for all its citizens. Given the abysmal failure of the Palestinian Authority to grant political, civil and human rights, they do not have those rights now and may not when they have an independent state. Instead of building a prosperous state and developing democratic institutions, Yassir Arafat did just the opposite. His misgovernment has brought the state to the verge of ruin.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Edward Said, a Palestinian nationalist and activist, denounced "Arafat's tyrannical regime" in 1997. [311]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Palestinian Legislative Council denounced Arafat's "rule for corruption, cronyism, lost opportunities, lost dreams, lost lives…." New York Times September 14, 2002. [312]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "No minister can appoint a driver or delivery boy in his ministry without the president's consent. Things depend solely on the president…..There is only one institution and that is the institution of the presidency, which has no law or order and is based on bribing top officials." Mu'awiya Al-Masri, Palestinian Legislative Council member from Nablus. August 2002 [313]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Few Palestinians are more keenly aware of the corruption and repression of Yasir Arafat's administration than is Raji Sourani. As Gaza's premiere human rights lawyer, Sourani has seen his countrymen arrested arbitrarily, beaten in captivity, held for months without trial and denied the right to a basic defense in court." New Republic June 6, 2002 [314]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Arafat should quit his position because he is the head of a corrupt authority. There is no point for him to remain in politics, especially as the Al-Fatah group has accused him of being responsible for all the tragedies in Palestine. Arafat has destroyed Palestine. He has led it to terrorism, death and a hopeless situation. Arafat has also divided the country, as Saddam Hussein divided Iraq, heaping humiliation on the nation." Ahmed Al-Jarallah, Editor-in-Chief, Arab Times, July 18 2004 [315]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It may be time for Yasser Arafat to fall on his sword or leave. The situation in Palestine is bad and getting worse. It is too easy to blame it one more time on Israel and the usual suspects -- the West, the Arabs, the others. But if you listened to Palestinians, they are saying their president for life -- Yasser Arafat -- is the problem along with his cronies who rule them, rob them and impoverish them." Youssef M. Ibrahim, Gulf News, July 20 2004 [316]
      
      
• POINT 24: The Palestinian people represent the struggle against war, colonialism and global domination.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: Unfortunately, just the reverse is the case. The Palestinian people have consistently refused to compromise and accept Israel's existence, and they have unleashed wars and terrorism on the Jewish nation for 80 years. Under Yasser's Arafat's leadership of the PLO, they also unleashed terrorism around the world. They symbolize not peace, but violence and racist irredentism.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Arafat's history is an unremitting record of murder and conflict against innocent people. Consider some of the most egregious 'operations' he masterminded:

      •Initiated a civil war in Jordan to overthrow King Hussein, 1970 (*)

      •Massacred eleven Israelis at the Munich Olympics 1972 (**)

      •Murdered 24 at Israel's Lod Airport

      •Abducted and murdered America's ambassador, his deputy and a Belgian diplomat in Khartoum 1973 (***)

      •Killed 52 Israeli civilians and wounded 100, mostly children, at Kiryat Shimona. December 1974 (****)

      •Killed 21 Israelis, mostly schoolgirls, and injured 65 at Maalot. May 1974 (*****)

      •Between 1971 and 1974, "Fatah engaged in a wave of plane hijackings, letter bombs, assassinations, and thirteen attacks on Western and Arab embassies." (******)

      •Between 1972 and 1982, he moved his base to Lebanon, where his attempt to gain control triggered a brutal civil war that took a toll of 40,000 lives.(*******)

      •1985: Palestinian terrorists kill twenty people in Leonardo da Vinci Airport near Rome. (********) [317]
      
      

    • Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle….is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [318]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It does not matter how many [Jews] there are. We will sweep them into the sea." - Azzam Pasha, Arab League Secretary General, 1948 [319]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "We shall never call for nor accept peace. We shall only accept war. We have resolved to drench this land with your (Israel's) blood, to oust you as aggressor, to throw you into the sea." - Hafez Assad, Syrian Defense Minister, later Syrian president. May 24, 1966
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "In 1967, the mood in the Middle East was ugly," Shuster reports. "Israel, independent since 1948, was surrounded by Arab states dedicated to its eradication. Egypt was ruled by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a firebrand nationalist whose army was the strongest in the Arab Middle East. Syria was governed by the radical Baathist Party, constantly issuing threats to push Israel into the sea." - The Mideast: A Century of Conflict, NPR [320]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The PLO's first leader was an Egyptian, Ahmed Shukairy. He inaugurated the organization's famous slogan about "driving the Jews into the sea." [321]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "To use words that some people no longer like to use today: 'We will throw Israel into the sea.' This phrase, by the way, is the truth." - Dr. 'Adel Sadeq, chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists Association and head of the Department of Psychiatry at 'Ein Shams University in Cairo [322]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinians have not been spearheading the struggle against war and violence. They have spearheaded the establishment of a tyrannical society dedicated to raising children to become suicide bombers.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: There are "marches and celebrations after each attack…." reports David Brooks in the Atlantic Monthly in June 2002. [323]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian society turns suicide bombers into heroic martyrs, naming streets, playgrounds and children's summer camps after them, plastering posters of them throughout the Territories, replaying their martyrdom videos on TV, and even selling 2002 Suicide Bomber calendars displaying the faces of all the dead bombers and Hamas' spiritual leader, Sheikh Yessin. Even the Nazis did not single out or honor those who slaughtered Jews." (London Observer Dec. 16, 2001) [324]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: quot;Why doesn't a single one of the leaders…expressing joy and ecstasy on the satellite channels every time a young Palestinian man or woman sets out to blow himself or herself up-send his own son?" (Abu Saber M.G., the grieving father of a suicide bomber, in a letter to Al Hayat (London) October 1, 2002. [325]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian children grow up in a culture in which suicide bombers are rock stars, sports heroes, and religious idols rolled into one…suicide bombing has become phenomenally popular. According to polls, 70 to 80% of Palestinians now support it." (Atlantic Monthly June 2002 ) [326]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Gaza City's walls "are shrines to suicide bombers and the death toll they have inflicted on the Israeli occupiers. Many of the city's mosques are plastered with 'martyrdom' posters extolling the deeds of suicide bombers….Even the Sbarro attack, where most of the victims were young children, is celebrated with news photos of the aftermath," according to the London Observer (12/16/01). [327]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Families celebrate the "weddings" between the martyrs and dark-eyed virgins in paradise. "Announcements that read like wedding invitations are printed in local newspapers so that friends and neighbors can join the festivities." (Atlantic Monthly June 2002 ) [328]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians promote Paradise Camps-"summer camps in which children as young as eight are trained in military drills and taught about suicide bombers." Atlantic Monthly June 2002 [329]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The Palestinian people are not spearheads in the struggle against colonialism and global domination. To the contrary, they are spearheads in the struggle to ensure that Arab Muslims dominate the entire Middle East and prevent any regional minority groups from having their right to self-determination-in this case, the Jewish state. In short, they are engaged in an imperialist effort to deny a minority its rights.
    
    
• POINT 25: The area that became the Palestinian Mandate was our land, our homeland. Jews-Zionists-took it away from us.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The claim that Zionists or Jews took away the Palestinians' land or homeland defies the historical record. The vast majority of Arabs who lived in the Palestine Mandate still live within its original boundaries-in Jordan, the Territories and in Israel. This claim is simply a ploy to deny the right of self-determination to one of the oppressed minorities in what became the Mandate-the Jews.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Jordan originally was part of the Palestine Mandate but was separated and awarded to Arabs. The Palestinians who live in Jordan still live in their "homeland'-the original Mandate. "In terms of territory, Transjordan represented a full four-fifths of the original Mandatory Palestine… [the British hoped] the Arabs would now waive their claim to the remaining fifth." Historian Benny Morris [330]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Transjordan, which occupied about 80 percent of Palestine was not freed from the Mandate. Residents of the East Bank still held Palestinian passports, were subject to British control, and were considered Palestinians. In fact, according to Sir Alec Kirkbride, the British representative in the area, Transjordan was "intended to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the National Home for the Jews in Palestine, which [Britain was] pledged to support, became an accomplished fact. There was no intention at that stage of forming the territory east of the River Jordan into an independent Arab state." Dartmouth Review [331]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arabs regarded Jordan as an expression of Palestinian self-determination. "The new Jordan, which emerged in 1949, was the creation of the Palestinians of the West Bank and their brothers in the East. While Israel was the negation of the right of self-determination, unified Jordan was the expression of it." - Sherif Al-Hamid Sharaf, Representative of Jordan at the UN Security Council, 11th June 1973 [332]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza cannot be said to have lost their "homeland." They in fact are still living in their "homeland"-the Palestine Mandate-if not in their old homes. " The vast majority of [refugees]… remained inside Palestine: in this sense, most of the Palestinian "refugees" are not refugees at all…" Historian Benny Morris [333]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Arabs who lived in the Palestine Mandate and who are now citizens of Israel cannot be said to have lost their "homeland." Often, they still live in the same areas they lived in before 1948 and they are full-fledged citizens of the state of Israel.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The claim that the Jews took the Palestinians' land" or "homeland" has no meaning politically. There had never been an Arab Palestinian state.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: After Rome conquered the Jewish state in 135 AD, successive empires ruled the area for the next 1900 years and Palestine ceased to be a distinct political entity.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine from 1517 to 1917-18 …never made it a separate, distinct administrative district." Its boundaries kept shifting. Parts of it were attached to Damascus, parts to Beirut and parts were independent. Historian Benny Morris [334]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestine was not a state but simply "a geographical name of rather loose application…." It did not have " a boundary by which Palestine can be separated exactly from the rest of Syria in the north, or from the Sinaitic and Arabian deserts in the south…" (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911 p. 600).
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Arabs maintained that their country belonged to themselves and that they had been masters in it for fourteen centuries. Great Britain, in authorising the establishment of a National Home, had disposed of a country which did not belong to it. This claim was particularly open to refutation. It was not in accordance with most elementary facts of ancient history in Palestine. It would be enough to point out that Palestine had belonged before the war to the Ottoman Empire. The country had been conquered, not by Arabs of Palestine, but by the Allies, and had finally been ceded to the Allies and not to the Arabs. Since 1517, Palestine had been under the rule of the Turks. There could be no reference, therefore, to an Arab nation in Palestine, nor could it be claimed that the territory formed part of the patrimony of that nation." Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission, 16th (Extraordinary) Session June 30 1930 [335]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The claim that the Mandate land was "our land" or "our homeland" has no meaning culturally. There had never been a distinctive cultural or national identity among Arabs who lived in the Palestine Mandate. At best, Arabs in the region identified culturally and politically with what became Syria or with their local village or town.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi reported that only after WWI was there "the emergence of a Palestinian identity where a few decades before no such thing existed" and even then, it developed only slowly among the upper classes." [336]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: As late as 1911, the Encyclopedia Britannica reported that the area known as Palestine had so many "ethnological groups" that it was hard to write concisely about the area's ethnology because "no less than 50 languages were spoken."
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Customs between Arab areas were so similar that the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations adopted a resolution that stated: "We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds." 1919 [337]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he sympathy of the Palestinian Arabs with their kinsmen in Syria had been plainly shown….Both peoples clung to the principle that Palestine was part of Syria and should never have been cut off from it." Peel Commission 1937 [338]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Palestine Arabs have at present no will of their own. Neither have they ever developed any specifically Palestinian nationalism. The demand for a separate Arab state in Palestine is consequently relatively weak." Count Folk Bernadotte, UN Envoy to Palestine, 1948 [339]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "By 1947, much of the Palestine Arab population had only an indistinct, if any, idea of national purpose or statehood…..[O]n the whole, save for the numerically small circle of the elite, the Palestinians were unready for the national message…Palestine Arabs, still caught up in a village-centered…political outlook, by and large completely lacked…a clear concept of the nation and of national belonging….Most Palestine Arabs had no sense of separate national or cultural identity to distinguish them from, say, the Arabs of Syria, Lebanon or Egypt." Historian Benny Morris. [340]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "From 1949 to 1967, the Palestinians receded from the political scene…The concept 'Palestinian' as such vanished, unless it was linked to the word 'refugee.' Only in the wake of the Six Day War did the Palestinians return to the political arena under their own banner…..They reappeared as 'Palestinians'-a term that had been forgotten for 18 years." Historian Yoav Gelber [341]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The claim that Zionists took away "our land" or "our homeland" has no meaning. To the contrary, Zionists and Israel were willing to GIVE the Palestinians a homeland and a state -in 1937, 1947, 1969 and in 2000.
    
    
• POINT 26: The party that introduced terrorism in our region was Israel during its creation. All these things were alien to our part of the world. We had a peaceable society.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: This effort to create an image of a peaceable, harmonious agrarian society in the region of Palestine defies the historical record. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the region was torn by violence, misgovernment and instability and was becoming increasingly impoverished.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he Palestine of the early 1800's was hardly less than an administrative shambles. Centuries of Turkish indifference and misgovernment had encouraged recurrent warfare between local pashas and had permitted Bedouin robber band to terrorize the country's 400,000 inhabitants. Trade was minimal. The entire region was…stunted in its growth by the depredations of tax farmers, by army recruitment, forced labor, drought, and locusts." Historian Howard Sachar [342]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Few individuals…die in the same village in which they were born. Families are continually moving from one place to another….in a few years…they fly to some other place where they have heard that their brethren are better treated." --early 19th Swiss-German explorer, John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land, (1822) reprinted 1983, p. 299 [343]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "A few years ago the whole Ghor (Jordan Valley) was in the hands of the fellaheen, and much of it cultivated for corn. Now the whole of it is in the hands of the Bedouin, who eschew all agriculture…The same thing is now going on over the plain of Sharon where….land is going out of cultivation and whole villages rapidly disappeared….Since the year 1838, no less than twenty villages there have thus erased from the map, and the stationary population extirpated. " H.B. Tristam, The Land of Israel: A Journal of Travels Through Palestine, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1865, p. 490
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The internal wars (between Bedouins and villagers and between villages) had a harmful influence on the growth of population, on the cultivation of the land, and on the degree of rootedness of the fellaheen in their villages. Very often villages passed from hand to hand. There really was not much difference between the fellah who regarded his land as his property and the Bedouin who pitched his tent on it for a brief stay and then moved on to another plot of land." Arieh L. Avneri [344]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: This effort to depict the Palestinian Arabs as non-violent and blame the Jews for terrorism in the region defies the historical facts. Just the reverse is true. It was the Arabs in Palestine who started a long campaign of terrorism in Palestine. They were led by Haj Amin al-Husseini who became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. His armed groups repeatedly incited riots and pogroms against the Jews in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1933 and 1936-39 (when 415 Jews were killed).
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The 1920 and 1921 riots "was begun by the Arabs and rapidly developed into a conflict of great violence between Arabs and Jews, in which the Arab majority, who were generally the aggressors, inflicted most of the casualties….The fundamental cause of the riots was a feeling among the Arabs of discontent with, and hostility to, the Jews…." British Government's Haycraft Commission of Inquiry into the 1920-21 Arab Riots. [345]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[T]he causes of the outbreaks of 1920 and 1921 [and] of 1929 and 1933…[and 1936] …were similar in character to the four previous outbreaks…As in 1933, it was not only the Jews who were attacked, but the Palestine Government." British Peel Commission Report, 1937 [346]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: During the Peel Commission hearings to investigate the causes of the 1936 disturbances, "Haj Amin emphasized that the 400,000 Jews then domiciled in Palestine were more than the country could absorb. When asked by Peel if this did not mean that in an independent Arab Palestine some Jews would have to be removed, the Mufti replied: 'We must leave all this to the future.' Other Arab witnesses made the same point, although rather less obliquely." Historian Howard Sachar [347]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Mufti of Jerusalem supported Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic program. The Mufti of Jerusalem received millions of dollars from Nazi Germany and Italian fascists for his violence against the Jews between 1936 and 1939. The German SS provided financial and logistical support for anti-Semitic programs in Palestine. [348]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Just the reverse is true. Palestinians introduced terrorism against the British. During the 1933 and 1936-39 Arab revolts, Palestinians also attacked and sabotaged the British in a pattern of terrorism, long before the Jews began to direct any animosity to the British.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: In the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, "…British patrols also were cut down by snipers, the new airport at Lydda was burned, troop trains were derailed, and the oil line from Mosul to Haifa was badly damaged. As the killings and sabotage increased, so did British reprisals….From July to November 1938…perhaps 16,000 local and imported guerillas were engaged in the insurrection, and they succeeded almost completely in paralyzing civil authority outside the nation's larger cities and in the Jewish agricultural areas. All interurban transportation was prohibited at night, as Arab infiltrators laid mines and explosives along roads and highways." Historian Howard Sachar [349]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There have been widespread acts of murder and other outrages by [Arab] gangs of armed terrorists. Apart from attacks in which British soldiers, airmen and police as well as many Arabs and Jews have lost their lives, the activities of these armed gangs have included repeated attempts to disorganize the means of communication, cutting of telegraph and telephone wires, derailing of trains, and attempts to prevent roads from being used by traffic. Considerable material damage has been done seriously affecting the economic life of the country and several attempts have been made to damage and set fire to the oil pipe-line between Haifa and `Iraq." Report by His Majesty's Government to the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Trans-jordan 1936 [350]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Just the reverse is true. The Jews were forced to organize a grassroots militia, the Haganah, in 1920 to protect themselves from the Arab violence unleashed that year, not to begin a campaign of terrorism. Jews felt that the British authorities were not providing sufficient protection for them.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The Haganah was committed to acting with restraint against Arab attacks. [351]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Hagnah's stated purpose was "to safeguard the national and social content of popular defence in this country". [352]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: A small group split off from the Haganah in 1931 to form the Irgun precisely because it did not accept the Haganah's policy of "restraint" as opposed to "retaliation" against Palestine's Arabs. [353]
      
      
• POINT 27: Throughout the Israeli occupation, which began in 1948, consecutive Israeli governments have carried out unimaginable atrocities against the Palestinian people.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The greatest atrocity against the Palestinian people is revealed in this claim: the insistence that Israel's occupation began in 1948. Palestinian leaders' refusal to compromise and accept the existence of the Jewish state alongside a state of their own cost them a state and led them to unleash a half century of wars and terrorism. They have brought untold suffering on Palestinians and on Israelis.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians don't have a state because they have had "an all or nothing policy," unlike the Zionists. "The Zionists never demanded the impossible….Our leadership….enabled the Zionists to succeed at every opportunity…by rejecting every proposal for compromise, rejecting proposals to give it a state on most of the land of Palestine…" Tawfiz Abu Bakr, Palestinian columnist, 2003 [354]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Because of "this irrational nihilist behavior [of Palestinians about accepting compromise], "Haj Amin Al-Husseini…rejected the settlement offered him by the Peel Commission in 1937…Then, he repeated his mistake by rejecting the Partition Plan that this time would have given 55% to the Jews and the rest to Palestine…." Al-'Afif Al-Akdhar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [355]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle….is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [356]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar, editor Jubran Tuweini wrote, "Once again, we realize that the Arabs are their own worst enemy - just as the worst enemy of the Palestinian cause is the Palestinians, who have endorsed a policy of refusal and fundamentalist extremism as a way of behavior. How many times have they already served Israel with their deeds? How many times has the behavior of these groups already saved Ariel Sharon and his government?" December 24 2003 [357]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The liberal-leaning Hazem Abd Al-Rahman wrote in his Al-Ahram column:"… Are the [Palestinians who attacked the Egyptian Foreign Minister] capable of accomplishing something for the Palestinian people? It is reasonable to assume that they, like the supporters of suicide bombings, are the first to damage the Palestinian cause, and are bringing death upon the Palestinian people…" December 24 2003 [358]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: On the liberal Arab website Elaph, Egyptian columnist Sami Buheiri wrote: "[T]he rabble majority of the Arab and Palestinian street today….refuse to accept any kind of a peace agreement with Israel... It is they who applaud the bus and restaurant bombings in order to destroy any spark of hope for peace... They are Arab nationalists who have failed completely in all their wars with Israel and in all attempts to achieve peace with Israel, because they were not serious, and they were not men - neither in fighting nor in peacemaking..." [359]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Indeed, one of the characteristics of the Palestinian national movement has been the Palestinians' view of themselves as perpetual victims of others-Ottoman Turks, British officials, Zionists, Americans-and never to appreciate that they are, at least in large part, victims of their own mistakes and iniquities. In the Palestinian Weltanschauung, they never set a foot wrong; their misfortunes are always the fault of others. The inevitable corollary of this refusal to recognize their own historical agency has been a perpetual Palestinian whining-that, I fear, is the apt term-to the outside world to save them from what is usually their own folly." Historian Benny Morris [360]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel's atrocities against Palestinians are "unimaginable" because they did not happen. The Arabs who chose to remain in Israel were granted full civil, political and human rights, and they became the most prosperous and most free Arabs in the Middle East.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel's Arab minority has all the same civil and legal rights as its Jewish majority. Israeli Arabs have five political parties. Arab-Israelis held 12 of the 120 seats in the Israeli Parliament in 2002. Arabic is an official language of Israel and is on equal footing with Hebrew. [361]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: All Arab municipalities are controlled and administered by Arabs and they receive government funding for education and infrastructure. [362]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Since polls were first taken in 1996, Palestinians have consistently rated Israel's democracy as the one they most admire in the world, according to the Palestinian Center for Palestine Research and Studies. "Every year Israel has been the top performer, at times receiving 80% approval. The American system has been the next best [67% in 1999], followed by the French…." Center for Palestine Research and Studies. [363]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Israel has proved that for fifty years its real power is in its democracy, guarding the rights of its citizens, applying laws [equally] to the rich and poor, the big and small…and in the participation of the nation in the development of institutions according to ability and efficiency and not according to closeness to [the ruler]…." Columnist Dr. Talal Al-Shareef, Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds, May 27, 1999. [364]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "We here [in Israel], with all our problems, and all the complexity of our situation, know deep inside that we are free, I mean, as far as thinking goes, and as far as the possibility of writing goes. We are freer to think than anyone in the Arab world." Salman Masalha, Israeli-Arab poet. 2004 [365]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The reality is that Israel is more democratic than any Arab country, and the suffering of the Palestinian citizen in Israel is much less than the suffering of the Arab citizen in his homeland and his own Arab country, whatever country that may be …" Munir Al-Mawari, Yemenite journalist, November 2003 [366]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in the Territories are "unimaginable" because they did not happen. Under Israeli administration of the Territories, the Palestinians achieved more self-government, prosperity, freedom and social betterment than they had ever enjoyed in the 19 years of Jordanian rule.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "In the West Bank…the Israelis encountered an Arab population whose economic and political development had been systematically aborted for years by the distrustful Hashemite government. Citizens living west of the river had been refused even the mildest degree of administrative autonomy….When, therefore, Israel instituted a military regime in the West Bank, it launched something entirely new, the first authentically Palestinian administration the local Arabs had ever known. Under Israeli auspices, departments were established for West Bank agriculture, education, posts and telegraphs, commerce and industry…" all run by local civil servants. Historian Howard Sachar [367]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel built up and developed the Territories and gave freedoms, rights, and opportunities to Palestinians that Jordan, during its 19-year rule, had denied them. Palestinians may not have wanted to be under Israeli rule, but they flourished. [368]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Life expectancy soared from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 while infant mortality plummeted from 60 per thousand live births to 15 per 1000 and childhood diseases disappeared due to systematic Israeli programs to eradicate them. [369]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel brought economic prosperity to Palestinians. Israeli investment in business, industry and infrastructure and the opening of its borders to labor made the Territories the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world in the 1970's and unemployment dropped from an average of 40% or more to below 5%. [370]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel fostered educational development, building 7 universities and 20 community colleges for the Palestinians. Illiteracy dropped from 50% to 30% just between 1967 and 1980. By 1990, only 14% of adults over age 15 were illiterate. [371]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israel offered political and civil freedoms, including freedom of association, trade unions, civic organization and opposition parties, none of which had been allowed under Jordan. It also established freedom of the press, even for newspapers hostile to Israel, giving Palestinians the freest press in the Arab world. [372]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The atrocities Israel committed in the Territories are unimaginable because they did not happen. Israel offered the Palestinians self-rule, something no Arab state had ever done. The atrocities occurring in the Territories today have been brought on by the Palestinian Authority. 98% of Palestinian's lived under Palestinian Authority rule by the beginning of the current Intifada. Under the PA, Palestinians saw a deteriorating standard of life, increased corruption, and a break down in the rule of law.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: From 1992 to 1996, per capita income dropped 35% in Gaza and unemployment rose over 20% in Gaza and the West Bank. [373]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1997, 40% of the PA budget was reported "missing". Monopolistic practices and diversion of funds from development projects to alleged "security Forces have discouraged private foreign investment. [374]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: During the period of PA rule restrictions on association. It intimidated and assassinated political opposition leaders. It conducted arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture and unfair trials, especially in new State Security Courts, which "flagrantly" violate "Fair trial standards." [375]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Arafat should quit his position because he is the head of a corrupt authority. There is no point for him to remain in politics, especially as the Al-Fatah group has accused him of being responsible for all the tragedies in Palestine. Arafat has destroyed Palestine. He has led it to terrorism, death and a hopeless situation. Arafat has also divided the country, as Saddam Hussein divided Iraq, heaping humiliation on the nation." Ahmed Al-Jarallah, Editor-in-Chief, Arab Times, July 18 2004 [376]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It may be time for Yasser Arafat to fall on his sword or leave. The situation in Palestine is bad and getting worse. It is too easy to blame it one more time on Israel and the usual suspects -- the West, the Arabs, the others. But if you listened to Palestinians, they are saying their president for life -- Yasser Arafat -- is the problem along with his cronies who rule them, rob them and impoverish them." Youssef M. Ibrahim, Gulf News, July 20 2004 [377]
      
      
• POINT 28: We Palestinians have all been alienated and painfully separated from our rights and our history.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim is simply another way to condemn the creation of the state of Israel, and to refuse to accept the results of the war Palestinians and Arabs launched in 1948. This chronic rejectionism has repeatedly cost the Palestinians the establishment of their own state. Palestinians have been deprived of their right to a state by no one but their own leadership.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinians don't have a state because they have had "an all or nothing policy," unlike the Zionists. "The Zionists never demanded the impossible….Our leadership….enabled the Zionists to succeed at every opportunity…by rejecting every proposal for compromise, rejecting proposals to give it a state on most of the land of Palestine…" Tawfiz Abu Bakr, Palestinian columnist, 2003 [378]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Because of "this irrational nihilist behavior [of Palestinians about accepting compromise], "Haj Amin Al-Husseini…rejected the settlement offered him by the Peel Commission in 1937…Then, he repeated his mistake by rejecting the Partition Plan that this time would have given 55% to the Jews and the rest to Palestine…." Al-'Afif Al-Akdhar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [379]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The mania for armed struggle….is the cause for [us] missing …historical opportunities since 1937 to 2000, with…pristine excuses such as 'we have the right[s] on our side…" Al-'Aff Al-Akhdar, Tunisian columnist, 2002 [380]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar, editor Jubran Tuweini wrote, "Once again, we realize that the Arabs are their own worst enemy - just as the worst enemy of the Palestinian cause is the Palestinians, who have endorsed a policy of refusal and fundamentalist extremism as a way of behavior. How many times have they already served Israel with their deeds? How many times has the behavior of these groups already saved Ariel Sharon and his government?" December 24 2003 [381]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The liberal-leaning Hazem Abd Al-Rahman wrote in his Al-Ahram column:"… Are the [Palestinians who attacked the Egyptian Foreign Minister] capable of accomplishing something for the Palestinian people? It is reasonable to assume that they, like the supporters of suicide bombings, are the first to damage the Palestinian cause, and are bringing death upon the Palestinian people…" December 24 2003 [382]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: On the liberal Arab website Elaph, Egyptian columnist Sami Buheiri wrote: "[T]he rabble majority of the Arab and Palestinian street today….refuse to accept any kind of a peace agreement with Israel... It is they who applaud the bus and restaurant bombings in order to destroy any spark of hope for peace... They are Arab nationalists who have failed completely in all their wars with Israel and in all attempts to achieve peace with Israel, because they were not serious, and they were not men - neither in fighting nor in peacemaking..." [383]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Indeed, one of the characteristics of the Palestinian national movement has been the Palestinians' view of themselves as perpetual victims of others-Ottoman Turks, British officials, Zionists, Americans-and never to appreciate that they are, at least in large part, victims of their own mistakes and iniquities. In the Palestinian Weltanschauung, they never set a foot wrong; their misfortunes are always the fault of others. The inevitable corollary of this refusal to recognize their own historical agency has been a perpetual Palestinian whining-that, I fear, is the apt term-to the outside world to save them from what is usually their own folly." Historian Benny Morris [384]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim makes no sense. It is a rhetorical flourish. How can you deprive people of their history? This claim apparently is based on the idea that history should be rewritten in accordance with extremist Palestinian positions. That history in fact is being written largely by a group of Israeli scholars known as the "new historians.". However, it is not seen as good scholarship, but rather as reframing the conflict in accordance with Palestinian propaganda.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "An anti-narrative of Zionism, counterposed to the Zionist (and Israeli) narrative…had existed since the very inception of the Zionist movement. Opponents of the movement, Jewish and non-Jewish, had created an entire literature explaining what was foul in Zionism and why…Israel was an illegitimate and unjust construct that had to be resisted." Historian Anita Shapira [385]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Far from unearthing new facts or offering fresh interpretations that would transform the general understanding of events, the new historians were effectively reiterating the standard Arab narrative of the conflict, in an attempt to give it academic respectability." Historian Efraim Karsh [386]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The 'new historians' have a "a political-ideological axe to grind." "It would be erroneous to call this 'myth debunking'. The work done before our eyes is merely the rewriting of the one-hundred-year Zionist history in the spirit of its enemies and opponents." Aharon Megged. Ha'aretz Weekly Magazine [387]
      
      
• POINT 29: The international community ignores the Palestinians. They still live in "fly-covered, floorless tents."
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim is fanciful. It has nothing to do with reality. Refugees have not lived in tents since the 1960's, over 40 years ago.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "Today…the camps resemble the poorer neighborhoods of Middle Eastern cities. The refugees don't own their individual plots of land, but they do own the shelters and are free to make improvements on them." Peter Kessler, information officer for UNHCR and Maher Nasser of UNRW [388]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "What is a West Bank refugee camp? I expected rows and rows of tents. No. No tents. The camps today look like towns or cities, a tight complex of drab apartment houses. To the untrained eye, there is nothing to indicate that they are refugee camps." Barbara Wolf, Human Rights activist with Global Mediations Network, January 2000 [389]
      
      
• POINT 30: Palestinians embody perhaps the most visible and universal case of human rights abuses today.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: This exaggerated claim defies reality. It ignores the real tragedies, suffering and human rights abuses occurring in the world today. The Palestinian Arabs do not face anything remotely comparable. To name a few:
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The world has turned a blind eye to gross human rights abuses around the world. "The fault is not that of the victims, who over the years have complained to the UN by the thousands about gross and systematic human rights abuses in countries such as Bahrain, Chad, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Zimbabwe." [390]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: SUDAN: In the civil wars in the Sudan, millions have been killed, mutilated and raped and slavery has been reestablished. "[T]he U.S. Agency for International Development…fears hundreds of thousands of people will die over the next nine months. This is no ordinary famine but part of the Sudanese regime's campaign against the African tribes in Darfur, a "strategy of systematic and deliberate starvation," according to a U.N. report that was initially suppressed so as not to offend Khartoum. Already some 30,000 people have been killed by Sudanese troops and Arab militias….. The depredations at Darfur are the same ones Khartoum practiced in its 20-year war against the south. An estimated two million people died there as Africans were butchered and enslaved." Wall Street Journal May 18 2004 [391]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: CHINA-OCCUPIED TIBET: "Over 1.2 million Tibetans have lost their lives as a result of the Chinese invasion and occupation. Tibetan people living in Tibet have no freedom of speech and can be put into prison [for] possessing the national flag, talking about independence for Tibet or disagreeing with the Chinese government. The use of detention, arrest, imprisonment, and torture of large numbers of Tibetans continues to be an integral part of China's effort to suppress opposition to Chinese rule in Tibet. Under Chinese occupation, human rights abuses, religious repression and environmental destruction are everyday occurrences." Australia Tibet Council [392]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: CONGO: "Genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) 'create a frightening picture of one of the most serious human rights situations in the world,' according to a report to the United Nations General Assembly….there are between 500,000 and 600,000 displaced persons scattered throughout the region… Children are still being recruited as combatants, but are demobilized when the militia can no longer feed them. As a result, about 25,000 and 50,000 child refugees, war orphans and "child sorcerers" are roaming the streets….Unsupervised, most drift into vandalism, vagrancy, begging, theft, prostitution and other crimes…" UN News Service, November 10 2003 [393]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: AFRICAN SLAVERY and GENOCIDE: Chattel slavery in Mauritania and the Sudan: "The U.S. State Department estimated that as of 1994 there were 90,000 blacks living as property of Berbers. The Berbers use their slaves for labor, sex and breeding. They're also exchanged for camels, trucks, guns or money. Slave offspring become the property of the master. According to a 1990 Human Rights Watch report, routine Mauritanian slave punishments include beatings, denial of food and prolonged exposure to the sun, with hands and feet tied together. Serious infringement of the master's rule can mean prolonged horrible tortures such as the "insect treatment" - where the slave is bound head and foot, and insects placed in his ears and other body orifices - and "burning coals," where the slave is bound and buried with hot coals placed on parts of his body."

      Slavery is not the only African injustice that goes practically ignored. There's the frequent outbreaks of genocide in Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia and the Congo. In fact, it's fairly safe to say that most of today's most flagrant human rights abuses occur in Africa." Massachusetts News March 2001 [394]
      
      

    • Supporting Evidence: BURMA: "The [military] junta removed all pretence of civilian administration and marked its arrival by massacring thousands of unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators in Rangoon and other Burmese cities and towns. Today, says Amnesty International, "torture has become an institution" in Burma. Reports….have repeatedly detailed a gruesome litany of abuses, including murder, torture, rape, detention without trial, massive forced relocations, and forced labor….These gross violations are added to ongoing suppression of other fundamental freedoms. Today, the most basic of globally recognized civil and political rights are not respected by Burma's generals, despite the fact that Burma is signatory to several of the most important international human rights treaties. There is no freedom of expression." Campaign for Human Rights in Burma [395]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim defies reality. People who suffer from the "worst human rights abuses" are not offered their own state with the international community, including their "enemy," Israel, giving unprecedented efforts in time, attention, money and technical assistance to make that state viable. This claim is an insult to the world community and to Israel. The Palestinian leadership rejected all these good-will offers and in 2000 chose to launch a terrorist war instead.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: According to U.S. envoy Dennis Ross, the 2000-2001 offer to the Palestinians would have ended the conflict by giving the Palestinians all of Gaza, a contiguous 95% of the West Bank and 2% land compensation from within Israel. [396]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There would be a net 97 percent of the territory that would go to the Palestinians… the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem would become the capitol of the Palestinian state… There would be a right of return for the refugees to their own state, not to Israel, but there would also be a fund of $30 billion internationally that would be put together for either compensation or to cover repatriation, resettlement, rehabilitation costs." - Dennis Ross, Former US Envoy to the Middle East. [397]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The World Bank's . "…level of assistance in the three years since the Intifada is at an extraordinary high level…It's a level of something over $300 (£160) per capita. According to our calculations, that is the highest per capita aid transfer in the history of foreign aid anywhere." Nigel Roberts, World Bank official in the Territories. February 29 2004 [398]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "In 1993, at the first donor's conference, Europeans and Arabs joined together in order to help the emerging [Palestinian] state. The Europeans took their mission seriously, as seriously as they take only their agricultural subsidies. The enormous sums, of at least 4.1 Billion Euros that have flowed to Palestine, don't include grants from individual European countries….Since 2001, the EU has been providing 10 million Euros a month to the PA." German newspaper Die Zeit, June 7 2002 [399]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The world community, including Israel, has repeatedly tried to work out compromises that would resolve the conflict from the eight plans proposed by the US since 1969 to the United Nations efforts and the Quartet's efforts with the Road Map. USA Today, 2002 [400]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim defies reality. Palestinians fabricate it to garner world sympathy. But they have had to INVENT Israeli abuses in order to make the claim because Israel has used great restraint in its efforts to put down the terrorist war launched in September 2000, known as the Intifada. The Palestinian Authority has an almost comical record of blaming Israel not only for the plight of the Palestinians, but also for the suffering Palestinians have inflicted on Israelis.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Palestinian Authority (PA) has emerged as a virtual kingdom of mendacity, where every official, from President Arafat down, spends his days lying to a succession of western journalists. The reporters routinely give the lies credence equal to or greater than what they hear from straight, or far less mendacious, Israeli officials. One day Arafat charges that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) uses uranium-tipped shells against Palestinian civilians. The next day it's poison gas. Then, for lack of independent corroboration, the charges simply vanish - and the Palestinians go on to the next lie, again garnering headlines in western and Arab newspapers." Historian Benny Morris, 2002 [401]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "[W]e should acknowledge that the public relations campaign mounted to convince the world of a massacre in Jenin was a politically motivated lie." Senator Joseph Biden. May 6 2002 [402]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "A massacre is the deliberate mass murder of the defenseless. The "Jenin massacre" is more than a fiction. It is a hoax. "Palestinian Authority allegations," reported the Boston Globe (April 29), ". . . appear to be crumbling under the weight of eyewitness accounts from Palestinian fighters who participated in the battle and camp residents who remained in their homes until the final hours of the fighting. . . . All said they were allowed to surrender or evacuate." Charles Krauthammer, May 3 2002 [403]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "One of the Jews' evil deeds is what has come to be called 'the Holocaust', that is, the slaughter of the Jews by Nazism. However revisionist historians have proven that this crime, carried out against some of the Jews, was planned by the Jews' leaders, and was part of their policy." - Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, official Palestinian Authority Television, September 21, 2001. [404]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Israelis "murder our kids and use their organs as spare parts." - Yasser Arafat, Al-Jazeera Television. January 13, 2002. "When the occupying authority holds the bodies of martyrs... they steal body parts of the martyrs." - Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, official Palestinian Authority daily. December 24, 2001. [405]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "On the matter of the baby settler who was killed in Hebron a few days ago, we already said that her death was a fishy action and there is information according to which this baby was retarded and it was her mother who killed her in order to get rid of her." - PA Radio. April 2, 2001(*). (The infant, Shalhevet Pass was shot in the head by a Palestinian sniper while in her mother's arms. Shalhevet's father was shot twice in the legs.) [406]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Israel has started a new genocide against the Palestinian people by poisoning them, using poisoned candy bags dropped down from airplanes." - Official Palestinian Authority website. May 21, 2001 [407]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Israel is distributing food containing material that causes cancer and hormones that harm male virility … We absolutely feel that it is an organized plan and conspiracy." Abdel Hamid al-Qudsi, Deputy Minister of the PA Ministry of Supplies (Yediot Ahronot, June 25, 1997) [408]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The occupation is using naked women to hunt down Intifada youth." -Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, official Palestinian Authority Daily, front page. Aug. 14, 2001.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Ironically, the PA has tried to absolve itself of the atrocities it commits by arguing that in fact, the Jews actually carried out these atrocities against themselves.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "On the matter of the baby settler who was killed in Hebron a few days ago, we already said that her death was a fishy action and there is information according to which this baby was retarded and it was her mother who killed her in order to get rid of her." - PA Radio. April 2, 2001.(*) (The infant, Shalhevet Pass was shot in the head by a Palestinian sniper while in her mother's arms. Shalhevet's father was shot twice in the legs.) [409]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Ironically, the PA has tried to absolve itself of the atrocities it commits by arguing that in fact, the Jews actually carried out these atrocities against themselves. [410]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The Israeli Mossad was behind the assassination in Jerusalem of Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi…. Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak had conspired together in September 2000 to allow Sharon to 'provoke' the Palestinians into violence that would provide an excuse for Israel to attack the Palestinians." - Yasser Arafat, interview on Israel Television Dec. 7-9.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The occupation is using naked women to hunt down Intifada youth." -Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, official Palestinian Authority Daily, front page. Aug. 14, 2001.
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: If the Palestinians suffer from human rights abuses today, it is because of their leadership, not because of Israel. Since the PA began taking over administration of the Palestinians in 1994, they have experienced a deteriorating standard of life, government corruption, a break down in the rule of law and a government that encouraged a culture of death, suicide bombing and violence.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: From 1992 to 1996, per capita income dropped 35% in Gaza and unemployment rose over 20% in Gaza and the West Bank. [411]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1997, 40% of the PA budget was reported "missing". Monopolistic practices and diversion of funds from development projects to alleged "security Forces have discouraged private foreign investment. [412]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: During the period of PA rule, there were new restrictions on association. The PA intimidated and assassinated political opposition leaders. It conducted arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture and unfair trials, especially in new State Security Courts, which "flagrantly" violate "Fair trial standards." [413]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arafat's "leadership brought the Palestinians to this terrible situation of chronic occupation, violence, dependence, suffering and pauperization. His consistent failure to achieve breakthroughs with the Israelis, the US, his own people, the Arab world and global public opinion is a shocking display of the autocratic incompetence, corruption and self-serving mismanagement, which prompted Palestinian calls for internal reforms well before Bush and Sharon raised this theme." Rami J Khouri, Executive Editor of the Beirut Daily Star, August 2003 [414]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: There were energetic demands for reform within the Palestinian Legislative Council long before Sharon raised the issue. The whole Council threatened to resign in September 2002 unless there was reform in the Palestinian Authority. "'Arafat hasn't been subjected to this degree of accountability before…This is an important precedent. Their main message is that they're seeking reform…'said George Giacaman of the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy…'We have started the reform….This is a positive step toward the division of authority and the rule of law…' said Salah Tamari." [415]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Khalil Shikaki, a respected Palestinian pollster, said the popular uprising that began here 28 months ago was aimed as much as the Palestinian Authority for its failure to deliver good government or to block expanding Jewish settlements as it was against the immediate effects of the Israeli occupation." New York Times January 12 2003 [416]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Khalil Shikaki, a respected Palestinian pollster, said the popular uprising that began here 28 months ago was aimed as much as the Palestinian Authority for its failure to deliver good government or to block expanding Jewish settlements as it was against the immediate effects of the Israeli occupation." New York Times January 12 2003 [417]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian society turns suicide bombers into heroic martyrs, naming streets, playgrounds and children's summer camps after them, plastering posters of them throughout the Territories, replaying their martyrdom videos on TV, and even selling 2002 Suicide Bomber calendars displaying the faces of all the dead bombers and Hamas' spiritual leader, Sheikh Yessin. Even the Nazis did not single out or honor those who slaughtered Jews. (London Observer Dec. 16, 2001) [418]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian children grow up in a culture in which suicide bombers are rock stars, sports heroes, and religious idols rolled into one…suicide bombing has become phenomenally popular. According to polls, 70 to 80% of Palestinians now support it." (Atlantic Monthly June 2002 ) [419]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Arab observers recognize that the Palestinian leadership's decision to initiate an Intifada instead of compromising and building their own state, has been a self-inflicted disaster for the Palestinian Arabs. In fact, Palestinians are trying to blame others for tragedies they have brought upon themselves.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: From 1992 to 1996, per capita income dropped 35% in Gaza and unemployment rose over 20% in Gaza and the West Bank. [411]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In 1997, 40% of the PA budget was reported "missing". Monopolistic practices and diversion of funds from development projects to alleged "security Forces have discouraged private foreign investment. [412]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: During the period of PA rule, there were new restrictions on association. The PA intimidated and assassinated political opposition leaders. It conducted arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture and unfair trials, especially in new State Security Courts, which "flagrantly" violate "Fair trial standards." [413]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arafat's "leadership brought the Palestinians to this terrible situation of chronic occupation, violence, dependence, suffering and pauperization. His consistent failure to achieve breakthroughs with the Israelis, the US, his own people, the Arab world and global public opinion is a shocking display of the autocratic incompetence, corruption and self-serving mismanagement, which prompted Palestinian calls for internal reforms well before Bush and Sharon raised this theme." Rami J Khouri, Executive Editor of the Beirut Daily Star, August 2003 [414]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: There were energetic demands for reform within the Palestinian Legislative Council long before Sharon raised the issue. The whole Council threatened to resign in September 2002 unless there was reform in the Palestinian Authority. "'Arafat hasn't been subjected to this degree of accountability before…This is an important precedent. Their main message is that they're seeking reform…'said George Giacaman of the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy…'We have started the reform….This is a positive step toward the division of authority and the rule of law…' said Salah Tamari." [415]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Khalil Shikaki, a respected Palestinian pollster, said the popular uprising that began here 28 months ago was aimed as much as the Palestinian Authority for its failure to deliver good government or to block expanding Jewish settlements as it was against the immediate effects of the Israeli occupation." New York Times January 12 2003 [416]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Khalil Shikaki, a respected Palestinian pollster, said the popular uprising that began here 28 months ago was aimed as much as the Palestinian Authority for its failure to deliver good government or to block expanding Jewish settlements as it was against the immediate effects of the Israeli occupation." New York Times January 12 2003 [417]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Palestinian society turns suicide bombers into heroic martyrs, naming streets, playgrounds and children's summer camps after them, plastering posters of them throughout the Territories, replaying their martyrdom videos on TV, and even selling 2002 Suicide Bomber calendars displaying the faces of all the dead bombers and Hamas' spiritual leader, Sheikh Yessin. Even the Nazis did not single out or honor those who slaughtered Jews. (London Observer Dec. 16, 2001) [418]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Palestinian children grow up in a culture in which suicide bombers are rock stars, sports heroes, and religious idols rolled into one…suicide bombing has become phenomenally popular. According to polls, 70 to 80% of Palestinians now support it." (Atlantic Monthly June 2002 ) [419]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: This claim threatens to make the moral yardstick developed since World War II trivial and meaningless because it misapplies the concepts of human rights abuses and re-introduces racism-anti-Semitism.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "The 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights marked a turning point away from the promise of a post-Cold War U.N. and universal human-rights standards. For the first time, the U.N.'s declared universality was modified by "national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds." Subsequent U.N. world conferences and summits in the 1990s added more qualifiers. Unadulterated universalism is no longer a U.N. rallying call. This degradation of standards reached its nadir at the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism. The conference was a U.N. "antiracism" meeting permitted to become a stage for anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. It produced a declaration reflecting those pressures. The U.N. has since made Durban the centerpiece of its antiracism agenda." Anne Bayefsky, April 29 2003 [426]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Terms such as 'genocide,' 'holocaust,' 'ethnic cleansing,' and even 'anti-Semitism, have been hijacked by the defamers of Israel and are now being used against the Jews, who have been the key victims of all these phenomena.'" Manfred Gerstenfeld 2002 [427]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "There is of late a very serious effort at disinformation about everything to do with the Middle East. There is a kind of madness that excuses all the crimes, abuses and errors of the Palestinian side, and…that condemns any single error of the Israeli side….I want to launch an appeal to the collective European way of thinking, and especially to the intellectuals and journalists because…they are in the process of creating a collective reality that is Judeophobic." Spanish leftist and intellectual, Pilar Rahola, 2002 [428]
      
      
• POINT 31: When will the Palestinian people deserve inclusion in America's drive for freedom and justice worldwide?
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: The US has included the Palestinians in its drive for freedom and justice worldwide. It has done more to help the Palestinians with humanitarian and financial aid than any other nation.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: The US has been the primary financial supporter of the Palestinian refugees for the past 54 years. The Unites States supplied close to two-thirds of UNRWA's (United Nations Reliefs and Works Agency) budget between its founding in 1950 and 1970, and subsequently supplied at least one-fourth of its funding. Since the program's inception in 1950, the US has been the largest donor, supplying a total of about $6.5 billion according to the Palestine Chronicle. January 5 2004 .(*) This money provides welfare, health care and education for Arab refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars.(**) [429]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The United States has been a major donor to the Palestinian Authority to help it develop a viable infrastructure and economy. It gave Palestinian groups $1.3 billion through its US AID program between 1993 and 2003, according to the Palestine Chronicle on January 5 2004.(*) This does not include other aid the US still provides the Palestinians through, for example, the United Nations Rehabilitation and Works Program (UNRWA). In 2002, the US upped its annual contribution to $119.25 million, according to the US Embassy.(**) In 2003, it pledged $95 million.(***) [430]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In the 2000-2001 negotiations, the US promised to help raise $30 billion to resolve the plight of Palestinian refugees: "There would be a right of return for the refugees to their own state, not to Israel, but there would also be a fund of $30 billion internationally that would be put together for either compensation or to cover repatriation, resettlement, rehabilitation costs." - Dennis Ross, Former US Envoy to the Middle East. [431]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The US has included the Palestinians in its drive for freedom and justice and fairness worldwide. It has done more than any other nation-with the exception of Israel perhaps-to help the Palestinians resolve their grievances and achieve their national aspirations.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Arab states never helped the Palestinians achieve autonomy or independence in the Territories. When Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza between 1948 and 1967, neither country ever supported the idea of autonomy or independence for Palestinians in the Territories [432]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Arab states never tried to help the Palestinians achieve autonomy or independence in the Territories. When Egypt fostered the development of the PLO in 1964, the original Charter explicitly excluded the Territories. The goal was to destroy Israel and replace it with Palestinian state: "This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or the Himmah Area." Article 24 of original PLO Charter, 1964 [433]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: More than any other nation, the United States has expended enormous amounts of time and led strenuous diplomatic efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli dispute and grant Palestinians autonomy, from the Rogers Plan in 1969, to President Carter's assistance with the Camp David Accords in 1978, the Schultz Plan in 1988, the Baker Plan in 1989, the Oslo Accords in 1993, and the Clinton-Barak plans in 2000.
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Carter, Clinton and Bush Administrations were the first and only nations since 1948 that called for the Palestinian Arabs to have their own state in the Territories and that tried to broker a deal to make the state come into being. Indeed, Jordan did not relinquish its claims to the West Bank until 1988. [434]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: Unfortunately, as long as Yasser Arafat, his Palestinian Authority and the terrorist groups leading the Intifada represent the Palestinian people, America cannot include them in its drive for freedom and justice worldwide. These groups are the enemies of freedom, justice, equality and peace, according to even Arab and Palestinian spokespeople.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Arafat destroyed freedom, justice, and equality in the Territories. His governance has seen "…the rise of a regime characterized by a massive police force whose specialty was intimidation of political opponents; an executive branch in which Arafat alone made all major decisions and in which the civil service was reduced to a corrupt patronage machine; the institutionalized absence of the rule of law, and a judiciary that lacked any independence; and the intimidation of the media and human rights organizations, to the point that it became virtually impossible to transmit any message other than one personally approved by Arafat." Historian Daniel Polisar, Human Rights Watch monitor, 2002 [435]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Arafat has destroyed Palestine. He has led it to terrorism, death and a hopeless situation. Arafat has also divided the country, as Saddam Hussein divided Iraq, heaping humiliation on the nation. Although he has become senile, Arafat still wants to retain the reins of Palestine in his hands. He has to be relieved of his responsibilities and should be forced to retire." Ahmed Al-Jarallah, Editor of the Arab Times, July 18, 2004 [436]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "It may be time for Yasser Arafat to fall on his sword or leave. The situation in Palestine is bad and getting worse. It is too easy to blame it one more time on Israel and the usual suspects -- the West, the Arabs, the others. But if you listened to Palestinians, they are saying their president for life -- Yasser Arafat -- is the problem along with his cronies who rule them, rob them and impoverish them." Youssef M. Ibrahim, Gulf News, July 20 2004 [437]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: In the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar, editor Jubran Tuweini wrote, "[T]he worst enemy of the Palestinian cause is the Palestinians, who have endorsed a policy of refusal and fundamentalist extremism as a way of behavior. How many times have they already served Israel with their deeds? How many times has the behavior of these groups already saved Ariel Sharon and his government?" December 24 2003 [438]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: On the liberal Arab website Elaph, Egyptian columnist Sami Buheiri wrote: "[T]he rabble majority of the Arab and Palestinian street today….refuse to accept any kind of a peace agreement with Israel... It is they who applaud the bus and restaurant bombings in order to destroy any spark of hope for peace... They are Arab nationalists who have failed completely in all their wars with Israel and in all attempts to achieve peace with Israel, because they were not serious, and they were not men - neither in fighting nor in peacemaking..." [439]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who was an intermediary in the negotiations, called Arafat's refusal to accept the Camp David offer "a crime against Palestinians, in fact against the whole region." (New Yorker interview March 24, 2003)
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "Prince Hassan bin Talal, uncle of Jordan's King Abdullah and a former heir to the throne of the Hashemite kingdom, has told an Italian newspaper that he sees Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a pragmatic man, who wants security for his people, but is unable to find a partner on the Palestinian side with whom to conduct negotiations."Ha'aretz, December 29 2003 [440]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: The US tried to include the Palestinians in the drive for freedom and justice. It asked Palestinian NGOs (non-government organizations) to make a pledge against hatred, violence and terrorism. In return, these groups would receive aid from the US Agency for International Development. The Palestinian NGOs refused.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: "In January 2004, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) issued guidelines requiring NGOs receiving funds through this agency to pledge "not to promote or engage in violence, terrorism, bigotry, or the destruction of any state, nor … make sub-grants to any entity that engages in these activities." The U.S. government guidelines list prohibited organizations, including many Palestinian groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades (the armed wing of Fatah), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In response, the Palestinian Nongovernmental Network, comprising ninety-two Palestinian NGOs, refused to sign the document. PNGO members announced that they preferred to forgo USAID funding, amounting to approximately $1 billion for the West Bank and Gaza between 1993 and 2002. PNGO urged its members to seek alternative funding from Europe and Japan, which do not require a similar pledge." [441]
      
      
• POINT 32: The United Nations Charter grants people who are under occupation the right to use "armed struggle" to resist illegal occupation.
  
  
  • COUNTERPOINT: There is nothing in the UN Charter that grants any group the right to initiate violence. Though the UN General Assembly did begin in the early 1970's to endorse the right of "dominated" peoples to use "armed struggle",(*) for self-determination, there is no way the Palestinians' terrorist war meets the criteria the UN outlined. The right to use "armed struggle" was for people who sought independence and self-determination. With the Oslo Accords (1993), the Palestinians had already been granted this right. They had no need to resort to armed struggle.

    (*) UN General Assembly Resolution 3246, November 29 1974 at http://ods-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/738/48/IMG/NR073848.pdf?OpenElement
    
    

    • Supporting Evidence: The right to resort to "armed struggle" was for people who sought "self-determination," and "freedom and independence." It was to be directed at "colonial powers which suppress their aspiration for freedom and independence…"(General Assembly Resolution 2627 (XXV) 1970 [446]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: The Oslo Accords (1993), Oslo II (1995) and the Camp David (2000) and Taba (2001) negotiations had all been designed precisely to give independence to the Palestinians.(*) By 1997, 98 to 99% of Palestinians were independent and under self-rule by their government, the Palestinian Authority.(**) [447]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: ""The armed violence used by national liberation movements [across the world] since the second half of the 20th century, for example in Algeria and Vietnam, did not intentionally target civilians. Its declared aim was to force the enemy to sit down at the negotiating table to reach a settlement. In contrast, you, in Hamas, have broken away from this political-military path by choosing to target Israeli civilians, and by stating that negotiating with Israel is a crime. You even refused to participate in the 1994 elections, because the Palestinian National Authority which organized them was born from the womb of negotiations with Israel…" Al-'Afif Al-Akhdhar in Al Hayat, July 14, 2002. [448]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: There is no way the Palestinians' terrorist war meets the criteria the UN outlined to justify the right to use "armed struggle." Israel is not a "foreign" colonial power that took over an independent country called Palestine. Israel is a neighboring country whose claim to the Territories is as great-if not greater-than the Palestinian claim. The land the Palestinians are trying to claim as their own is disputed territory, not occupied territory.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: Legally, the Territories are still governed by the League of Nations Mandate because no legal sovereign entity has yet been designated to govern them. The League of Nations Mandate specifically stipulated that the administrative power over the whole Palestine Mandate was to facilitate Jewish settlement of the land: The Mandatory powers "shall facilitate Jewish immigration…and shall encourage…close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes." Article 6 League of Nations Palestine Mandate. [449]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The two parcels of land (the West Bank and Gaza) are parts of the Mandate that have not yet been allocated to Jordan, to Israel, or to any other state..." Eugene W. Rostow, New Republic, 10/21/91. "The West Bank is…an unallocated part of the British Mandate." Rostow, The New Republic, 4/23/90
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Because the Territories have never been allocated to another sovereign entity, the Mandate rules calling for Jewish settlement in the area are still in force, making "The Jewish right of settlement in the area [is] equivalent in every way to the right of the local population to live there," according to Professor Eugene Rostow, former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the American Journal of International Law. [450]
      
      
  • COUNTERPOINT: There is no way the Palestinians' terrorist war meets the criteria the UN outlined to justify the right to use "armed struggle." Indeed, judging from Palestinian statements and opinions, the terrorist war is not a war for liberation, but rather a war of aggressive conquest whose purpose is to take over and destroy the UN member state of Israel.
    
    
    • Supporting Evidence: A poll released on October 22 2003 by Palestinian Media Watch, reveals that 59% of Palestinians believe that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad should continue their armed struggle against Israel even if Israel leaves all of the West Bank and Gaza, including east Jerusalem, and a Palestinian state is created. (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, October 20 2003 [451]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "The struggle will continue until all of Palestine is liberated." - Yasser Arafat, PLO Chairman (Voice of Palestine, 11 November 1995) [452]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: HAMAS Charter calls for the "obliteration of Israel" and of the Jews [453]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: "No one can complain about what Hamas and Jihad are doing. I say that it is the right of every Palestinian to struggle so long as there is a single Israeli soldier in the land of Palestine." - Farouk Qaddumi, head of the P.L.O.'s Political Department (Al-Musawar, 30 September 1994) [454]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: Yasser Arafat explicitly called for undoing the "Nakba," the Palestinian defeat in 1948: "Our nation is patient and determined which sacrificed its body to defend itself, which was laid bare by the Nakba carried out the international, Zionist and imperialist power, which didn't have the right to allow [the creation of Israel], for those who didn't have the right [the Zionists]. Acts of sacrifice, determination and revolution have sent a message to the world that Palestine is the homeland of the Palestinian nation and it has no other, and it will not accept an alternative to its homeland." Arafat Speech broadcast on PA Television for "Nakba Day," May 15 2004 [455]
      
      
    • Supporting Evidence: A Hamas leader in Gaza said he would not give up his arms even if Israel pulled out of Gaza because Haifa and Jerusalem are still "occupied"-cities that are part of pre-1948 Israel. "But speaking in Gaza City, Ahmed Bahar, one of the Hamas leaders on the Israeli hitlist, said the pullout from Gaza would not end the fighting. 'We will not throw away our weapons…Jerusalem is still occupied, Haifa is still occupied. They took our land by force and we have the right to take it back by force." The Guardian, April 23 2004 [456]
      
      

[1] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 169-171

[2] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 179

[3] (*) http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/concepts/d2.html

(**) http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/a47250072a3dd7950525672400783bde/fd4d250af882632b052565d2005012c3!OpenDocument

[4] (*) Cited in Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 153

(**) Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p 213

[5] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_whitepaper_1922.php

[6] 1939 British White Paper archived at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/brwh1939.htm

[7] Mandate Report archived at http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/fd4d250af882632b052565d2005012c3!OpenDocument

[8] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/a47250072a3dd7950525672400783bde/fd4d250af882632b052565d2005012c3!OpenDocument

[9] Cited in Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 73

[10] (*) Interim Report of the Mandatory to the League of Nations, June 30 1922 at http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/349b02280a930813052565e90048ed1c!OpenDocument

(**) Arieh Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession, 1984, p. 252

[11] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/a47250072a3dd7950525672400783bde/5f21f8a1ca578a57052566120067f658!OpenDocument

[12] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/a47250072a3dd7950525672400783bde/fd4d250af882632b052565d2005012c3!OpenDocument

[13] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p133; Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 227-229

[14] Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, 2003, p. 31

[15] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 453-456

[16] http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/alpart.html

[17] Cited in David Horowitz, State in the Making, 1953, p 233

[18] Al-Ayyam (Palestinian newspaper) September 3, 2003, translated at MEMRI at

[19] Al-Hayat, London, July 14, 2002. Translated at MEMRI at

[20] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI

[21] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[22] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[23] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[24] Benny Morris, “The Rejection,” The New Republic, 4/21/03 at http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[25] Cited in David Horowitz, State in the Making, 1953, p 233

[26] Cited in Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 8

[27] JC Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine, 1976, p. 308

[28] Cited in Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 20

[29] Cited in Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948 2002, p. 20

[30] Emil Ghoury, Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. Excerpt online at

[31] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,653594,00.html

[32] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 7

[33] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/a47250072a3dd7950525672400783bde/5f21f8a1ca578a57052566120067f658!OpenDocument

[34] Peel Commission Report, cited in Bard, Myths and Facts, p. 26

[35] Or Hearing before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Washington D.C., State Department, Jan. 11, 1946, Central Zionist Archive (Jerusalem), V/9960/g, p. 6.

[36] United Nations Official Records of the First Special Session of the General Assembly, Volume III, May 9 1949 archived at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/1343338d30d39dcf85256e5c00578e01!OpenDocument

[37] Cited in Marie Syrkin, “Palestinian Nationalism: Its Development and Goal,” in Michael Curtis et al, eds., The Palestinians: People, History, Politics, 1975, p. 201

[38] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 309

[39] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/4ecbf3578b6149c50525657100507fab!OpenDocument

[40] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/4ecbf3578b6149c50525657100507fab!OpenDocument

[41] Cited in David Horowitz, State in the Making, 1953, p 233

[42] Al-Ayyam (Palestinian newspaper) September 3, 2003, translated at MEMRI at

[43] Al-Hayat, London, July 14, 2002. Translated at MEMRI at

[44] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI

[45] Cited in Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2001, p. 322

[46] (*) Cited in Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p.321

(**) Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2001 p. 321

[47] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2001, p. 315

[48] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 221

[49] Martin Peretz, “The God that Did Not Fail,” The New Republic, September 8 and September 15 1997 at http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/Courses/so191/MiddleEastReadings/GodNotFail.html

[50] Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002 p. 92

[51] Cited in Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 92

[52] Cited in Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel,, p. 26

[53] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 22-23

[54] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 167.

[55] “An Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine to the League of Nations, June, 1921 at

[56] John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land, (1822) reprinted 1983, p. 299

[57] Cited in Samuel Katz, Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, 1977, p.128

[58] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 123

[59] Kenneth W. Stein, “The Jewish National Fund: Land Purchase Methods and Priorities, 1924-1939,” Middle Eastern Studies, April 1984, at

[60] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 253

[61] Moshe Aumann, Land Ownership in Palestine 1880-1948, 1976, p.5

[62] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 253

[63] The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry summaries are archived at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/anglo7.html

[64] The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry summaries are archived at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/anglo7.html

[65] Emil Ghoury, Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. Excerpt online at

[66] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian, February 21, 2002 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,653594,00.html

[67] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[68] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[69] Ya’akov Meron, “Why Jews Fled the Arab Countries,” Middle East Quarterly, September 1995 at http://www.meforum.org/article/263 Also in Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial, p. 29

[70] Ya’akov Meron, “Why Jews Fled the Arab Countries,” Middle East Quarterly, September 1995 at http://www.meforum.org/article/263

[71] http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/comment/comment-littman120302.asp

[72] Cited at

[73] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[74] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 157

[75] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 160

[76] Translated by MEMRI at

[77] Myths and Facts, 2001, p. 184

[78] http://www.fortruthssake.com/refugeezone/where.asp and

[79] (*) Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 442

(**)

[80] http://www.fortruthssake.com/refugeezone/where.asp

[81] http://mondediplo.com/focus/mideast/a2335

[82] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[83] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[84] Cited at

[85] Cited in Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, pp. 88-89

[86] Benny Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1998 edition, p. 296

[87] http://www.refugees.org/world/articles/palestinians_in_lebanon.htm

[88] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 442

[89] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, (eds.), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, p. 161

[90] http://www.un.org/unrwa/overview/qa.html

[91] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p 685

[92] http://ods-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/328/08/IMG/NR032808.pdf?OpenElement

[93] http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/41/a41r069.htm

[94] http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/41/a41r069.htm

[95] Cited in Mitchell Bard, Myths and facts, 2001 p. 186

[96] Figures available at

[97] Efraim Karsh, “What Occupation?” Commentary Magazine July-August 2002, p. 49

[98] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 686-688 and Efraim Karsh, “What Occupation?” Commentary Magazine July-August 2002, p. 49

[99] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 861-863; Efraim Karsh, “What Occupation?” Commentary Magazine July-August 2002, p. 49

[100] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 686-688 and 861-863; Efraim Karsh, “What Occupation?” Commentary Magazine July-August 2002, p. 49

[101] Cited in Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 707

[102] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p 679

[103] (*) Justus Reid Weiner, Illegal Construction in Jerusalem: A Variation of an Alarming Global Phenomenon, 2003, pp. 19-20

[104] Mitchell Bard, Myths and Facts 2001, p. 346

[105] http://info.jpost.com/C003/Supplements/Refugees/6-7.html

[106] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_whitepaper_1922.php

[107] http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/concepts/british.html

[108] http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/concepts/british.html

[109] (*) UN Resolution 3237, November 22 1974 at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/512baa69b5a32794852560de0054b9b2!OpenDocument

[110] Ross Dunn In Ar-Ram, “ End sleaze or lose aid, Arafat told,” Scotsman on Sunday, February 29 2004 at http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=238542004

[111] Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff and Bruno Schirra, “Arafat Bombs, Europe Pays,” Die Zeit, June 7 2002, Article archived at http://www.aijac.org.au/updates/Jun-02/130602.html

[112] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/covers/0,16641,1101681213,00.html

[113] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1967to1991_plo_un_1975.php

[114] http://almaz.com/nobel/peace/1994a.html

[115] John Lancaster, The Washington Post, January 13, 2001 at

[116] http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP42202

[117] http://www.jewishf.com/bk000818/isedan.shtml

[118] Cited in David Horowitz, State in the Making, 1953, p 233

[119] Al-Ayyam (Palestinian newspaper) September 3, 2003, translated at MEMRI at

[120] Al-Hayat, London, July 14, 2002. Translated at MEMRI at

[121] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI

[122] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[123] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[124] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[125] Efraim and Ina Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1999, Chapter 20 and Palestine Mandate text at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/palmanda.htm

[126] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p 100

[127] (*)Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 679

(**) Rephael Vardi, "The Beginning of Israeli Rule in Judea and Samaria," Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, April 16 1989 at http://www.jcpa.org/jl/hit08.htm

[128] http://www.bartleby.com/65/ca/CampDavAc.html

[129] Dennis Ross interview at

[130] http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A24668-2002May2¬Found=true

[131] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance” The Guardian, February 21, 2002

[132] http://www.hvk.org/articles/0502/195.html

[133] http://www.idf.il/daily_statistics/english/1.doc and http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull%26cid=1063856310295

[134] http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engMDE020032002?Open?Open

[135] http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engMDE020032002?Open?Open

[136] Editorial, “Stand Up to Evil,” Arab News, May 16 2003 at http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=26224&d=16&m=5&y=2003

[137] Al-Hayat, London, translated at MEMRI at

[138] “The Psychological Framework of Suicide Terrorism,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs at

[139] Article available at

[140] Article available at

[141] Article available at

[142] http://www.theatlanticmonthly.com/issues/2002/06/brooks.htm

[143] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4320907,00.html

[144] http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SP42602

[145] http://www.theatlanticmonthly.com/issues/2002/06/brooks.htm

[146] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4320907,00.html

[147] At

[148] At

[149] Interview with Benny Morris by Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest,” Haaretz, Jamuary 8 2004, archived at http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:ENM3MWa1RhQJ:http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/~censor/katz-directory/04-01-08haaretz-shavit-morris-english.doc+%22Survival+of+the+Fittest%22+Shavit&hl=en

[150] Count Folke Bernadotte, To Jerusalem (diary)

[151] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949, 1998, pp. 17-18.

[152] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 309

[153] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/4ecbf3578b6149c50525657100507fab!OpenDocument

[154] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 686-688 and Efraim Karsh, “What Occupation?” Commentary Magazine July-August 2002, p. 49

[155] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 861-863; Efraim Karsh, “What Occupation?” Commentary Magazine July-August 2002, p. 49

[156] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 686-688 and 861-863; Efraim Karsh, “What Occupation?” Commentary Magazine July-August 2002, p. 49

[157] Cited in Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 707

[158] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p 679

[159] New York Times January 17, 1997

[160] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/international/middl…/14MIDE.html?pagewanted=print&position=to

[161] MEMRI translation at

[162] http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?I=20020610&s=ephron061002

[163] http://www.arabtimesonline.com/arabtimes/opinion/view.asp?msgID=514

[164] Archived at http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040720-094015-8208r

[165] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 7

[166] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/a47250072a3dd7950525672400783bde/5f21f8a1ca578a57052566120067f658!OpenDocument

[167] Peel Commission Report, cited in Bard, Myths and Facts, p. 26

[168] Or Hearing before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Washington D.C., State Department, Jan. 11, 1946, Central Zionist Archive (Jerusalem), V/9960/g, p. 6.

[169] Cited in Marie Syrkin, “Palestinian Nationalism: Its Development and Goal,” in Michael Curtis et al, eds., The Palestinians: People, History, Politics, 1975, p. 201

[170] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 309

[171] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/4ecbf3578b6149c50525657100507fab!OpenDocument

[172] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/4ecbf3578b6149c50525657100507fab!OpenDocument

[173] http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/alpart.html

[174] Cited in David Horowitz, State in the Making, 1953, p 233

[175] Al-Ayyam (Palestinian newspaper) September 3, 2003, translated at MEMRI at

[176] Al-Hayat, London, July 14, 2002. Translated at MEMRI at

[177] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI

[178] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[179] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[180] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[181] Cited in Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2001, p. 322

[182] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2001, p. 315

[183] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 221

[184] Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002 p. 92

[185] Cited in Efraim Karsh, The Palestine War 1948, 2002, p. 92

[186] http://www.mideastweb.org/unscop1947.htm

[187] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/4ecbf3578b6149c50525657100507fab!OpenDocument

[188] Cited in Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, p 55

[189] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p133; Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 227-229

[190] Cited in Sarah Honig, “Fiendish Hypocristy II: The Man from Klopstock St.,” Jerusalem Post, April 6, 2001 .At http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/jpost/index.html?ts=1063833723

[191] Cited in Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 211

[192] Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti, 1993, p. 100 cited in Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, p 56

[193] Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, Blaming the Victims, 2001 p. 248

[194] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary history of the Middle East Conflict, 1987

[195] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 223

[196] Count Folke Bernadotte. Diary, To Jerusalem (Memoires) 1951 London

[197] Peel Commission Report, cited in Bard, Myths and Facts, p. 26

[198] Or Hearing before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Washington D.C., State Department, Jan. 11, 1946, Central Zionist Archive (Jerusalem), V/9960/g, p. 6.

[199] Cited at

[200] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[201] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 157

[202] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 160

[203] Translated by MEMRI at

[204] Myths and Facts, 2001, p. 184

[205] Cited in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 1975, Document 35, p. 154

[206] Cited at

[207] Cited in Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, pp. 88-89

[208] Benny Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1998 edition, p. 296

[209] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage; http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[210] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[211] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[212] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[213] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[214] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[215] http://channels.netscape.com/ns/news/story/jsp?id=200311032143000

[216] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[217] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/MEPP/PRRN/hammarberg.html

[218] Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael, “Palestinian refugees: championed by Arab world yet treated like outcasts,” available at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1051472/posts and LA Times version at http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-adfg-palestine4jan04,1,6405678.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1049671/posts

[219] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p 685

[220] http://ods-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/328/08/IMG/NR032808.pdf?OpenElement

[221] http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/41/a41r069.htm

[222] http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/41/a41r069.htm

[223] Translated in Palestine Media Watch Bulletin, June 30 2004 at http://www.pmw.org.il/

[224] Benny Morris, “The Rejection,” The New Republic, 4/21/03 at http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[225] Al-Ayyam (Palestinian newspaper) September 3, 2003, translated at MEMRI at

[226] Al-Hayat, London, July 14, 2002. Translated at MEMRI at

[227] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI

[228] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[229] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[230] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[231] http://www.oas.org/OER/gallerypo/PermanObsPublication/israel2.htm

[232] http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/facts%20about%20israel/people/SOCIETY

[233] Available at http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/20_Facts_about_Israel_and_the_Middle_East.asp

[234] At http://www.mideastweb.org/hamas.htm

[235] MEMRI Dispatch at http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP13800

[236] In The New Republic, 4/11/03 at

[237] Haycraft Commission report cited at http://palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_riots_1920-21.php

[238] http://www.ciaonet.org/mes/mes11/

[239] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p 203

[240] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p133; Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 227-229

[241] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 212

[242] Report available at http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/a47250072a3dd7950525672400783bde/fd4d250af882632b052565d2005012c3!OpenDocument

[243] http://www.etzel.org.il/english/index.html

[244] “Restraint and Retaliation” at http://www.etzel.org.il/english/index.html

[245] Archived at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/anglo15.html

[246] http://www.etzel.org.il/english/index.html

[247] Professor Yehuda Lapidot, “The Irgun Site,” at http://www.etzel.org.il/english/index.html

[248] http://www.etzel.org.il/english/index.html

[249] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 278

[250] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 7

[251] Peel Commission Report, cited in Bard, Myths and Facts, p. 26

[252] Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, p 150

[253] Benny Morris, “The Rejection,” The New Republic, 4/21/03 at http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[254] Yehoshua Porath: Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion 1929-1939, Vol. 2, p81-82

[255] Benny Morris, cited in Alan Dershowtiz, The Case for Israel, p. 46

[256] Count Folke Bernadotte, To Jerusalem (diary)

[257] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949, 1998, pp. 17-18

[258] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, pp. 219

[259] http://www.npr.org/news/specials/mideast/history/history4.html

[260] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1948to1967_plo_backgd.php

[261] Dr. Adel Sadaq, "Class Isn't Over Yet, Stupid," Hadith al Madina, [Egyptian newspaper] April 23 2002, translated and archived at http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=countries&Area=egypt&ID=SP37302

[262] (*)"Palestinian Children's attitudes to women and minorities" from ALPHA Institute for Research and Statistics, as reported in Palestinian newspaper, Al-Ayyam, February 19 2004 in cited at "Latest Updates," Palestine Media Watch, March 25, 2004 at (**"" TARGET="_blank">http://www.pmw.org.il/

(**" TARGET="_blank">http://www.pmw.org.il/

(**)"Palestinian Children's attitudes to women and minorities" from ALPHA Institute for Research and Statistics, as reported in Palestinian newspaper, Al-Ayyam, February 19 2004 in cited at "Latest Updates," Palestine Media Watch, March 25, 2004 at http://www.pmw.org.il/

[263] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1991to_now_plo_charter_revise.php

[264] http://www.iris.org.il/quotes/allquotes.txt

[265] Peace Watch

[266] The New Republic April 11, 2003

[267] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1991to_now_plo_charter_revise.php

[268] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50830,00.html

[269] Dershowitz, 162

[270] http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=13885

[271] http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=14817

[272] http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=6&x_article=94 http://www.edume.org/reports/report1.htm http://www.saidit.org/archives/feb03/article1.html

[273] http://www.edume.org/reports/5/1.htm

[274] http://www.edume.org/reports/5/1.htm

[275] http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/myths/mf22.html

[276] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 679

[277] Letter of Agreement available at http://www.israel-mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH00sc0 1

[278] Dennis Ross interview at

[279] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI

[280] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 886

[281] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50830,00.html

[282] Security Council Official Records, Special Supplement, 1948, p. 20

[283] Cited in Dr. Elfan Rees, “Speech to the UN” 1958 in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, p. 154

[284] Cited in Isi Leibler, The Case for Israel, 1972, p. 60

[285] Cited in Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, “20 Facts About the Middle East” available at http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/20_Facts_about_Israel_and_the_Middle_East.asp

[286] http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/syria_raid.html

[287] http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Peace/benamidiary.html

[288] "Camp David: an Exchange." The New York Review of Books. September, 20, 2001.

[289] Statement on the Middle East Peace Talks at Camp David The White House, The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room Washington, DC, July 25, 2000 Released by The White House Office of the Press Secretary

[290] http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4419440-103680,00.html

[291] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50830,00.html

[292] (*) Jerusalem Post, August 9, 2001.

[293] Al-Ayyam (Palestinian newspaper) September 3, 2003, translated at MEMRI at

[294] Al-Hayat, London, July 14, 2002. Translated at MEMRI at

[295] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI

[296] http://www.theatlanticmonthly.com/issues/2002/06/brooks.htm

[297] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4320907,00.html

[298] http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SP42602

[299] http://www.theatlanticmonthly.com/issues/2002/06/brooks.htm

[300] (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4320907,00.html )

[301] At

[302] Poll available at

[303] Greg Myre, “Trial of Palestinian Leader Focuses Attention on Israeli Courts,” New York Times, May 5, 2003

[304] Translated by MEMRI at

[305] Translated by MEMRI at

[306] http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Facts+About+Israel/State/THE+STATE-+Elections.htm

[307] http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP3499

[308] http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP3499

[309] http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP3499

[310] http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=331495&contrassID=1&subContrassID=7&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

[311] New York Times January 17, 1997

[312] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/international/middl…/14MIDE.html?pagewanted=print&position=to

[313] MEMRI translation at

[314] http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?I=20020610&s=ephron061002

[315] http://www.arabtimesonline.com/arabtimes/opinion/view.asp?msgID=514

[316] Archived at http://www.upi.com/view.cfm

[317]

(*) Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, 2003, pp. 52-54

(**) Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, 2003, pp. 63-64

(***) Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, 2003, pp. 63-64

(****) Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, 2003, p. 67

(*****) Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, 2003, p. 67

(******) Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, 2003, p. 61

(*******) http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/massacre.html

(********) http://www.fact-index.com/l/li/list_of_terrorist_incidents.html

[318] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI

[319] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, pp. 219

[320] http://www.npr.org/news/specials/mideast/history/history4.html

[321] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1948to1967_plo_backgd.php

[322] http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=countries&Area=egypt&ID=SP37302

[323] (http://www.theatlanticmonthly.com/issues/2002/06/brooks.htm

[324] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4320907,00.html

[325] http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SP42602

[326] http://www.theatlanticmonthly.com/issues/2002/06/brooks.htm

[327] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4320907,00.html

[328] at

[329] at

[330] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p 100

[331] Steve Menashi, “Sad Sad Said, Dartmouth Review, August 1998 at http://www.dartreview.com/issues/5.27.98/said.html

[332] Cited at http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/jordan.html

[333] http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[334] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p. 7

[335] http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/a47250072a3dd7950525672400783bde/5f21f8a1ca578a57052566120067f658!OpenDocument

[336] Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, p 150

[337] Yehoshua Porath: Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion 1929-1939, Vol. 2, p81-82

[338] Benny Morris, cited in Alan Dershowtiz, The Case for Israel, p. 46

[339] Count Folke Bernadotte, To Jerusalem (diary)

[340] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949, 1998, pp. 17-18.

[341] Yoav Gelber, Palestine 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 2001, pp.298-299

[342] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 22-23

[343] John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land, (1822) reprinted 1983, p. 299

[344] Arieh L. Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs 1878-1948, 2002 edition, p. 20

[345] Haycraft Commission report cited at http://palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_riots_1920-21.php

[346] http://www.ciaonet.org/mes/mes11/

[347] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p 203

[348] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, 2001, p133; Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 227-229

[349] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, p. 212

[350] Report available at http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/a47250072a3dd7950525672400783bde/fd4d250af882632b052565d2005012c3!OpenDocument

[351] http://palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate_riots_1920-21.php

[352] http://www.etzel.org.il/english/index.html

[353] “Restraint and Retaliation” at http://www.etzel.org.il/english/index.html

[354] Al-Ayyam (Palestinian newspaper) September 3, 2003, translated at MEMRI at

[355] Al-Hayat, London, July 14, 2002. Translated at MEMRI at

[356] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI

[357] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[358] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[359] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[360] Benny Morris, “The Rejection,” The New Republic, 4/21/03 at http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[361] http://www.knesset.gov.il

[362] http://www.knesset.gov.il

[363] Poll available at

[364] Translated by MEMRI at

[365] Interview March 2004, translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD68804

[366] Translated by MEMRI at http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP60503

[367] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 670-671

[368] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 670-671

[369] http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0bzz0

[370] Howard Sacher

[371] http://www.paktoday.com/deserve.htm

[372] Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, 2000, pp. 670-671

[373] http://www.israel-un.org/archive/latest-archive.htm#1999

[374] http://www.israel-un.org/archive/latest-archive.htm#1999 (?)

[375] Amnesty International, July 11, 2002. http://www.hrw.org/wr2k/Mena-07.htm

[376] http://www.arabtimesonline.com/arabtimes/opinion/view.asp?msgID=514

[377] Archived at http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040720-094015-8208r

[378] Al-Ayyam (Palestinian newspaper) September 3, 2003, translated at MEMRI at

[379] Al-Hayat, London, July 14, 2002. Translated at MEMRI at

[380] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI

[381] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[382] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[383] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[384] Benny Morris, “The Rejection,” The New Republic, 4/21/03 at http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[385] Anita Shapira, “The Past is Not a Foreign Country,” The New Republic, 11/29/99 at

[386] Efraim Karsh, “The Unbearable Lightness of My Critics,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2002 at

[387] Aharon Megged, “The Israeli Suicide Drive,” Ha’aretz Weekly Magazine, June 10, 1994, pp. 27, 92.

[388] Cited by Julie Bosman, “What is a Palestinian Refugee Camp?” May 10 2002 at http://slate.msn.com/id/2065656

[389] Barbara Wolf, “Falling Through the Cracks: Reflections on the Palestinian Refugee Camps,” The Ambassadors Online Magazine, January 2000 at http://ambassadors.net/archives/issue7/opinions_gaza.htm

[390] Anne bayefsky, “At the UN, Israel Bashing Is Always the First Priority,” Chicago Sun Times, March 30 2003, cited in Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, 2003, p. 184

[391] “See No Evil,” Wall Street Journal Online May 14 2004 at http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108483696135614030,00.html

[392] Australia Tibet Council at http://www.atc.org.au/whatcanido/post.html

[393] “DR Congo Presents Frightening Picture of Human Rights Abuses,” UN Report, November 10 2003 at http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/0/f502770db72e22a785256dda007c9dc1?OpenDocument

[394] “Slavery Today in Africa is still horrific,” Massachusett’s News, March 2001 at http://www.massnews.com/past_issues/2001/march%202001/marafrica.htm “Slavery Today in Africa is still horrific,” Massachusett’s News, March 2001 at http://www.massnews.com/past_issues/2001/march%202001/marafrica.htm

[395] http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/aboutburma/humanrights.html

[396] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50830,00.html

[397] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50830,00.html

[398] Ross Dunn In Ar-Ram, “ End sleaze or lose aid, Arafat told,” Scotsman on Sunday, February 29 2004 at http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=238542004

[399] Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff and Bruno Schirra, “Arafat Bombs, Europe Pays,” Die Zeit, June 7 2002, Article archived at http://www.aijac.org.au/updates/Jun-02/130602.html

[400] Barbara Slavin, “Bush’s Plan Follows Harsh History: Many US Peace Proposals Since 60’s Haven’t Worked,” USA Today, 2002 at http://www.mafhoum.com/press3/103P51.htm

[401] Benny Morris, “Peace? No Chance,” The Guardian , February 21, 2002 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,653594,00.html

[402] Senator Joseph R Biden, “Truth vs. Double Standards in Jenin,” May 6 2002, NYU Global Beat at

[403] http://www.tampabayprimer.org/index.cfm?action=articles&drill=viewArt&art=362

[404] http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP27601

[405] http://www.zoa.org/pubs/ArafatsLegacyOfLies.PDF

[406] (*) http://www.zoa.org/pubs/ArafatsLegacyOfLies.PDF Translation courtesy of IMRA.

[407] http://.http://www.wafa.pna.net/EngText/21-05-2001/page014.htm

[408] Cited in http://www.freeman.org/m_online/jul97/govt.htm

[409] http://www.zoa.org/pubs/ArafatsLegacyOfLies.PDF Translation courtesy of IMRA

[410] "One of the Jews' evil deeds is what has come to be called 'the Holocaust', that is, the slaughter of the Jews by Nazism. However revisionist historians have proven that this crime, carried out against some of the Jews, was planned by the Jews' leaders, and was part of their policy." - Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, official Palestinian Authority Television, September 21, 2001.

[411] http://www.israel-un.org/archive/latest-archive.htm#1999 (?)

[412] http://www.israel-un.org/archive/latest-archive.htm#1999 (?)

[413] Amnesty International, July 11, 2002. http://www.hrw.org/wr2k/Mena-07.htm

[414] http://www.dailyalert.org/archive/2003-08/2003-08-29.html

[415] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articlesA5462-2002Sep11.html

[416] Dexter Filkins, “A Political Limbo Tests Arafat’s Fortitute,” New York Times, January 12 2003 at

[417] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1076213366908&p=1078397702269

[418] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4320907,00.html

[419] http://www.theatlanticmonthly.com/issues/2002/06/brooks.htm

[420] Al-Hayat, London, July 14, 2002. Translated at MEMRI at

[421] “Why an Even More Difficult Future Awaits Us, Palestinians and Arabs,” Al-Hayat (London) July 21, 2002, at MEMRI

[422] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[423] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[424] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[425] Benny Morris, “The Rejection,” The New Republic, 4/21/03 at http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030421&s=morris042103

[426] Anne Bayefsky, “Human Wrongs,” Wall Street Journal, April 29 2003 at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=7553

[427] Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Europe’s Moral Attitudes Toward the Holocaust in Light of the Current Defamation of Israel,” Jerusalem Viewpoint, April 1 2002 at

[428] Marc Tobiass, “Judeophobia Explains the Pro-Palestinian Hysteria of the European Left,” Interview with Pilar Rahola, proche-orient.com, October 2 2002 at http://www.proche-orient.info/en_xjournal_racism_int.php3?id_article=5283

[429] (*) Mohammed Daraghmeh, "Palestinian Groups Refuse US Money," Palestine Chronicle, January 5 2004 at (**"" TARGET="_blank">http://palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20040107135522110

(**" TARGET="_blank">http://palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20040107135522110

(**)Mitchell Bard, citing UNRWA data in Myths and Facts, 2001, p. 182 and US Congressional Services Research Department, November 21, 2003 at http://www.pennyhill.com/middleeastandnorthafrica/rs21668.html

[430] (*) Mohammed Daraghmeh, "Palestinian Groups Refuse US Money," Palestine Chronicle, January 5 2004 at (**"" TARGET="_blank">http://palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20040107135522110

(**" TARGET="_blank">http://palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20040107135522110

(**) US Embassy Press Release September 25 2002 at (***"" TARGET="_blank">http://www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/peace/archives/2002/september/092604.html

(***" TARGET="_blank">http://www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/peace/archives/2002/september/092604.html

(***) http://www.useu.be/Categories/GlobalAffairs/Middle_East/May2203USAidPalestinians.html

[431] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50830,00.html

[432] See Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, 1997, pp. 178-179

[433] PLO original Charter archived at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/cove1.html

[434] CBC News, "Quest for Peace: Jordan's King Hussein," archived at http://www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/mideast/hussein_text.html

[435] Daniel Polisar, "Yasser Arafat and the Myth of Legitimacy," 2002 at http://216.109.117.135/search/cache?p=Arafat+elected+president+percent+vote&ei=UTF8&cop=mss&xargs=0&pstart=1&b=21&u=http://www.jpef.net/sep02/Yasser%2520Arafat.pd&w=arafat+elected+president+percent+vote&d=1B921E5C46&icp=1

[436] http://www.arabtimesonline.com/arabtimes/opinion/view.asp?msgID=514

[437] By Youssef M. Ibrahim, "Outside View: Time for Arafat to Go?" Gulf News, July 20 2004 archived at http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040720-094015-8208r

[438] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[439] Translated by MEMRI at http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP63604

[440] Haaretz Service, "Jordan's Hassan: Sharon Pragmatic, But Cannot Find a Partner," Haaretz Daily, December 29 2003 at http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=377281&contrassID=1&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

[441] Gerald Steinberg, "NGOs Make War on Israel," Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2004 at http://www.meforum.org/article/633

[442] http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engMDE020032002?Open?Open

[443] http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engMDE020032002?Open?Open

[444] John Sigler, "Palestine: Legitimate Armed Resistance vs Terrorism," Electronic Intifada, May 14 2004 at http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2684.shtml

[445] Abdel Rahman al-Rashed (general manager of Al- Arabiya news channel) "Innocent Religion is Now a Message of Hate,". Article appeared in the pan-Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. September 4 2004. Reprinted in Telegraph News, September 9 2004 at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/05/wosse605.xml

[446] UN General Assembly Resolution 2621 (XXV), October 12 1970

[447] (*) Dennis Ross, US Envoy to the Middle East, interview on Fox News at (**"" TARGET="_blank">http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50830,00.html

(**" TARGET="_blank">http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50830,00.html

(**) Dore Gold et al, "Occupied Territories or Disputed Territories?" Jerusalem Issue Brief, September 2 2001 at http://www.jcpa.org/art/brief1-1.htm

[448] http://www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SP40102

[449] Palestine Mandate Charter at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/palmanda.htm

[450] http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/myths/mf22a.html

[451] Public Opinion and Marketing Research of Israel (PORI) Sept 2003 at http://www.pmw.org.il/

[452] Cited at http://www.iris.org.il/quotes/quote36.htm

[453] http://www.mideastweb.org/hamas.htm

[454] Cited at http://www.iris.org.il/quotes/allquotes.txt

[455] Amon Regular, "Arafat calls on Palestinians to 'Terrorize your Enemy'," Ha'aretz, May 15 2004 at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/427699.html

[456] Ewen MacAskill, "Youths on Gaza Frontline Keep Hatred Alive, The Guardian, April 23 2004 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1201534,00.html