Category Archives: Library

After reading Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent op-ed column in the ignoble NYTimes, it’s obvious to me why the Israeli government doesn’t like dealing with him—even if he would negotiate which, so far, he has refused to do.

In addition to being a Holocaust denier (see his PhD thesis) Abbas is a world champion prevaricator. Referring to the 1947 U.N. partition of Palestine in the column, Abbas doesn’t mention Palestinian Arab rejection of it then and subsequent Palestinian militia attacks on Jewish settlements. All he says is “Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs.”

Actually they primarily expelled the ones whose villages had attacked Jewish settlements or else commanded roads and other terrain features the invading Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi armies would use, according to Israeli historian Benny Morris’s pull-no-punches 2009 history “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.”

As even Shlomo Avineri, a columnist at the Left-wing Ha’aretz newspaper (sometimes derided as the only Hebrew-language Arab newspaper in the Middle East) puts it: “A decision to go to war has consequences…Effects cannot be divorced from causes.”

Unless you’re a lying Palestinian president, or one of his fellow-traveling political or news media enablers who studiously ignores history.