Johnny Depp is older than the ‘Palestinian people’

Jewish college students face humiliation from peers who demand answers to questions based on slanderous lies about the Jewish people. “How can you live with being complicit in genocide?” “How dare you show your face on campus, you murderer?” “How can you justify white supremacy in Israel?” and on and on.

The Tanakh warns us, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him,” (Proverbs 26:4) but Jewish students often don’t have that luxury: The fools in question are none other than their very own professors.

I wish more American college students were aware that their professors are lying to them about Israel. This is no easy feat, as I’m just a 60-year-old Jew with a laptop facing off against a four-decade, $12 billion Arab-funded disinformation campaign aimed at American universities. But, it is necessary to try, so here goes.

The foundational accusation is that Israel is a European settler colonial entity that stole land from the ancient, indigenous Palestinian People through the heavy hand of British imperialism. The so-called Palestinians are Muslim “people of color” whose long tenure in the area can be proven by the fact that they have referred to Jerusalem as “Al Quds” in Arabic for over 1,100 years. Therefore, the “Palestinians” are justified in savage acts of war to displace the “settler colonialist” Jews and have a “right of return” to “their land.” As illegal occupiers, Israel is further accused of committing genocide against the indigenous “Palestinians.”

This is how more than a few American college professors describe the situation in Israel to their students—justifying all sorts of disruptive protests, violent intimidation of Jewish students, vandalism, and more.

There’s just one problem. The professors’ claims are false. Why American college professors feel they can lie about Israel with impunity is a good question. Perhaps they don’t know they’re lying, in which case I would argue they have no business in the teaching profession. Or, they’re cynically manipulating gullible American kids into backing their cause.

Alternatively, and this is increasingly common, they’re being paid to lie. Entire Arab-funded departments have been richly endowed to spread these lies on campus. In this case, self-proclaimed world-class Middle Eastern scholars explain to their young charges that the Jews, who lived throughout the Middle East for well over 2,000 years, predating the rise of Islam, are a fictitious people.

No, they explain, today’s Jews are white Europeans who became Jews in the Middle Ages through a spurious conversion process (the so-called “Khazer theory”), so their presence in Israel is an act of colonialism. This is an impressive feat of intellectual dishonesty, considering that even the most cursory look at history reveals that the Muslim world long hosted Jewish communities, which they treated as second-class “dhimmis” (i.e., apartheid) before violently expelling them in 1948. Maybe these professors need to take a Middle East 101 course or something, but that would interfere with them teaching an entire generation of American leaders to hate Israel and feel good about Jewish death and suffering.

Let’s break down the slander and see if we can make some sense of what’s going on. First, though, we should examine the tiny threads of truth embedded in the false narrative. It is true that a small number of Arabic speaking Muslims have been living in the area of Israel for 1,100 years. This is a historical fact, and out of respect for that history, the British, in their role administering the former Ottoman territory of Palestine, recommended a partition of the land into Jewish and Arab sectors in 1947.

The Arabs rejected that plan and sent five armies to destroy Israel and kill every Jew in the area. They were defeated. The war did displace some Arab residents, but it was a war that Israel neither wanted nor started. Responsibility for the refugees falls squarely on the Arab invaders, but the world has made it 100% Israel’s problem to solve. Muslims have holy sites in Jerusalem, and the State of Israel has almost always honored Muslim requests for access and non-interference at those sites.

Now, to the canards, starting with the accusation that Israel is a white European colonial enterprise. What percent of Israel’s population do you think is of European descent? 100%, 80%? How about 20%? That’s right. Just one fifth of Israelis are of European ancestry. The rest are Middle Eastern Jews, Muslims, North Africans, or Africans. You know, “people of color.” As for the colonial aspect of this lie, don’t believe the fairy tale that the British Empire imposed Jewish residency in the area, that Israel is sort of like Rhodesia, a white colony that subjugated local “people of color.” This is a whopper.

Here’s the truth: The Turkish Ottoman Empire was on the losing side of World War I. As the victors, Britain and France presided over the self-determination of the empire’s many peoples. Most of the countries in the Arab world were created through this process, including Israel. If you object to the establishment of the state of Israel, you must also reject the existence of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and many others.

The area known as Palestine was a province of the Ottoman Empire, a piece of land that has been conquered and reconquered multiple times since the Jews left in 70AD. It was never the geographic setting of some ancient Palestinian nation. This is why those pervasive maps showing Zionist “theft of Palestinian land” that you see around campus are completely fake.

As for the genocide libel, American college professors accuse Israel of deliberately exterminating the indigenous Palestinian people. This genocide has been so diabolical that none of the thousands of reporters assigned to Israel over the last 75 years have ever seen it take place. Indeed, this “genocide” has been so thorough in its evil that the Muslim population of Gaza and the territories has gone from a robust 500,000 in 1948 to mere 5 million today, a pathetic husk of its former self. South Africa, which confidently brought the charge of genocide against Israel at the ICC this year, has had to ask for a delay in the proceedings because they can’t find any evidence of this crime against humanity. Funny how that works.

Now, to the “stolen land” lie. There has been a continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel for over 3,600 years. The historical records of numerous civilizations are replete with detailed accounts of the existence of a Jewish kingdom in Israel starting around 1400 BC. Then, after being expelled from Israel by the Roman Empire in the year 70AD, the majority of Jews lived outside of Israel. Some moved back over the intervening centuries, however.

This process picked up speed in the 1880s, as European Jews migrated back to their holy land, the site of the historic Jewish kingdom and the holy Temple in Jerusalem. This is why the Torah mentions Jerusalem hundreds of times, versus the Quran, which mentions the city precisely zero times.

The Jews bought 100% of the land they resided on from absentee Ottoman landlords. At that time, and until the 1948 war, no one ever mentioned the existence of an ancient “Palestinian People” who were affected by these land purchases and the arrival of Jews. There was talk of “local Arabs” being troubled by the Jewish presence, and there were some violent confrontations, mostly notably the 1929 pogrom in Hebron, which led to dozens of Jewish deaths.

There was no mention of “Palestinians” during the 1948 war or its aftermath. There was never any mention of this allegedly ancient people during the eras of Greek dominance of Israel in the 4^th and 5^th centuries BC. The historical records of the Romans, who controlled what they called “Judea,” the land of the Jews, never cited the existence of a “Palestinian People.” Nor did the Persian empire, the Babylonians, and Assyrians, who also conquered the area. Byzantium has no records of Palestinians, either. For that matter, the Ottoman Turks, who controlled the area for the 500 years leading up to 1919, never discussed any Palestinian people. If they did, they referenced Arab Muslims who were citizens of the Ottoman Empire.

When did references to this ancient, indigenous “Palestinian People” enter the historical record? The answer is 1964. (AD, that is, not BC). That’s pretty recent. In fact, Johnny Depp is older than the Palestinians. The term was coined by the KGB, then trying to defeat the USA, Israel’s ally, as a proxy in the Cold War.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what Zuheir Mohsen, a leader of the PLO, said on the matter in 1977: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people.”

Realizing that their claim to indigenous status is null and void, some Arab intellectuals and their apologists at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia changed their story and claimed that the Palestinians are actually the descendants of the ancient Philistines, from which the word “Palestine” derives. This is an unprovable point, but it is almost certainly a fabrication. The Philistines, who lived in the area even before the Jews arrived. disappeared from the historical record in the 6^th century BC.

The current Arab Muslims living there have zero cultural or religious expressions of identity to link them to the Philistines, which is what you have with Spanish speaking Catholics in Central America who trace their roots to the Aztecs. Rather, most honest historians agree that the ancestors of the Arab Muslim residents of the Israel area arrived with Arab conquests of the land in the 9^th Century AD. It’s possible that the Arab Muslim invaders converted some people already living there to Islam, but those people, if they existed, were likely descended from any number of previous conquering nations. It’s an unknowable fact. A large number of this allegedly ancient people actually arrived as recently as the 1930s, when Jewish immigrants drained the area’s malarial swamps and developed a viable economy.

Going a little deeper, we see that the foundational claim about Palestinian rights to the land of Israel is actually a two-threaded argument. One the one hand, we have the bogus reference to the non-existent Palestinian people. On the other, we have the historically accurate assertion that the land of Israel has been under Muslim control for 1,100 years. The problem for “Palestinians” is that the Muslim-centric argument undermines the indigenous argument.

The Islamic argument against Israel, in contrast to the indigenous argument, has nothing to do with the fictitious “Palestinian People.” It’s simply a claim that, because the Arabs conquered the area in the 9^th century in the name of Allah and Islam, they are entitled to take it back through force. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this argument. The Arabs are entitled to make the claim and wage war against Israel, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the rights of a nonexistent people. And, a drive to invade a sovereign country for reasons of conquest should not merit the kind of exclusive fury and phony self-righteousness foisted on college students by their teachers.

This is why we have attacks from Hezbollah (The Party of Allah) against Israel. They don’t care about any so-called Palestinians. They’re intent on destroying Israel because they’re offended that Jews are living in Dar al Islam, the world created by Islamic conquests that occurred well after historically proven Jewish sovereignty in Israel. As a result, the struggle for “Palestine” is just one of dozens of ethnic-territorial conflicts going on in the world right now. Why this dirty war should be the most important issue on campus today should be a mystery.

In fact, the Islamic argument for invading “Palestine” legitimizes the true Jewish claim on the land. It’s an admission that the Arabs arrived after the Jews. Genius professors somehow can’t connect the dots here and explain why the Al Aqsa Mosque, built on the site of the much older Jewish Temple, somehow proves that the Arabs are entitled to the land. The Muslims who established the Al Aqsa Mosque were abundantly aware that they were building it on an ancient Jewish holy site. It’s why they selected the spot in the first place.

My advice to American college students is this: If you’re getting ready to march in protest against Israel, set up tents, spit on your Jewish classmates, or feel “exhilarated” that Jewish babies are being burned alive in front of our parents—because your professors told you that resistance to white settler colonialism is justified—you’re taking action in service of a lie. You’re better than that, I’d hope. Instead, use your critical thinking skills to get at the truth. Question what you’re being told. You’re a student. Go to the library and look it up. Don’t accept TikTok as fact. Think for yourself.