Palestinian Solidarity Campaign Stands Solidly With Lies

The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, the “UK-wide campaigning group on behalf of the Palestinians” fails to accurately display any facts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and serves only to detrimentally affect the “poor helpless Palestinians” it seeks so desperately to uplift.

The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign begins their history in 1897 with the Zionist Conference of 1897 at which Jewish leaders, under constant threat of anti-Semitic attacks, seeking a home for the Jewish people chooses to settle in the historical territory of Palestine. PSC misrepresents this as Zionists claiming and occupying land illegally.

Fast forward to 1917; PSC misrepresents the Balfour Declaration, ignoring the history of the anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and the continued support of the Jews to Britain during World War I. PSC also states that at this time, only 5% of population of “Palestine” is Jewish while 95% are Palestinian Arabs. In actuality, roughly 10% of the population of Israel was Jewish and Jerusalem itself had a 65% Jewish population.

Moreover, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign fails to note that Palestine itself is a colonialist name adopted by the “Arabic speaking world” after conquering the land “for the purposes of spreading Islam”; furthermore, a Jewish presence has always existed in the historical land of Israel. Not to mention, Palestine as a term was only adopted less than 100 years ago during the British mandate, again under colonial rule; the term began to become widely spread only after 1967 when the Arab world began to formulate a way to remove the historical existence of the Jewish people.

Palestinians, the Making of a People, a pro-Palestinian narrative by Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Midgal, begins the Palestinian history at the furthest historical date of any text: 1834, the year of the first Palestinian revolt against their Ottoman rulers. The Jewish people have a historical presence in the land dating no less than 3000 years before Jesus based upon archeological and text evidence.

The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign then continues their history to 1918 explaining that Britain now occupies Palestine and sponsors colonial Jewish immigration from 1918-1948 while simultaneously crushing Palestinian revolts. Unfortunately for those of us concerned with truth, this narrative ignores entirely the history of the White Papers, a British policy enacted in 1939 to restrict the immigration of Jewish people. Further ignoring the history of the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were systematically massacred by Adolph Hitler, a man assisted and advised by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-husseini, the leader of the “Palestinians”, PSC continues.

Moving ahead to 1948, PSC notes the “numerous terrorist attacks by Zionist militias” (the Irgun and Lehi, Jewish paramilitary groups defending the Jewish people continuously attacked by the Arab Palestinians), while ignoring the history of the 1920s Nebi Musa riots in which countless Jews were attacked by Arab Palestinians. PSC further explains that only 6% of the land of Israel was owned by Jews ignoring the reality that the majority of the land was in fact run by and legally owned by the Jewish people, who bought the land in legal and ethical dealings.

From 1948-1949, PSC states that Israel kills 13,000 Palestinians, drives 750,000 from their towns and homes, and causes the Nakba in which Jews conquer 78% of historic Palestine. This would make a strong argument if only the actual numbers were used.

In 1948, after the Arab world went to war attacking Israel, the lone Jewish state, 850,000 Jewish refugees were forced to flee their homes in a land massing 99% of the Middle East, settling safely in the 1% of the land that was left, Israel. With the 500,000 now displaced Arabs needing a home, one would expect the Arab world to integrate the Palestinian population and provide homes and resources for them. Instead, in 1949, the one UN organization dedicated to a single people, UNRWA, was created to systematically retain the Palestinian refugees as an “open sore” against the land of Israel and the Jewish people. In doing so, the Arab world brilliantly created a reason to continue their already violent attack on the Jewish people.

The PSC then continues to 1967, the year of the 6-Day War, a war of self-defense in which Israel claimed “historic Palestine” for the security of Israel, then immediately offering land back in exchange for peace. PSC fails to note the history of the Arab League’s historic NO campaign: NO peace, NO recognition, and NO negotiation with the Jewish State. Eventually, Israel was able to make peace with Egypt in exchange for the Sinai in 1979, attempting to give back Gaza, an attempt rejected by Egypt that would have removed the question of Gaza entirely from the Israel debate.

Moving to 1987, the real failure to report accurately begins to occur, when the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign describes the first Intifada, a violent uprising in which over 1500 people were killed, as non-violent. In 2000, during the second intifada in which suicide bombings by Palestinian nationalists were widespread and attacks on Israeli civilians were the norm, the PSC describes thousands of Palestinians killed resisting Israel’s huge army. The PSC fails to note the way in which these Palestinians were “killed while resisting”: blowing up coffee houses and busses, attacking towns, and massacring innocents.

The Palestinian Solidarity campaign than continues to accuse Israel of violating and invading every Palestinian city in 2002, a blatant falsity, and continues its history in 2005 with the withdrawal from Gaza. Ignoring the history of settlers being attacked and massacred for their Jewish heritage in Gaza, the PSC makes careful note of the blockade of Gaza and settlements of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) while ignoring the massive number of missiles fired at southern Israeli towns and schools.

The PSC conveniently ends their history with the “democratic” elections of Hamas in 2006, ignoring the split and bloody civil war between Fatah and Hamas, ignoring the 13,000 rockets fired into Israel by Hamas and splinter groups, and ignoring the continuous calls to terror on Hamas television, prompting children and women to become suicide bombers.

Much like any anti-Israel organization, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign reports only the “facts” they want to display to the world, ignoring the truth and substituting it with a Palestinian fictional narrative only recently developed in the last 50 years. The PSC is a disgusting mechanism used only to undermine the credibility of Israel and attack the Jewish state.

The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign displays no solidarity with Palestine, instead it only attacks Israel, calls the land “an apartheid”, undermining the historical narrative of South Africans, and insists Israel should break down its security barrier, allow in terrorists and free Palestine “from the river to the sea”.

If Palestine was freed “from the river to the sea”, where exactly would Israel be?

Seth Greenwald is an intern at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle Eastern Reporting in America (CAMERA) and a student at Clark University. Seth can be reached at Sgreenwald@clarku.edu