Love of the Land: A decade of anti-Israel clichés

A decade of anti-Israel clichés

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror
27 December 09

Just in time for Christmas, The Financial Times came out with a seasonally-themed editorial on "The need for peace in the Holy Land." You wouldn't quite know it from this editorial, but the 21st century's first decade began with far-reaching Israeli proposals for peace that were rejected by the Palestinians at Camp David and Taba in 2000/01, and now that the decade is about to end, it turns out that last year, Israel's prime minister proposed a Palestinian state on the equivalent of all the pre-1967 territories of Gaza and the West Bank, with east Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital - but again, the proposal was apparently not good enough.

While these Israeli efforts are not even mentioned, the Financial Times worries about a lack of outside interest and involvement:

It is, at best, disingenuous to pretend that two parties with such massively disproportionate power, resources and diplomatic and financial support could ever reach a deal on their own. The Palestinians are under Israeli occupation and the land on which they hope eventually to build their state is daily being eaten away. Any possibility of dividing the Holy Land into two states - with 78 per cent of historic Palestine for Israelis and 22 per cent (the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem) for the Palestinians - will soon evaporate, if it has not already."

This short paragraph could be a promising entry for any competition that seeks the most concise summary of the past decade's most popular distortions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Let's begin with the statement at the end that talks of "78 per cent of historic Palestine for Israelis and 22 per cent [ …] for the Palestinians." Sounds awfully unfair to the Palestinians, doesn't it? However, for this statement to be correct, "historic Palestine" would have to be defined as the territory that remained after Britain decided in the early 1920s that the area east of the Jordan river - constituting 77 percent of the British Mandate of Palestine - would be considered as "Transjordan," while only the remaining 23 percent west of the Jordan river would be referred to as "Palestine."

In other words, Israel in its pre-1967 borders does not cover "78 per cent of historic Palestine," but 78 percent of modern-day Palestine as defined less than a century ago by Britain. Indeed, if the point of reference is British Mandate Palestine, Israel's pre-1967 territory amounts to less than 20 percent, while more than 80 percent - Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan - was under Arab rule until 1967, and obviously, these areas are still populated predominantly by Palestinians.

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Love of the Land: A decade of anti-Israel clichés