every year, augmented by minor immigration (about 7 percent in total, primarily legal), explained the Arab population increase. In other words, most Arabs living in Palestine when Israel was formed had been there for their entire lives, as had their ancestors—if not from “time immemorial,” then at least for several centuries.
The denial of Palestinian history is also built into Israel’s school curriculum. As an Israeli historian has pointed out, the land that would become Israel has no history from the destruction of the Second Temple until the onset of Zionist settlement. It is only a religious image surviving from biblical times, the subject of Zionist yearning but (with the exception of the occasional arrival of Crusaders) it has no occupants. The Palestinians first appear during Zionist colonization in the early twentieth century, but then only as external obstacles to the Zionist project. Even the most recent textbooks (which delete some of the overtly racist content of earlier ones) do not have a single map of the land during Zionist colonization that includes all the human settlements, showing only the Jewish ones (and occasional mixed Arab/Jewish ones). There are no Palestinian towns or villages, no people with their own desires, aims, and conflicts. Instead, the Palestinians appear first because of opposition to their de-employment in the late 1920s, but the fate of the banned laborers receives no attention in retrospect (as it did not at the time). Palestinians then reappear only because of their later opposition to Zionist projects, opposition that is portrayed in racist terms.
THE FOUNDING OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL
Once the United Nations agreed to set aside a section of Palestine to form a Jewish state in 1947, the Zionists launched an ostensibly defensive war against surrounding Arab armies. The conflict ended up expanding the size of Israel from the UN-mandated 56 percent of Palestine to 78 percent. Israel’s subsequent history is one of expansion outward and relentless attacks on the hapless, displaced Palestinians and on the nearby Lebanese—all to seize additional land and water and to terrorize the Arabs into submission. The policy continues to this day, with such regular events as the five-week bombing of Lebanon during the summer of 2006 (killing at least 1,300, while Israel lost about 160, mostly soldiers) and the slaughter of another 1,300 Arabs in Gaza in late 2008–early 2009 (Israel losing only 11). By the way, a 100:1 kill ratio is considered a successful war but a 10:1 ratio is a failure, and a 3:1 ratio drives Israel out of seized territory (southern Lebanon in the late 1990s). The United States is also willing to tolerate similarly gross disparities in mortality, with US deaths limited to fighting personnel. When America loses three thousand civilians in one day, the entire world trembles— each dead 9/11 victim has been redeemed now by almost one hundred victims elsewhere.
This is not of course the story Israel told—to its own citizens or to the world at large. In its version, a brave set of souls set about reclaiming their natural birthright, that is, all the land, part of which their distant ancestors may once have occupied. They had a book that the same ancestors were said to have written that gave them the land in perpetuity from the God they worshipped. If this absurd rule were applied generally, it would require the wholesale resettlement of the world’s peoples, with re-resettlement required by extending the time horizon backward. European Americans would be forced to return to their “homeland” in Europe so America could be returned to its rightful owners, the Amerindians, from which it had surely, and very recently, been stolen through wholesale slaughter and lies. But the Jewish Zionist dream resonated with aspects of what can be called Christian Zionism, especially in the United States. This, combined with horror at the recent genocide of six million European Jews, permitted the rule of “right of return” to lands through which one could claim an ancient connection, to be enforced in this particular case. But the reality is that a racialist (and then racist) country was shoehorned into the Middle East, so that Jewish people (half and quarter also) from around the world can immediately claim citizenship to this land but none of those who were so recently expelled could do so. This ethnic definition of Israel could only create pressure for expansion.
One consistent feature of the mythology is that the Zionists have always reached out in peace to their Arab neighbors, wanting only their fair share of