Jews Join Anti-Zionists in Rewriting History

History is a set of lies agreed upon.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Jews, Judaism, the holy land, and the country of Israel have always been distinct but connected things. They were inseparable in the Bible but history has torn at those bonds. While the Bible states that God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish patriarchs and their descendants, the modern reestablishment of the Jewish State as a secular one with many non-Jews as citizens has pulled Jews in various directions. One needn’t walk far to find a Jew who does not believe in God; who lives in the land of Israel but is not a Zionist; who is a devout believer in Judaism but doesn’t live in the holy land, and various other iterations.

The non-Jewish world has taken note and often enlists Jewish people who break from the historical collective to validate and promote their own biases. Just as anti-Semites like to showcase Jews who also don’t believe in the Old Testament, anti-Zionists parade Jews who despise Israel.

Organizations like the United Nations do much the same.

On November 10, 1975, the United Nations passed a series of anti-Israel initiatives. The most famous one, UN Resolution 3379, known as the “Zionism is Racism” resolution, was ultimately removed due to the efforts of the United States. Unfortunately, UN Resolution 3376 remains, which created the Committee for the Inalienable Rights of Palestinians. That committee granted Palestinian Arabs unique “inalienable rights” compared to every group in the world, granting them the right to “national independence and sovereignty.” The Kurds, Yazidis, Roma, Rohingya Muslims and hundreds of other actual peoples have no such rights according to the UN. Only a group of Arabs whose grandparents lived in the holy land precisely in the 1946-8 timeframe have special rights to independence and sovereignty. Imagine granting the right to national independence and sovereignty to Italian Catholics whose grandparents lived in New York between 1934 and 1936!

That fiction has festered and created alarming alliances.

On July 1, 2021, this committee founded on bogus rights met to discuss “Israel’s Systematic ‘Demographic Engineering’… in “East Jerusalem.” The historic place known as “East Jerusalem” existed for a mere 19 years as an artifice of war and ceased to exist over fifty years ago.

No matter. Lies beget lies and are most comfortable consorting with lies.

The international conference on the “Question of Jerusalem” ran on the theme “Forced demographic change in Jerusalem: Grave breaches and a threat to peace.” The conclusion to the question was announced at the outset and alarm bells were rung about Arabs supposedly being replaced in Jerusalem by Jews. The fact that the Arab population in Jerusalem skyrocketed by 3.4 times between 1980 and 2019 while the Jewish population in the city only grew by only 1.9 times was never mentioned because fiction acts as fact when operating in the Lie Zone.

In its ongoing attempt to rewrite history based on lies, the conference’s opening remarks were given by Rosemary DiCarlo, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, speaking on behalf of Secretary-General António Guterres. She said “that measures to change Jerusalem’s status and demographic composition are without legal validity and should be firmly rejected by the international community,” advocating for Jews to be purged from the eastern part of the city to recreate the Judenfrei “East Jerusalem” as enacted by the Jordanians in 1949. Not understanding her own biases and actual facts, her comments suggest that the UN position is that Arabs should be evicted from Jerusalem to bring the ratio of Jews back to 74% of the city as existed in 1967, instead of the 61.7% that exists today (today’s level is the lowest since 1946).

Cheikh Niang from Senegal who chaired the phony forum bemoaned Jews moving to Silwan as a major obstacle to peace. I guess no one ever told him that it was Jews from Yemen who founded Silwan 140 years ago, before the Jordanian Arabs routed them from their homes.

Samir Bakr, Assistant Secretary-General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation for Palestine and Al-Quds Affairs chimed in that “Jerusalem has been an integral part of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967,” failing to acknowledge that eastern Jerusalem was part of Jordanian territory and that all “Palestinians” in Jerusalem were Jordanians from 1954 to 1988 when Jordan pulled its citizenship. There was never “Palestinian territory” until Israel gave the Palestinian Authority territory in 1996.

To ensure a sense of validity at the cockamamie committee, a Jew was brought in to elaborate on the supposed injustice and “threat to peace” her people were committing.

Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FEMP), kicked off an extensive panel discussion about supposed Israeli crimes. FEMP, with “peace” in its name sounds like an unbiased organization devoted to harmony. It is actually an anti-Zionist organization specifically devoted to attacking Israeli policies which funds like-minded organizations.

*Lara Friedman, President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, an anti-Israel organization marketed as a peace-seeking foundation.*

Friedman echoed the sentiments of prior speakers that Israel engages in “a systematic policy of demographic engineering with total impunity,” similarly failing to discuss actual population statistics which undermines the entirety of the smear.

She then gave a warped rendition of the history of Jerusalem in 1948 and 1967, skipping the unhelpful points of the Jordanians expelling all of the Jews from eastern Jerusalem and granting Jordanian citizenship to residents “not being Jewish” in the anti-Semitic purge. Obviously she neglected to mention that Jews have been the continuous majority in Jerusalem for over 150 years, since the late 1860’s.

Friedman then added that “Palestinians inside Israel after 1948 were given Israeli citizenship, but Palestinians in East Jerusalem were not, leaving them in the legal limbo of permanent resident status.” This is malarkey as US President Joe Biden would say.

Citizenship for Arabs in eastern Jerusalem

After the 1948-9 Arab-Israel war, Israel took the western part of the city and Jordan took the remainder, including Greater Bethlehem which was also supposed to be an international city according to the 1947 UN Partition Plan. The Arabs in the eastern part of Jerusalem were given Jordanian citizenship by Jordan which illegally annexed the area. Of course Israel did not give “Palestinians in East Jerusalem” Israeli citizenship in 1948-9 as Jordan had seized it.

When Israel reunited Jerusalem in a defensive war after the Jordanians attacked Israel again in 1967, it amended its citizenship law in 1968 to account for the Jordanian Arabs which came under Israeli rule. It immediately gave all of these Jordanians permanent resident status and put in place clauses 4a and 5, to enable these non-Israelis to become Israeli citizens under certain conditions.

A key component was renouncing citizenship of any other country. It was only twenty years later in 1988 that Jordan stripped the Arabs of the West Bank of Jordanian citizenship after finally renouncing claim to the region. Since that time, these former Jordanians/ new stateless “Palestinians” could apply for Israeli citizenship provided they passed a number of other tests such as Hebrew fluency, no criminal record and swearing allegiance to Israel, according to Clause 5. Few applied due to these conditions but the numbers have grown. Clause 4a makes it even easier to become an Israeli and many have applied, hoping to be integrated into a first-world society. Thousands of Arabs living in eastern Jerusalem are now Israeli citizens.

The conference absurdities continued, such as Michael Lynk, United Nations Special Rapporteur, saying that Israeli Jewish settlers in eastern Jerusalem make it impossible for “Palestinians to return East Jerusalem as the capital of their own State,” adding yet a new twist that Palestine is an actual state and it’s not just Palestinian Arabs who want to “return” to Israel, but East Jerusalem itself wants to return as the capital of Palestine, as if that actually ever existed in history.

The false narratives around Israel-Palestine continue to gain mouthpieces at the anti-Israel United Nations, progressive campuses and media, and on social networks. The anti-Zionists are all too willing to accept Jewish anti-Zionists cloaked as lovers of peace as their allies, to buttress the fiction as the new version of history.

Napolean once said “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Anti-Semites and anti-Zionists are actively and broadly rewriting history with outright lies burning the People of the Book figuratively, as a possible prelude to doing so literally in the shadow of the Holocaust.