Israel’s independence is the historical moment around which the ahistorical phenomenon of “Palestinian nationalism” has been conceived. The Palestinian narrative is not formed out of the naturally evolving folklore of a people, it is rather a mechanism of globally disseminated linguistic colonization whose assumptions ground the landscape of postmodern thought, determining the nature and limits of political, religious, philosophical, and social discourse, and thereby displacing the possibility of free dialogue. In it, the medieval and pre-modern conceptions of the Jew as “sorcerer”, “heretic”, “witch” and “devil worshipper” are historically appropriated in secular language, to wit, the Jew as “colonial settler”, “imperial hegemon”, and “apartheid state”. Out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire the territory called Palestine, under the modern administrative authority of the British Empire, comes into focus through the lens of Western reason as it evolves from existing within the hermeneutic horizon of British imperialism to the hermeneutics of American anti-imperialism, decolonization, and the internationally sanctioned ethical-legal principle of self-determination. The logic of post-colonial thought is the condition of the possibility of the myth of Palestinian nationalism, that is, of the Enlightenment version of pre-modern antisemitism, a rehashing of the same superstitions that have helped to create anti-Jewish mythology from time immemorial, only now cloaked in a pervasive simulacrum of Reason.

Israel’s independence signifies the success of the Western global-historical paradigm of creating a sovereign nation-state modeled after Western style democracy. At the same time it marks the gradual turning of the Western world against Israel, against the consummation of that very paradigm that had become the basis of Western logic. The reason for this seeming contradiction is simple. It is the same reason why medieval Christianity did not apply the logic of forgiveness when it came to the Jews, or why it only applied it with strict qualifications. It is because the Jew is the exception to the rule. The real nature of this exception is not within the scope of our present inquiry. Bear in mind, however, that hints to the nature of this exception are everywhere, and that, with patience, we will come to fully understand it. The historical events that face the Jew in our time and within witch Palestinian nationalism is conceived will be the scope of this discussion. What I will aim to show above all is the nature of that barbaric, Dionysian savagery that calls itself “Palestinian nationalism”, the spearhead of the modern attack on the existence of the Jew.

In 1914, after the second Aliyah, between 80,000 and 90,000 Jews were already settled in Palestine, the Jewish homeland so named by the Romans after they conquered it and expelled most of the Jews in 70CE. From 1453 Palestine had been under Ottoman rule. Before the first world-war, foreseeing a victory over the Ottoman Empire, the British government contemplated support for the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. In 1917 the Balfour declaration confirmed this support and was incorporated into the Mandate for Palestine, in effect becoming binding international law. Because the growing belief in a principle of self-determination for all people was evolving into an internationally sanctioned right soon to be placed in the framework of international law and diplomacy, the British attempted to treat the Arabs in Palestine as equals to the Jews, regardless of evidence to the contrary (e.g. Arab banditry and harassment of Jews, the Nebi Musa riots, the Arab uprising of 1936-1939, murder of Jewish civilians, lack of industry and absence of modern values, to name some). The notion of “equality” has become part of the discourse of modern politics and has well served the cause of so-called “Palestinian nationalism”. The logic of “different but equal” is the ahistorical assumption that politics inherits from Western philosophy when the latter renounces the possibility of a philosophical position from which truth could be known. As such, all we have to work with is “difference”, before which no truth claim can stand. Truth is thus constantly changing, differing from itself, passing away, and losing credibility. It is from this nihilistic exhaustion that the assumption that all values are “different but equal” emerges. Equalitarianism is the signpost that points to the truth of all nihilism, that is, to undifferentiated substance. In this kind of substance all differences are eliminated, and all nations gradually dissolve into the melting pot of international equality. Before nations dissolve, however, empires must fall, so that nations can take their place and create the conditions for global equalitarian hegemony.

After the passing away of the Ottoman Empire, the area of Ottoman Syria under British civil administration operating between 1920 and 1948 was called Mandatory Palestine. Along with the Balfour declaration, Woodrow Wilson’s “principle of self-determination”, grounded in the general assumption of “different but equal”, was to guide any post war territorial appropriations in the former Ottoman region. The purpose of the mandate was to administer these regions until they developed into independently functioning states. British policy aimed at treating Jews and Arabs as different but equal, all the while bumping up against natural inequalities that bespoke real differences, making the state building process increasingly difficult to manage. The British were frustrated, the Jews were building, and the Arabs were barking.

Out of this arrangement emerged Israel, Transjordan, disputed Gaza, the disputed West Bank, and the so-called All-Palestinian Government. The termination of the Mandate in 1948 turned over the territories to the authority of the United Nations. On May 14^th of that year Israel declared its independence. A provisional government was recognized by the United States as the de facto authority in Israel, while the Soviet Union was the first to recognize the Israeli government de jure. Following the major powers were countries in South America, South Africa, and Europe. Under the United Nations general assembly resolution 273 Israel became a member state of the U.N. following the approval of U.N. Security Council Resolution 69. As the world community accepted the fledgling state into the concert of nations, the Arab states rejected it. Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Arabs within Israel mobilized against the new Jewish state as soon as its independence became a reality. Arab military commanders instructed Arabs within Israel to leave, promising a swift Arab victory after which the Arabs could return to the land, Judenrein.

After the war, the West bank was occupied and later annexed by Jordan, and Gaza and was placed under the authority of the so-called All-Palestinian Government, an entity furnished by the Arab League to support Palestinian Arabs. Neither helped to relieve the situation of the Arabs whose promise of a Jew-free homeland was broken.  Indeed, Jordan would have preferred to annex the West Bank and Egypt to annex Gaza rather than be concerned with supporting a Palestinian state, unless annexation was no longer an option and a Palestinian state served their interests. After the 1967 war, this became the case. Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza, and the use of Palestinian Arabs as perpetual victims of the Israelis became a fully grounded norm.  The United Nations agency for the so-called Palestinian refugees focused on maintaining the refugees rather than actively supporting the possible creation of a recognizable political state that would operate as the framework of a home for the remainder of Arabs, those yet to be ordered by the modernizing operations of the international machine. There is a reason for this seemingly unusual oversight, this people existing untamed in a region that underwent relatively swift modernization in the post-Ottoman vacuum.

During the mandate period, the British were working toward the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine. The region to the East of the Dead Sea became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Arab “half” of Palestine. To the west would be the Jewish homeland. The difficulty was that Arabs rejected this partition, wanting what was left of Palestine to be a Palestinian Arab state. The U.N. partition plan proposed a compromise that significantly reduced the size of the Jewish half, to which the Jews agreed but the Arabs did not. Increasing tension due to the Arabs’ reaction to the British White Paper policy, Arab fear of Jewish immigration, and the Arab League’s proposal to Britain that the idea of a Jewish homeland be abandoned altogether triggered riots and Jihad among the Arabs against Jews. If the remainder of Arabs agreed to compromise then they would lose their whole advantage. Any compromise would concede that a Jewish state should exist, and a fair resolution would dissolve the Arab grievance, that the Jews displaced them from their native home. Therefore the landless Arabs must remain landless to fulfill the anti-Zionist cause. Arab nationalist Haj Amin al-Husseini seized the opportunity to fuel the flames of anti-Jewish feeling among the Palestinian Arabs, instigating riots and demonstrations.

Under the mandate, Husseini was appointed by the British as Grand Mufti of Palestine. He seized upon every opportunity to make trouble for the Jews and to continue a process that began before the Ottoman fall. Looking back, the seeds of Palestinian nationalism were sown among the Palestinian Arab notables who would telegraph Constantinople to protest Jewish land purchases during the Ottoman period, the work of Husseini kept the seeds growing, and they sprouted into a national ideology with the Palestinian Liberation Organization under the charismatic, yet slovenly leadership of Yasser Arafat. During WW2, Husseini collaborated with the Nazis, helping them to recruit Bosnian Muslims to the Waffen SS. Husseini’s influence upon the Palestinian Muslims spanned from 1921 – 1959 when the All-Palestinian government was dissolved by Nasser and Egypt took Gaza, whereupon Husseini fled to Lebanon. By then having lost most of his authority, he joined the PLO.

Husseini ‘s role is critical in understanding Palestinian nationalism as he brought the influence of fascist nationalism to both Palestinian nationalism in particular and Arab nationalism in general by disseminating Nazi propaganda, recruiting Muslims for the Nazis, and identifying the common enemy of both Muslims and fascists, that is, Western democracy and the Jews. This was part of the process of defining the purpose of Arab nationalism and fusing it with the stateless Arabs of Palestine, giving them a clear sense of direction, but as yet no home. Indeed, maintaining their homelessness as a tactic for the purpose of creating a so-called “nation” is an indispensable condition for the refinement of the Palestinian cause, for the concentration of anti-semitism into a single point that could masquerade as a victim of the heretical, imperialist hegemon, Israel.

Since the war of 1948 the remainder of Palestinian Arabs did not become part of the Arab nation states, nor did they become Israeli citizens. In the ambiguity of war there is much room for filling in gaps. At the start of the 1948 war, the Arab military instructed the Palestinian Arabs to leave, the Haganah was fiercely retaliating for attacks against Jews, and the frustrated British were at a loss and prepared to withdraw. The popular explanation is that the Israeli forces “displaced” Palestinian Arabs. After 1948 these “displaced” Arabs were not given citizenship by their fellow Arabs, and they remained hostile to Israel. The popular interpretation is that these remaining Arabs are victims of the so-called “Jewish colonial settlers”. This remainder was the unfinished business of Husseini, and an opportunity for Yasser Arafat. The former was able to strengthen the movement through its alliance with Nazi Germany, and the latter was able to transform it into a formal national liberation movement.

Within the equalitarian value-system of the international system, any group that can claim the status of “a people” can have a right to self-determination. Parallel to the growth of Palestinian nationalism, which generates an image of a “people”, is the inscription of this national origin myth upon the minds of the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters in the West. This ahistorical narrative is meant to displace the historical narrative of Israel for the purpose of Arab hegemony in the region.

The importance of the language of “displaced persons” must not be overlooked. By naming the remainder “displaced persons” one is capable of generating and sustaining a narrative that describes an indigenous Palestinian people who pre-existed the Israeli state. Once the U.N. recognized this remainder as a “displaced people”, and, as such, also as “refugees”, the myth of a native Palestinian people became the global hermeneutic assumption which was the springboard for Arafat’s success as a national hero. The remainder is thus placed into a context that is fabricated in order to be able to make sense of them within the hermeneutic situation of the modern world. In other words, the Western world wants to see sovereign states made up of individuals with a shared culture. Since this remainder identify first as Muslims, as do virtually all Arabs in spite of Western-Muslim syncretism, there were no traits in this remainder of Muslims that could be rationalized by the modern mind. Consequently this remainder was taken up in the logic of nationhood where it could find a place in the modern world. The Western mind created the philosophical and political framework within which its deadliest enemy would cunningly cast itself as the victim of Western hegemony in general, of Zionism in particular, thereby killing two birds with one stone.

Ironically, the Israeli state, a perfect fit in the modern paradigm, would now be cast as the remainder – the last colonial, settler, apartheid state – the last barrier to a streamlined, modern global community in which nations were a mere stage in the evolution of the global international world order. The nationalism of the Jew, his connection to his Holy Land, now becomes pivotal in determining who is in and who is out. Jewish national pride becomes the heresy of the Jew in a world where patriotism, imperialism, and fascism are synonymous. The Jew is now seen as a force of imperial hegemony that displaces Palestinian natives who would otherwise comply with the new world order.

Taking up the cause of the world’s most beloved victims, the U.N. deployed two agencies that administer refugees. There is the “U.N. Refugee Agency” and the “U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees”. The 2^nd was originally created in 1949 to aid the 600,000 - 700,000 of the remaining Arabs of Palestine that were without a state. After the 1967 war, Israel took the West Bank in its defensive war with Jordan and it took Gaza in its defensive war with Egypt. Israel neither annexed these territories, nor did the Arab national states absorb the remaining Arabs. Since this remainder was not rooted as a native people in Palestine, they had to be formalized in some way in order to make sense of the situation. Many refugees had not lived very long in the villages they left. The United Nations adapted the definition of “refugee” to define Arab refugees from Israel to include any Arab who had lived in Israel for 2 years before leaving. Even if the Arab had moved just a few miles, and even if he had returned, he was still called a “refugee”. Jews who moved the same distance for the same purpose were not called refugees. For refugees other than Palestinians, the definition includes (1) leaving out of a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” (2) being “outside the country of his nationality” and 3) being “unable to, or… unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country”. A Palestinian refugee is (1) “anyone whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948,” and (2) “who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict”. In addition UNRWA counts all descendants of those who meet these criteria. Whereas the first definition of refugee is universal, the second is unique to the Palestinian-Arab remainder. This aspect of special treatment is necessary in the myth creation process, as it creates the illusion of a native Palestinian people by generating so many so-called refugees as a result of tweaking the definition of the word.

Without a clear sense of who the enemy is, a myth will not succeed. The hero and the villain define the myth and give it meaning. The Nazis and the Muslims had a common enemy in the British, the French, the Jews, and Western democracy in general. Hitler found a natural ally in the Arabs while the British found a natural ally in the Jews. Husseini became the most important Arab collaborator with the axis powers. In addition to recruiting Yugoslavian Muslims to the SS, he started out touring Arab towns in Palestine to whip up anti-Zionist sentiment and anti-Jewish demonstrations, he played a lead role in the 1936-1939 Arab revolts in Palestine, and he had agents in the Kingdom of Iraq, the French mandate of Syria, and Mandatory Palestine, and he supported the Iraqi Golden square coup d’etat. He also helped prevent Jews from leaving Europe by protesting British immigration policy in Palestine. Nazi support for Husseini meant support for Palestinian liberation from the British and for the attack on Israel. The influence of German National Socialism on nationalism in the Arab Muslim world is far ranging and little cited. The Young Egypt Party was modeled after the Nazi youth. The Syrian Social Nationalist party was fascist-inspired. Hassan al Banna, ally of the Mufti and founder of Muslim brotherhood, acknowledged Muslim common interest with the Nazi anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist purpose. Both hated Jews and Western democracy. The Muslim world, caught up in the evolution of the modern, secular nation-state, took its lead in its own nationalism from the axis powers, which not only lent it practical support, but also injected it with the anti-Western angst of fascists and Nazis.

For the Arabs, WW2 effectively characterized the Western powers as the enemy of world peace and as the friend of the Jew. The polarization of Muslim and Jew, fascism and democracy, was the framework within which Palestinian nationalism, yoked to fascism, continued to take shape. As Arab nation-states imbibed anti-Western and anti-Jewish propaganda, so the stateless Arabs imbibed with them. The Arab remainder, state-less and untamed, was poised to become the spearhead of the Anti-Israel/Anti-Western movement of the 21^st century, the post-modern sacrificial lamb of the nations.

The creation of the myth of Palestinian nationalism represents the opposite pole of Western civilization. It is not a historical event but rather a disguise, the point in which the West, inscribed in the name of the Palestinian, turns against itself as the Palestinian wars with the modern Israeli state, that is, where the West, inscribed in the name of the Jew, fights for itself and its history as the Jew. The Palestinian Arab exists behind an illusion of modern nation building while it functions as the concentrated locus of modern anti-semitism. The Jews of Israel form a fully functioning Western style democracy. But the Jew is not forgiven for his nationalism which is seen as both the source of Palestinian Arab suffering and of global disfunction. This duel image of injustice - the Arab as victim of Jewish hegemony on one hand, and the blocking of international progress by the dark powers of the maleficent Pharisee on the other, is the superstition of our time. It frames our thoughts, shapes our conscience, and guides our behavior. It is the chaos that tears at the seams of reason and civil society. It is the metaphysical sign that hangs above a savage mob of bloodthirsty witch hunters whose madness spreads across time and reaches deep into the bowel of nothingness.

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There is much talk about stopping the "humanitarian crisis" in the so-called occupied territories.  The Palestinians are invariably cast as the innocent victims in a myth about Israeli occupation.  Too many conservatives are buying into this new version of an old story: moral equivalence between israel and the Palestinians.  It is not a humanitarian crisis.  It is a war.  There are good guys and there are bad guys.  Israel needs to put a decisive end to Hamas and to the Palestinian effort to occupy the Israeli state.

Too many good people are afraid to take a side and frame the truth clearly and openly.  It's not possible to find a middle position anymore.  The situation is polarized. Israel is the protagonist in a war against an enemy that Israel has in common with the entire civilized world.

We should be clear about this for the sake of the United States, for Israel, and for Western civilization. 

Never in the history of war and peace has the use and misuse of language so obfuscated the nature of events as with the Israeli – Palestinian conflict.  By now there are 67 years of multi-layered narrative that confuse the situation which is basically an issue of population exchange characterized as a military occupation. Not only have events somewhat analogous to this conflict come and gone with much less scrutiny, but population transfers in the nation building process have resolved or nearly resolved themselves with relative ease without the interference of global P.R. battles which notoriously  misappropriate the true nature of events. 

Generally speaking, transfers under the watch of the Great Powers were aimed at expanding Western style democracy through the construction of nation-states. For example, the population transfers and property exchanges in the division of India and Pakistan, Balkan population exchanges in the post-Ottoman states, the relocation of Muslim inhabitants of Greece to Turkey and of Orthodox Christians in Turkey to Greece, all of which naturally involved territorial disputes, were organized to increase homogeneity and, in the end, to minimize conflict and to stabilize national boundaries.  This is part of the modernization process which has made possible a world in which a United Nations, a European Union, formalized international law, and national accountability can exist, among other things that we take for granted with respect to their civilizing roles and their origins in Western history. 

When it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, however, public relations battles have taken center stage, obscuring the democratization process with devastating consequences.  When Israeli national defense is characterized as genocide, when the preservation of its national identity is called apartheid, when suicide bombings are seen as being a legitimate means of self-defense and the innocent victims of these bombings are cast as the villains, then reason is turned on its head and innocent lives are constantly under the threat of brutal violence.

There are a few basic concepts that have become common parlance when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict.  First, there is the “Israeli occupation”.  Secondly, there is the “Palestinian refugee”, and last but certainly not least, the “Palestinian right of return”. This is not to mention more marginal but equally divisive rhetorical weapons such as “genocide”, “war crimes”, and “pariah state”, all targeting Israel. Other myths include that of “stolen Arab land”, the “homeless Palestinian refugee”, and the “immigration of alien Jews who displaced a Palestinian people”. Furthermore, omissions such as the extent of Arab immigration to Israel are intentionally left out to create illusions such as that of the presence of a “native Palestinian people”. What really existed was a multiethnic expression of loosely organized peoples living under Ottoman Turkish rule. In order to properly understand the conflict as a whole, the narratives that disguise what is really happening have to be deconstructed. It has come to the point where truth and fiction are so intermingled that one cannot tell them apart.  The mixing of truth and untruth has become so thorough that a de-structuring of the whole narrative is in order. 

I will start with the so-called “military occupation”.  First of all, let’s put everything in its proper context. One should bear in mind that the controversy surrounding British involvement in the middle east sways between two poles. In the traditional view, the British entered the middle east as advocates of Arab independence and of a national Jewish homeland.  According to the popular view, British advocacy was just a facade for the aggrandizement of its Empire.  After WWI, it fell to the British to partition and define loosely structured “geographic expressions” whose populations had not yet evolved into sovereign nation states.  The British mandate period involved creating a middle-east that was democratic and modern.  Indeed, the process of partitioning is another example of where a misleading narrative has come to demonize a specific group, in this case, the British. The British Empire has come to be understood as the cause of almost every difficulty that besets the peoples formerly under British rule.  The expansion of the British empire, however, carried with it the general intention of imparting its mode of civilization to the rest of the world.  Without the influence of the West in general and of the modern British state in particular, the middle-east after WWI would have likely remained in a state of pre-modern backwardness.  When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1798, conquering it without much resistance, he found a declining civilization that has since had to contend with its Western neighbor.  Swaying between Westernization and radicalization, the Muslim world has been struggling to assert itself in the face of the Great Powers.  This basic pattern governing the relationship between the West and Islam is repeated in the relation between Israel and the Palestinians.

The distinction between the West and the Muslim world, and the association of Israel with the West, often go unnoticed.  The West and Islam are two distinct historical entities with two different yet combining histories. Furthermore, since the United States’ recognition of Israel’s independence in 1948, Israel has come to be closely associated with the West.  Israel integrated the values and institutions of Western culture and government into the fabric of its national existence, while preserving its Jewish essence, albeit at the cost of much assimilation.  To the extent that Israel has become a Western phenomenon, the “Jew” has also become “Western”.  Never before in history has the Jew been so closely associated with the white man.  So close, in fact, that the Jew and Israel are, according to the prevailing anti-Western narrative, guilty of the same so-called crimes that the West has been charged with, which brings us back to the so-called “occupation”. One of the thematic charges brought against the West is “imperialism” which involves colonial occupation and territorial expansion, not always at the cost of the colony, as propaganda would have us believe.  Israel has been characterized as the Western Imperialist and charged with the same crimes in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is because both Western Imperialism and the Arab-Israeli conflict have been misunderstood, wrongly defined, and misrepresented. 

A military occupation involves one national authority taking over that of an existing sovereign. The German occupation of France in WW2 is an example.  Under occupation the territory is not annexed, rather, authority is transferred.  After WW2, the 4^th Geneva Convention established international laws for the purpose of protecting civilians in war zones and in order to return the occupied state to its former authority rather than run the risk of annexation.  These laws evolved out of the response to the excesses of the axis powers and they are informed by international law theory that goes back to Hugo Grotius in modern times, and as far back as St. Augustine’s theory of Just War which comes down to us from the 4^th century CE and remains the implicit philosophical groundwork for modern international law concerning war.  Such philosophy is foreign to the Muslim world and its take on war and peace.  Israel, on the other hand, has internalized the just war theory as part of its own process of modernization and Westernization.  One would not be hard pressed, in fact, to find that St. Augustine’s moral reflections on war come from the very ideas laid down in the Torah itself.

The relation of Israel to the so-called Palestinians does not fit the definition of an occupation because there is no sovereign state that is being occupied.  What we have come to call “Palestine” is the West bank and the Gaza strip.  Under Ottoman rule, before and during WWI, “Palestine” (so named since the expulsion of the Jews by the Romans in 70 CE) included what is now Israel, Jordan, Gaza, and the West bank.  It was split in half, one piece for the Arabs (Transjordan) and one for the Jews (Israel).  Needless to say, it is not so simple as it looks on paper, but it is also not so complex as it has come to seem.  When Pakistan and India were divided, Muslims in India migrated to Pakistan and Hindus in Pakistan migrated to India.  This paints a neater picture than reality because it does not bear out the details of the complex process of how a nation state evolves. But the general idea is clear, and the basic point is simple.  When nation states were delineated by the British, a basic plan was set in motion that was reasonably accommodated in reality.  The boundaries of the nation were drawn, with population exchanges and property transfers being part of the process of streamlining the nation building process.  Let us not forget that the lines for these nations were not imagined out of thin air by the British, they were refined.  The forms of the modern nation states are approximations of geographic and demographic expressions that have taken shape over the course of history.  The influence of the West involved modernizing and streamlining these natural expressions such that national, linguistic, political and cultural boundaries neatly matched up, enabling peoples that were formerly ruled by foreign entities to achieve national sovereignty. The final product is the modern map as we know it.

When Palestine was cut in half during the British mandate period, this streamlining process, together with the general British goal of connecting the totality of the empire from the Atlantic to the mid-Pacific by incorporating Palestine, were interrupted.  Neither before nor after the war of 1948 did the Arab nations absorb the overflow of Arabs who remained in and around Israel.  The same thing happened in a much more definitive way in the aftermath of the 1967 war.  Upon gaining the territories called Gaza and the West bank in a successful defensive war, Israel did not annex those regions – which it could justifiably have done under the circumstances – nor did the Arab nations absorb the Arab refugees that remained there.  This tactic of refusing to absorb refugees was the common tactic all along on the Arab side.  If the refugees are not absorbed by their Arab brethren, then the Israelis can easily be cast as occupiers while the Arabs in limbo can be cast as “displaced homeless native refugees”.  Furthermore, the idea of placing the responsibility on Israel to absorb refugees who are violently opposed to Israel’s very existence is not within the boundaries of reason by any stretch of the imagination.  If the public believes the narrative that charges Israel with genocidal imperialism against a so-called native Palestinian people, then a “Palestinian nationalism” can be constructed ex post facto, so long as the public, and the so called Palestinians believe that a native Palestinian people existed as a national entity before the refugee problem.  Today this myth has become a common assumption.  It is taken for granted in the public sphere of debate regarding the crisis. 

What is commonly referred to as the “Israeli occupation” is in fact a matter of “territorial dispute”.  This is because there was no Palestinian national state to be occupied in the first place. The so called occupation is really an unresolved population exchange.  The territories will remain contested until the national status of Israel is conclusively defined, and the Arabs called Palestinians are allowed to return to the lands of their brethren to become citizens.  Without these appropriations the so-called “peace process” will continue with no end in sight.