As for the untruths that form the backbone of the text, we can only lament the fact that despite our having previously pointed you to the actual facts and provided the evidence to back them, you continue to publish statements that you have been informed are simply wrong. We can only continue to call on you to do better and to choose instead to adhere to the fundamental journalistic commitment to the truth.
Dear National Post editorial staff:I’m writing to you on behalf of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East regarding John Robson’s piece titled, “Only a fool would recognize a Palestinian state that doesn't exist.” While Mr. Robson is entitled to his own opinion, he seems unaware that he is not entitled to his own facts. As a result, his text is riddled with falsehoods and inaccuracies that serve as a scaffolding to support shameless anti-Palestinian racism.Robson actually begins by noting a basic banality: “You cannot talk about the two-state solution without being laughed out of the room.” As articulated most comprehensively years ago by political scientist Ian Lustick in his trenchant volume, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, a two-state solution is not on the table.If Robson wonders who is responsible, he could start with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s boast that “everyone knows that I am the one who for decades blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state.” Or he might consult the platform Netanyahu’s victorious Likud Party ran on in 1977 that proclaimed, “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Or he could take note that no Israeli government has supported a viable, sovereign Palestinian state. Unfortunately, Robson’s takeaway is not that Palestinians need more support in achieving their national aspirations, but instead that it is time to stop coddling them so.Robson approvingly quotes an observer who claims that Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was done “in the promise that the Palestinians could show what they would peacefully do with territory.” This assertion is categorically false. Dov Weisglas, a top aide to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, made it clear that the withdrawal was specifically intended to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state or even of peace itself, as follows:The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress... The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.Robson makes the risible claim that “Palestine” (which he puts in quotes) has no “demonstrable historic right to the land.” Today’s Palestinians, their parents, and their grandparents inhabited Palestine for generations before the Zionist movement and before their expulsion by the Yishuv (and then Israel). The roughly 500 destroyed Palestinian villages in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories attest to their centuries-old presence and the obvious right they have to their land. It is not because Robson chooses to ignore them that they did not exist.Robson, once again without explanation and with total disregard for historical truth, refers to “genocidal attacks” against Jews before Israel’s creation in 1948. As Zionists often point out, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine for millennia, including under the roughly 13 centuries of Muslim (Arab and non-Arab) rule. Before Zionism, under Muslim rule indigenous Jews were either a plurality or an outright majority in Jerusalem. While Palestinians had no unique immune to the disease of anti-Jewish hate, Robson simply ignores fact that none of this would have been possible in the presence of genocidal intent.What is true is that, beginning with the second aliya in the early 20th century, Zionists opted for the twin policies of the conquest of land and the conquest of labour. The first refers to the acquisition of Palestinian land (including entire villages) from absentee landlords and the subsequent expulsion of their populations. The second refers to a refusal to employ non-Jewish labour. Their combination generated increasing numbers of landless, unemployed and impoverished peasants. Worse, as exhaustively documented by historians such as Benny Morris and Nur Masalha, contemporary Zionists were determined to rid themselves of the local Palestinians in order to create their new society. At times they made their intentions public, such as when the leader of the World Zionist Organization (and Israel’s founding President) Chaim Weizmann shared with the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 his vision that “Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.”In that context, it is no wonder that repeated British inquiries – the 1921 Haycraft Commission, the 1929 Shaw Commission, the 1930 Hope-Simpson Enquiry, the 1936 Peel Commission – consistently reported that it was the ongoing dispossession and displacement of Palestinians, along with their prescient fear of losing their homeland altogether, that fuelled the communal violence that plagued Palestine during the mandate era.We can discern no purpose for Robson’s fact-free narrative other than to enable him to make transparently bigoted attacks on Palestinians and the very concept of their existence. The State of Palestine has been recognized by the overwhelming majority of the world’s countries – including a majority even of NATO members – and it exists no less simply because it is under occupation. Robson’s lone brush with the truth is to note the futility of clinging to the two-state solution. Were he to do so in sympathy with Palestinians we would be grateful for his decency. Instead, he uses it to scorn, mock and degrade them. It is jarring to read so dehumanizing a piece in a major newspaper, and appalling that it was accepted for publication. As for the untruths that form the backbone of the text, we can only lament the fact that despite our having previously pointed you to the actual facts and provided the evidence to back them, you continue to publish statements that you have been informed are simply wrong. We can only continue to call on you to do better and to choose instead to adhere to the fundamental journalistic commitment to the truth.Sincerely,Media analyst, CJPME
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