The United Nations Organization opened its doors in 1945, and by 1989, the Security Council and General Assembly together voted on 870 resolutions dealing with the “Arab-Israeli” conflict—as it was commonly known in those decades. When I worked on a research project commissioned by the Office of the late Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, I read and tabulated every one of them.
In this period, the Security Council “condemned” Israel,” its highest rebuke, 49 times. Sometimes Israel was “vigorously condemned,” “deplored,” or “strongly deplored.” No Arab state was ever so chastised.
In the same period, the General Assembly “condemned,” “deplored,” or otherwise castigated Israel 321 times. Again, no Arab state was ever so judged. The aggregate number of individual state votes against Israel in the UN’s first 44 years came to 55,642 votes.
For the UN’s first quarter-century, it did not issue a single resolution referencing “Palestinians.” In those UN decades, there were no “Palestinian” on anyone’s lips.
Image from X.
The “Palestinians” made their UN debut three years after the Six-Day War of 1967. Post-war, the five months of heated debate in both chambers climaxed on November 22 with UN Security Council Resolution 242, which would shape the conflict for decades to come. And this text, too, said nothing about any “Palestinians.”
The germ of this notional nation originally came from the Chairman of the Arab League of States, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. In a 1959 meeting, he raised the idea of rebranding the mixed bag of migrant workers called “the Arab refugees”—as they had been called for ten years —into “Palestinian refugees,” even though there was nothing Palestinian about them. (No, it was not the KGB that created the “Palestinian” identity).
His model was the then-ongoing, five-year bloody terror rebellion in Algeria against the French (1954-62), which he supported. There, the Muslims had the brains to abandon their religious jihadi vocabulary, which would not win them support in France, and, instead, adopted the identity of patriotic, anti-imperialist freedom fighters. After WWII, there were scores of such colonial uprisings.
After that, it took another decade for the lie of “Palestinians” to gestate. Golda Meir was their inadvertent midwife.
Two years after Israel’s miraculous victory, on June 17, 1969, during an interview with the London Sunday Times, Israel’s new Prime Minister went to war against the growing fashion of speaking of Israel’s enemies not as “the Arabs” but as “the Palestinians.” Golda said, “There never was such a nation,” causing the Jew-haters to exclaim, “How dare she deny the existence of the Palestinians!” And the rest is history.
When Golda emigrated to Eretz Israel in 1921, no Arab there called himself a Palestinian. However, thanks to this interview, which made waves worldwide, by December 10, 1969, UN GA Resolution 2535 referred to “the people of Palestine.” A year later, UNGA 2628 included “…the rights of Palestinians…” With these two resolutions, the “Palestinians” entered the chatter in the hot air factory that is the UN, which had a solid record of hostility to the world’s only tiny Jewish state for a quarter-century before anyone ever heard of “Palestinians.”
As a reminder of the historic absence of an Arab “Palestinian” identity, in 1950, Jordan annexed the Judea and Samaria it had overrun in 1948, even though no Arab ever had a name for these areas. There never was an Arab nation living in these hills. We know this because authentically indigenous peoples do that—they name their rivers, lakes, hills, and mountains.
This reality meant that, in 1967, all that the New York Times stylebook could do was refer to the “western bank of the Jordan River” that the IDF had captured. That’s a no-name name, no more than a topographical description barren of any national or historical resonance. Moreover, in 1950, Jordan did not identify the Arabs on the “western bank” as being a different nationality entitled to their own state. And, of course, Jordan did not surrender its claim to that land until 1988.
However, once inside the UN as a concept, these “freedom-fighters” a.k.a. the PLO terror covens, made known their presence in the world via one terrorist horror after another. They planted bombs in Israeli supermarkets; skyjacked airliners, using the terrified passengers as hostages to trade for terrorists in Israeli prisons; slaughtered Israeli children in school buses and classrooms; and murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games.
From this moment forward, the very name “Palestinian” effectively “switched sides,” migrating from Jews to Arabs. In 1948, only Zionists identified as “Palestinians.” The Arab position, which the Grand Mufti had adamantly insisted upon since the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, was that there never was such a country with that name. Today, the Arabs are the “Palestinians” and as such, it is a form of verbal apartheid—no Jews included.
Before long, the treasonous Israeli and Jewish left climbed aboard the “Palestinian” bandwagon and became partners with Nasser in creating this faux-nationality. One motivating factor was their opposition to the rise of a new generation of Zionist pioneers throwing up new settlements in the liberated territories in the middle of the night on uninhabited land. These settlements did not dispossess any Arabs, just as the leftist kibbutzniks in the 1930s and 40s did not drive any Arabs from their homes.
The difference was that the new settlers were religious Jews whom the socialists reviled. The Zionist left’s notion of the resurrection of Jewish independence did not envision a state any more religious than other liberal democracies. They wanted a new Jewish identity stripped of the Jewish religion. Religion had gone out fashion during the Enlightenment, right?
In 1993, the architect of the future Oslo Peace fiasco, the atheist Yossi Beilin, had for many years said that if Israel defined the conflict as religious, there could be no peace. So, Israel would redefine it as a political clash between two nations claiming ownership of the same territory that could then be resolved via political compromise.
It is Israel’s tragic history that the invention of the mendacious and venomous “Palestinian” narrative was as much an Israeli-Jewish betrayal as psychological warfare waged by the Arabs.
In Israel in 2022, no less, hostility to the Jewish religion was a prime catalyst for riots after the Israeli elections when the Likud Party won. This was because Likud wanted to reform the disgustingly one-sided High Court. Supported by a former prime minister, the kibbutz-raised atheist Ehud Barak, mobs blocked automobile and airport traffic because they were terrified that a reformed court would be more respectful of the Jewish religion.
The Oslo Peace fiasco, no less, had been led by two soulmates of Barak and Beilin, namely Rabin and Peres. Both were well-known Marxists who wanted to be rid of what they called the “West Bank,” or “the administered areas/shtachim.” Notably, they and their followers never call this region “Judea and Samaria” because of its religious resonance. Only religious Zionists use those names.
Tragically, today in Israel, everyone across the political spectrum calls the Arabs “Palestinians.” Each time they do this, they unwittingly support the fantasy that there is such a nationality and that it is entitled to its own state in its ancient homeland, just like the Jews.
Secular Israelis seem to nurse the unconscious fantasy that, someday, the “Palestinians” will have a change of heart, stop hating and murdering them all the time, and act like a normal nation at peace with its neighbors.
The “Palestinian” national identity is a verbal hologram; that is, something that looks like it is there, but really is not. The enemy is Islam. The “Palestinian” identity is as empty as the Palestinian National Museum was on the day it opened in Bir Zeit in 2016. After the ribbon-cutting ceremony, guests were ushered into the brand-new, $25 million building whose every corridor, wall, and gallery was empty of any objets d’art produced by “Palestinian” artists and artisans in the “Palestinian” style.
And when journalists asked the curator, “Where are the exhibits?” He said they were being made abroad, and there was a delay in delivery.
Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.
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