The below article has been quoted from Ha'aretz.Click here to read the full article
Apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu's public opinion polls show
that if he wants to return to the Prime Minister's Office, it won't be enough
for him to give Ariel Sharon advice about how to "eradicate
terrorism." Sharon's polls, by the way, show that most Israelis still
support the policy of restraint. As peace with the Palestinians fades, along
with the Jewish majority in the Land of Israel, Netanyahu is offering Israelis
the ultimate solution. He has a theory that once and for all will free the Jews,
including the leftists, of the occupier's complex and fear of apartheid.
Netanyahu investigated and found that most of the Palestinians living between
the Jordan River and the Mediterranean are the offspring of foreign workers
attracted to the country at the beginning of the 20th century by the Jewish
pioneers who made the desert bloom (click here to read our response to this
argument) - moths attracted by the light, so to speak.
The logical conclusion is that there's no reason to get hot and bothered about a
demographic threat. No country gives national rights to its foreign workers,
even if they are the absolute majority in a particular district. It doesn't
matter when the natives, the Jews, invited the Arabs to plow their fields; they
were day workers who exploited the generosity of the Jews and got stuck like a
bone in their throat and don't deserve self-determination.
A report by Yossi Verter in Ha'aretz from July 17, about a meeting of Netanyahu
supporters in Eilat, describes how the former prime minister won applause by
telling his listeners that he gave a knock-out blow to a CNN interviewer who
told him the Palestinians claim Israel stole their land. "I told her it
wasn't their land," he revealed to his supporters, and that until the start
of the return of the Jews "there wasn't a living soul here." In a
letter published yesterday in Ha'aretz, Netanyahu reiterates the claim that at
least half the growth of the Arab population in the country, in the first half
of the 20th century, was because of Arab immigration. And he adds: "Not
only did the Jewish pioneering bring with it technological and medical progress
and raise the life expectancy of all the population, it also brought masses of
Arab immigrants."
Netanyahu didn't invent this theory. It can be found in the writings of the
leaders of the Revisionist movement. He probably found it in Joan Peters' book,
which, like Netanyahu, buttresses the claim with quotes from Winston Churchill.
In the 601 pages of "From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish
Conflict," published in 1984, the freelance journalist tries to prove that
the Arabs of Israel are not anything more than the offspring of foreign workers
who exploited the generosity of their employers. Peters, who underwent a
transformation from Arab-lover to Zionist, uses quotation marks around the term
Palestinians.
If Netanyahu had telephoned the Middle East historian Yehoshua Porat,
from the Hebrew University, he would have saved himself the severe criticism we
heard from the Jerusalem professor yesterday. Porat would be happy to send
Netanyahu a copy of a 1986 article that appeared in the New York Review of Books
about the old-new theory Netanyahu is now promoting. Porat, like others who
reacted to Peters' book, tore its thesis into shreds.
It's important to note that Porat is not suspected of being a leftist or a
Netanyahu-hater. He was one of the more prominent academics who backed Netanyahu
in the election campaign of 1996 against Shimon Peres.
Porat says that the foreign Arab workers who settled mostly in the Ashdod and
Ashkelon area, as well as Circassians and Muslims who came from Bosnia, were a
tiny minority. Arabs from Syria did indeed come to work for Jews "but when
the work was done they went home," says Porat.
You don't have to be a big expert, says Porat, to understand that most of the
growth of the Palestinian population was a result of natural birthrates.
"It's enough to look at the Arab population of Israel, which has grown
five-fold since the establishment of the state, from 150,000 to 800,000 (not
counting East Jerusalem). And that was in a society that wasn't eager to absorb
them."
The veteran Orientalist also ridicules Netanyahu's
theory that it was the work of the Jewish pioneers who made the desert bloom and
that this drew the Arab workers. "The Jewish settlement needed donations
from Rothschild and then, under the Mandate, there was an orderly administration
that controlled immigration. And with the numbers, Porat demolishes the
Peters-Netanyahu theory. "The census of 1922 showed there were 600,000
Palestinian residents in the country. The high birthrate, together with modern
medicine and improved nutrition, were what contributed to the growth of the
population.
To put things in perspective, Porat mentions that Napoleon's expedition to
Egypt at the beginning of the 19th century estimated there were two million
people in the country. "Look how many there are now in Egypt," he asks
and answers himself, "and that's all without any foreign workers."
Porat concludes that Zionism doesn't need
prevarication to justify its existence.
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Quote- From Time Immemorial is work of propaganda, with all the bad connotations that term carries. Peters' case rests upon distortion and fabrication. Time and again, she misconstrues sources in a tendentious manner. She cribs uncritically from partisan works. She conceals crucial calculations, and draws hard conclusions from tenuous evidence. She speculates wildly and without ground. She exaggerates figures and selects numbers to suit her thesis. She adduces evidence that in no way supports her claims, sometimes even omitting "inconvenient" portions of the citation. She invents contradictions in sources she wishes to discredit by quoting them out of context. She "forgets" undesirable numbers in her calculations. She ignores sources that cast doubt on her conclusions, even when she herself uses those sources for other purposes. She makes baseless insinuations and misleading claims. ...
end quote.