“To put it bluntly,” writes Lyn Julius writes a thought-provoking piece for The Propagandist, “Arabs need to become Zionists if there is to be peace. They need to accept that the Jews are an indigenous Middle Eastern people with a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.”
She was responding to a “role playing exercise” in which Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland participated. She asks:
How has the peace agenda come to be so seriously skewed? The victims of a genocidal project to destroy the Jews in the Middle East have been turned into aggressors, and Jewish suffering downplayed. Who around the negotiating table remembers that it was the Arabs who rejected the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, and launched a war of annihilation against Israel in 1948? Who remembers the Arab League secretary-general Azzam Pasha’s spine-chilling promise in 1947: ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades’?
Read the rest of her excellent post and her astute dissection of Freedland’s blind spots and the distortions of history that have created the current Israel/Palestine narrative.
