Chapter 6 - A GARLAND OF MYTHS The distortion of history, ancient and modern, basic to the Arab-British resistance to Jewish restoration, had been fully articulated by 1948. After 1948, the Arabs added greater depth and vehemence in presentation and with it a theme of hatred of the Jews, comparable only to the demonology of medieval Christianity or the excesses of German Nazi propaganda in our own age. Inevitably, the propaganda became even more intense and unrestrained after the Six Day War. As Hitler and Goebbels, the arch-propagandists of the century, discovered and taught, the greater the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. The Arabs' version of history, of their and the Jews' relationship to Palestine, is not uniform. It is often accommodated to the tastes or prejudices of the audience. It not only fabricates, it also ignores the known recorded facts and unblinkingly replaces the picture of public knowledge of even a year ago with a completely imagined substitute. The most startling item in the Arabs' propaganda is their usurpation of the Jewish patrimony of Jerusalem. Arab political propaganda claims that Jerusalem is an "Arab city," has been an Arab city for many centuries, and is a holy city in Islam. There is only one small grain of truth in this claim, which on the whole is as false as the quite common description of Palestine as "a land holy to three faiths." It is possible to call Palestine a land holy to two faiths: to Christianity as well as to Judaism. It was certainly never holy to Islam. Palestine has no significance in the Moslem religion. It never existed as a country under Arab or any of the other Moslem administrations. Jerusalem does contain a place holy to Islam (and this too was borrowed from Judaism), but the city as such has no significance in Islam. The known facts are fascinatingly simple. Mohammed, in establishing Islam in Arabia, hoped that both Jews and Christians would adopt the new religion. He called on them to accept him as the successor of both Moses and Jesus, whose original authority and sanctity he respected. To emphasize the affinity and religious continuity between the two older religions and Islam, he at first ordered that when praying the Moslem should adopt the Jewish custom of turning his face to Jerusalem (at that time still under Christian rule). When, however, there was no response by Christians or Jews to his claim or to his appeal, he rescinded the order eighteen months later. Moslems at prayer have ever since turned their faces to Mecca. The Koran itself relates only that Mohammed in a single night was transported to heaven by "Buraq." He was first taken to what the Koran called the "uttermost mosque." Jerusalem is not mentioned in the story, and there was, of course, no mosque in Jerusalem. After Mohammed's death, the tradition - which did not pass unchallenged by an opposing school of thought - laid it down that the "uttermost mosque" meant the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. (Jerusalem) had been holy to the Jews for nearly two thousand years before Mohammed. On this legend rests the Moslem claim to the Jewish Temple Mount as a Moslem Holy Place. It is not known that Mohammed in fact ever set foot in Jerusalem. Here begins and ends the religious significance of Jerusalem to Islam. Nor were the Moslems overly impressed with Jerusalem's importance when they ruled in Palestine. The city never played any part in the Arabs' political life. It never served even as a provincial capital, not even a subprovincial capital (an honor reserved for Ramleh). No less significantly, it was never a Moslem cultural center. Nor did the Arabs attach any importance to living in Jerusalem. Successive Arab attacks, encouraged or permitted by the British, from 1920 onward, gradually squeezed the majority of the Jews out of the Old City and into the New. In 1948, when their ammunition ran out, the final remnant and the handful of defenders surrendered to the Jordanians. That was when the city was divided. Suddenly, for the first time in history, the Arabs discovered and revealed to the world the vehement, passionate, almost desperate, accents of a deep-rooted, long-standing, and undying attachment to Jerusalem. This fabrication of an emotion ... may be helpful in demonstrating a national characteristic of the Arabs, which has assumed central importance in the confrontation between the Jewish and Arab peoples: the admitted capacity of the Arabs to manufacture facts, to deceive themselves into accepting them, and to work themselves up into a public passion over what is in fact a nonexistent emotion. "What a people believes," writes Hitti about the Arabs, "even if untrue has the same influence over their lives as if it were true." As a major political weapon, however, complex fabrication has developed organically among the Arabs in the two generations of the struggle for Palestine. The Arabs' account of the events of the Six Day War consisted of a counterpoint utterly different to the events themselves. Their reports bore only minimal relation to what was happening - except for the two facts that a war was in progress and that its scene was the Middle East. The effect of the Arab reports was not achieved without the assistance of foreign news media which credulously or in wishful eagerness, spread them. Deception was, after all, the obverse of self-deception. When President Nasser claimed that British and American planes had bombed Egyptian airfields and that Egyptian planes had bombed Israeli cities, he was misleading not only the world, but also the Arabs. King Hussein's (Jordan) decision to attack Israel - and to persist in the attack even after the Israeli Prime Minister had urged him to desist to avoid a clash - was probably based on his belief in Egyptian reports of havoc and destruction in Israel. The Arab terrorist organizations ... adapted the tone and content of their propaganda to prevailing political currents in the world and made effective use of the modern mass media. They disseminated so plausible a statement of their motives, so lively a version of their fighting methods and achievements, that the average person, with little opportunity or interest to make a study, naturally tended to accept them. This is, of course, the type of story that Europeans and Americans expect to hear, attuned as they are to the taut heroic dreams of liberation movements, underground or open, that have captured the public imagination during the past thirty years. The Arabs' action stories have, moreover, often been retailed and given added verisimilitude by the dispatches of eager American and European news correspondents on the spot. The picture thus presented of the purpose of the Arab terrorist organizations, of their origin and background, and of the natures of their activities, was a sophisticated, modern fulfillment of Al-Ghazzali's permissive philosophy: It was a mixture of exaggeration and wishful thinking. It was spread abroad with great intensity by the worldwide labors of a large team of propagandists, some frankly professional, many planted as students at universities in Europe and the Americas, all maintained or subsidized by a vast budget. In fact, the Fatah and its rival organizations have never carried out or tried to carry out an attack of any significance on any unit of Israel's army, air force, or navy. Fatah operations have been directed almost exclusively against civilian targets. In these operations, they have confined themselves almost exclusively to two weapons: explosives with a time mechanism, and hand grenades. By far the greater number of Fatah operations have been executed from outside Israeli territory: mainly across the Jordan River, but also to a lesser degree in the mountains of Galilee straddling the dividing line with Lebanon. Across these borders, at a safe distance, the fighters of Fatah have carried out hundreds of light-artillery attacks. Such attacks across borders have provided the most picturesque locations for conducted visits by foreign correspondents. Here the missing ingredients of stark military confrontation and of guerilla valor could be added at will. Journalists and television teams were, for example, taken at night to the banks of the Yabbok River in the heart of Transjordan. Facing each other across the river, two groups of Fatah fighters exchanged artillery fire with careful imprecisions. The following day, Scandinavian television viewers were shown the Yabbok River, now identified as the Jordan, and the battling forces, one of which was now described as the Israeli Army. The picture of the battle was accompanied by a commentary on the casualties probably inflicted on the Israeli Army and the certain destruction of specific Israeli military targets. Those news-hungry journalists, ignorant of local geography, no experts in battleground reporting, bemused by the night and the noise, unconscious of the Arabs' infinite capacity for invention -what reason did they have to doubt the authenticity of the connection between what their eyes saw and what their hosts were telling them? The targets of attacks from across the border were invariably the Israeli border villages - their men and women and children, their domestic animals, their little houses. As in the days before 1967, when they were harassed nightly by Syrian artillery fire pouring down from the Golan Heights, there are children in many villages on the Jordan who do not know what it is to sleep in their own cots; they spent their childhood nights in underground shelters. Nor is this yet the full measure of the masquerade. Fatah and its sister organizations were not born after or as a result of the Six Day War and the Israeli occupation of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. They came into existence some ten years earlier, when three quarters of a million Arabs in Samaria and Judea lived under Arab rule from Jordan and three hundred thousand lived in the Gaza Strip under Egyptian Arabic rule. They did not enjoy the independence which the Fatah propagandists claim to be the breath of life to them, and they seemed quite oblivious to its absence. For those nineteen years, there was no talk of independence nor any action to secure it. In those years as well, Israel was the target of Fatah's activities - Israel in its cramped partition borders. Then, too, Fatah acted in the name of the "Palestinian people" - presumably the Arab-ruled Arabs of Hebron and Jenin and Nablus as well as the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa and Nazareth in Israel. Fatah was not founded in Palestine. Throughout the years of non- Israeli rule in Judea and Samaria, it did not have its headquarters there and did not conduct its operation from there. It was founded in Lebanon in the late 1950s. Yasser Arafat, its leader, is not uncharacteristic of the Fatah membership. (Arafat's family) were not "refugees" or exiles, they had simply moved house in the 1920s, twenty years or more before the State of Israel came into existence. Though he was a frequent traveler, in all the nineteen years of Jordanian Arab rule, he did not set foot, let alone try to live, still less naturalize his movement, in Judea or Samaria, not even in the city he claims as his birthplace (Jerusalem). He gave Palestine and the people who lived there a wide berth. For Fatah members could not expect shelter from the Palestinian Arabs, whether in Jordan-occupied Judea and Samaria or in Israel. With few exceptions, the "Palestinian people" were not involved at all, nor did they offer any substantial cooperation, even passive, in these operations. The terrorist organizations are not, in fact, nor have they been, an arm of the allegedly homeless Palestine Arabs. Each of them has been the instrument of one or more of all of the Arab states. The Arab states, defeated and not yet able to resume a direct attack on Israel, began to promote "popular" terrorist activity on a large scale. They turned to Fatah as the potential instrument of preparatory attrition, and set up additional terrorist organizations of their own. The largest contributions in cash (to support Fatah) came from the fabulously wealthy oil states of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. Training facilities were provided by Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan. The Fatah carried out a daily artillery barrage against Israel, that is, against sitting-duck targets: the villages along the Jordan's West Bank. From the rest of Israel, moreover, came volunteers - veterans of 1948, high school students, new immigrants - for a stint of labor and guard duty in the harassed villages. (Fatah) now developed its capacity for propaganda and exploited the receptiveness of many elements in the West. Arab pride soared, and volunteers poured in. They were all absorbed: There was no lack of money or facilities in this liberation movement de luxe, financed as it was by the treasuries of some of the richest states in the world. The Fatah now also began to ignore the laws of the land and its authorities, arrogating to itself the rights of a regular army responsible only to its own commanders. They set up the beginning of a state within a state. The "liberation" movement was shifting the focus of its activities. The propaganda campaign abroad continued to mobilize considerable sympathy in the larger world. This image had great advantages: It emphasized the Palestinians as the objects of Arab concern and struggle. In their extremity, (Fatah) evoked sympathy and pity in all the Arab countries as well as among the Arabs of Judea and Samaria. There developed a sharp crisis between Jordan (who ousted them) and the other Arab states. Whatever their future, by their success in disseminating the story of a "Liberation" movement and the hoax of the "revolution" of the "Palestinian nation," they rendered incalculable service to the Arab states. They mobilized the sympathy of many honestly ignorant people throughout the world who thus unwittingly helped the pan-Arab war effort against the restoration of the Jewish people to its homeland. It was one of the great myths of Arab propaganda elements in the period of the Mandate that the Arab farmers of Palestine had been dispossessed or rendered landless. In fact, every square inch of land acquired from the Arabs was paid for.