Further, the claim bruited by Arab propagandists of various stripes that the Palestinian refugees were driven out by Israeli forces during the War of Independence is more than likely only minimally valid. The brunt of the responsibility for the flight of Palestinian villagers and fellaheen must be borne almost exclusively by the Arabs. “Every year,” writes Sol Stern in A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred, “the legend grows about the historical crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948.” This is the “nakba myth,” which “has become a lethal political cocktail.” But it is for the most part falsified history.  Even Sir John Glubb of “Glubb Pasha” fame, the British general of the Arab Legion that conducted a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against the newborn Jewish state, wrote in the London Daily Mail for August 12, 1948 that “The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war.” Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, interviewed in the Beirut Telegraph for September 6, 1948, stressed that “these refugees [are] the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state,” and the Jordanian daily Falastin in an article for February 19, 1949 blamed the “Arab states which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes.” These are only a brace among other such affidavits.

With all this information at our fingertips, readily accessible to anyone who cares to do a modicum of research, the question practically asks itself. Why is the international community so quick to accept Palestinian victimhood and to condemn Israel? The answer is self-evident. What the Palestinians have going for them is the latent—and more often manifest—hatred of Israel and the Zionist enterprise in much of the world, which is only the contemporary permutation of age-old antisemitism and which they can tap into and exploit to their own advantage. This is why the Palestinian narrative has “taken.” As Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick puts it, “Anti-Semitism is back in style. Its new justification is not race or religion. It is nationalism….And like its racist and religious predecessors, its aim is to deny the right of Jews to be free.”

The Western embrace of the Palestinians may be nothing more than the furtive policy and privy intention of an international community that plainly wishes for Israel to disappear from the historical proscenium. The fact that Israel within its current borders, as well as Judea and Samaria (aka the “West Bank”), comprise the historic and legal home of the Jewish people is conveniently brushed aside. I am reminded of a moving passage from poet Clive Wilmer, in his New and Collected: “I can’t live where I once lived, though/the roof there used to cover me.” Moreover, there is little willingness to recognize that when terrorism becomes a way of life as it has for the Palestinians, there is scant prospect for peace.