Despite all evidence

Editorial

The fire that threatened to engulf Yad Vashem before it was brought under control on Sunday was not an act of arson, as initially reported. At first, it appeared, someone might have sought to destroy the most vital resource of Holocaust remembrance and study in the world. It is a great relief to know that there was no such intent. Yet, even as our original fears that someone might have tried to incinerate this fond of historical knowledge were assuaged, other news suggests that deliberate efforts continue to attempt to eradicate much of the Jewish historical record on a different front.

In a report from Jerusalem and Ramallah, the National Post’s Jonathan Kay wrote of confronting history-negating conspiracy theories from senior Palestinian officials. (It is worth reviewing Kay’s column in the July 19 Post.) In his article, Kay acknowledges that he was aware that the official Palestinian narrative promotes the idea that the Jewish people have no history in the region, that there was no Temple and that Israeli archaeologists are plotting to destroy the third-holiest Muslim site, the Dome of the Rock (itself constructed atop the remnants of the destroyed holiest site of Judaism). But, Kay writes, it was still a shock to hear such blatant fantasy face-to-face.

Kay contends that events of the last decade, intended to break the spirit and the back of the Jewish state, have served instead “to remind Israelis why their country was founded in the first place, thereby reinvigorating its specifically Jewish sense of mission.”

Kay’s article came out about the same time as the release of a poll of Palestinian public opinion, which seems to suggest that the historical negation Kay heard from senior Palestinians is shared by wide swaths of the population in the West Bank and Gaza.

The survey was conducted by American pollster Stanley Greenberg on behalf of the Beit Sahour-based Palestinian Centre for Public Opinion and was sponsored by the Israel Project. It asked more than 1,000 respondents in the West Bank and Gaza whether they agreed with U.S. President Barack Obama’s statement that “there should be two states: Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people.” One in three respondents – 34 percent – said yes; 61 percent said no. Even more significant than this overwhelming rejection of peaceful coexistence was the 66 percent who contended that a two-state solution should be viewed as an interim stage toward the ultimate goal of a single Palestinian state in the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

In its website headline, Commentary magazine optimistically declared: “New poll shows real cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” But there was nothing in the poll that was news and, frankly, nothing to get excited about. The “phased strategy” to eliminate Israel, expressed by two-thirds of respondents, has been official Palestinian policy since 1974 and has never been renounced or redacted.

In fact, as if to confirm that the 1974 policy was neither a mistake nor to be rescinded, on the very day that Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles of the Oslo Accords and shook hands with Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin, he restated – again, as clearly as the sunshine on the White House lawn that day – his determination to destroy Israel.

“Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do it in stages,” Arafat told Jordanian TV. “We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel.”

The recent poll had plenty of other findings as well, such as the fact that 72 percent of respondents denied any Jewish connection to Jerusalem. This statistic, too, should not be shocking, however, since this is what the Palestinian education system and politicians have been saying for at least three generations.

Nonetheless, while the historical denial laid bare in this poll may well be the cause of the conflict, as Commentary states, this reality is likely to come to nothing. Those who are prepared to believe nonsense in the face of all evidence – whether in Ramallah, Tehran, Damascus, the capitals of Europe, the United Nations or “progressive” circles in North America – will continue to find reasons to blame Israel for the hatred heaped upon it. For some, like the officials Kay met and many of the respondents to the opinion poll, the best resolution would seem to be if Jews and their history would just disappear and be forgotten.

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