Free A Durable Peace by Benjamin Netanyahu Page B

pauper village.
    And for the country as a whole, he gave this bereaved lamentation:
    Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies…. Palestine
is desolate and unlovely…. It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land. 57
    Twain’s observations were echoed fourteen years later in the report of the eminent English cartographer Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
on Judea: “In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no appearance of life or habitation.” 58
    Stanley wrote these words in 1881—the very year that Arafat designates as the beginning of the Zionist “invasion” and the
“displacement” of the dynamic local population. That Arafat is caught in another lie is by itself unimportant. What is important
is that this lie, endlessly repeated, refined, and elaborated, has displaced what every civilized and educated person knew
at the close of the nineteenth century: that the land was indeed largely empty and could afford room to the millions of Jews
who were living in intolerable and increasingly dangerous conditions in the ghettos of Europe and who were yearning to return
to the land and bring it back to life.
    It is true, of course, that there were Arabs living in Palestine, and that in the middle of the nineteenth century they outnumbered
its Jewish population. But by the third quarter of the century the total population of the entire country, Arabs and Jews,
was still only 400,000—less than four percent of today’s figure. 59 By the end of World War I, that number had reached 900,000 on both banks of the Jordan, and roughly 600,000 in western Palestine
(the present state of Israel), although these are still insignificant numbers when compared with the overall potential of
settlement and habitation. 60 As the German Kaiser, who visited Palestine in 1898, said to Herzl, whom he met there, “The settlements I have seen, the
German as well as those of your own people, may serve as samples of what may be done with the country. There is room here
for everyone.” 61
    When intelligent and humanitarian men such as Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George considered this wasteland of Palestine, they
understood that its minuscule Arab presence, making use of virtually none of the available land for the people’s own meager
needs, could hardly be considered a serious counter to the claim of millions of Jews the world over to a state of their own—especiallywhen the vast reaches of Arabdom (which extends over five hundred times the area of today’s Israel and the administered territories
combined) * would be considered a homeland for the Arabs. As Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky put it a few years later, in his testimony
before the Peel Commission:
    I do not deny that [in building the Jewish state]… the Arabs of Palestine will necessarily become a minority in the country
of Palestine. What I do deny is that
that
is a hardship. It is not a hardship on any race, any nation, possessing so many National States now and so many more National
States in the future. One fraction, one branch of that race, and not a big one, will have to live in someone else’s State….
I fully understand that any minority would prefer to be a majority, it is quite understandable that the Arabs of Palestine
would also prefer Palestine to be the Arab State No. 4, No. 5, No. 6. [Today there are twenty-one Arab states]… but when the
Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish claim to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation. 62
    In trying to shore up their historical claim to Palestine, the Arabs have not merely distorted the demographic and physical
conditions of the country in the nineteenth century. They have tried to persuade the world that the Arabs of Palestine had
forged a distinct and unique national identity over the centuries; otherwise, they knew, they would not qualify for