Keynote speaker at Palestine Book Fair says Jews made up their history

The keynote speaker at the Palestine Book Fair was Rima Khalaf, the former UN official with a history of making up lies about Israel who was forced to resign when she issued a report calling Israel an apartheid state, something even the UN couldn't countenance.

Previously she had - as a UN official - supported BDS, praised Arab regimes that were against normalizing relations with Israel, praised Egypt for launching the Yom Kippur War, and supported terror attacks by calling them "resistance." 

At the book fair, Khalaf said that "Zionists" made up history and that European Jews have nothing to do with Israel, essentially endorsing the antisemitic and absurd theory that Jews are Khazars.

To market settler colonialism, oppression, and apartheid to a world weary of all, Zionism had to invent a new narrative – a false narrative that would normalize the abnormal, legitimize the blatantly illegal, and justify the morally repugnant. Zionist leaders understood early on that it wasn’t enough to win military conflicts. They also had to win the conflict of narratives which in the past proved to have a bigger effect on the trajectory of human history.

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Zionism... had to reinvent Judaism and Jewry to fit its purposes, and it did. All of a sudden, the Jewish portion of Palestine’s history became the history of Europeans of the Jewish faith. Accordingly, the European Jews became the “rightful” heirs to the land of Palestine.

This alternative history would portray their invasion of Palestine, as a ‘just’ war to reclaim what is theirs. And although still illegal under international law, it would depict their dispossession and uprooting of Palestinians as an unfortunate, yet justifiable necessity, for exercising their “legitimate” return to their land.

This false narrative was needed to beautify what under any other circumstance would look ugly and appalling. It was also necessary to harness the religious feelings of European Jews and give their narrative priority over the religious feelings or national rights of anyone else involved.

Hence, narrative was of the utmost importance in the construction of the state of Israel and the consequent dispossession, oppression, and subjugation of the Palestinian people.

She is saying that European Jews have no ties to the Land of Israel, and that somehow in a few decades Zionists fooled millions of them into believing they were really descended from Jews of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. 

The projection is something to behold. Palestinians who have no history as a people before Zionism are claiming that it is the Jewish people who have a false history.

Palestinians, who deny even the existence of the Jewish Temples, are claiming that Jews have suppressed Palestinian history. 

Denying a people's heritage to make a bogus claim on land is the Palestinian Arab invention, not a Jewish one.

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