Ruth King

The other day on a city bus I saw a sign that warned riders of identity theft. It highlighted the words “It can cost you forever.”

On my left (definitely on my left) a passenger was reading the New York Times appraisal of what Israel must give to the “Palestinians” in order to proceed with the charade at Annapolis. What a fitting example of identity theft which seems to cost forever.

Israel’s defamers have cynically stolen all the terms which define Jewish history and aspirations. It is a phenomenon which started long ago when the word “ghetto” became synonymous with minorities living in poverty in certain boroughs where they constituted the majority. In fact the word ghetto has a significant and uniquely Jewish history. In the fifteenth century in many European cities, the ghetto was the only place Jews could live, frequently behind heavily fortified walls, under curfews, in fear of attacks in spite of the guards they were forced to hire, and permitted to leave only a few days a year.

After the French Revolution and Napoleon, many ghettos were disbanded. They were reintroduced by the Nazis and European countries which colluded in herding together Jews under horrific conditions from whence they were taken to extermination camps.

Now, the neighborhoods of Europe where Arabs live and terrorize their non-Arab neighbors are called “ghettos” in their diurnal complaints to local administrations. And dictionaries—all of them—dismiss the Jewish history of pre-Holocaust ghettos as if they were simply gated communities.

Another favorite stolen term is the “Palestinian Diaspora,” defined in many online dictionaries as including those Arabs who were expelled or ran from Israel during the war against the Jewish state which started in 1947. In fact “diaspora” is unique to the Jewish exile from the land of Israel after the expulsions in the 6th century B.C. and then after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 A.D.

And, as night follows day, the longing of Jews in the Diaspora to return to the only nation which has restored and sustained their faith and given them an opportunity to live in freedom from the centuries of dislocations, murders, torture and genocide has been turned into the Arab’s “right to return” to Israel—and trust me they don’t just mean the “West Bank.” So swiftly has this theft been legitimated that even Israeli and American diplomats and leaders discuss the Arab “right of return” as if it were a negotiable item.

The word “refugee” in the Middle East now refers exclusively to Arabs, as Jews gladly shed their statelessness and assumed citizenship in Israel and anywhere else in the non-Arab world in which they alighted. There were, in fact, more Jewish refugees from Arab lands than Arabs who left Israel and to whom the entire world headed by the United Nations has given “hereditary status,” with sons, daughters, grandchildren and great grandchildren of those Arabs now called “refugees.”

Even the Temple Mount is being stripped by Arabs and their academic cohorts in American universities of its solely Jewish history.

But the most egregious theft of identity is the word “Palestinian,” now used ubiquitously to describe only the Arabs of Palestine and the putative name for an Arab terrorist state in the heart of Israel. Palestinian was the name accorded to all Jewish cultural, social, and scientific enterprises before the official name became Israel in 1948. Palestine was the land mass that included present day Jordan and Gaza which was deeded to the Jews by the terms of the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations.

To call only Arabs “Palestinian” and to ignore Israel’s legitimacy in Palestine is to be an accomplice in a massive identity theft which will cost forever.

In a monograph The Palestinians: a Political Masquerade written by Arthur Kahn and Thomas F. Murray published by AFSI in 1977 the authors write: "The Arabs of Palestine have allowed themselves to be defined as an 'anti-nation,' one that derives its entire meaning and purpose from the desire to destroy another nation.”

And this remains the goal of those Arabs now packing their suitcases for their trip to Annapolis to demand more concessions from the Palestinian Jews who have no real "identity" left to squander.