Here is another excellent review of The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, which you can order here.
“‘The Palestinian Delusion’ Untangles a Web of Fashionable Lies (Opinion),” by Steve Gruber, Flag & Cross, December 15, 2019:
Chances are that if you know a college student, he or she believes these things: Israel exists on stolen land. Israelis are all just Europeans, anyway. The true inhabitants of the land that is called Israel today are the Palestinians, and their country is Palestine. The Israeli occupation is cruel, and marked by numerous human rights abuses perpetrated against the innocent Palestinians. One day, the occupation will end, and from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
But fervently and passionately believed falsehoods are still just falsehoods. And now, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on Islam and jihad, and author of the unique and groundbreaking The History of Jihad, has turned to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and delivered a concise but comprehensive refutation of all the false claims about this conflict that prevail today on college campuses and elsewhere. In the sharp and factual book The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, historian Robert Spencer untangles the web of lies that envelop all discussion of this conflict in the international media, and gives us the unvarnished (and often unwelcome) truth.
One thing that nobody ever seems to wonder about is why this conflict is still going on so many decades after some of the most renowned and respected leaders in the world began to devote concerted efforts to ending it. Why has every one of the numerous attempts to bring peace failed, and failed consistently for seven decades now? In The Palestinian Delusion, Spencer answers that question and many others about this intractable dispute, and in the process, establishes definitively that Israel, contrary to the claims of so many among the academic, political, and media elites, not only has a right to exist, but has the best claim of any country to the supposedly occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
From the beginning of this book to its end, Spencer provides copious quotations of the primary actors in this ongoing drama, thereby providing a straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth account that would be difficult, and likely impossible, to refute. He explains not only why every attempt at hitting upon an agreement that will enable Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in peace has failed, but also why they were doomed to fail from the start. He elucidates the key and almost totally overlooked element of this dispute that foredoomed all negotiations to failure, except insofar as they served as stepping stones to get the Palestinians what they wanted.
There is much more. Read the rest here.
mortimer says
Wouldn’t it be great if all first-year students were required to read and study ‘The Palestinian Delusion’ ?
mgoldberg says
My first year college student will get hers in two days or so. There are so many who need to learn the basics of this ‘Palestinian delusion’ this falsely pictured ‘peace process’. The media is so incapable of delivering this information; but they will smear any attempts to actually drill down and analyze the Jihad. In the name o correctness, they will smear any attempts to drill down into the fruth and the facts of history and ideology.
mgoldberg says
The necessity is compounded by the severity of the need… the muslim arab mind is so hostile to jews and any concept of an independent Israel that people need to see and understand the issues as they truly are… not what we might wish them to be. It is not a matter of two ‘peoples’ competing for land. That is a misnomer and a falsity perpetrated to explain the eternal war declared against others, all, and especially jews and any independent Jewish state.
This morning Palestian Media Watch noted a video of a Fatah leader speaking:
“A senior Fatah official touts Palestinian “values” while praising teenage terrorists and the murder of innocent Israeli civilians.
Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, in a speech in October at a “Loyalty to Martyrs (i.e. terrorists)” conference, praised the murder of Israeli civilians, saying that the “children of Palestine felt that the [Palestinian Authority] leadership didn’t know what to do.”
Headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah is the PA’s ruling party.
While justifying terror, Zaki claimed that murdering a man in front of his wife and two-year-old son, and not killing the wife and t, and , contraton, shows Palestinian “values,” notes Palestinian Media Watch’s Itamar Marcus.
Can there be any “values” more perverted than these?
And yet, The reality is that Muhannad Halabi, a 19 yo Palestinian terrorist who stabbed and murdered 2 Israelis, Rabbi Nehemiah Lavi and Aharon Bennett, and, contrary to what Abbas Zaki claims in this speech, stabbed and attempted to murder both Bennett’s wife, Adele, and their 2 yr old son in the Old City of Jerusalem on Cot 3, 2015. Folowing the attack, he was shot and killed by police.
Robert_k says
Just by seeing that the Palestinians speak Levantine Arabic and gave names indicating foreign countries and cities shows the duplicity of the Palestinian Nationality.
mortimer says
I would be interested to learn the first case in which an Arab was called ‘a Palestinian’.
The best example I found is here: 1898: Khalil Beidas, his preface to his translation of Akim Olesnitsky’s A Description of the Holy Land: “the people of Palestine were in need of a geography book about their country… the Palestinian peasant waits impatiently for winter to come, for the season’s rain to moisten his fossilized fields”. It has been proposed that this represents the first instance in modern history where the term ‘Palestinian’ or ‘Filastini’ appears in Arabic. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_name_%22Palestine%22#Rashidun,_Umayyad_and_Abbasid_Caliphates_period)
mgoldberg says
It is curious that the translation of Olesnitsky’s book uses the notion of the Palestinian peasant. The Jewish residents were known as palestinians but were known as Jews and the arabs abhorred the notion of any connection… yet they secretly yearned to be something. I wonder if anyone has ever wrtten about that schism in the arab, muslim heart- his inability to be a person, other than as a part of the ummah, after his tribe, his family, his extended family etc.
Mr. Cohen says
This article will make Muslims angry:
http://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/17/forbes-names-tel-aviv-2nd-best-city-to-visit-in-2020/
gravenimage says
‘The Palestinian Delusion’ Untangles a Web of Fashionable Lies
……………
Thank you, Steve Gruber.
Linde Barrera says
To grave image-Great job debunking Leander’s nonsensical verbiage. Some folks just like to babble and Leander is surely one of those.
gravenimage says
Thank you, Linde.
And Merry Christmas to you and yours!