The essay, “The Twentieth Century”, in a history book
of that name, analyzes what is perhaps the most outrageous example of the
“New History”. The book has been introduced into the Ninth grade in
Israeli schools. The very title is a deception. The Twentieth Century
ignores the first two decades of the century. It’s narrative begins
after the first World War. The pupils are kept ignorant of the
historic Zionist revolution in Jewish life which was at its height in
precisely those decades. In this book, there is no Herzl, no Nordau, no
Dreyfus, no Ben-Yehuda, no Bialik. No key figures in the Jewish cause
during the war, neither Weizman nor Jabotinsky exist, nor does Arthur
Balfour of the Balfour Declaration.
The book’s narrative opens with a major
falsification. The League of Nation’s Mandate for Palestine (1922) is
dismissed in one paragraph and that one paragraph is mendacious to the
ultimate degree. Hence, no mention of recognized Jewish rights or of
solemn British obligations to the Jewish people for the “reconstruction of
the Jewish National Home”. The beginning of the upbuilding is implicitly
ascribed to British benevolents, and so there is no mention of the
worldwide intensive operation of the Jewish National Fund.
Relations with the Arabs are falsified – to the
disadvantage of the Jews. Like the Mandate, the text of the Weizman-Feisal
agreement is not quoted, but described tendentiously. The outbreaks of
Arab violence in the 1920s and 1930s are misdescribed, minimized or
ignored. British intervention favoring the Arabs is glossed over or left
unmentioned.
The book does not contain the story of gradually
intensifying British policy, nor of Britain’s contribution to Jewish
distress in Europe by the virtual closing of the gates of Eretz Israel
– a policy maintained religiously throughout the Holocaust.
The book conjures up, in grotesque untruths, a tale
of Israeli superiority in armament during the War of Independence; and it
manipulates dates crucial to the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The
PLO, created in 1964 – three years before the Six Day War – is
described as having been born in 1968.
As a valedictory message to the fourteen year old
pupils, the book asks a question: “Will the Jewish People continue to
exist?”
