Deliberate Deceptions: Facing the Facts About U.S.-Israeli Relationship.

• Author: Safty, Adel

One of the most abiding features of the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the asymmetrical nature of the balance of power between its main protagonists: Politically, militarily, financially, linguistically, and organizationally, the Zionists have almost always enjoyed the upper hand. Nowhere is this asymmetrical nature more dramatically illustrated than in its linguistic dimension. The effectiveness with which the Zionists combined the propagandistic use of language with their organizational and political skills to construct a towering edifice of mythologies about the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict was unmatched by anything the Palestinians and the Arabs could do or say.

So powerful was the edifice of Zionist mythologies about the conflict that it marginalized any competing version of the historical realities of the conflict, and indeed negated the very existence of the Palestinian people themselves. So dominant was Zionist propaganda that it defined the limits of most Western debates, discussions, coverage and analysis of the conflict in mainstream media and scholarship. This in turn made it possible for Western politicians, particularly American leaders, to remain ignorant of and insensitive to the fundamental causes of the conflict and of the validity of claims of the various parties, on the one hand, and their consistency with the norms of justice and international legitimacy, on the other hand.

Recently, Israeli historians and writers delved into declassified Israeli cabinet and military documents, interviewed politicians and military leaders, and found realities inconsistent with the "official" version of the conflict dominant in Israel and the West. These Israeli writers include Simha Flapan, Tom Segev, Benny Morris, Amnon Kapeliouk, and Meron Benvenisti.

The works of these Israelis directly challenged established Zionist mythologies about the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thus, Simha Flapan stated at the beginning of his book that he wrote it "in the hope of sweeping away the distortions and lies that have hardened into sacrosanct myth . . . and had become accepted as historical truth."

Israeli historian Benny Morris said about the official Israeli version, dominant in the West, about the Palestinian exodus in 1948-49: "People's minds have been warped by 40 years of nonsense."

There have also been other challenges to the Zionist propaganda dominant in America. Foremost among writers and scholars with crucial contributions in this area are Alfred Lilienthal and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod; other persistent challengers of "official" knowledge about the conflict include Noam Chomsky, Cherryl Rubenberg, and Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens.

The edifice of fabrications and mythologies has now been thoroughly discredited; it is shaken but it has not yet crumbled. This is partly because of the strength of the long-dominant propaganda and the growing effectiveness of Israel's friends in the...