To  contact us

Phone: 020 8455 5140

Fax: 020 8731 760

Or emails as under officers (see home page, left hand side).

Postal Address 31 The Vale London NW11 8SE

Myth # 1  “Jews stole Arab land.”

  FACT   

From the beginning of World War One, absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut owned much of the then-Palestine’s land. Jews went out of their way to avoid purchasing land in areas where Arabs might be displaced.  Land was largely uncultivated, swampy, cheap and – crucially - without tenants. After Jews had bought up all the uncultivated land, they began to purchase cultivated land from willing Arab vendors. 

Myth # 2 “The British changed their policy after World War II to allow the survivors of the Holocaust to settle in Palestine ”

  FACT

 During the War, the gates of Palestine were closed, stranding thousands of Jews in Europe, many of whom became victims in the Holocaust, Hitler's ‘Final Solution' for the Jews of Europe  After the war, Britain refused to allow Holocaust survivors to find sanctuary in Palestine. Some Jews were smuggled in by Jewish resistance fighters.

Myth # 3 “ Israel took all of Palestine in 1948.”

  FACT

80% of historical Palestine was severed by the British in 1922 and allocated to what became Transjordan (later Jordan). Jewish settlement in Transjordan was banned.  The United Nations partitioned the remaining 20% of Palestine into two states in 1947/8, but the Arabs refused to discuss partition (which would have created a Palestinian state) and instead tried to destroy Israel by force in the 1948 war, which Israel won, leaving the Palestinians without a state, with the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip taken by Jordan and Egypt respectively, contrary to the UN partition plan.  With Jordan 's annexation of the West Bank in 1950, Arabs controlled approximately 80% of the territory in the former Palestine Mandate, while the Jewish State had 17.5% (Gaza, the remaining 2.5%, was occupied by Egypt).

Myth # 4  “Resolution 242 requires Israel to return to its pre-1967 boundaries.”

  FACT

Resolution 242 calls for "termination of all claims or states of belligerency" and the recognition that "every State in the area" has the "right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force." This is a call for Arab states to recognise the existence of the State of Israel; to this day, Jordan and Egypt are alone among Israel’s neighbours in recognising Israel. Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Kuwait are among the Arab states, which do not, implicitly or explicitly, recognise Israel, contrary to Resolution 242.

  Resolution 242 also calls for the "Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict", the 1967 Six Day War, in which Israel gained the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan, the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria while fighting a defensive war sparked by the Arab world’s desire to destroy Israel. 

  The resolution does not make Israeli withdrawal a prerequisite for Arab recognition of Israel. Moreover, it does not specify how much territory Israel is required to give up.

  The Security Council did not say Israel must withdraw from "all the" territories occupied after the Six Day War. This was quite deliberate.

                                      The Palestinians never demanded an end to Jordanian occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state. While fighting a defensive war in 1967, Israel came to control the West Bank; at the 1967 Khartoum Conference, the Arab world rejected Israel’s immediate offer to cede the West Bank in return for peace and recognition of the Arab world, in the infamous Three Nos: No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No negotiations of Israel.

  Since the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, the case for tagging Israel as an “occupying power” has been further weakened by the fact that Israel has transferred virtually all civilian authority in the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority.  98 percent of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza comes under the PA's authority. The extent to which Israel has been forced to maintain a military presence in the territories has been dictated by the Palestinians' unwillingness to end violence against Israel.