The legal paperwork of the League of Nations also made our rights here crystal clear and said not a word about any “Palestinians” with an equivalent right to a state in this tiny territory.

These Arabs, my book, my work-in-progress documents, spent the first Biblical generation of forty years after the League of Nations Mandate kicked in denying there was such a country as Palestine.

Not until a decade following the birth of Israel, and the shedding of the term “Palestinian” for the Jews in the new state of Israel; not until 1959 is there a conscious effort to pick up the idea of “Palestine” and imagine an historic “Palestinian” people living in it. When the Jews stopped using the words “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” and starting using the words “Israel” and “Israelis”; ten years later the Arabs picked up those words and ever since have made them their own.

In truth these Arabs in their masses can here only came after the Zionists, and because of the Zionists who were creating wealth and job opportunities. So many of the Arabs who ran into Gaza in 1948 had been migrant workers from all over the Arab world who because they were migrant workers had no immovable property to hold onto in the fighting. There was nothing “Palestinian” about them, let alone Ancient Palestinian about these 200,000 migrant workers who ran behind Egyptian lines in 1948-49 and got marooned. Undocumented aliens with no papers.

The Palestinian Narrative is pure invention and the sky would not fall if an Israeli leader would say so in public…