He said “Jewish gangs exiled more than 750,000 Palestinians.” This is a double whammy of a lie. First of all, there were no Jewish gangs. The IDF was an organized army in uniform; that is not a gang.

The UN figure, secondly, was 590,000, not 750, and of those perhaps 100,000 were not exiled by “Jewish gangs” but, as soon as the UN General Assembly voted for partition on 29 November 1947, who picked up and packed up and left the country because they did not want to live under a Jewish regime. And they were able to pick up and pack up so quickly because they had where to run to, because so many of them were no natives of Balestine at all but had come into the country during the Mandate period to get in on the booming economy – thanks to the Jews. They had homes and families elsewhere, and so when they decided to leave, they had where to run to and find a place to live, not in refugee camp but with family, on the old family sod.

The IDF in its infancy as well, fighting to save the infant Jewish state was too busy fighting the regular armies of five Arab states to have had the time to expel 750,000 people.

The interviewer in Kul-al-Arab asked Shaath, “Do you still believe in two states for two peoples?”

Here is the answer: “We do not recognize anything called the state of the Jewish people. We are prepared to recognize the State of Israel, if they say that the Israeli people include those Muslim and Christian residents who” – fasten your seat-belts now – “are the true owners of the land. We do not agree to two states for two peoples, which means that Israel belongs to the Jewish people. Israel must belong to everyone who lives there, and first and foremost to its original inhabitants. We have never agreed and never will agree under any circumstances to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people.”

Remember, now, this is the voice of the “moderate peace camp” among the Arabs here, these “moderates” unlike those terrible religious fanatics in Hamas.

Fatah and Hamas are identical in their goals, differing only in tactics.

Israel should not be negotiating with Fatah any more than with Hamas, and never should have been negotiating with any these so- called Balestinians who think like this.

This is the best and brightest of them, and he has the mind of a delusional amnesiac for whom history is whatever you want it to be in order to justify your appetite for another man’s property and your desire to use homicidal violence to take it from him…