Creating History

The craft has been around forever, but now lying has reached new heights. Even the most salacious prevaricators over past centuries did not take it on themselves to alter the history of the Jewish people, their attachment to the Holy Land, or their allegiance to the city of Jerusalem.

That all changed when Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, instituted a strategy of creating new “truth.” His first assertion was viewed as laughable: Jesus, he said, was actually a Palestinian freedom fighter battling the Romans just like Arafat and his ilk were battling the “illegal” Jews “occupying” the so-called Arab land of Israel.

His bizarre assertion of prior claim and Israeli theft started a new trend in how to bring a final solution to the Jewish presence in the Middle East. Like Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, Arafat cunningly planted lies that eventually yielded a bumper crop of fictitious “facts.” These lies masquerading as truth not only have subverted real history but have slowly criminalized the State of Israel.

Arafat’s plan, in fact, had nothing to do with fact. It was all about changing perceptions. Considering how little people in the West know about the actual history of the Middle East, fantasy could easily pass for fact and, in time, change the game entirely.

Changing perceptions about himself and the Palestinians was something Arafat proved extremely adept at doing. One of the world’s chief terrorists, he orchestrated terrorist activities against Israel from around the world, including the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship on October 7, 1985. To everyone’s horror, Palestinians boarded the ship and shot Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer as he sat helplessly in his wheelchair. Then they dumped his body overboard. Less than 10 years later, Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Stunningly, the preposterous has become the norm in many circles; and it is the rationale for displacing the Israelis and reconfiguring the Jewish state into a Palestinian fiefdom. Who would have believed that a day would come when the contention that the Jewish people never existed as a presence in the Middle East would be taken seriously? Or that there was no physical evidence the Jewish Temples stood on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem?

Who would ever have thought that anyone would believe the Jewish refugees who arrived in the country after World War II were invaders fleeing a Holocaust that never existed? And who would have dreamed of entertaining the notion the Jewish people concocted the idea of the Holocaust to dupe the world and elicit sympathy for themselves?

We live in a culture that allows con artists to ply their merciless trade on uninformed, trusting, well-intentioned people. Petty frauds and promises of huge rewards delude millions and rob them of their hard-earned savings annually. Yet no con can equal that being practiced by Israel’s enemies. They hate the Jewish state and will do anything to bring about its destruction.

Their success is the direct result of society’s failure to propagate the facts and confront the lies with unassailable truth. The pattern we need to follow is laid down in Deuteronomy 6:6–7:

And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.

The antidote for error is truth. And there is no battlefield on Earth where more is at stake. The world becomes susceptible to lies when it becomes more enamored of pleasure and distractions than of serious study of facts.

For this reason, The Friends of Israel has produced this issue of Israel My Glory. We are attempting to set the record straight—–biblically and historically—in order to help clarify the truth about Israel.

Frankly, one of the reasons we decided to make these facts available has been the volume of questions coming to us from people seeking the truth. There is a hunger for information and biblical validation of what has been taught over the millennia because so many are now distorting history in hopes of destroying not only a country, but the faith upon which our hope rests.

Jesus told us the truth will make us free (Jn. 8:32). The truth will also keep us free.