If there were too many Arabs in Palestine in 1890 to suit your pet political fantasy, you can simply state that there were few Arabs here, as Joan Peters did. Very few people can contest your statement; certainly not Americans who had no family living in Palestine. If there were too many Jews living here in 1920 to suit your ideas, you can change that too at a stroke of a pen.

Most people can't remember what happened last week, let alone last year, and most people do not live in the places described, so there is little chance of detection.

There are various media for propagating such falsehoods, of which the best are probably Op-Eds in respectable journals. The same journals that may pursue facts with scrupulous rigidity in their news reports, allow any old nonsense to be perpetrated on the public in their Op-Ed columns. Careless or mendacious columnists, pundits and politicos take full advantage of this liberty to foist their favorite versions of history on an unsuspecting public.

Take the case of M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum and Shmuel Rosner. Rosenberg was Rosner's guest on his blog. He made the following statement and repeated it:

(remember, the last three years of Oslo were, by far, the safest years in Israel's history)

The last three years of Oslo (1997-2000) were not only the safest years in Israel's history, with virtually no terrorism.

Now it seemed to me that 1997 to 2000 encompasses four years, and not three, but who am I to argue with the mighty Rosenberg and Rosner? Perhaps my education in arithmetic was defective. My second grade arithmetic teacher, after all, was not a distinguished political analyst or journalist. It also seemed to me that those years were not particularly safe. Since I didn't trust my memory, I went hunting for facts. According to The Israel Minstry of Foreign Affairs , 41 people were killed by terror in 1997, 16 in 1998 and 8 in 1999. Eight people were killed by terror in 2000. In this "safe" period, 73 people were killed in terror attacks. "Only" 63 people were killed in terror attacks in the four years of 1982-1985, and therefore by that measure, that period was safer. Overall, 428 people were killed by terror in Israel between 1990 and 1999, the worst decade for terror since the foundation of the state. The 1980s were the safest decade by this measure, with 174 deaths. Now whom are you going to believe? Me, I am just a blogger - nobody pays attention to me. The dead people are dead and they can't protest. Thanks to the editors of Ha'aretz, Rosner and Rosenberg can determine what history ought to be for right-thinking people.

Rosenberg was not content with that statement however. When I challenged him, in a letter to Rosner's blog (reproduced there in mutilated form) Rosenberg responded, in the same blog:

The fact that less than a half dozen civilians were killed in Israel during the last three years of Oslo was not a statistical fluke....

It is not clear if "the last three years" are 1998-2000 according to the way I was taught to count, or 1997-2000, the way Rosenberg counts. Nor iwasit an accident that Rosenberg now specified "civilians." Nonetheless, his count is wrong by any possible measure. From a different list of the Israel Ministry of foreign affairs we find:

Jan 6 98 Yael Meivar, 25, died of gunshot wounds sustained in a terrorist attack on Dec 31, 1997 near the settlement of Alei Zahav in Samaria.

Feb 11 98 David Ktorza, 40, of Jerusalem, was stabbed to death near his home.

May 6 98 Haim Kerman, 28, was stabbed to death in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Aug 5 98 Harel Bin-Nun, 18, and Shlomo Liebman, 24, were shot and killed in an ambush by terrorists while on patrol at the Yizhar settlement in Samaria.

Aug 20 98 Rabbi Shlomo Ra'anan, 63, was stabbed to death in the bedroom of his caravan in Hebron.

Oct 9 98 IDF soldier Michal Adato, 19, was stabbed to death at Moshav Tomer in the Jordan Valley.

Oct 14 98 Itamar Doron, 24, was shot to death near Moshav Ora, outside Jerusalem.

Oct 26 98 Danny Vargas, 29, of Kiryat Arba was shot to death in Hebron.

Oct 29 98 Sergeant Alexey Neykov, 19, was killed when a terrorist drove an explosives-laden car into an Israeli army jeep escorting a bus with 40 elementary school students from the settlement of Kfar Darom in the Gaza Strip.

Jan 13 99 Sergeant Yehoshua Gavriel, 25, of Ashdod, was killed when terrorists opened fire at the Othniel junction near Hebron.

Aug 7 99 The body of an Israeli, shot in the head, was found in a burned vehicle.

Aug 30 99 Yehiel Finfeter, 25, of Kiryat Motzkin, and Sharon Steinmetz, 21, of Haifa, were murdered whlie hiking in the Megiddo region.

The deaths of civilians were placed in bold type above. You can see that eight people were killed, not counting the two settlers who were on patrol, and might not be considered "civilians." Eight is more than half a dozen in anyone's arithmetic. Overall, 16 people were killed by terror in 1998 and 8 in 1999. These were relatively quiet years, but not the "safest in Israel's history."
In November 2000, Israel and the Palestinians were still negotiating. A festive summit proclaimed an end to terror. In that month according to the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, another eight civilians were killed by terrror:

Nov 2, 2000 - Jerusalem

Two people were killed and 10 injured by a car bomb explosion near the Mahane Yehuda market. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack.

Nov 20, 2000 - Gush Katif

Two people were killed and 9 injured by a roadside bomb that exploded alongside a bus carrying children to school.

Nov 22, 2000 - Hadera

Two people were killed, and 60 wounded when a powerful car bomb was detonated alongside a passing bus on the town's main street.

Nov 28, 2000 - Kfar Saba

Two Israeli teenagers on their way to school were killed in a suicide terrorist attack near the "Meeting Place of Peace" gas station in Neve Yamin. The bomber, from the Hamas terror group, blew himself up in a gathering of students waiting at a bus stop. Four other teenagers were wounded, one critically.

If we include 1997 among the "three" last years of the Oslo agreement as Rosenberg did, then we must add many more victims:

Mar 21 97 Michal Avrahami, 32, Yael Gilad, 32, and Anat Winter-Rosen, 32, were killed when a suicide bomber detonated a bomb on the terrace of a Tel Aviv cafe. 48 people were wounded.

...

Apr 25 97 Hagit Zavitzky, 23, of Kfar Adumim and Liat Kastiel, 23, of Holon were found stabbed to death in Wadi Kelt.

Jul 30 97 16 people were killed and 178 wounded in two consecutive suicide bombings in the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem:Lev Desyatnik, 60, of Jerusalem; Regina Giber, 76, of Jerusalem; Valentina Kovalenko, 67, of Jerusalem; Shmuel Malka, 44, of Mevaseret Zion; David Nasco, 44, of Mevaseret Zion; Muhi A-din Othman, 33, of Abu Ghosh; Simha Fremd, 92, of Jerusalem; Grisha Paskhovitz, 15, of Jerusalem; Leah Stern, 50, of Jerusalem; Rachel Tejgatrio, 80, of Jerusalem; Liliya Zelezniak, 47, of Jerusalem; Shalom (Golan) Zevulun, 52, of Jerusalem; Mark Rabinowitz, 80, of Jerusalem.
Eli Adourian, 49, of Kfar Adumim, died of his wounds on August 11. Ilia Gazrach, 73, of Pisgat Ze'ev, died on August 29. Baruch Ostrovsky, 84, of Jerusalem died on October 3.

Sep 4 97 Five people were killed and 181 wounded in three suicide bombings on the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall in Jerusalem.
The victims: Yael Botwin, 14; Sivan Zarka, 14; Smadar Elhanan, 14; Rami Kozashvili, 20; and Eliahu Markowitz, 40 - all of Jerusalem.

Nov 19 97 Gabriel Hirschberg, 26, was killed by automatic gunfire in the Old City of Jerusalem.

I have included the names with a purpose. Each victim is an individual. To suit their political whims, Rosenberg and Rosner want to simply wipe out the memories of each of those victims. Smadar Elhanan, Anat Winter Rosen, Yehiel Finfeter, and all the others do not deserve to be erased from the history of mankind in order to further the lobbying efforts of the Israel Policy Forum.

It may be convenient to believe that the Oslo years were the safest in Israel's history, but the facts do not support the contention - not about the last three years, not about the last four years, and certainly not about the entire Oslo decade. In 1996 Israel suffered 56 terror fatalities. It was the worst year since 1978. In 1996, the total was 41. Hardly the safest year in Israel's history. As to what conclusions we must draw from this regarding Oslo or Yasser Arafat, that is another matter. The "statistics" that Rosenberg cites are a gimmick, but the gimmick just isn't true. Allowing that 1998-2000 were years of relative quiet, we have to conclude that the Palestinian Authority was quite capable of maintaining the calm if they wished. Therefore, was the violence that did occur, before and after the quiet, also due to the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo agreements? If they were responsible for the quiet, they were also responsible for the violence. According to that reasoning, this must be the case for the "Tunnel Riots" of 1996, and also for the bloody riots of May 2000, during the "safest" years in Israeli history, when PA police fired on IDF soldiers.

While Rosenberg and Rosner seem to be interested in whitewashing the Oslo years, a different group are interested in whitewashing the Hamas. A whole school of punditry is busy giving the Hamas a face lift, and modifying history accordingly. For example, in the Australian, Middle East Correspondent Martin Chulov writes:

"Egyptian officials told Israeli media during the week that they are aiming for Hamas to sign two levels of agreements with Israel...The second is to strictly maintain the Hamas-led ceasefire of August 2004."

Chulov has apparently invented a cease fire. I have been unable to find any mention of a cease-fire, lull, Tahidieh, Hudna or truce in August of 2004 in contemporary news reports. On the contrary, on August 31, 2004, Hamas perpetrated a double suicide attack in Beersheba, in revenge for the killings of their leaders.

Winston Churchill once told his assistants, "Give me the facts, and I will twist them the way I want, to suit my argument." These gentleman however, have apparently discovered that the facts are unecessary, and if inconvenient, can be replaced by new "facts" of their own superior invention.

Ami Isseroff