Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro Imagines a History for an Imaginary People

President Gustavo Petro of Colombia has delivered himself of an idiotic outburst against Israel. As we examined earlier, he said here: “Colombian president: Zionism partially owns international financial capital,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, January 8, 2025:

“In 1948, Palestinians opened their cities and territories to Jews who fled the Nazis with the intention of coexisting, supposedly as they had done with the Jews that had already lived in the Levant,” Petro wrote on X/Twitter.

During World War II, the unchallenged leader of the Palestinian Arabs, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, spent the war years in Berlin, where he met with Hitler and praised his “Final Solution.” Al-Husseini also became a friend of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, with whom he apparently visited Auschwitz. He made pro-Nazi broadcasts to the Arab world, and even raised several Waffen-SS brigades among Bosnian Muslims. Is this the kind of Palestinian Arab that Gustavo Petro thinks “welcomed” the Jews to Palestine? And where was that “welcome” when, the day after the Jewish state declared its independence on May 14, 1948, five Arab armies invaded Israel, having for months warned the Arab inhabitants of Mandatory Palestine to leave the territory where battles were soon to take place, and assuring them that they would then be able to return with the triumphant Arab armies and reclaim not just their own property, but that of the Jews who would all have been expelled or killed?

“Just a few months later, the nationalist influx forged a political current under the newly created State of Israel that led to the violent expulsion of Palestinians from their own homes and villages,” he added. “There was never any justice for the Palestinian people; they were segregated in their own homeland, and factions within them had to resort to armed struggle for national liberation.”

First of all, the “Palestinian people” did not exist in 1948. They were invented, for propagandistic reasons, in the mid-1960s, at the suggestion of the KGB. Zuheir Mohsen, the leader of the Palestinian terror group As Saiqa, explained why they had been fabricated:

The Palestinian people does not exist … there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. Between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese there are no differences. We are all part of one people, the Arab nation […] Just for political reasons we carefully underwrite our Palestinian identity. Because it is of national interest for the Arabs to advocate the existence of Palestinians to balance Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons […] Once we have acquired all our rights in all of Palestine, we must not delay for a moment the reunification of Jordan and Palestine.

Secondly Petro refers to the “expulsion” of the Palestinians during the 1948 war, but ignores the fact that almost all of those who left, beginning in the fall of 1947, did so not because the Jews were driving them out but because Arab broadcasts from leaders abroad urged them to leave, so as to get out of the way of the invading Arab armies. Some Jewish leaders, like the Mayor of Haifa, and the heads of Histadrut (the Israeli labor federation), urged the Arabs to stay put. Others, of course, were not unhappy to see the Arabs leave.

The ”Palestinians” were not “segregated in their “own homeland.” The Land of Israel was the homeland only of the Jews, who had been living in that homeland, though often in small numbers, for 3500 years. The Palestinian Arabs did not arrive until, at the earliest, the 7th century, that is 2000 years after the Jews had been living in that land. The League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine was created precisely in order that Jews from around the world could return to, and rebuild, their ancient homeland. Two mandates, one for Iraq and the second for Lebanon-Syria, were created for the Arabs. That was in addition to all the Arab lands, from the Maghreb to the Persian Gulf, that were already independent (having previously been part of the Ottoman Empire), that would eventually become states. In fact, there are now 22 Arab states, making the Arabs the people who are most richly endowed with such polities.

The 160,000 Arabs who remained in Israel after the 1948 war were not “segregated,” nor subject to “apartheid.” They were immediately granted equal rights, civil and political, with the Jewish citizens of the state. They participate fully in the life of the country. Does Gustavo Petro know any of this? If he did learn about it, would it matter, or is he so deep-dyed an antisemite that his mental filter would block out all such information?