The Big Lie, and History’s Turning Points

At the beginning of the book, we are shown a Palestinian during the 1948 war over the creation of the state of Israel. The scene is about how this Palestinian has been torturing a man he captured in order to find out what he is doing; then he kills him. But the torture is not treated in the fiction as anything other than a regrettable necessity; later, the character does in fact regret his actions that day.

That's not what makes this book evil. No, it's the fact that Berry sets this scene against a background in which Israelis are systematically driving all the Palestinians out of Israel; the Israelis are heavily armed by the British while the Palestinians have no weapons to counter them; and the Israelis have rounded up whole villages of Palestinians and slaughtered them, men and women alike.

These things are not what the scene is about. They are slipped in as background; they are treated as if they were the sort of thing that was really going on in Palestine in 1948.

This is the kind of thing that readers -- especially ones who don't know anything about history -- are likely to assume the writer has researched, so that it can be trusted. The book is fiction, so we know this particular character did not torture and kill the other guy -- that part is obviously made up. But the background is assumed to be real. And readers often come out of books like this thinking they now know something about the real world.

In fact, what Berry is providing is pure propaganda -- the propaganda created by terrorists and murderers to "prove" that Jews "deserve" to be blown up by suicide bombers. It is exactly as reliable as the widely-believed propaganda lie that either President Bush or the state of Israel -- or both -- actually carried out the 9/11 attacks in order to provide a pretext for invading innocent Muslim countries.

(Oddly, the same liars who make this claim often turn around and talk about how proud they are that Islam stood up against the West on 9/11. Which is it? Why would you be proud of it if you didn't do it? They know they're lying; the incredible thing is that so many supposed intellectuals in the West believe it, or pretend to.)

The truth -- the well-documented historical truth -- is that the British did not arm the Israelis. They blocked all attempts by the Israelis to arm themselves. Every weapon that the Israeli army had in 1948 was smuggled in. While the "poor, unarmed Palestinians" were supported by the fully-armed military forces of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. The Arabs had the military advantage, in numbers and in weaponry.

Furthermore, while there were places where Israelis encouraged Muslims to flee, it was not a systematic effort, and many of those who fled did so at the well-documented insistence of Muslim leaders, who wanted Muslims out of the way so they could set about the business of slaughtering Jews. Only Israeli courage and audacity in combat prevented the genocidal outcome intended by the Arabs who defied the United Nations by trying to destroy Israel at the moment of its creation.

At the end of the war, the reason there was no Palestinian state is not because the Israelis prevented it. It was because the Arab nations prevented it -- Egypt took over the rule of the Gaza Strip and Jordan ruled the West Bank, declaring it to be part of their national territory and suppressing any attempt to create a Palestinian state there.

As for wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians by Israelis, it didn't happen. Nowhere, not in 1948, and not since then. A lot of people think it has happened because of propaganda. Like when the media was full of reports, during the intifadeh, that Israelis had massacred hundreds or thousands of Palestinians in Jenin. Later, sober investigation showed that no such thing had happened -- that, on the contrary, Israelis had suffered needless casualties on their own side because of the extraordinary lengths they went to to prevent civilian casualties on the other side.

So when a novel like Berry's The Alexandria Link treats such events as background, as if everybody knew that this is how Israelis act, what it is really doing is furthering the propaganda of one side in a desperate war.

The propaganda takes the standard form of accusing the victims of perpetrating exactly the crimes that the propagandist has committed against them.