Israel lobby group counters Palestinian dispossession with– Jewish creationism

By Annie Robbins, Mondoweiss
Seriously now, this is not the Onion:

We don’t make this stuff up. When I first saw this I thought it was a spoof ad– of the famous images of Palestinians’ loss of land.

But it’s no spoof. The ad above is a response from the Israel lobby group StandWithUs to a “Disappearing Palestine” poster campaign in Vancouver. That campaign is now taking the city by storm–see the image below. Launched by a group of seven solidarity groups calling themselves the Palestine Awareness Coalition, they have spent $15,000 to put posters on 15 buses, and to place a mural in Vancouver’s central SkyTrain station.

Hence– Stand With US:

[This graphic] depicts Jewish loss of land from Biblical times to the present by juxtaposing a map of the ancient Jewish kingdom circa 1000 BCE, a map of the land designated as the Jewish homeland by the League of Nations in 1920, and a map of the much smaller Israel of today

Never mind the League of Nations never designated the whole region from the Jordan river to the sea for a Jewish homeland, never mind that Trans-Jordan was never included in the Palestinian mandate. This new theory was originally put forth by Canada’s own Howard Grief, who passed away last June. Grief copyrighted his theory in 2008. Grief, speaking here at a settler conference in 2011, which declared the “establishment of The Jewish Authority in Eretz Yisrael”,  argues that the 1920 San Remo conference gave Jews sovereignty over all of historical Palestine.

Extremist Zionist groups are now embracing Grief’s theory, as well as a Jewish biblical connection to Palestine, to justify… the Jewish claim to all of historical Palestine, or Eretz Yisrael.

I’d say that this looney tunes ad is asking a lot of ordinary folks who don’t regard bible stories as real estate titles. Here is a modern logic people can relate to, and it makes sense:

About Annie Robbins

Annie Robbins is Editor at Large for Mondoweiss, a mother, a human rights activist and a ceramic artist. She lives in the SF bay area. Follow her on Twitter @anniefofani