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The Encyclopedias
- Abstract
Everyone knows that Arab propaganda has become more effective in recent years. But it is not generally known that the Arab spin on Middle East history and the Arab-Israeli conflict, once accepted only in openly partisan circles, is more and more becoming the standard version even in mainstream reference works. These include single-volume works like Webster’s New World Encyclopedia and The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, as well as a costly multivolume encyclopedia like Collier’s, and—most shocking of all—even the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Here many entries related to the Middle East are pervaded by the view that indigenous and blameless Palestinian Arabs were robbed of their land and their rights by colonialist European Jews. To support this view, not only is the history of our own time falsified, but ancient history is also rewritten in such a way as to deny the Jewish people any claim to the Land of Israel and to establish Arab priority there. Thus, a familiar feature of Arab propaganda—the utterly unfounded myth that today’s Palestinian Arabs are descendants of the Canaanites who were displaced by the Hebrews—is often accepted as fact.
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