Palestinians make myths equally as well as bombs

As the US envoy drives into the rubble of Jenin, what he will find is a tangle of myths. The Israelis say they killed several dozen Palestinians, mostly armed men. The PLO claim hundreds of innocent civilians were shot or blown up in their houses, an estimate echoed by some relief organisations.

President Bush's man will try to establish what really happened, but his findings will not matter much to either side. What counts in this dirty, drawn-out war is rhetoric, and the Palestinians have by far the more explosive lexicon.

From the day the Israelis went in three weeks ago, the PLO put out daily reports of "massacres". None has been validated. Nevertheless, UN observers and foreign journalists, denied front-line access, propagated the "m-word". Their reports struck chords in Europe, where the memory of "occupation" is associated with German and Russian brutality. Reaction was swift. An Israeli company lost a large order from Denmark last week when unions called a boycott. The Pope's pet newspaper, L'Osservat o re Romano, accused Israel of " exterminating" Arabs. In London, Leftwingers, Muslim day-trippers from Burnley and bewildered liberals marched to Trafalgar Square waving placards that equated Ariel Sharon with Adolf Hitler.

To describe what has gone on in the West Bank as "genocide" and "a holocaust" is both a monstrous abuse of truth and a massive propaganda coup. Making myths wins the Palestinians more friends than making bombs. It is a tactic that could well wrest them victory from the ruins of Jenin. But if the Middle East conflict is ever to be resolved, the first step on the road to peace will have to be the shedding of myths.

The central Palestinian legend is the myth of the refugees. A million Arabs, by most responsible accounts, left their homes during Israel's independence war in 1947-48. At ceasefire talks in Cyprus the following year, a British-trained Israeli diplomat whom I knew, Walter Eytan by name, offered to let most, though not all, of the displaced persons return home. The gesture was flatly rejected. Instead, the refugees were crammed by Arab states into squalid camps, pending the day of return. The centre of Jenin, a prosperous garden town, was turned into a nursery for martyrs. Those who fled the camps were denied basic rights, including citizenship, in Arab states.

Imagine, if you can, all Englishspeakers evicted from Wales and held for half a century in central Hereford and you'll have some notion of the absurdity of the socalled Palestinian problem. Millions of Germans who fled East Prussia and Sudetenland in 1945 found new homes in the Federal Republic. Farmers from North Africa were resettled in France. Britain honoured its obligations to citizens of former colonies. The Palestinians alone have been held in limbo - as much by Arab pride as by Israeli intransigence.

The second hoax is the occupation myth. For 35 years, we are told, Palestinians have suffered in the West Bank and Gaza under the heel of Israeli oppressors. As a young reporter in the region, I observed a very different picture in the 1970s. Palestinians from many walks of life told me they were no worse under Israel than they had been under Egyptian and Jordanian rule. They enjoyed greater prosperity and freedom of movement, along with an impartial judicial system and superior medical care. I went with Israeli doctors into the Bir Zeit hospital during a cholera epidemic, spent a peaceful Christmas in Bethlehem and talked politics freely without having to worry about police informers.

The benign phase of occupation ended when Ariel Sharon, in his first term as a minister, pushed through an expansion of Israeli settlements. The resentment this provoked gave rise to the first intifada, a relatively bloodless protest led by young Palestinians who were accustomed to Israeli democracy.

The Israelis over-reacted. Yassir Arafat, exiled in Tunisia, infiltrated PLO agents to radicalise the insurrection, and the occupation turned oppressive. The Oslo peace agreement in 1993 broke the cycle, but the Israelis were in no rush to give up settlements and Arafat's return created a police state.

Afafat is the master myth-maker, a virtuoso of double-speak. At the UN, with gun in one hand and olive branch in the other, he seemed to all the world to be signalling peace. To his own people, the olive branch represented Palestine. He has never flagged in his aim to secure the whole of Palestine, the end of Israel, whatever the human cost.

Eleven days ago his favourite Gaza imam, Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, spoke the whole truth in a televised Friday sermon. "We are convinced of the victory of Allah," he said. "We believe that one of these days we will enter Jerusalem as conquerors, enter Jaffa ... and all of Palestine as conquerors."

He continued: "Anyone who does not attain martyrdom in these days should wake in the middle of the night and say, 'My God why have you deprived me of martyrdom for your sake?' For the martyr lives next to Allah."

These are the bald truths behind the Palestinians' sympathy-grabbing myths. The Israelis have proved helpless at this contest. Their attempts to minimise loss of life are mocked by wrecked houses and a continous blast of PLO propaganda, spouted uncritically by European fellow-travellers. In war, truth is the first casualty on both sides. The Israeli version of events is not always credible. But if the conflict is ever to be settled, it is the Palestinians who will have to abandon the fantasy world they have sustained for 54 years and begin to confront some political realities.

Israel has done itself untold damage by sending tanks into Jenin. What it should have sent was a platoon of Hampstead shrinks to dissemble the myths, and resume the talking cure.