Phantom Nation Obliterates the ‘Free Palestine’ Hoax

The charge of “Palestinian genocide” actually encompasses two bold, baseless lies. 

Bruce W. Davidson | July 21, 2026

The charge of “Palestinian genocide” actually encompasses two bold, baseless lies. One is the assertion that there exists a distinct Arab Palestinian people group with significant historical roots in Palestine. The other is the claim that these people are deliberately being targeted for extermination by Israeli Jews. Shai ben-Tekoa’s Phantom Nation: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace thoroughly debunks the first lie and chronicles how it was constructed, developed, and subsequently spread around the world, especially by left-leaning mainstream journalists. It argues convincingly that real peace becomes a possibility only “when the world sees through the essentially antisemitic myth of this phantom nation.”

When I lived and studied in Israel in 1976, people usually referred to the fighting between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East as “the Arab-Israeli conflict,” recognizing it as a broader issue than just Israelis versus certain people living in refugee camps. The Yom Kippur War had happened only three years previously, and in 1976 much of the world marveled at the dramatic rescue by Israeli commandos of Jewish hostages held at Entebbe Airport in Uganda by Arab and German leftist hijackers. I remember well a lecture by a professor from Hebrew University that explained the essentially religious nature of the conflict. In the 1990s I taught a course about the conflict at a junior college in Osaka, but I downplayed its religious character to my students.

Since that time, the prominence of terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezb’allah has made the Muslim character of hostility to Israel difficult to ignore. What I did not understand fully during the........

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