Arab propaganda views the Jews as interlopers in the Land and the Palestinians as its native inhabitants. A new book presents the historical data that refutes the lie.
In her new book, Dr. Rivka Shpak Lissak continues her head-on battle with Arab propaganda, which seeks to undermine the historical connection between the Jewish People and its Land, simultaneously claiming that the Palestinians are the true indigenous population of the Land.
In a book entitled “When and how the Arabs and Muslims Migrated to the Land of Israel”, Dr. Shpak Lissak exposes the historical lie that has taken root within European anti-Israeli propaganda, a lie that has been translated into anti-Israel resolutions in various tribunals.
The book presents the findings from comprehensive research replete with details and data showing how the Arabs came to the Land of Israel mainly within the past two hundred years and the ruin that they brought upon it during the years of their cruel and brutal rule.
In her interviews with the media, Dr. Shpak Lissak said that what impelled her to fight for historical truth, despite the fact that she sees herself as a leftist, was, ironically, Shlomo Sand’s book, which aroused a great deal of media attention in Israel and abroad. Sand argued, in his book, that the Jewish People is nothing but a people that was invented over the generations and that actually, the true Jews are the Palestinians who had never been exiled from the Land by the Romans, but who had converted to Islam.
“In the first book, When and How the Jewish Majority in the Land of Israel Was Eliminated: Are the Palestinians descendants of Islamized Jews, I proved that the Romans were not kind. They eliminated the Hasmonean kingdom and brutally oppressed two rebellions, the Great Rebellion and the Bar Kochba Rebellion. There were terrible massacres. The ports of the Mediterranean Sea were filled with refugees from the Land of Israel. From a population of three million Jews, only one hundred and fifty thousand to two thousand remained”, she told Arutz 7 in an interview.
The new book is the first part of the research and it deals with the period of time from the Arab conquest until World War I (640-1914). The subsequent part, in the next book, which she is working on now, will deal with the period until the establishment of the State of Israel.
Shpak Lissak explains that the goal of the book is to refute the thesis that the Arabs are the earliest inhabitants of the Land and to prove that most of the Arabs of the Land of Israel-Palestine (who define themselves as Palestinians from the point of view of nationality) are the descendants of immigrants who came to the Land from Arab and Islamic countries in a slow trickle, some even at the encouragement of the local government. From the end of the 19th century until the First World War, this trickle became waves of immigrants seeking employment, following the economic development of the Land by the Zionist movement and Christian organizations, who created highly-paid employment opportunities and a quality of life much higher than that in their countries of origin.
The importance of this book is in the small details and the painstaking work of the researcher, who provides a reliable picture of how it was – and how it was not – here, in the Land of Israel.