At Metro-North Railway, New Map, More Distortions

Henry Clifford, who earlier bankrolled distorted maps about Israel and the Palestine Mandate at Metro-North Railway stations in New York, this month has come up with a new one. Well, actually, he pulled it from the Web site of PASSIA:

The map on the left is a huge manipulation for multiple reasons. First, though its title refers to “Land ownership” and it shows pockets of “Jewish-owned land” in 1947, the equivalent Arab-owned land is not identified. Instead, in an apples-versus-oranges misleading comparison, the Jewish-owned land is juxtaposed against land designated for an Arab state according to the U.N. Partition Plan.

So why doesn’t Clifford show us the Arab-owned land? If he did, commuters would see that the amount of privately-owned Arab land was nearly equivalent to privately-owned Jewish land. As previously noted by CAMERA:

During the Mandate, the British carried out detailed land surveys, marking off who owned what, and according to figures in the British Survey of Palestine, published in 1946 and republished by the PLO-affiliated Institute for Palestine Studies, at least 65 percent of the country was state land, and probably much more than that. Jews owned 8.6 percent of the land and Arabs owned 28.6 percent. But the Arab total included Bedouin grazing land (8.4 percent) and waste land (13.4 percent), neither of which was legally ownable according to the prevailing Turkish and British land laws. Not counting Bedouin grazing land and waste land, Arab owned land totaled only 6.8 percent.

Second, Clifford’s map falsely designates Jerusalem as part of the land slated to go to an Arab state under the 1947 partition plan. In reality, as illustrated by the U.N. map below, the plan called for Jerusalem and its suburbs to become an international zone:

Moreover, under the partition plan, Jaffa was supposed to have been part of the Arab state, but Clifford’s ad wrongly indicates it was to be part of the Jewish state.

As for the Moshe Dayan quote, CAMERA called Clifford out several months ago for truncating the statement, cutting out Dayan’s assertion that Jews purchased much of the land: “In a considerable number of places, we purchased the land from Arabs and set up Jewish villages where there had once been Arab villages.”

But Clifford, the one man show called the Committee for Peace in Israel and Palestine, will not be deterred by the facts. Like the commuter rail, he barrels on full steam ahead, running over any facts along the way.