RUTHFULLY YOURS

The organization in charge of “design and content” for the exhibit is “Flüchtlingskinder im Libanon,” translated, “Refugee Children in Lebanon.” Ingrid Rumpf (aka Ingrid Hull), head of the organization and curator of the exhibit, explained her motivation in a 2011 interview by comparing Israelis to Nazis: “My involvement in the Palestinian problem is significantly influenced by my confrontation with Nazism.”

Over the years, the litigious Ms. Rumpf has evidently enjoyed casting herself as a victim, launching repeated objections to bad press and other criticism over the exhibit before German courts and administrative tribunals.

In the exhibition catalogue, the organizer explicitly asks and answers the question: “Why did we create this exhibition on the Nakba?” The answer given: to reeducate all those whose “perceptions” have been “hindered” by “German guilt” and “the mass media” in order to “evoke understanding” that in 1948, Palestinians were “robbed of their homeland and their property.”

According to UN regulations, the exhibit was required to have been authorized by the highest UN authority in Geneva. UN guidelines spell out that a request — in this case from “the mission of Palestine” — must be sent to the Cultural Activities Committee of the UN Office in Geneva “who shall make recommendations for approval by the Director-General.” Michael Møller of Denmark.

In other words, the UN itself approved an exhibit proclaiming that “the partition resolution violates fundamental principles of the U.N. Charter.”

According to the exhibit, the problem with the partition plan was that it was prepared and adopted “without consulting the Palestinian people,” and “the General Assembly is not authorized to pass binding laws or create new states.”

Actually, the General Assembly decision not to hand Arab rejectionists a veto over Jewish self-determination was deliberate and well-justified. And the partition resolution never purported to be a law or “create” a state. The resolution represented a stamp of moral and political approval for the creation of Israel, which was accomplished by a declaration of its own people almost six months later.

The “source” identified in the exhibit for this bogus contention is one Norman Paech. He is a former German Left Party parliamentarian, who distinguished himself by voting against a 2008 resolution establishing a committee to report on antisemitic crimes and to support the growth of Jewish life in Germany. A prolific inciter, Paech has also claimed that there is a “right to armed resistance” against anyone living in a Jewish settlement, Israel is an “apartheid state,” and Israel waged “a war of extermination” in Lebanon.

The UN-sponsored exhibit contains a litany of other fabrications and hate speech.

These include: “The roots of the Palestine problem date back to the late nineteenth century, when…Zionism developed in Europe.” “The Balfour Declaration was legally, politically, and morally dubious.” The 1948 war consisted of “acts of terrorism…by the Zionists.” Jews were busy conducting “massacres,” while Arabs were busy fleeing. The “leading Zionist representatives headed by the subsequent Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, planned and implemented the ethnic purge.”

The case for Arab rejection of a Jewish state, indicates the exhibit, is that “the Palestinians failed to see why they should be made to pay for the Holocaust.”

The exhibit used the word “indigenous” only to describe Arabs and their “ancestral soil.” The presence of Jews, and the association of Judaism with the land of Israel, for almost 4,000 years were never mentioned.

Palestinians, the exhibit claims, were “an entirely uninvolved people” in Nazi persecution of Jews. In fact, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, closely collaborated with the Nazis. Living lavishly under German auspices during much of the war, and still considered a hero by many Palestinians, al-Husseini pressed Hitler to extend his solution of the Jewish problem to Palestine.

Nowhere in its history of Israel’s creation is there any mention that the armies of five neighboring Arab states — exclusively equipped with the standard weapons of a regular army — invaded the day old Jewish state on multiple fronts. Instead, the exhibit gives a revisionist account of impoverished Arab “troop strength.”

As for the 800,000 persecuted Jews who were forced to flee Arab states, the exhibit blames Israel: “Israel’s expansionist policy had grave effects on the mainly peaceful coexistence of Muslims, Jews and Christians that had prevailed for centuries in the Arab countries of Asia and Africa. The result was massive immigration of Jews from these countries to Israel.”

The exhibit concludes with the final message that Israel is the “lost homeland” of Palestinians to which they are “longing” to return. The visual images include signs saying “no return = no peace” and pictures of a title deed and front door key.

Nowhere does the exhibit talk about recognition of, and peaceful co-existence with, the Jewish state.