A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEMSELVES A NATION ARE ONE:

The new language of the post-1967 period alarmed Palestinians, who realised that any future political settlement was likely to ignore the situation that existed prior to the war, and would only attempt to remedy current grievances.

Empowered by its military triumph, the 1967 victory was another chance for Israel to rewrite history. Israel's official language reflected that sense of newfound power.

In fact, Israel felt powerful enough that it shifted its discourse from presenting itself as a victimised country defending its border from Arab hordes to a country that had supremacy over ideas, history and common sense. Although it conquered all of Palestine and subjugated millions of its inhabitants, it still declared them non-existent.

Indeed, the infamous declaration once made by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that Palestinians "didn't exist" and that "there is no such a thing as a Palestinian people" was far more dangerous than a mere racist comment, as justifiably understood by many.

The statement was made two years after the Naksa.

The more land Israel illegally seized by military means and the more Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland, the more Israeli leaders felt the pressing need to erase Palestinians from the annals of history as a people with an identity, a culture and an entitlement to a nationhood.

If Palestinians "existed" in Israel's imagination, there could never be any moral justification for the creation of Israel; no spin could be powerful enough to rejoice at the birth of the Israeli "miracle" that "made the desert bloom".

Israel's violent birth callously required the destruction of a whole nation - one with a unique history, language, culture and collective memory. Therefore, the Palestinian people had to be wiped out to quell any possible sense of Israeli guilt, shame and legal and moral responsibility for what had befallen millions of a dispossessed people.

If a problem does not exist, then one is under no obligation to fix it. Thus, the denial of the Palestinian was the only intellectual formulation that would allow Israel to sustain and promote its national myths.

Not surprisingly, the Israeli logic was convincing enough for those - driven by political necessity, religious zeal or simply self-deluded - who felt the need to also celebrate the Israeli "miracle".

Their new mantra, as repeated by one of the United States' most opportunistic, and indeed, ignorant politicians, Newt Gingrich a few years ago, was: "Palestinians are an invented people."

This logic seeped through to every facet of Israeli society.

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