Astute observers will have noticed that there are many writers, bloggers, and journalists who always put "Palestinian" and "Palestine" in quotation marks. The reason is simple: The "Palestine" of Abbas was fabricated out of whole cloth in the sixties.

In the Waterworld of media in which we now live, the real dirt of truth is rare and precious. Scientists and engineers can at least resort to "first principles" (although they often neglect to do so). But historians and "average citizens" (know any?) have no such touchstones.

But the Internet at least gives us access to lots and lots (and lots) of stuff--all biased, largely intentionally. For some, scraping away biases becomes a largely unsatisfying obsessions; for others, applying their own slant to things has become a refined art.

So here I will make some statements, offer some pointers, and turn you loose to do your own research until you feel you've gotten as clear a picture as you want or need. Is it a true picture? I leave that to the reader, hoping you share my belief that there is truth, and that it is, for practical purposes, knowable.

My father's parents brought him from Ostrolenka, in Poland, to Tel Aviv, in the British Mandate of Palestine, around 1920, when he was three years old. He and they became Palestinians at that time. That was the country specified on their travel documents when they moved to New York, just over a decade later.

The Arabs of Dad's childhood were Arabs, not Palestinians. In fact, all the inhabitants of the region treated the "Palestinian" designation as a temporary thing. Many of the Arabic-speakers did not call themselves Arabs, but Egyptians, Syrians, Fellaheen, and numerous other terms.

Dad flew light planes in WWII for the US Army Air Corps, until a shrapnel wound to the head re-directed his career, and he became an air traffic controller.

When he finally recapitulated part of his parents' odyssey, and took me, age three, and my mother and baby brother back to The Land in 1950, much had changed. The British were gone. Now it was Israel.

But the Arabs were still Arabs--not Palestinians.

I grew up in Israel, and there were no Palestinians anywhere. Plenty of Arabs; I spent part of my childhood in the Jezreel Valley, not far from Um al-Fahm, a good-sized Arab village. In the fifties, there were attacks by Fedayeen, from Egypt. In Kfar Saba high school, there were a couple of Arabs in my classes. No Palestinians.

After my army service, I was called up for what became known as the Six-Day War. We fought Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese--even some Iraqis. But no Palestinians.

When we toured Judea and Samaria after the war, we spoke to many Jordanians. We met Arabs who had lived in refugee camps in Jordan since 1948, because their countrymen refused to allow them to be absorbed back into their former culture. Those were the people who later took on the name "Palestinians."

I am not making some wild new claim. Here's a quote I found at www.israelforum.com: "In 1946, Prof. Philip Hitti, the distinguished Arab historian of Princeton University, declared before the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry: 'There is not such thing as Palestine in Arab history, absolutely not.'"

So who invented "Palestine"? Was it Ahmed Shukeiry, the Acco attorney who became president of the Arab League, and promised to slit the throat of every Israeli Jew, in the sixties? Was it Haj Amin el-Husseini, the admirer and collaborator of Hitler and Goebbels, who took delight in the Holocaust and in Goebbels' approach to propaganda?

Joan Peters felt the "Palestinians" were getting a raw deal from Israel. She, an academic journalist, asked the "Palestinian" leaders if they would open their archives to her, so that she could write an authoritative book, depicting their plight.

Believing, by that time, their own lies, with regard to the origins of "Palestine," they were only too glad to do so.

But when the honest Ms. Peters began to dig in the "Palestinian" archives, she discovered the extent of the intentional fabrication of the myth of "Palestine." So she instead wrote, From Time Immemorial, making her odor stink in the nostrils of the PLO ever since. This book describes in great detail how and when the myth was fabricated and promulgated.

Bottom line: There are now two-three generations of political pawns, created by the Arabs, who call themselves "Palestinians." They are largely ignorant of historical reality, and represent a real social problem. Questions such as where to place the blame for their condition must be dealt with elsewhere, as well as the related issue of how they can be helped. My points here are:

• There is not, nor was there ever, a nation such as the "Palestinians" claim;
• The whole thing is a ruse perpetrated for political purposes;
• This point must be settled before engaging in intelligent, good-will dialogue about Israel.