Gingrich says he supports the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as part of a peace deal. But when he asserted recently that he believes the Palestinians are an “invented” people, he placed himself outside the mainstream of thought in the international community, including Israel’s conservative prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
And Gingrich is not backing away from his assertion. He first made the comment Dec. 9 on a Jewish cable channel, and then doubled down at the Dec. 10 GOP debate.
“Is what I said factually correct? Yes. Is it historically true? Yes,” Gingrich said to applause.
“Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists,” he said. “It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘Enough lying about the Middle East.’ ”
Earlier, in the cable interview, Gingrich said this: “I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it’s tragic.”
An ABC News fact-check report on the Dec. 10 debate concluded that Gingrich’s “invented people” statement is not accurate.
“Scholars assert that a Palestinian national identity began to solidify in the 1890s when Arabs in the region now known as Palestine revolted against the Ottoman Empire,” ABC reported. “While the revolt was eventually crushed, the clans that banned together later reemerged as a relatively unified Palestinian people.”
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Gingrich’s comment “unhelpful” and added that she thinks he understands that, according to Reuters.
