Immediately after Oslo, the Palestinian Authority’s “cultural” organs started celebrating “Canaanite festivals.” They were designed to underscore the PA’s newly invented claim that the Palestinian Arabs — whose ancestors conquered Palestine in the seventh century, about 2000 years after the Jewish tribes settled the Holy Land — were actually descendants of the Canaanites, and therefore the land’s “original” inhabitants, possessing a prior claim to it.

Innocently, Israelis dismissed these claims as yet another harmless Arab fantasy. But recently, as widening Western circles subjected to Arab propaganda started questioning Israel’s rights to the land, and suggesting that it was stolen from the Arabs and should be returned to them, Israelis finally realized that the web of historical fabrications, distortions, and outright lies (like the insistence that the Temple Mount was never a Jewish place of worship) spun by the PA and its Western sympathizers is a serious challenge to Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist.