and hostility throughout the region.The response to the war was not promising internationally either.The United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 242 on November 22, 1967,reflecting the US Lyndon B Johnson administration's wishes to capitalise on thenew status quo ante. The UN resolution demanded Israeli withdrawal "fromoccupied territories" in exchange for normalisation with Israel.The new language of the post-1967 period alarmed Palestinians, who realisedthat any future political settlement was likely to ignore the situation thatexisted prior to the war, and would only attempt to remedy current grievances.Empowered by its military triumph, the 1967 victory was another chance forIsrael to rewrite history. Israel's official language reflected that sense of newfoundpower.In fact, Israel felt powerful enough that it shifted its discourse frompresenting itself only as a victimised country defending its border from Arab hordesalso to a country that had supremacy over history. Althoughit conquered all of Palestine and subjugated millions of its inhabitants, itstill declared them non-existent.Indeed, the infamous declaration once made by formerIsraeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that Palestinians "didn't exist"and that "there is no such a thing as a Palestinian people" was farmore 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 morePalestinians were ethnically cleansed from their ancestralhomeland, the more Israeli leaders felt the pressing need to erase Palestinians from theannals of history as a people with an identity, a culture and an entitlement toa nationhood.If Palestinians "existed" in Israel's imagination, there couldnever be any moral justification for the creation of Israel; no spin could bepowerful 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 possiblesense of Israeli guilt, shame and legal and moral responsibility for what hadbefallen 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 thatwould 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 feltthe need to also celebrate the Israeli "miracle". Their new mantra, as repeated by one of theUnited States' most opportunistic, and indeed, ignorant politicians, NewtGingrich a few years ago, was: "Palestinians are an invented people."This logic seeped through to every facet of Israeli society.Despite a fledgling movement in Israel that attempts to challenge theIsraeli narrative, in Israeli literature the Palestinian is a "muteshadow", as poignantly phrased by Elias Khoury.The shadow is a reflection of something real, but intangible. It is mute sothat it can be talked at, but can never talk back.The "mute shadow" Palestinian exists and doesn't exist.But defying common sense and rewriting history is an old Israeli habit.Israel's official discourse regarding what took place during the Nakba was notfinalised until the 1950s and 60s.In a Haaretz article