As any builder knows, the quality of a house depends directly on its foundation. If a house’s foundation is built poorly, the building itself will suffer. The same is true for logical argumentation; when the basic facts are wrong, the later conclusions are going to be off-track as well.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened in a recent commentary by Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders.

His April 25 column entitled: “The modern Middle East was shaped by Canada. Should we finish the task?” called for the federal government to become involved with the Middle East, citing Canada’s history of peacemaking in the region.

Going back in history, Saunders wrote that: “in May, 1948, Israel declared its sovereignty and immediately launched military raids on the lands separating its strips of land, forcing hundreds of thousands of Arabs to become refugees.”

This is highly misleading. As noted by Saunders, in 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate into separate Jewish and Arab states, a proposal that was accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs. Following this, Arab militias launched a low-level war on the nascent Jewish country, seeking to strangle it before it was even born, launching attacks and blockades of roads.

On May 14, 1948, Israel formally declared its independence, and was immediately attacked by its neighbouring Arab states, including Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and even Iraq. This is exactly the inverse of Saunders’ retelling, where Israel, upon declaring its independence, simply attacked its neighbours and was therefore the aggressor.

The goal of the Arab leaders who invaded was hardly a secret. They wanted to prevent the establishment of a Jewish State and to annihilate it, a goal that remains at the heart of Palestinian rejectionism as exemplified by Hamas and others.

Saunders’ statement that Israel’s actions had the result of “forcing hundreds of thousands of Arabs to become refugees” was highly misleading. While there were indeed hundreds of thousands of Arabs who became refugees as a result of the war, they did so for a variety of reasons, largely because they were encouraged to do so by their Arab leaders who – expecting a quick victory over Israel – instructed them to leave, lest they be caught in the middle of the bloodbath.

This inversion of history on Saunders’ part – claiming that Israel started the war that it didn’t – sets the stage for his modern-day prognosis: that the continuing conflict is due to Israel’s prime minister, who he stated “has deliberately fought any resolution or closure for decades, stoking and sometimes actively encouraging extremist leadership in Gaza – a state of affairs that has led to unspeakably horrific consequences for his people, and war without end.”

While criticisms of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are certainly fair game, Saunders’ critique was entirely one-sided, blaming Israel while letting Palestinians entirely off the hook. Netanyahu has not been prime minister since 1948, and other Israeli leaders have gone to extraordinary lengths to make painful concessions for peace and to offer the Palestinians what they claim to want, only to have it rejected.

Saunders made no statement about the Palestinian refusal of repeated Israeli peace offers, notably one which saw the Jewish State offer the Palestinians all of Gaza, eastern Jerusalem, Judea & Samaria (“West Bank”) and more, nor about the ongoing Palestinian indoctrination of their next generation in school textbooks and more, exhorting them to reject Israel’s very existence.

While Doug Saunders is entitled to his own opinions, he’s not entitled to his own facts. His column falsely claimed Israel launched the 1948 war when it was in fact its victim and the Jewish state only acted in self-defense. Furthermore, for the Globe’s columnist to wrongly lay the entirety of the blame for the lack of Middle Est peace on a singular Israeli leader, was not only factually flawed, it was historical revisionism.