By Eric Vandenbroeck
A critical history of Palestine Part 2.
The history of what is now Palestine and Israel is a complicated
one that started when the Hashemite Sherif
Hussein and particularly also his son Faisal I bin Hussein teamed up with the
British the result of which was that for a brief period of time in 1920 Faisal
I bin Hussein became the King of Syria which supposed to have included what is
now Palestine and Israel.
As Steven Wagner
pointed out in his 2014 dissertation, few British officials, however,
recognized the inherent contradiction in their promises to Zionists and Arabs
between 1917 and 1919. Including that the understanding of Arab politics was
limited by a few channels of information, and the biases of some officers.
Hence what they understood about the connection between the Hashemite family
and Arab secret societies differed from the true relationship. (Steven Wagner, British
Intelligence and Policy in the Palestine Mandate, 1919–1939, DPhil,
University of Oxford: 2014, pp 26–28.)
In this context, a three-way alliance between Britain, the Arab
movements and Hashemite Sherif Hussein and his two
sons, was based on a temporary alignment of interests of each party. Britain misunderstood and overrated the connection between
the Arab movements and the Hashemites, but only came to realize this after
the end of the war.
Nevertheless,
Hussein's achievement was nothing short of extraordinary. Notwithstanding his
pretense to represent "the whole of the Arab Nation without any
exception" the Sharif represented little more than himself. The minimal
backing he received from a few neighboring tribes had far less to do with a
yearning for independence than with the glitter of British gold and the promise
of booty. Hussein could not even count on the support of his local
constituency. As late as December 1916, six months after the Sharif and two of
his sons, Abdallah and Faisal, launched what came to be known euphemistically
as the Great Arab Revolt, the residents of Mecca
were almost pro-Turks, and it would not be before the winter of 1917 that the
pendulum would start swinging in the Hashemite direction.
Unlike
Turkey-in-Europe, where the rise of nationalism dealt a body blow to Ottoman
imperialism, there was no nationalist fervor among the Ottoman Empire's
Arabic-speaking subjects. A British Intelligence Report (FO 686/6 from 28 Dec
1916) estimated that a mere 350 activists belonged to all the secret Arab
societies operating throughout the Middle East at the outbreak of World War I,
and most of them were not seeking actual Arab independence but rather greater
autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. To the vast majority of the eight to ten
million Arabic-speaking Ottoman subjects, the message of the tiny secret
societies meant nothing. They remained loyal to their imperial master to the
bitter end and shunned the sharifian revolt altogether. Between 100,000 and
300,000 of them even fought in the Ottoman army during the war. As Lawrence of
Arabia put it in a 1915 memorandum on the conditions in Syria:
Between town and
town, village and village, family and family, creed and creed, exist intimate
jealousies, sedulously fostered by the Turks to render a spontaneous union
impossible. The largest indigenous political entity in settled Syria is only
the village under its sheikh and in patriarchal Syria the tribe under its
chief. ... All the constitution above them is the artificial bureaucracy of the
Turk. ' .. By accident and time the Arabic language has gradually permeated the
country until it is now almost the only one in use; but this does not mean that
Syria-any more than Egypt-is an Arabian country. (As quoted in Eliezer Tauber,
The Emergence of the Arab Movements, 1993, Chapter 28.)
These realities
appear to be of little import for Hussein and his sons. For all the rhetoric of
Arab independence in which they couched their communications with the British,
the Hashemites were no champions of national liberation but
in their own way, imperialist aspirants anxious to exploit a unique window
of opportunity to substitute their own empire for that of the Ottomans, Hussein
had demonstrated no nationalist sentiments prior to the war, when he had
generally been considered a loyal Ottoman apparatchik, and neither he nor his
sons changed in this respect during the revolt.
In spite of all the
early promises to Sherif Hussein and his son Faisal I
bin Hussein, for the British controlling Palestine was
perceived as vital in order to protect Suez that would ameliorate the
German threat to Egypt and India.
In fact when all
people born in British Mandatory Palestine between 1923-1948 (today's Israel)
had "Palestine" stamped on their passports at the time. But when they
were called Palestinians, the Arabs were offended. They complained: "We
are not Palestinians, we are Arabs. The
Palestinians are the Jews".
It also is no
accident that neither Mark Twain, nor any of
the series of English travelers who visited the area, nor anyone else who
traveled through desolate Palestine over the centuries ever mentioned the
“Palestinian" people. They spoke of encountering Muslim Arabs, as well
as Jews, Christian Arabs, and others, but no one, among multitudes of people
who wrote about Palestine, ever refers to any Palestinians. Nor do the many
British white papers and other documents the British government produced
during the Mandate period ever mention the Palestinians. The opposing factions
in those documents are the Jews and the Arabs.
There is a very simple reason for this: there were no
Palestinians.
Tour
of the Holy Land in 1695 shows no Islamic nation at all. “Most of the land
was empty, desolate, and the inhabitants few in number and mostly concentrated
in the towns of Jerusalem, Acco, Tzfat, Jaffa,
Tiberius and Gaza. Most of the inhabitants were Jews and the rest Christians.
There were few Muslims, mostly nomad Bedouins. ... In the Galilee capital,
Nazareth, lived approximately 700 Christians and in Jerusalem approximately
5000 people, mostly Jews and some Christians. ... In Gaza for example, lived
approximately 550 people, 50 percent Jews and the rest mostly Christians.”
An uncomfortable fact
for those who advance the claim that the Palestinians are the indigenous people
of the area is that they have no history: there was never a state of Palestine,
never a king or president of Palestine, never (until quite recently) a
Palestinian flag, and nothing that distinguishes the Palestinians culturally,
linguistically, or otherwise from the other Arabs of the region.
During the Mandate
period, the Arabs of Palestine generally considered
themselves to be Syrians, and Palestine to be Southern Syria. Early in
1919, Arab Muslims in fourteen Palestinian municipalities, calling themselves
the Muslim-Christian
Association, presented a petition to the Paris
Peace Conference, which was deliberating about the postwar fate of Syria,
Palestine, and other former Ottoman possessions.
The petitioners
insisted that Southern Syria, that is, Palestine, be considered “inseparable
from the independent Arab Syrian government,” for it was “nothing but part of
Arab Syria and it has never been separated from it at any stage.” Arabs in
Palestine, they said, had “national, religious, linguistic, moral, economic,
and geographic bonds” with Syria, and therefore insisted that Palestine must be
‘‘undetached from the independent Arab Syrian Government.1 Palestine “should be
part of Southern Syria, provided the latter is not under foreign control.”2
Likewise in March
1919 in far-off San Salvador: a group of people who identified themselves as
“Syrian Palestinians” called on the world’s powers to establish “no separation
between Syria and Palestine” and hoped that “Syria and Palestine remain united.”
This unity was important, they explained, for “we trust that if Syria and
Palestine remain united, we will never be enslaved by the Jewish yoke.”3 The
president of the Muslim-Christian Association, Arif
Pasha ad-Dajjani, declared that “Palestine or
Southern Syria,an integral part of the one and
indivisible Syria, must not in any case or for any pretext be detached.”
Those who were making
these demands would all today be considered Palestinians. Yet they would have
been baffled beyond measure if they could have been transported a century ahead
and made to listen to today’s rhetoric about the Palestinians, the indigenous
people of Palestine. So would Musa Kazim al-Husayni,
who as head of the Jerusalem Town Council declared in October 1919: “We
demand no separation from Syria.”
Even Ahmad Shukairy, who in the 1960s was president of the Palestine
Liberation Organization conceded that at the close of World War I, no one was
talking about the rights of the Palestinian people; instead, what was in the
air was union of the Arabs of Palestine with the Arabs in Syria: the slogan
went “Unity, Unity, From the Taurus [Mountains] to Rafah [in Gaza], Unity,
Unity.”5 In February 1920, a group of Palestinian Arabs held a congress in
order to emphasize that call for unity between Syria and Palestine. It passed a
resolution stating that “it never occurred to the peoples of Northern and
Coastal Syria that Southern Syria (or Palestine) is anything but a part of
Syria.” Another resolution called for Palestine “not to be divided from Syria”
and demanded “the independence of Syria within its natural borders.”6 The
following month, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who was
to emerge in the ensuing years as the leader of the Arabs’ violent opposition
to the Jews in Palestine, lent his signature to a petition to the British
military governor of Palestine, demanding that Palestine be included within the
borders of Syria and that any border between Syria and Palestine be removed. In
April 1920, however, at the San Remo conference, the British and French decided
to treat Syria and Palestine as separate entities. Even that inhabited the
ancient site of Jerusalem as early as 3200 BCE.”8
So is that really true? Are the Palestinians really
the indigenous people of the area that the State of Israel now occupies, and
were they really displaced by the Israelis?
There is no trace of
support for such an idea in history. No archeological evidence, or evidence of
any other kind, has ever been found to substantiate a link between the ancient
Canaanites or Jebusites and the modern-day Palestinians.9 The land that is now
the State of Israel corresponds roughly to the lands known in ancient times as
Judea, Samaria, Idumea, and Galilee, and was
inhabited by Jews. In A.D. 134, the Romans expelled the Jews from the area in
retaliation for a revolt against their rule.
Subsequently,
Palestine was the name of a region but never of a people or of a political
entity. The area that was Palestine was part of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine)
Empire until it was conquered by the countered a significant number of Jews,
and were no kinder to them than they had been to their brethren in Europe.
According to the twelfth-century Syrian Muslim chronicler al-Azimi, “they burned the Church of the Jews."12
A contemporary of al-Azimi and a fellow chronicler, Ibn al-Qalanisi,
added: “The Franks stormed the town and gained possession of it. A number of
the townsfolk fled to the sanctuary and a great host was killed. The Jews
assembled in the synagogue, and the Franks burned it over their heads. The
sanctuary was surrendered to them on the guarantee of safety on 22 Sha’ban [14
July] of this year, and they destroyed the shrines and the tomb of Abraham.”13
The Crusaders,
expanding on the prohibition that the Romans had set centuries before, forbade
Jews to enter Palestine, but some came anyway. In 1140, with the Crusaders
still ruling Jerusalem, the Spanish philosopher and poet Yehudah
Halevi wrote in his Kuzari, or Book of Refutation and
Proof in Support of the Despised Religion, that Jews could be closest to the
God of Israel within Israel itself. He himself then set out for the land, only
to be killed in Jerusalem the following year.14
In fact, there is
increasing evidence that comes to light is that the “Palestinian people” were
a propaganda invention during the 1960s, in order to counter the image of
the tiny Jewish state standing virtually alone against the massive Muslim Arab
nations surrounding it, the KGB (the Soviet Committee for State Security)
invented the “Palestinians,” an even smaller people who were, the propaganda
insisted, oppressed by a powerful and ruthless Israel.15 Also the French historians Guy Milliere and David Horowitz, authors of the book Comment le
peuple palestinien fut invente (How the Palestinian
People Were Invented), explain that the Palestinians were invented in order to
“transform a population into a weapon of mass destruction against Israel and
the Jewish people, to demonize Israel, and to give totalitarianism and
anti-Semitism renewed means of action.”16
A nation and a people
need a distinct identity, and so one was constructed for the Palestinians. For
a national flag, the new Palestinians appropriated the banner of the ill-fated
Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan, the short-lived 1958 union between those
two nations.
But a nation and
people also need a founding father. There being no Palestinian history, and
thus no great Palestinian historical figures, someone more contemporary would
have to serve this purpose. That would be Yasser Arafat, who was even less of a
Palestinian than his people. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa,
who had served as acting chief of Cold War-era Communist Romania's spy service,
Arafat was one of the multitudes of the indigenous people of Palestine who was
actually from somewhere else: “the KGB destroyed the official records
of Arafat's birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents
saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was, therefore, a Palestinian by
birth."17
Inventing a History
There were also
efforts to fit out the new people with a history. The Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam reported on December 4, 1998, that the chairman of
the history department at Gaza's Khan Yunis Educational College, Dr. Yussuf Alzamili, “called on all
universities and colleges to write the history of Palestine and to guard it,
and not to enable the [foreign] implants and enemies to distort it or to
legitimize the existence of Jews on this land."18
Alzamili may have revealed more than he had intended.
Universities and colleges were not only to “guard” the history of Palestine but
to “write” it. Had it not already been written? Was this a tacit admission
that the Palestinians were not a people and had no history, and so this history
had to be fabricated, as was the nationality itself?
Jesus Christ named Palestinian
All Christians know
this about Jesus, according to Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki in April 2017: “The Christians know that Jesus Christ
was a Palestinian. He really was from Jerusalem, and his resurrection was from
Jerusalem.”20
An official daily
newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida,
reminded its readers on November 18, 2005: “We must not forget that Messiah
[Jesus] is a Palestinian, the son of Mary the Palestinian.”21
Everything
about him was Palestinian, such that, as Palestinian politician, Azzam al-
Ahmedsaid on December 19, 2018, “Christmas is one of
the permanent Palestinian symbols.” Jesus as a Palestinian was central to
Palestinian claims of everyone in the land of Palestine.”22
A member of the
Palestinian Authority's Parliament, Mustafa Barghouti, added on the same
occasion: “Jesus, who was born on this land, was a Palestinian and defeated his
suffering. This tree hints at an additional victory that the members of our people
will achieve at Khan Al-Ahmar.”23
A picture of Jesus as
a victimized Palestinian also appeared in the rhetoric of Laila Ghannam, the district governor of Ramallah and El-Bireh. On July 31, 2017, she attended mass at Holy Family
Roman Catholic Church in Ramallah, and told the priest, Father Ibrahim Shoumali: “The integration of all residents of the
district”, that is; both Muslims and Christians,“brings
everyone pride. Jesus is a Palestinian, and the occupier's bullets do not
differentiate between one Palestinian and another. We are all partners to the
struggle, building, and making decisions.’24
In pursuing this
notion of Palestinian victimhood being embodied in Jesus the Palestinian, Al-HayatAl- Jadida’s editor in
chief, Mahmoud Abu Al-Hija, in an editorial published
on February 19, 2017, departed from Islamic orthodoxy, which holds that Jesus was
a prophet of Allah, not the savior or redeemer of the world, and conveniently
forgot about the hatred and genocidal incitement that are routinely featured in
Palestinian media: “Palestine has never brought anything to the entire world
but this message, the message of love, tolerance, and peace. There is no better
and clearer proof of this than the message of the righteous Palestinian Jesus
Christ, peace be upon him, who bore his cross while the crown of thorns wounded
his forehead. He walked through the Via Dolorosa, bore the suffering of this
path, and became the savior of all mankind and its redeemer from the injustices
of hate and its destructive ailments.”25 Similarly, despite the fact that the
Qur'an states that Jesus was neither killed nor crucified (4:157), Fatah
Central Committee member Tawfiq Tirawi
declared him the first Palestinian martyr: “For Christmas, the birthday of
Jesus the first Palestinian and the first Martyr (Shahid), peace be upon him,
we will surely stop the path of suffering [that is, referring to the Via
Dolorosa, which Christians believe to be the path Jesus walked on his way to
being crucifixion] and go up to free Palestine, happy New Year.”26
A September 2016
editorial in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida was a bit more
careful not to contravene Qur'anic claims regarding the crucifixion: “Jesus,
Issa son of Maryam, peace be upon him, was the first Palestinian Martyr
(Shahid), who was crucified by the Jews, or they think they crucified him.”27
In an op-ed published
in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on May 16, 2015, columnist Omar
Hilmi Al-Ghoul directly equated the sufferings of
Jesus with the sufferings of the Palestinians, both, he said, at the hands of
the Jews: “the messenger of peace and love, Jesus, may he rest in peace...
suffered from the injustice of the first Jews...in the same way his people, the
Palestinians, have suffered from the Zionist Jews in the past and in the
present.. .for the delay in doing them [the Palestinians] justice through
restoring some of their rights.”28
On Christmas Day in 2014,
Al-Ghoul wrote in Al- Hayat Al-Jadida: “My lord
Jesus, peace be upon you, those who crucified you 2,000 years ago [that is, the
Jews] have returned to crucify your people, of different religions, without
distinguishing Christians from Muslims. They spread their poison in every part
of your homeland, where your churches and the mosques of your successor,
Prophet Muhammad son of Abdullah of the Quraysh tribe, peace be upon him, were
built, to spread destruction, strife and discord.... Jesus, the man of peace
and love, rest in peace, for your people, the Canaanites, stand firm on the
ground, holding onto their rights, determined to protect their land."29
Perhaps Palestinian
officials believed in the totalitarian dictum that once the big lie was
frequently enough repeated, it would be generally accepted as true.
"Palestine is Jordan and Jordan is
Palestine..."
In the early days of
the existence of the Palestinians, the fact of their nonexistence in history
was much more widely known than it is today. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister
Golda Meir stated that “there was no such thing as Palestinians.... It was not
as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a
Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away
from them. They did not exist.”30 In fact, she noted, an “independent
Palestinian people with a Palestinian State” had never existed.31
The Arab Muslims of
Palestine knew this as well. Syrian President Hafez Assad once told Yasser
Arafat: “You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one
point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian
entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people,
Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian
authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people.”32
Prince Hassan of the
Jordanian National Assembly put it simply on February 2, 1970: “Palestine is
Jordan and Jordan is Palestine; there is only one land, with one history and
one and the same fate.”33 In a 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, PLO executive committee member Zahir
Muhsein likewise acknowledged that the Palestinian
people were a propaganda invention:
The Palestinian
people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for
continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In
reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians
and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about
the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand
that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose
Zionism.
For tactical reasons,
Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to
Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa,
Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of
Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.34
Abdul Hamid Sharif,
the Prime Minister of Jordan, would have agreed. He said in 1980: “The
Palestinians and Jordanians do not belong to different nationalities. They
hold the same Jordanian passports, are Arabs and have the same Jordanian
culture.”35
King Hussein of
Jordan put it most succinctly of all in 1981: “The truth is that Jordan is
Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.”36
Even Yasser Arafat
himself admitted this, saying in 1993: “The question of borders doesn’t
interest us.... From the Arab standpoint, we mustn't talk about borders.
Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic
nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond it....
The P.L.O. is fighting Israel in the name of Pan- Arabism. What you call
‘Jordan’ is nothing more than Palestine.”37
Despite the now
universal acceptance of the distinct nationality of the Palestinians, traces
of their newly minted status sometimes appear in sources that would never admit
that the entire Palestinian identity is an exercise in mummery. The Institute
for Middle East Understanding, in a 2006 article entitled “Palestinian Social
Customs and Traditions,” stated matter-of-factly that “Palestinian social
customs and traditions are similar to those of other Arab countries.”38 The
Palestinian values noted, family solidarity, hospitality, honor, are elements
of Muslim culture all over the world; there is absolutely nothing specifically
Palestinian about them.
Likewise, the Excellence
Center in Palestine acknowledged that “the Culture of Palestine is closely
related to those of its nearby countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.”39
Indeed. By now it is commonplace to see traditional Arab dress, food, and
customs described as “Palestinian,” with no acknowledgment that they are just
as Syrian, and Lebanese, and Jordanian as they are Palestinian. The propaganda
creation has taken on a life of its own. The existence of the Palestinians is
taken for granted.
The Palestinians Strike Back
There are, however,
still occasional dissenting voices.
Late in 2011, former
House speaker Newt Gingrich, who was then a strong contender for the Republican
Party's 2012 presidential nomination, dared to inject a note of historical
realism into the campaign. “Remember,” he told an interviewer, “there was no
Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire.... 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.”40 The Palestinians, said
Gingrich, had “an enormous desire to destroy Israel.”41
In response, the
Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, affected dismay,
demanding that Gingrich “review history” and claiming: “The Palestinian people
inhabited the land since the dawn of history.”42 Fayyad added: “From the
beginning, our people have been determined to stay on their land. This,
certainly, is denying historical truths.”43 Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi charged that Gingrich had “lost touch with reality”
and that he questioned the reality of the Palestinian nationality only as “a
cheap way to win [the] pro- Israel vote.”44 A Hamas spokesman declared that Gingrich’s
remarks were “shameful and disgraceful” and demonstrated “genuine hostility
toward Palestinians.”45
None of the reporters
who interviewed Fayyad, Ashrawi, or the Hamas
spokesman had the historical knowledge or temerity to confront them with the
statements of Yasser Arafat, Zahir Muhsein, or any of the other Arab leaders who had denied
that there was any such thing as a Palestinian people.
Hussein Ibish of the American Task Force on Palestine went even
further than his allies, charging that denying the reality of the Palestinian
people was just an attempt to divert attention away from the fact that the
Israelis were a newly minted people as well:
“To call the Palestinians
‘an invented people' in an obvious effort to undermine their national identity
is outrageous, especially since there was no such thing as an ‘Israeli' before
1948. ”46
Ibish
was being disingenuous. It is hard to go anywhere in Israel, from the Negev to
the Golan Heights, including Judea and Samaria, known today as the West Bank
and a center of Palestinian settlement, without encountering archeological
sites that testify to the ancient Jewish presence in the land. There most
certainly were “Israelis" before 1948; in English Bible translations they
are known as “Israelites," but they are the same people, and they had
lived continuously in Eretz Israel for several thousand years.47 There is; in
contrast, no evidence of Arabs in the area before the seventh century of the
common era.
Nonetheless, the myth
has taken hold, and it is now widely taken for granted, in our age that has
little historical memory and scant interest in gaining more, that the
Palestinians are a genuine nationality and are the indigenous people of the
land that Israel illegally occupies.
Having established
the Palestinians as a tiny indigenous people whose land had been stolen by
rapacious, well-heeled, and oppressive foreigners, it was time to return to the
negotiating table, not in order to achieve any genuine accord with Israel but
to exploit the victimhood status of the new tiny people they had invented in
order to win valuable concessions from the Israelis.
The story of the
Israeli-Palestinian “peace process" henceforth universally refers to the
Muslim Arabs of Palestine as Palestinians, and almost always also adopts the
Jordanian term “West Bank" for Judea and Samaria.
The Elusive Solution
There have been
innumerable “solutions" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and none of
them have actually solved anything. Yet it has never occurred to any of the
American presidents who have tried to win a Nobel by being the man who finally
brought peace to the Middle East, or to any of the Prime Ministers of Israel
who, willingly or unwillingly, made massive concessions to the Palestinians in
the hope of finally achieving peace, or to any of the professional diplomats
and foreign service “experts" who have expended massive amounts of time
trying to hit on the solution that would actually satisfy everyone, that
perhaps there is a fatal flaw in the “peace process" itself, such that a
peaceful negotiated settlement will never, ever be achieved.
Yet that flaw does
exist. It is called jihad.
The Islamic doctrines
of jihad, along with the supremacist and anti-Semitic passages of the Qur'an
and Sunnah, have been responsible for the entire problem from the beginning up
to now. They engendered the hostility that Arabs had for the Zionist settlers
in Palestine, even as those Arabs moved close to the new Jewish arrivals in
order to benefit from the economic opportunities they offered. They led to the
failure of every negotiated peace settlement, because each was predicated upon
the Arabs’ accepting the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine, no matter how
small, and such a state was plainly un-Islamic, a violation of the Qur’anic the
command to “drive them out from where they drove you out." They have led
to the ferocious demonization of the Jewish state among young Palestinians,
ensuring that the conflict will continue for decades to come no matter what
agreements are made.
So what is the solution?
The reality is that
there is no solution, at least not one that will bring about genuine amity and
a situation in which Israelis and Palestinians live peacefully as neighbors.
That is not something
that people today, particularly Americans, want to hear. There is a prevailing
assumption that Palestinians, Israeli's or/and they're representatives just sit
down and talk with one another, they will ultimately be able to find common
ground and work out all their differences.
Well, the Israelis
and the Muslim Arabs have done this again and again and again for more than
four decades now, and the conflict still rages. Borders have been adjusted,
troops have been withdrawn, settlements have been dismantled, and yet the Palestinian
media still daily seethes with rage and hate against Israel, and calls for its
destruction. For talks to succeed, both sides have to be willing to make
compromises and abide by agreements; the Palestinians have repeatedly shown
that they are willing to do neither. They clearly see negotiations with Israel
as a means to gain concessions that are steps on the way to the ultimate
collapse of the Jewish state.
Going forward,
therefore, there should be no negotiations at all, or if there are, they must
be conducted on a more realistic basis.
Negotiate on the Basis of Reality, Not Fantasy
Previous negotiated
settlements have included the requirement that Palestinians renounce terrorism,
and they did so on paper but never made even a token effort to do so in
reality. Any future negotiations should not even begin until this has been done
and the Palestinians can show that it has been done to the satisfaction of all
parties.
Is that likely ever
to happen? No. But future participants in the “peace process” will be foolish,
and will be played for fools, if they continue to negotiate with the
Palestinians while the Palestinians continue to incite hatred and violence
against Israel.
Political Settlements
Prime ministers,
presidents, diplomats, and other negotiators should also realize that the
two-state solution and any other solution that will ever be devised will never
blunt the force of the jihad against Israel, or take away the impetus for that
jihad. In light of that, it doesn't really matter which one is ultimately
implemented; none will solve the problem.
For example in 1967,
immediately following the Six-Day War, Israel offered to return almost all the
land it had won in that war of self-defense in exchange for peace.
The Arab world
responded to this offer in September 1967 with the three famous “No’s” of
Khartoum; “no peace with,” “no negotiations with,” and “no recognition of”
Israel. As Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban commented:
“This is the
first war in history which has ended with the victors suing for peace, and
the vanquished calling for unconditional surrender.”
More than a decade
later, when Egyptian President Anwar as-Sadat promised that his country would recognize Israel’s
right to exist and establish diplomatic relations if it returned the Sinai
Peninsula to Egypt, Israel, under the leadership of the right-wing prime
minister Menachem Begin returned the Sinai in its entirety.
That territory alone,
three times as large as Israel, made up 91 percent of the land the Jewish state
had captured in the Six-Day War. As part of handing over land that served as a
potential protective buffer in case of war with Egypt, Israel also gave up the
oil fields it had developed in Sinai, which would have saved Israel billions of
dollars each year on oil and enabled it to become largely energy independent.
And this was only one
of many times Israel was willing to make compromises for peace. At Camp David
in the summer of 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian
Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat and the Palestinians more than 95 percent of
the West Bank and part of Israel proper (to make up for the percentage of the
West Bank it was not returning) in which to establish a Palestinian state.
Arafat not only rejected the offer, he then launched the second intifada,
during which the Jews of Israel, civilians especially, were targeted for death
by suicide/homicide bombers. Whereby the families of the killers where given
large payments of money by Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In addition, the bombers
themselves where promised that as a reward for murdering Israelis and other
Jews, they will immediately ascend to a high place in heaven where they will be
served by seventy-two virgins.
Thus, in Israel’s
often desperate pursuit of peace, it has returned, or offered to return, more
than 97 percent of the land captured in 1967 (in addition to much of the West
Bank, the Golan Heights, lost by Syria in its war with Israel, remains in
Israel’s hands). So much for the charge that Israel has not been willing to
make compromises for peace.
The Two-State Solution
The Israeli withdrawal
from Gaza in 2005 then gave the world an intimation of what a Palestinian state
would be like. Mortimer
Zuckerman and the others who raised money for a greenhouse equipment for the
Palestinians assumed that once the Israelis were gone and the “occupation”
was over, the Palestinians would lay down their weapons and resume a normal
life. Many likewise continue to hope that if a Palestinian state is finally
established, Palestinians will end their jihad against Israel and the two
states will indeed live side by side in peace.
But the “river to the
sea” a chant that has become so popular among certain groups in the United
States is a maximalist imperative that leaves no room for any Jewish state at
all. The State of Palestine would, like unoccupied Gaza, become a new base for
jihad attacks against a diminished Israel. It would inevitably be a rogue
state, dedicated only to the destruction and conquest of its Jewish neighbors.
The One-State Solution
Some say that in
light of these realities, and in light of the fact that Israel has a perfectly
reasonable claim to sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza, by dint of
international agreements and the right of conquest, it should simply annex
those territories and make the Arabs living in them citizens of Israel. Israel
can simply enforce its laws impartially upon all citizens, prosecuting terror
activity as it does now. It has even been argued that many Palestinians would
welcome becoming citizens of Israel, as they are tired of their society that
idolizes rage and hate, and are ready to live in peace.
Particularly
maddening to many Palestinians is the
vast corruption of their leaders. Mahmoud Abbas and his two sons control
a business empire worth four hundred million dollars. Similar is with the
leaders of Hamas.
Their fortunes have largely been skimmed from the aid money that the United
States, the European Union, and others have lavished upon the Palestinians.
Palestinians who are less wealthy can see what is happening and would prefer
being citizens of Israel over continuing to live at the mercy of what could be
called a
corrupt band of kleptocrats.
Others, however, will
never abandon the jihad.
Thus a unitary state
would be racked with unrest and violence against Jewish Israelis. It would also
have a massive Muslim Arab population that could ultimately overwhelm the
Jewish population of Israel and turn it into the twenty-third Arab state.
On the Palestinian
side, the one-state solution refers to Palestinian “refugees" flooding
into Israel and becoming citizens of a unitary state, which would, by the sheer
force of numbers of these “refugees" quickly lose its character as a
Jewish state and become part of the Arab Muslim conglomerate of states. The Jews
would be massacred, expelled, or subjugated.
1 Daniel Pipes, “The
Year the Arabs Discovered Palestine,” Middle East Review, Summer 1989.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid
7 Jean Patrick Grumberg, “When Was the ‘Palestinian People’ Created?
Google Has the Answer.” Gatestone Institute, November
20, 2017
8 “Palestinians: The Invented
People,” News and Views for Jews Down Under, August 17, 2014.
https://jewsdownunder.com/2014/08/17/palestinians-the-invented-people/
9 Grumberg,
“When Was the ‘Palestinian People’ Created?”
10 “Palestinians: The
Invented People.”
11 Ibid.
12 “Palestine
Liberation Organization: Draft Constitution (1963),” The Israel-Arab Reader: A
Documentary History of the MidMiddle East Conflict, Laqueur and Rubin, p. 93.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Jamie Glazov,
“From Russia With Terror,” FrontPageMagazine.com, March 31, 2004.
16 Grumberg, “When Was the ‘Palestinian People’ Created?”
17 Ion Mihai Pacepa, “The KGB’s Man,” The Wall Street Journal, September
22, 2003.
18 “Rewriting
history: Jesus misrepresented as ‘Muslim Palestinian,’” Palestinian Media
Watch, n.d. http://palwatch.org main.aspx?fi=505
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 including for the
above see also
https://townhall.com/columnists/jonathanfeldstein/2019/12/10/hijacking-jesus-n2557748
30 Golda Meir, “Who
Can Blame Israel?,” Sunday Times, June 15, 1969.
31 Ibid.
32 “Palestinians: The
Invented People.”
33 Ibid.
34 James Dorsey, “Wij zijn alleen
Palestijn om politieke
redden,” Trouw, March 31, 1977.
https://brabosh.com/2016/02/18/pqpct-bbo/
35 “Palestinians: The
Invented People.”
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 “Palestinian
Social Customs and Traditions,” Institute for Middle East Understanding, June 26,
2006. https://imeu.org/article/social-customs-and-traditions
39 “The Culture of
Palestine,” The Excellence Center in Palestine, n.d.,
http://excellencenter.org/the-culture-of-palestine/
40 “Palestinians are
an invented people, says Newt Gingrich,” Associated Press, December 9, 2011.
41 Ibid.
42 Glick, “Yes,
Palestinians Are an Invented People.”,
https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2011/12/13/yes_palestinians_are_an_invented_people_99796.html
43 “Palestinians tell
Gingrich to learn history after ‘invented people’ claim,” The Guardian,
December 10, 2011.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Glick, “Yes,
Palestinians Are an Invented People.”
47 Ibid.
48 Howard M. Sachar,
A History of the Jews in the Modern World, 2006, p.455
49 “UN Security
Council Resolutions: Resolution 95 (September 1, 1951),” Jewish Virtual
Library.
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