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 Sharif 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 in 1920 Faisal I bin Hussein became the King of Syria
which supposed to have included what is now Palestine and Israel.
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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