Posted on 08/30/2004 5:34:58 AM PDT by SJackson
There is a myth hanging over all discussion of the Palestinian problem: the myth that this land was "Arab" land taken from its native inhabitants by invading Jews. Whatever may be the correct solution to the problems of the Middle East, let's get a few things straight: § As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn't take Palestine from the Arabs; they took it from the British, who exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. And the British don't want it back. § If you consider the British illegitimate usurpers, fine. In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917. And the Turks don't want it back. § If you look back earlier in history than the Ottoman Turks, who took over Palestine over in 1517, you find it under the sovereignty of the yet another empire not indigenous to Palestine: the Mamluks, who were Turkish and Circassian slave-soldiers headquartered in Egypt. And the Mamluks don't even exist any more, so they can't want it back. So, going back 800 years, there's no particularly clear chain of title that makes Israel's title to the land inferior to that of any of the previous owners. Who were, continuing backward: § The Mamluks, already mentioned, who in 1250 took Palestine over from: § The Ayyubi dynasty, the descendants of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader who in 1187 took Jerusalem and most of Palestine from: § The European Christian Crusaders, who in 1099 conquered Palestine from: § The Seljuk Turks, who ruled Palestine in the name of: § The Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, which in 750 took over the sovereignty of the entire Near East from: § The Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, which in 661 inherited control of the Islamic lands from § The Arabs of Arabia, who in the first flush of Islamic expansion conquered Palestine in 638 from: § The Byzantines, who (nice people—perhaps it should go to them?) didn't conquer the Levant, but, upon the division of the Roman Empire in 395, inherited Palestine from: § The Romans, who in 63 B.C. took it over from: § The last Jewish kingdom, which during the Maccabean rebellion from 168 to 140 B.C. won control of the land from: § The Hellenistic Greeks, who under Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. conquered the Near East from: § The Persian empire, which under Cyrus the Great in 639 B.C. freed Jerusalem and Judah from: § The Babylonian empire, which under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. took Jerusalem and Judah from: § The Jews, meaning the people of the Kingdom of Judah, who, in their earlier incarnation as the Israelites, seized the land in the 12th and 13th centuries B.C. from: § The Canaanites, who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before they were dispossessed by the Israelites. As the foregoing suggests, any Arab claim to sovereignty based on inherited historical control will not stand up. Arabs are not native to Palestine, but are native to Arabia, which is called Arab-ia for the breathtakingly simple reason that it is the historic home of the Arabs. The terroritories comprising all other "Arab" states outside the Arabian peninsula—including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as the entity now formally under the Palestinian Authority—were originally non-Arab nations that were conquered by the Muslim Arabs when they spread out from the Arabian peninsula in the first great wave of jihad in the 7th century, defeating, mass-murdering, enslaving, dispossessing, converting, or reducing to the lowly status of dhimmitude millions of Christians and Jews and destroying their ancient and flourishing civilizations. Prior to being Christian, of course, these lands had even more ancient histories. Pharaonic Egypt, for example, was not an Arab country through its 3,000 year history. The recent assertion by the Palestinian Arabs that they are descended from the ancient Canaanites whom the ancient Hebrews displaced is absurd in light of the archeological evidence. There is no record of the Canaanites surviving their destruction in ancient times. History records literally hundreds of ancient peoples that no longer exist. The Arab claim to be descended from Canaanites is an invention that came after the 1964 founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the same crew who today deny that there was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Prior to 1964 there was no "Palestinian" people and no "Palestinian" claim to Palestine; the Arab nations who sought to overrun and destroy Israel in 1948 planned to divide up the territory amongst themselves. Let us also remember that prior to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the name "Palestinian" referred to the Jews of Palestine. In any case, today's "Palestine," meaning the West Bank and Gaza, is, like most of the world, inhabited by people who are not descendants of the first human society to inhabit that territory. This is true not only of recently settled countries like the United States and Argentina, where European settlers took the land from the indigenous inhabitants several hundred years ago, but also of ancient nations like Japan, whose current Mongoloid inhabitants displaced a primitive people, the Ainu, aeons ago. Major "native" tribes of South Africa, like the Zulu, are actually invaders from the north who arrived in the 17th century. India's caste system reflects waves of fair-skinned Aryan invaders who arrived in that country in the second millennium B.C. One could go on and on. The only nations that have perfect continuity between their earliest known human inhabitants and their populations of the present day are Iceland, parts of China, and a few Pacific islands. The Chinese case is complicated by the fact that the great antiquity of Chinese civilization has largely erased the traces of whatever societies preceded it, making it difficult to reconstruct to what extent the expanding proto-Chinese displaced (or absorbed) the prehistoric peoples of that region. History is very sketchy in regard to the genealogies of ancient peoples. The upshot is that "aboriginalism"—the proposition that the closest descendants of the original inhabitants of a territory are the rightful owners—is not tenable in the real world. It is not clear that it would be a desirable idea even if it were tenable. Would human civilization really be better off if there had been no China, no Japan, no Greece, no Rome, no France, no England, no Ireland, no United States? I have no problem recognizing the legitimacy of the Arabs' tenure in Palestine when they had it, from 638 to 1099, a period of 461 years out of a history lasting 5,000 years. They took Palestine by military conquest, and they lost it by conquest, to the Christian Crusaders in 1099. Of course, military occupation by itself does not determine which party rightly has sovereignty in a given territory. Can it not be said that the Arabs have sovereign rights, if not to all of Israel, then at least to the West Bank, by virtue of their majority residency in that region from the early Middle Ages to the present? To answer that question, let's look again at the historical record. Prior to 1947, as we've discussed, Palestine was administered by the British under the Palestine Mandate, the ultimate purpose of which, according to the Balfour Declaration, was the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In 1924 the British divided the Palestine Mandate into an Arabs-only territory east of the Jordan, which became the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and a greatly reduced Palestine Mandate territory west of the Jordan, which was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews. Given the fact that the Jews and Arabs were unable to coexist in one state, there had to be two states. At the same time, there were no natural borders separating the two peoples, in the way that, for example, the Brenner Pass has historically marked the division between Latin and Germanic Europe. Since the Jewish population was concentrated near the coast, the Jewish state had to start at the coast and go some distance inland. Exactly where it should have stopped, and where the Arab state should have begun, was a practical question that could have been settled in any number of peaceful ways, almost all of which the Jews would have accepted. The Jews' willingness to compromise on territory was demonstrated not only by their acquiescence in the UN's 1947 partition plan, which gave them a state with squiggly, indefensible borders, but even by their earlier acceptance of the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan, which gave them nothing more than a part of the Galilee and a tiny strip along the coast. Yet the Arab nations, refusing to accept any Jewish sovereignty in Palestine even if it was the size of a postage stamp, unanimously rejected the 1937 Peel plan, and nine years later they violently rejected the UN's partition plan as well. When the Arabs resorted to arms in order to wipe out the Jews and destroy the Jewish state, they accepted the verdict of arms. They lost that verdict in 1948, and they lost it again in 1967, when Jordan, which had annexed the West Bank in 1948 (without any objections from Palestinian Arabs that their sovereign nationhood was being violated), attacked Israel from the West Bank during the Six Day War despite Israel's urgent pleas that it stay out of the conflict. Israel in self-defense then captured the West Bank. The Arabs thus have no grounds to complain either about Israel's existence (achieved in '48) or about its expanded sovereignty from the river to the sea (achieved in '67). The Arabs have roiled the world for decades with their furious protest that their land has been "stolen" from them. One might take seriously such a statement if it came from a pacifist people such as the Tibetans, who had quietly inhabited their land for ages before it was seized by the Communist Chinese in 1950. The claim is laughable coming from the Arabs, who in the early Middle Ages conquered and reduced to slavery and penury ancient peoples and civilizations stretching from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic; who in 1947 rejected an Arab state in Palestine alongside a Jewish state and sought to obliterate the nascent Jewish state; who never called for a distinct Palestinian Arab state until the creation of the terrorist PLO in 1964—sixteen years after the founding of the state of Israel; and who to this moment continue to seek Israel's destruction, an object that would be enormously advanced by the creation of the Arab state they demand. The Arab claim to sovereign rights west of the Jordan is only humored today because of a fatal combination of world need for Arab oil, leftist Political Correctness that has cast the Israelis as "oppressors," and, of course, good old Jew-hatred.
Back to the Arabs
Very interesting read.
Fleeing a war zone to avoid being killed is not "voluntarily abandoning ... property". But then, I know how some have twisted the divine Commandment, "Thou shalt not steal" to "allow" precisely what you describe.
Unfortunately for you, the civilized world, through the Geneva Convention, does not subscribe to this barbarism.
France discovered learned this after the Franco-Prussian War when Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine.
Germany learned the same lesson after WWII, when it was forced to cede East Prussia to Poland.
You are confusing "rights" with "power". There is certainly nothing in the rules of conduct of the civilzed nations of the world which allows for mass dispossesion and expulsions. And only in the last case, East Prussia, was their a wholesale disposession and expulsion of the native inhabitants by the conquerors.
Either we believe in property rights, or we believe in the rule of the strongest with the most guns.
They conquered it, they moved out or suppressed the indigenous barbarians, and they are productively using the land in furtherance of civilization.
I can't speak for Nebraska, but out in my part of the country (Pennsylvania), the land was legitimately bought from the Indians for a fair price in a settlement made without war. My right to my property in this state is based upon real title, not force. The force enforces my title. It does not create it.
"If evolution is true, then we all should move to Africa. And if the Bible is true, then we all should move to Iraq. Huh? Why would we move to Ur of the Chaldees?"
That was sarcasm, my dear fellow, sarcasm. I don't put alerts such as barf, sarcasm, etc - I assume that for most part, the intent of such statements are obvious. For example, the idiocy of billions of humans living in Mesopotamia or Kenya/Tanzania is (or should be) self-evident.
Interesting that your map shows a Palestine state.
As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn't take Palestine from the Arabs; they took it from the British, who exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel's declaration of independence in 1948.
This assumes that the illegitimate League of Nations that was never recognized by the US (so why are purported US citizens using this to justify Israeli actions?) had some sort of power to give away willy-nilly the land inhabitated by other people to various occupying powers. Americans rejected that concept in 1920, when we refused to ratify the League of Nations treaty.
In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917.
Well, strictly speaking, the British wrested it from the Turks by using a mainly Arab force from free Arabia to take the land from occupying the Turkish Army.
The Byzantines, who (nice people—perhaps it should go to them?) didn't conquer the Levant, but, upon the division of the Roman Empire in 395, inherited Palestine from: The Romans, who in 63 B.C. took it over from:
This just goes to show you what a biased twit the writer is. "Byzantines" were and are Romans. The Arabs and Turks still correctly call both the Greeks and the Arabized Christians of the Middle East "Romans".
As the foregoing suggests, any Arab claim to sovereignty based on inherited historical control will not stand up.
The claim is not so much to sovereignty as to the write to live in the land of your birth secure in your property. This is an obfuscation and smoke screen.
terroritories comprising all other "Arab" states outside the Arabian peninsula—including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as the entity now formally under the Palestinian Authority—were originally non-Arab nations that were conquered by the Muslim Arabs when they spread out from the Arabian peninsula in the first great wave of jihad in the 7th century
Not true as far as Jordan, Syria, and western Iraq go. These areas were the Roman province of "Arbaia Felix" and were of course inhabitated by Arabs. The Punic inhabitants of Tunisia and Algeria and Lybia and Morrocco were Carthaginian Phoenicians, Phoenicians being the direct continuation of the Canaanites. The Arab conquest of these areas from the Romans caused most Romans to flee to the East Roman Empire or Italy or Spain, while the Punics and Berbers became integrated with the Arabs.
The recent assertion by the Palestinian Arabs that they are descended from the ancient Canaanites whom the ancient Hebrews displaced is absurd in light of the archeological evidence. There is no record of the Canaanites surviving their destruction in ancient times.
The Phoenecians were the direct continuation of the Canaanites (who were clearly not displaced by the Hebrews as openly admitted by the Bible - "So the children of Israel dwelt in the midst of the Chanaanite, and the Hethite, and the Amorrhite, and the Pherezite, and the Hevite, and the Jebusite: And they took their daughters to wives, and they gave their own daughters to their sons, and they served their gods." - Judges 3.5-6).
See: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/2938/histcult.html
And also:
"In the Tell-el-Amarna tablets Canaan is found under the forms of Kinakhna and Kinakhkhi. Under the name of Kanana the Canaanites appear on Egyptian monuments, wearing a coat of mail and helmet, and distinguished by the use of spear and javelin and the battle-axe. They were called Phoenicians by the Greeks and Poeni by the Romans."
http://www.christiananswers.net/dictionary/canaanites.html
So obviously, the native inhabitants of Palestine at 1917, and those who moved to the land from Syria and Lebanon were undoubtedly Canaanite/Phoenician in origin. This especially applies to the Palestinian Christian population, which has no Arab admixture. And also, as noted above, the native population of North Africa outside Egypt.
"In the days when the trading Phoenicians held a prominent place, especially among the Canaanites, this word (Kena'ani), and even Canaan (e.g. Is., xxiii, 8), got the signification of "merchant, trader." As the name of the country it occurs under the forms Kinahhi, Kinahni, and Kinahna, as early as two centuries before Moses in the cuneiform letters of Syrian and Palestinian princes to Egyptian Pharaos, found at Tell el-Amarna; and earlier still in Egyptian inscriptions, in the form Ka-n-'-na. The Phoenician town of Laodicea calls itself on coins from the second century B.C. "a mother in Kena'an". In Grecian literature too, evidence remains that the Phoenicians called one of their ancestors, as well as their country, Chna, and even at the time of St. Augustine the Punic country people near Hippo called themselves Chanani, i.e. Canaanites." - Catholic Encyclopedia, Cana, Canaanites
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03569b.htm
In any case, today's "Palestine," meaning the West Bank and Gaza, is, like most of the world, inhabited by people who are not descendants of the first human society to inhabit that territory.
As far as any normal history shows, the Canaanites were the first known civilized inhabitants of the land, and the Palestinian Arabs are partially descended from the Canaanites. See above.
The only nations that have perfect continuity between their earliest known human inhabitants and their populations of the present day are Iceland, parts of China, and a few Pacific islands.
There are many more than this. We could start with the Armenians, Kurds, Georgians and other Caucassians, Basques, Picts, Dravidians, Australian Aboriginies, Ukranians, the Queycha Indians of Bolivia and Peru, etc., etc. This is totlally disingenuous lies.
Given the fact that the Jews and Arabs were unable to coexist in one state, there had to be two states.
This isn't a "fact". It is a situation created by colonial aspirations of Britain and the European Jewish population. many Jews had lived relatively peacefully among the Arabs for centuries until the poison of Zionism was thrown into the mix.
At the same time, there were no natural borders separating the two peoples, in the way that, for example, the Brenner Pass has historically marked the division between Latin and Germanic Europe.
Brenner Pass has never and still does not mark the division of Latin and Germanic Europe. The south slope of the Alps is inhabitated by Germas in an autonomous Italian province seized by Italy from Austria called South Tirol. More proof that this fellow simply has no idea what he is talking about.
The Arabs thus have no grounds to complain either about Israel's existence (achieved in '48) or about its expanded sovereignty from the river to the sea (achieved in '67).
As far as the undemocratic Arab governments, they have nothing to complain about, and are fortunate they have not been wiped out. As far as the Arab inhabitants who had nothign to do with the fighting, they have every right to complain about dispossesion.
My map shows TWO Palestinian states. It also shows how "expansionist" those naughty Zionists are.
Generally people flee ahead of the arrival of the fighting. Perhaps you don't have experience with this in your family. I do, since my mother's family was dispossesed in Georgia and fled ahead of Sherman to Jacksonville. We didn't wait for the fighting so we could be burned up in our home.
Also, fleeing a war zone to go to the nation of the invader is not the same as simply fleeing the war zone. It is collaberating with the enemy.
The Palestinians could hardly flee to the nation of the invader when they fled from a part of Palestine under Jordanian or Egyptian or Lebanese control to a part of those countries outside Palestine. They remained within the same sovereign territory the entire time.
Worth reading:
David Ben-Gurion declared in 1938, "after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the whole of Palestine" In 1948, Menachem Begin said, "The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel, All of it. And forever".
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/1947%20Partition%20plan%20for%20Palestine
I suppose you think the plantations of the south should be returned to the slaveholders?
Yes, I'd like my family's property back, or at least fair compensation. It is currently held by the US Government as Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base. We were never given anything for it or for the senseless or needless destruction of our property and possessions.
BCE and CE are designations used by Jewish authors in books and essays intended for Jewish readers, when referencing dates in the Gregorian calendar. These terms have been in use since the early 1800's, so it's not some new liberal PC fad.
Maybe we should use the Islamic calendar and reference dates before 637 AD as BM.
So, West of the Mississippi and North of Rio Bravo, what?
We give it all back?
The term used was population transfer.
Diplomats considered that it was better to resettle a restive population in another area rather than allow it to remain in an geographic area that being annexed by conquest or political settlement by another power.
I'm sorry. People like you are simply totally evil. "Population Trasnfer" or whatever other bland name you want to give to it, is an enormous crime against humanity.
Perhaps instead of annexing by conquest, we could expect that minorities would be left in peace in their mother countries, or given a semi-autonomous status if in a multi-ethnic state.
It is only when we begin to constrict freedom and deny people the right to be who they are, live as they wish, and speak and worship as they are wont, that the "problems" "requiring" "Population Transfer" surface and make it a "necessity".
Civilized people recognize the travesties carried out in Acadia, Posen, West Prussia, Silesia, Trabizond, Smyrna, Cilicia, Transylvania, East Prussia, Pommerania, Sudetenland, Slovakia, Galacia, Kalmykia, Crimea, Banat, Bosnia, Kosovo, and numerous other places as barbarism and a descent to evil.
Rights", however natural, do not exist in a vacuum. "Rights" are not self-enforcing, nor can they exist in a state of anarchy.
Then you must believe rights come to us at the sufferance of the government, rather than being self-evident, self-existant, and naturally ours from God. The existence of a Government is not necessary for my rights as a human to exist. They are mine by reason of my existence, and I don't need a government to defend them, since another of my rights is to self-defense.
I'm not familiar with the course of establishing land title in those areas. In the areas I've lived in, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, the land was equitably bought or ceded by the Indians under various purchase agreements and treaties, and the purchase agreements and treaties remain in force, giving the Indians various privileges (such as access to hunting grounds and fisheries not enjoyed by Americans).
I would enjoy your enlightenment regarding the establishment of title by Americans beyond the Mississippi.
The Congress of Vienna established a peace without population transfers, and without a vengeful treatment of France, which was even left with some of its illgotten gains of the Napoleonic wars in Alsace and Lorraine. It is in fact the exact opposite of what occured 100 years later at Versailles.
You are right about the greatness of the men involved, starting with Metternich.
I would remind you that he represented a peaceful Catholic State, Austria, which then encompassed many nationalities and which did not suffer from the nationality problem until it embraked on ill-advised adventures in Bosnia. The world would be a much better place had Austria-Hungary been left intact in 1919.
Some examples of other states where different ethnic groups have coexisted in harmony - Finland (Swedish minority), Switzerland (French and Italian minorities), Poland (Ukranian and Lithuanian minorities).
There was no real nationality problem in Europe until the French Revolutionary period and the subsequent Romantic period.
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