How Strong Is the Arab Claim to Palestine?-Exactly who has the right to claim "I had it first?"

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 Ayyubi dynasty, the descendants of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader who in 1187 took Jerusalem and most of Palestine from:

§ 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 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 17^th 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?

Back to the Arabs

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.

Yes, the Byzantines began as Romans but by the time of the Middle Ages were quite distinct, and even spoke Greek as their official language. They would not have considered themselves Latins by the time they lost the Holy Land, in any event.

When the Romans lost the Holy Land, they still dominated Italy, Roman Spain, and Roman Africa. Emperor Heraclius had reorganized the Empire a few decades previously, and made Greek the official language, but this hardly changed who the people were, or what they called themselves.

There are Romans who speak Romance languages, and there are Romans who speak Greek (and now Arabic).

The Phoenicians were Lebanese.

Don't you mean the Lebanese are (some of) the Phoenicians? And the Phoenicians also lived all along what is now the Israeli coast, besides having colonized north Africa. Haifa was a Phoenician city, was it not? The core territory of ancient Israel proper is the Jerusalem area and the West Bank, not the Philistine/Phoenician coast.

Many Jews did live relatively peacefully among the Arabs, as long as the Arabs were in control.

Not just in Palestine, but all over the Arab world.

Some falsehoods in your arguments:

I think your comments are directed at someone else. I don't recall making these arguments you refer to.

Many Jews did live relatively peacefully among the Arabs, as long as the Arabs were in control.

...And as long as they behaved like proper dhimmis, which you know what that means.

Add to that the fact that the area was considered a largely uninhabited backwater, and the Arabs really didn't care about it much at all. It only became a problem when Jews took over. Oh, and why don't you tell us about the nice plans the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had for the Jews there in WWII?

Oh, the Grand Mufti, the uncle of Arafat? The one who suggested to Hitler that instead of expelling all the Jews from Europe, he should just kill them?

"Byzantium is the name given to both the state and the culture of the Eastern Roman Empire in the middle ages. Both the state and the inhabitants always called themselves Roman, as did most of their neighbors. Western Europeans, who had their own Roman Empire called them Orientals or Greeks, and later following the example of the great French scholar DuCange, Byzantines after the former name of the Empire's capital city, Constantinople.

These names give witness to the composite nature of Byzantium. It was, without any doubt, the continuation of the Roman state, and until the seventh century, preserved the basic structures of Late Roman Mediterranean civic culture: - a large multi-ethnic Christian state, based on a network of urban centers, and defended by a mobile specialized army. After the Arab/Muslim conquest of Egypt and Syria, the nature of the state and culture was transformed. Byzantium became much more a Greek state [perhaps best seen in the emperor Heraklios' adoption of the Greek title Basileus], all the cities except Constantinople faded away to small fortified centers, and the military organization of the empire came to be based on a series of local armies."

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/byzantium/

"The dawn of recorded history found Lebanon inhabited by its native people who it would seem called themselves the Kena'ani (Akkadian: Kinahna), the "Canaanites". Canaan was therefore earliest native name applied to the land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. In Hebrew the word kena'ani has the secondary, and apt, meaning of "merchant", a term which well characterizes the Phoenicians because the nature of the country and its location, forced these ancient Lebanese to turn to the sea, where they engaged in trade and navigation."

http://www.cedarland.org/phoenicia.html

Byzantium became much more a Greek state [perhaps best seen in the emperor Heraklios' adoption of the Greek title Basileus]

Heraclius adopted the title "Pistos in Christos Basileus" after the defeat of Persia. Its meaning is "Great King, Faithful in Christ". "Great King" was the traditional title of the King of Persia. By adopting it, Heraclius was claiming to have superceded their empire. Adding "Pistos in Christos", Herclius was dilineating what seperated him from the Zorastrian Persians.

This BCE thing really bugs me. It's obvious we still reference dates as either before the birth of Christ, or after. What's wrong with B.C.? Must we all be so politically correct?
I mean no disrespect, quite the opposite. I am using the standard Western dating system, without making a religious affirmation contrary to my faith. Calling Jesus "Christ" is an affirmation that he is the Messiah. As I do not believe this, it would either be disengenuous or contemptuous for me to use the terms "BC" and "AD."

I decided to add this before reading you most recent comment.
If I am "simply totally evil", then you have nothing to fear. People like me are no threat because our "evil" is recognized by all and immediately. We can be avoided or ignored.
It is those who are partially good and evil that should concern you. They hide their evil by doing good; then when the foolish have been deceived, it is too late.
To paraphrase from the Bible: beware false prophets. Outwardly they preach good but inwardly are ravenous wolves.

Finland and Switzerland are too small to be reasonable examples. As for Poland: I wonder if the Jewish minority - or the German, for that matter - would agree with you.

I agree that Austria did not suffer from nationality problems because the ruling German and Hungarian minorities suppressed dissident minorities.
Tsarist Russia was called the prison of nationalities. If you've seen the movie Fiddler on the Roof, you know how the Tsar dealt with Jews.

The conclusion that there was no nationality problem in Europe until the French Revolution overlooks two groups. The Irish were unhappy with English rule, and the Huguenots were forced to leave France when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes.

What would be the relevance of your quotations?

I was pointing out the Talmud grants property rights to tenants who work the land, who you were disdaining and dismissing as having none. This is a universalist ideal as well.

If you really want to start talk about Divine Land Grants though, lets talk about Deuteronomy 28 and 29.

Then why bother to reference the birth of Jesus at all? Again, there is an elephant in the room that no one wants to recognize.

By your logic, I should never use the word "kosher", or refer to the "Yom Kippur" war. Besides, I really don't have a problem with Jews who hold your view. I fear the practice will become standard in ALL circles, and B.C. and A.D. will go the way of Christmas Break, that is now called Winter Break or the like.

Which Partition of Poland? To my recollection, Poland has been partitioned four times, the last of which was between Hitler and Stalin.

The Irish were a ethnic group with a distinct territory, a separate language, and religion. If that doesn't qualify as a nationality, I don't know what does. I wonder what the Irish thought they were, if not a nationality distinct from the British.

The Huguenots were a Protestant religious minority. The Treaty of Alais in 1629 stripped them of political power but confirmed liberty of conscience. They were allowed to worship as they pleased, to publish religious texts, and to seek civil and military employment.
In 1665 - for no good reason - Louis xiv began to strip away the protections of the Edict of Nantes, which had been in force since 1598. Finally, in 1685, he revoked the document outright.
Though prohibited from leaving France, thousands of Protestants fled the country. This exodus may not qualify as a population transfer in the strict sense of the word, but its about as close as you can get without being one.

There was never been any great affection between the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons, not to mention between the Normans and the Celts.

If you contend that there was little ethnic conflict before the first partition of Poland, I lack the knowledge to dispute you. However, the Poles never displayed much affection for the Jews during period after Poland disappeared from the map. Neither was there much love between Poles and Jews after WWI.

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