Ron Nachman: Arabs Occupied

Israel is not an occupier in Judea and Samaria, according to Mayor Ron Nachman of Ariel, who spoke this week with Arutz Sheva's Hebrew-language news service. If Arabs living in the region are under a form of occupation, the occupier is the Palestinian Authority, he added.

Nachman recently joined several other Israeli leaders in Judea and Samaria in sending a strongly-worded letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon arguing on behalf of Jewish and Israeli rights in Judea and Samaria, and against the establishment of a PA state in the region.

International law clearly shows that Israel is not an occupier, Nachman said. He noted that several leading figures in the field of international law have reached the same conclusion.

Israel is not an occupier because Judea and Samaria were never an independent political entity, he explained. Historically this was understood, he said, pointing out that Egypt and Jordan were never referred to as “occupying” Judea, Samaria or Gaza when they controlled those territories between 1949 and 1967. During that time local Arabs did not accuse them of occupation or seek to establish an independent state.

Stricly speaking, you`re wrong: 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.  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. 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 http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=11607

Who’s talking about the chain of title to the Land of Israel. Most of the so-called Arabs are not from Arabia. That’s all I’m saying. The pre-Islamic language of the entire region was Aramaic, still spoken in parts of Syria and by Kurdish Jews and Christians. As for the “chain of title” to Israel, when the Romans sold the rebellious Judaeans into slavery and dispersed them throughout their then-united empire, they and their descendants, among whom I am numbered, did not lose title. Those who were able to came back. Those who were not stopped by discriminatory laws and persecution, stayed. All title-holders in between were squatters on stolen land, let the UN and the League of Nations be damned.

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