The Palestinian Obsession

If nothing else, the Palestinians' UN statehood gambit goes a long way towards revealing the deep-seated European and US pathologies that enable and prolong the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

In a nutshell, the Palestinian Authority - or Fatah - or PLO initiative of asking the UN Security Council and the General Assembly to upgrade its status to that of a sovereign UN member state or a sovereign non-UN member state is an act of diplomatic aggression.

Eighteen years ago this week, on September 13, 1993, the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles with Israel on the White House lawn.

There, the terror group committed itself to a peace process in which all disputes between Israel and the PLO - including the issue of Palestinian statehood - would be settled in the framework of bilateral negotiations.

The PA was established on the basis of this accord. The territory, money, arms and international legitimacy it has been given was due entirely to the PLO pledge to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel through bilateral negotiations.

By abandoning negotiations with Israel two years ago, and opting instead to achieve its nationalist aims outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel, the Palestinians are destroying the diplomatic edifice on which the entire concept of a peace process is based. They are announcing that they have no intention of living at peace with Israel. Rather they intend to move ahead at Israel's expense.

In truth, there is little new in the Palestinians' behavior. They have been using the UN to weaken Israel diplomatically since the early 1970s. Moreover, even if their bid does provide them with upgraded diplomatic status, it won't change the reality on the ground, nor are the Palestinians particularly interested in changing the situation on the ground.

As the PLO ambassador in Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah, made clear in an interview Wednesday with Lebanon's Daily Star, in the event that the UN recognizes some form of Palestinian statehood at the UN, the new "State of Palestine" will still expect the UN to support the so-called Palestinian "refugees."

This is true, he said, even for the "refugees" who live in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. That is, the same UN that the Palestinians seek recognition of statehood from will be expected to provide relief to Palestinian "refugees" living inside "Palestine."

As he put it, "Even Palestinian refugees living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens."

So if nothing will change on the ground, why do the US and the EU care what the Palestinians do at the UN next week with their automatic General Assembly majority?

Why have the senior peace-processors of Washington and Europe descended on Jerusalem and Ramallah, begging and pleading with the Palestinians to cancel their plans?

Why have the Americans and the Europeans been pressuring Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them to put out the diplomatic fire there have set at the UN?

Why are the White House and the State Department telling the media that the US will consider it a major diplomatic embarrassment if the Palestinians go through with their threats? Why in short, do the Americans and the Europeans care about this?

The Palestinians have certainly never given either the Americans or the Europeans a good reason to support their cause. Just this week, the PLO representative in Washington told reporters that the future state of Palestine will ban Jews and homosexuals.

And yet, the Obama administration and the EU have made the establishment of a racist, homophobic Palestinian state the greatest aim of their policies in the Middle East.

Every single Palestinian leader from the supposedly moderate Fatah party has rejected Israel's right to exist and said that they will never set aside their demand that Israel accept millions of foreign-born Arabs - the so-called Palestinian "refugees" - as citizens. They say this with the full knowledge that this demand is nothing less than a demand for Israel's destruction.

And yet, both the US and the EU, which certainly do not support the destruction of Israel, insist that it is imperative to strengthen and support the supposedly moderate Fatah party which seeks the destruction of Israel.

Every year, the US and Europe transfer collectively approximately a billion dollars in various forms of aid to the Palestinian Authority and yet, the PA has failed to develop a market economy capable of supporting the Palestinians without foreign assistance. Instead, they have developed a welfare society where most economic activity stems from foreign handouts.

Rather than feel embarrassment at their failures, PA leaders use their economic corruption to continuously threaten their patrons. If aid is cut off, they say, the PA will disintegrate and the far more popular Hamas movement will take over, and then, woe of woes, the peace process will be destroyed.

Of course, Hamas is also sustained by Western aid money. Every month, the same PA that warns of the dangers of a rising Hamas transfers tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza to pay salaries of Hamas "government" employees.

Yet despite its mafia economy, and its exploitation of their aid funds to support a terrorist organization, the US and EU insist on maintaining the PA's status as the largest per capita foreign aid recipient in human history. And they do so even as the Eurozone is on the brink of collapse and the US is descending rapidly into a new recession.

Finally, in the interest of maintaining the peace process, aside from periodic pro forma statements, the US and the EU have turned blind eyes to the PA's routine and institutional glorification of terrorist mass murderers and Nazi-style anti-Semitic indoctrination and incitement of Palestinian society.

Given their absolute commitment to the so-called peace process, it would be reasonable to expect the US and the EU to oppose the Palestinians' decision to move their conflict with Israel from the negotiating table to the UN.

After all, in acting as they are, the Palestinians are making clear that they are abandoning the sacrosanct peace process.

The Obama administration is engaging in desperate eleventh hour diplomacy to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plan, because it does not wish to oppose it. Most EU member states are expected to support the Palestinian bid at both the Security Council and the General Assembly.

The fact that the US and the EU are reluctant to oppose the Palestinian UN initiative, despite the fact that it destroys the foundations of the peace process, tells us two things about the Americans and the Europeans. First, their support for the Palestinians has more in common with a psychological obsession than with a rational policy decision.

The Obama administration, the EU bureaucracy and most EU member states are obsessed with the Palestinians. There is nothing the Palestinians can say or do to convince them that the Palestinian case is anything other than wholly and completely just.

There are many possible explanations for how they arrived at this obsession. But the fact is that it is an obsession. Like all obsessions, their faith in the justice of the Palestinian cause is impermeable to contrary facts or rational interests.

The flip side of this obsession is, of course, a complementary obsession with blaming Israel for everything that goes wrong. For if the Palestinians are always in the right, and they are fighting Israel, then it naturally follows that Israel is always in the wrong.

This "Blame Israel First" mindset was exposed in all its madness in a New York Times editorial on Thursday.

Despite the Palestinians' refusal to negotiate with Israel, despite Fatah's unity-government deal with Hamas, and despite their rejection of Israel's right to exist, the Times argued that Israel is to blame for the current crisis in relations.

In the paper's view, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu "has been the most intractable" party to the conflict. Netanyahu's crime? He has permitted Jews in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to exercise their property rights and build on land they own.

Of course, that is not how the Times put it. In the Times' words, Netanyahu has been "building settlements."

Intrinsic to the Times' claim, (and to the Obama administration's EU-supported demand that Israel disregard Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria), is an embrace of the Palestinians' bigoted position that Jews must be banned from the future Palestinian state.

That is, like the administration and the EU, the Times' support for the "just Palestinian cause" is so comprehensive that its editors never even question whether it is reasonable for them to be completely committed to the establishment of a racist state. It is this inability to consider the significance of their actions that removes Western support for the Palestinians from the realm of policy and into the sphere of neurosis.

The second lesson of the US and European unwillingness to oppose the Palestinians' UN statehood bid is that the Obama administration and the EU alike are obsessed with getting on the right side of inherently anti-Western international institutions.

Here, too, the reason that the position is an obsession rather than a considered policy is because no conceivable rational US or European interest is advanced by strengthening the UN and similar bodies.

Administration officials have repeatedly said that they do not wish to veto a Palestinian statehood resolution at the Security Council because they do not want to isolate the US at the UN. It is due to their aversion to isolation that the administration has worked so intensively in recent weeks to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plans, by pressuring Israel to give them massive concessions.

It never seems to have occurred to anyone at the White House that standing alone at the UN more often than not means standing up for US interests, and that standing with the crowd involves sacrificing US interests.

As for the EU, their automatic support of the UN is somewhat more reasonable. Although the UN majority systematically empowers states and forces that are hostile to Europe, many EU member states share the UN majority's anti-Israel and anti-American positions. So by voting with the majority, EU member states are able to act on their prejudices without having to own up to them. Moreover, many EU states have irredentist Islamic minorities. Joining the Israel-bashers at the UN is a low-cost way to appease them.

On Thursday, Netanyahu announced that he will address the UN General Assembly in New York next week and put the truth about the Palestinian cause on the table.

But whether he makes a difference or not, at least reason will have one defender at the UN next week.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT "palestinians" AND THE BIG LIE: 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? 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, and 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. Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation. He offers his traditionalist conservative perspective at View from the Right. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=11607 What Is the Origin of the Name Palestinian? The term Palestinian is thought to have been derived form the greek and latin words for one of the chief enemies of the Israelites – the Philistines (Greek Palaistine, Latin Palaestina, for Hebrew Plishtim). The Philistine kingdom of Philistia occupied the narrow strip of coastal plain between modern Gaza and Joppa from thirteenth to seventh centuries B.c. Indeed, the word Palestine appears in the King James version of the Bible with reference to this region (Joel 3:4). However, more modern versions use the term Philistia. David Jacobson, an instructor at the University College of London on Jews and the classical world, believes tat Palestine may have originated as a Greek pun on the translation of “Israel” and “land of the Philistines”. He observes that the Greek and Latin terms frequently appear in ancient literature with reference not to the land of Philistines, but to the land of Israel. For example, Herodotus (circa 450 B.c.), reputed to be the father of history, recorded that the people of Palestine were circumcised, a distinction of the Israelites, not Philistines (who were uncircumcised). Likewise, Aristotle (fourth centure B.c.) observed in his writings that the Dead Sea was in Palestine (a geographical setting in Israel far to the east of Philistine territory). And Philo of Alexandria (first century A.c) indentified Palaistinei with biblical Canaan and remarked that “palestinian Syria was occupied by the populous nation of the Jews”. Furthermore, if Palestine was derived from Philistine, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Septuagint (circa 250 B.c.), should have translated the Hebrew word “Plishtim” (Philistine) by the well-known Greek term Palaistinoi (Palestine). However, the translator chose the Greek transliteration Philistieim (revealing by the plural ending IM, a term of Hebrew origin). Jacobson argues that the Greek word Palaistine is quite close to the Greek word Palaistes, wich means “wrestler”, “rival” or “adversary”. This is the very meaning of the Hebrew word Yisra’el (Israel), based on Genesis 32:25-17, in wich Jacob received the name Israel because he “wrestled” (Hebrew sarita) with “God” (Hebrew El). To the Greeks, who liked to use wordplays, the word Palestine would have sounded both like the people of Israel, who were thought to be the descendants of a hero who wrestled with a god, and the Philistines, who lived in adjacent coast. The first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus , who wrote in Greek, supports this general usage by referring to both the land of the Philistines and the much larger Land of Israel as “Palestine”. However, he also distinguished the Land of Israel by this term when he wrote of “the events that befell us Jews in Egypt, in Syria and in Palestine”. The use of the term Palestine in identification with the Land of Israel officialy took root when the Roman emperor Hadrian renamed the country Syria Palaestina. It is often thought that Hadrian did this to punish the Jews for their revolt adainst Roman rule (the Bar-Kokhba Revolt of A.d. 132-135), for by removing their name for their country, the historic connection with their homeland would be severed. However, since the first-century Jewish writers Philo and Josephus had already used this term in Greek for Israel, and Roman writers continued this practice. Hadrian may have simply codified the ancient and accepted usage. Nevertheless, the designation Palaestina appears to habve been applied particularly to Judea, at the center of wich was the capital city of Jerusalem. Hadrian’s attack was clearly leveled against Jerusalem, wich he considered the heart of the rebellion. It was from this city he expelled the Jewish population and renamed it Aelia Capitolina (in honor of his own family name Aelia and the gods on Rome’s Capitol Hill). To obscure the Jewish religion of the city, he plowed under the site of the Temple Mount and erected within it pagan temples and shrines. In this way Hadrian symbolically sought to remove the Jewish past and build a new and revised Roman future. Even tough Romans attempted to sever a connection between Palestine and the Jewish people, Palestine remaied identified with Israel as a place of promise “so that in later times the words Judea and Palestine were synonymous”. Therefore, in general sense, the name Palestine has moreof a historical link with the land of the people of Israel – the Jews – and in a restricted sense, also with the Philistines. In addiction, the later application to Judea and Jerusalem may well have arisen from an attempt by the Roman enemies of the Jews to revise their historical origins. Who in Palestine Was Called a Palestinian? Greek and Roman writers used the terms Palestine and Palestinian to refer to the land of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. As we have seen, early secular writers such as Herodotus and Aristotle had used these terms in this way, as had first-century Jewish writers such as Philo and Josephus. In the early first century A.D.the Roman poet Ovid decribed Jewish Sabbath observance with the words “the seventh-day feast that the Syrian of Palestine observes”. Other Latin authors, such as the poet Statius and the historian Dio Chrysostom, also spoke of the Jews as Palestinians and the Jewish homeland as Palestine. Likewise, in Talmudic literature (third century A.D.), Palestine is used as the name of a Roman province adjoining the provinces of Phoenicia and Arabia (i.e, the Land of Israel). In the fourth century A.D. the three provinces into which the Land of Israel had been divided were referred to as first, second and third Palestine. But the term Plestine seems to have disappeared completely after the Muslim conquest of A.d. 638. In fact, Palestine never appears in the Qur’an, wich refers to the area as simply “the holy land”(Al-Arad Al-Muqaddash). In like manner, Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Qur’an , and Arab historians variously referred to it as Iliya (adapted from the Latin Aelia), Bayt Maqdis (adapted from the the Hebrew Beit Hamiqdash, “the Holy House” or “the Temple”) or finally as Al-Quds (the holy one). The crusaders renewed the use of the three Palestines, however, after the fall of the Crusader kingdom, the name Palestine was no longer used officially, but was preserved only by Christians cartographers in maps drawn in their native lands. From the establishment of islamic rule over the land until the late nineteenth century, inhabitants of the region between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean appear to have referred to themselves primarily with respect to to their religions (mohammedan, Christians and Jews) The first modern use of the term Palestinian appears during the time of the British Mandate (1917-1948). To the classicaly trained British mind the Land of Israel had ceased to exist in ancient times; and Palestine had endured in the classical literature as the designations of the Jewish homeland and heritage. This may be seen , for example, in the Jewish Encyclopedia (published in London 1905), which states that Palestine is “the portion of Syria that was formerlythe possession of the Israelites”. Given the British penchant for historical accuracy, the term is applied witrh reference tothe Jewish residents of the country . Therefore, the standard British reference for defining terms, the Oxford English Dictionary, defines the term Palestinian as 1) “the Jews who returned to Israel from Moscow” and 2) “Jews from Israel who voluntereed to he British army to fight Germany”. In fact, Jewish soldiers serving with the Allies during World War II had the word Palestine inscribed in the soulder badges. In addiction, under the British mandate, the Jewish owned newspaper Jerusalem Post was known as the Palestine Post and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra was called Palestine Philharmonica Orchestra, and postage stamps were issued bearing the apellation “Palestine - EI”, the abbreviation EI meaning Erets Israel (Hebrew for “the land of Israel”). These usages makes clear that even though the term Palestinian could have also been applied to Arabs or many other ethnic groups (such as the Armenians, Greeks, Syrians and Ethiopians pf Jerusalem’s Old City or the German Templars of its New City), under British rule, the term was especially understood to refer to a Jew from Palestine. http://israelxxpalestina.blogspot.com/2010/04/lie-about-palestinian-people-and.html

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