Posted on 08/14/2002 7:18:09 AM PDT by carton253
The “Palestinian problem” is often asserted to be the “heart of the matter”, which must be dealt with before any real Middle East peace or any solution can occur.
The “heart of the matter” however, is not the Arab refugees or the “Palestinian Arab refugees” or the “rights” of the “Palestinians” – or even Palestine. Were the Jewish-settled independent state on any area within reach of the Arab world – no matter how remote or barren the location, there might well be another “problem”. And very likely there would also be another group of effendis (Arab landlords) to sell land to the Jews. There would be “landless” peasants anxious to better their lot who would migrate into the area of Jewish development. Perhaps they too would be goaded into claiming that the Jews displaced them from their “land since time immemorial”. But the chances of the dhimmi Jews gaining independence among Arabs in an Arab country, where Islam is the state religion are not even arguable. Even in the Jews’ own Holy Land it took two thousand years and millions of Jewish lives to accomplish the political rebirth of Israel.
The Arabs believe that by creating an Arab Palestinian identity, at the sacrifice and well-being and the very lives of “Arab refugees”, they will accomplish politically and through “guerrilla warfare” what they failed to achieve in military combat: the destruction of Israel – the unacceptable independent dhimmi state. That is the “heart of the matter”.
All the myths surrounding the Arab “Palestinians” are based on the same premises:
1. The “Palestinian people” have had an identity with the land
2. That identity has been present for “thousands of years.”
3. The alien Jews “returned after 2000 years” in 1948 to “displace” the “Palestinian Arabs” in the “new” Jewish state.
4. The Arabs were there first – it was Arab land.
5. The Jews “stole” the Arabs’ land.
6. The Jewish terrorists forced the peaceable Arabs to flee from “Palestine”.
7. Palestine is Israel, and Israel constitutes all of Palestine. “In 1948 Palestine became Israel”.
8. Only Jews immigrated into “Palestine,” while Arabs were natives there for millennia.
9. There are no places for the “homeless” Palestinian “refugees” to go.
10. The Jews were living in quality and tranquility with the “Palestinian Arabs” before Israel became a state, just as Jews had lived traditionally in peace and harmony throughout the benevolent Arab world.
11. The Arab “Palestinians,” like other Arabs, have “nothing against Jews – only Zionists”.
Contrary to those Arab propaganda claims:
1. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Arabs or Arabic-speaking migrants were wandering in search of subsistence all over the Middle East. The land of “Palestine” proper had been laid waste, causing peasants to flee.
2. Jews and “Zionism” never left the Holy Land, even after the Roman conquest in AD 70.
3. The traditional land of “Palestine included both areas east and west of the Jordan River (Transjordan or Jordan).
4. The Arabic-speaking “masses” in “Palestine” – what few there were – though of themselves as “Ottomans or Turks”, as Southern Syrians or as “Arab People” – but never as “Palestinians” even after effendis and the Mufti tried to incite “nationalism” and even after T.E. Lawrence had made Herculean attempts to inject the Arabic-speaking residents of “Palestine” with nationalism.
5. Imbued with religious prejudice, the Muslims of Palestine erupted into anti-Jewish violence often, and at the call of the Muslim leaders, long before Israel.
6. Those anti-Jewish, apolitical acts were later, by the British, ascribed as “Nationalism”.
7. The bulk of all “Arab” peasantry in the area – East Palestine, Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian, and others – were rendered “landless” by feudal-like societal structures, natural disasters, extortionate taxation, and corrupt loan sharks. Yet the Jews were cynically charged with creating “landless” Arabs in “Palestine”. The British gave state domain lands, allocated for the “Jewish National Home” to those “landless” Arabs who claimed they were being “displaced by Jews” in Western Palestine.
8. All the land outside the limited Jewish-settled area of Western Palestine was treated as “Arab” land: more than 80% -- including even part of Western Palestine – was diverted to the Arabs. (Winston Churchill signed a white paper in the early 1920’s that single handedly divided Mandate Palestine into two parts – giving the larger part to the Emir Abdullah and creating Transjordan)
9. The overwhelming bulk of Palestine called “Eastern Palestine” or “Transjordan” became the Arab independent state within Palestine, despite the fact that all “Palestine” had been designated as a “Jewish National Home.”
10. The “homelands” to which Arab refugees moved in 1948 included lands that many Arab refugees had only recently left in order to gain economic advantages of the small Jewish region within Palestine. Those “homelands” where many Arab refugees of 1948 originated included the greater part of “Palestine” – Jordan today – to which the Jews claimed historic rights. Jordan was no less a “Palestinian state” than was the Jewish-settled fraction named “Israel”.
11. Those who were deprived the Arab “refugees” of homes among families and within their own Arab nation are the Arab-Muslim leaders.
12. The Arab “refugees-émigrés”, who by tradition been migrating into the Jewish-settled areas, were accepted as citizens of Palestine-cum-Jordan, because Jordanians acknowledge that their country is “Palestinian soil”.
13. All other adjacent Arab states refused to grant the dignity of citizenship to those whom they called their Arab brothers. The migrants had left their nearby Arab homelands to share the new prosperity in the Jewish-settled area of Western Palestine, that fraction of the original Jewish homeland retained by the Jews.
As we have seen, it is only in the Jewish-settled area of Western Palestine that the population distribution is relevant. The charge that “Arab Palestinians were excluded from their homeland” has been levied against the Jewish people, based upon the false assumption that Jews were allowed to settle, unrestricted, throughout their Jewish National Home” of “Palestine”, and thus Israel was equivalent to all of “Palestine”. Since the land of Israel – mainly the Jewish inhabited land in1948 – accounted for less than a fourth of the land originally designated “Palestine,” and if the rest of “Palestine” is inhabited by Jordanian/Palestinians in an Arab state carved out of the Palestinian “Jewish National Home” where Jews are forbidden by law from settling – how, then can Arabs be said to be “excluded” from a “Palestinian Homeland.”
The situation-changing effect of a detailed analysis of the composition and distribution of the population of Western Palestine, and of the nature of immigration and in-migration into that area, is of immense significance; yet these data have heretofore been almost entirely ignored. There was neither map nor measure readily available to identify accurately the population or territory actually involved in the Jewish-settled areas that constituted the land where 98% of all Jews in “Palestine” would live until after 1948 – a fraction of Western Palestine. There are been no relevant recognition of the British land restrictions against Jews, which limited Jewish settlements to only a portion of Western Palestine.
The land in the “Jewish National Home” was treated largely as “Arab Land.” The Jews immigration was brutally restricted while “illegal” Arab immigration was freely permitted – that was in fact the British “system” of immigration. To appease Arab “discontent”, the British violated the international League of Nations Mandate, by “facilitating” Arab settlement into Jewish settled land, and by treating the Jews only “on sufferance” in their “Jewish National Home.” No real measure of in-migrants or immigrants was ever taken, because the prevalent erroneous assumption was and still is that those Arab migrants had “always been there.” The omission of such information facilitated the myth of today.
The situation that subsequently evolved brings to mind once more this parable:
In the state of Georgia, there is a population of nearly 600,000 farmers – 500,000 white farmers and 85,000 black farmers. The white farmers are sprinkled on land throughout the state. The black farmers have been permitted to dwell and buy land in a small, generally undeveloped, and abandoned coastal country of that state; they have toiled to drain and reclaim its swampland and have begun to build up its sandy wastes.
Although, the majority of the state’s land is state domain, the whites exert pressure and utilize violence in order to keep the Georgia administration from selling to the blacks that state territory which is their right. The Georgia government passes spuriously based legislation that has the effect of impeding the sales of state domain land to the black would-be settlers, and enacts restrictions on entry into Georgia in order keep out the blacks. The only land left available to them is the outrageously overpriced land that the whites sell to the blacks, most of which has become dunes and swampland.
Meanwhile, white migrant workers throughout Georgia, and from neighboring states as well, begin flooding into the area that has been promised to and allocated by federal legislation for black settlement. Having been hired by the blacks to assist in development, those white migrants are then designated by the government of Georgia to be the “original settled inhabitants” of the area. Then the white so-called “original settlers” charge that the blacks are “dispossessing” the whites, and must be kept out, although all the states surrounding Georgia – as well as the majority to territory inside Georgia – are dominated by whites, all in areas where KKK persecution and violence against blacks have been occurring with regularity. The white farmers resent the prosperity and equality accruing to those whom they regard as their “slaves” and therefore claim that the previously deserted land was “expropriated from whites”, insisting that the blacks’ farms belong to the whites from time immemorial.
Would any reasonable jury today respect such a claim?
And yet, so buried by layer-upon-layer of propaganda is the actual historical situation of Arabs and Jews in the Jewish-settled area of Western Palestine that just Arab demands have been given acceptance by many who, while in search of justice, lack the facts.
What happened in Rhodesia and South Africa is a model for what the Arabs want to do to Israel. The Arabs obviously want to make Israel Rhodesia III, though clearly won't allow any of the descendants of those westerners who built the nation from nothing to survive. I sincerely hope that the Israelis fight to win, unlike those in Rhodesia and South Africa, and that the rest of the western world finally wakes up. I have little hope of the latter (with the exception of the US), but a great deal of hope for the former (after all, the Jews of Israel, unlike citizens of Rhodesia and South Africa, have no where else to go).
Cinnamon Girl, thank you for recommending this book to me. I loved it...
Although I knew most of this, it has indeed been buried in a sea of misinformation and the revision of history.
AMAZON reader's reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0963624202/customer-reviews/ref=br_lf_b_8/104-0008749-4554356
SAMPLE pages from the book:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0963624202/reader/1/ref=lib_dp_TFCV/104-0008749-4554356#reader-link
Sample page:
Thank you for that and for pinging the list...
Next book in my list is Bay Ye'or's Islam and Dhimmitude: A Clash of Civilizations. Should prove interesting.
Joan Peter's research is faultless.
It isn't. I'm sorry but it isn't faultless.
Daniel Pipes, whose credentials as a defender of Israel require no elaboration, wrote this in the New York Review of Books in 1986(!):
It has become open season on Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, although Yehoshua Porath's review [NYR, January 16] is one of the more restrained of the attacks upon it made in the past fifteen months or so. Mrs. Peters has brought this upon herself to a large extent, for, as I wrote in my review of the book in The New Republic of April 23, 1984, "many of its valuable points are buried in passages of furious argumentative overkill," and too much of its more than 600 pages is given over to very conventional polemics. Since then, some patient researchers have found numerous examples of sloppiness in her scholarship and an occasional tendency not to grasp the correct meaning of a context from which she has extracted a quotation. All in all, her book is marked—and marred—by an over-eagerness to score a huge and definitive polemical triumph, which has caused her too often to leave prudence and responsibility behind.But the fact remains that there is an original and significant argument at the heart of her book [...]
I am not mentioning this to rain on your parade, but you should know there are problems with Peters' research before you get blindsided in a discussion with a well-prepared PLO sympathizer.
It is unfortunate that Peters has not seen fit to publish an updated, revised edition of her book which would fill in gaps in the demographical data and correct errors. The story isn't as simple as she makes it out to be.
For my part, during the same time that I was finding out how indeed hundreds of thousands Palestinian Arabs were dispossessed and treated badly by the Israelis, I also learned of the 1400 years persecution of Jews by Muslim Arabs, starting with Moe Ham Head his own self and culminating in the 1948 war of extermination and the expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries. The same Arab genocidal mindset that continues to this day and is so twisted and perverse that it accuses the other side of the crime it is planning and implementing. So my compassion for the Arabs ... let's say it has its limits.
It takes nothing away from the accomplishments of the Israelis to admit that real injustices against Palestinian Arabs were committed (some of whom had indeed been living there for many generations). That is how nation-states are born - in blood and tears - and Israel has tragic history like all other nation-states (but much less than most of them).
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