December 7, 2004
Dear Friend of FLAME:
Daily we hear assertions that Israel is occupying Palestinian land.
Even the
New York Times reports without comment or clarification
that Israeli troops ventured into the Palestinian territories
or that Arab militants are upset because Israel is building settlements
on Palestinian land. This is, of course, propaganda of the first
order, since there is
no such thing as Palestinian land, and
to use that phrase is to promote a blatantly political anti-Israel
agenda. Yet like so many lies, the myth of Palestinian territory
seems to gather adherents and the patina of respectability the more
it is repeated. The excellent article below, by Lawrence Auster, lays
bare the historical facts of the matter: Israel has never taken land
from the Palestinians, and the Palestinians have no legal claim to Judea
and Samaria (the West Bank) or Gaza. (That's not to say that the Palestinians
shouldn't have land or even a state, but only that such land or state
must be the product of negotiations with Israel and not a foregone conclusion
before such negotiations begin and certainly not a justification for
terrorism.) We urge you, whenever you see unquestioning reports of Palestinian
land, to write your editor with clarification. This article will
supply you with all the facts you need.
Best regards,
Jim Sinkinson
Director, FLAME
P.S. FLAME has recently published an excellent article on the absurd
and scary notion, being dusted off again in the wake of Yasser Arafat's
death, of a "single-state solution" a united Jewish-Islamic
state in the land that is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. While
the idea seems ludicrous on its face, it is being advocated vociferously
on the Op-Ed pages of many American media. For clarification on this
dangerous proposal, please go to
http://www.factsandlogic.org/ad_88.html.
By Lawrence Auster,
FrontPageMagazine.com,
August 30, 2004
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 peopleperhaps 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 territories comprising all other
"Arab" states outside the Arabian peninsulaincluding
Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well
as the entity now formally under the Palestinian Authoritywere
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 ownersis 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 1964sixteen 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.