Preventing ‘Palestine’ Part I: Essential pre-conditions
By MARTIN SHERMAN, JPOST
Into the Fray: Formula for an alternative to two-state-solution requires policy that depoliticizes the context and ‘atomizes’ the implementation.
PHOTO: REUTERS/SHARIF KARIM
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If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when? – Hillel the Elder,Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14
In Part 1 of this three-part series I set out the essential preconditions for implementation of a viable alternative to a “two-state-solution” (TSS) approach consistent with the long-term survival of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
To reiterate…
I emphasized that, given how ingrained the TSS-approach has become in the culture of the discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict, generating any conceptual space for the consideration of alternative, Zionist-compliant proposals requires a dramatic restructuring of Israel’s diplomatic apparatus.
However, judging from some of the talk-backs received, the centrality of Israeli diplomacy – particularly public diplomacy – was not fully appreciated.
So to reiterate this point, allow me to quote one of the country’s foremost experts on the role of public diplomacy, Prof. Eytan Gilboa, who, in an article aptly titled “Public Diplomacy: The Missing Component in Israel’s Foreign Policy,” warned:
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“The lack of an adequate PD program has significantly affected Israel’s strategic outlook and freedom of action… Any further neglect of PD would not only restrict Israel’s strategic options, it would be detrimental to its ability to survive in an increasingly intolerant and hostile world…”
Gilboa is right. In the absence of a well-financed and well-formulated public diplomacy offensive, Israel will find not only that its strategic options are restricted, but that its very survival is threatened. Among the survival- threatening strategic restrictions that Israel will be subjected to, is the inability to break out of the stranglehold the TSS has on its perceived range of actionable alternatives.
Instrument of what policy?
Furthermore, in Part I, I underscored that diplomacy must be an instrument of policy designed to achieve national goals, rather than diplomatic pressures being a determinate of policy that dictates those goals.
So to what goals should such reconstituted and reinvigorated diplomatic machinery be directed in order to facilitate the repudiation and replacement of the TSS? To answer this question in an operationally useful manner, it is first necessary to identify the fuel that drives the TSS-compliant perspectives.
In this regard, there is little room for ambiguity. Clearly, sustaining the TSS mythology is what is commonly known as the “Palestinian narrative” – the notion that the Palestinian Arabs are a distinct people that comprise a coherent and cohesive national entity, with a clear vision of a “homeland,” in which they aspire to exercise national sovereignty.
If this claim can be disproven in a manner that is not only substantively persuasive, but that can be pertinently packaged politically, the foundations upon which the edifice of the TSS is erected will no longer be tenable.
Conversely, as long as the perceived legitimacy of the Palestinian narrative persists – or more accurately, is allowed to persist – it will continue to fuel the myths and the misperceptions that perpetuate the TSS.
TSS-opponents must be forced to acknowledge the bitter truth. If the contention that the Palestinian Arabs are indeed a distinct people that comprise a coherent, cohesive national entity with a clear vision of a homeland in which they aspire to exercise national sovereignty cannot be repudiated, then there is little ground – moral or practical – for opposing the TSS.
Deconstructing the narrative
Accordingly, the overriding aim of an adequately endowed and appropriately energized Israeli diplomatic drive, on which all subsequent endeavor is predicated and to which all subsequent effort is harnessed, must be the deconstruction of the Palestinian narrative.
This assault on the pervasive but unmerited legitimacy of the narrative must be directed both at its factual veracity and it moral validity – i.e. both at the empirical elements on which it is founded and the objectives it is being used to promote.
Delegitimizing the Palestinian narrative will be a daunting task, but the difficulty should not be overstated. We should take heart from the accomplishments of the TSS-advocates themselves. Imagine how hopeless the situation of any pro-TSS Palestinian activist must have seemed in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the wake of Israel’s dramatic Six Day War victory.
Faced with the perception of invincible Israeli military might on the one hand, and resolute US rejection on the other, any realistic pundit could well have been excused for considering the TSS dead in the water.
Will and wherewithal
By way of illustration, the 1980 Republican platform that brought Ronald Reagan to the White House stated: “We believe the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank would be destabilizing and harmful to the peace process.” Moreover, in Israel, up until the late 1980s, successive opinion polls found that 80 percent or more of the electorate opposed any significant territorial withdrawal in Judea/Samaria.
Yet despite the bleak prospects, TSS-advocates did not despair. With commendable resolve and resourcefulness they managed, against all odds, to convert the status of their highly improbable political paradigm from marginal to mainstream – eventually even monopolistic. For almost a quarter of a century, it has dominated and dictated the discourse as the preferred mode of ending the Mideast conflict.
This, then, is the example that must be emulated – in reverse. The opponents of the TSS need to marshal the will and the wherewithal to achieve what the proponents of TSS did: dislodge a dominant paradigm and replace it with their own.
Without wishing to understate the difficulties entailed in this, in some important aspects this reverse endeavor is – or could be – easier.
For those seeking to debunk the Palestinian narrative, and hence the fundamental rationale of the TSS, have an important ally on their side – the truth. After all, to strip the wafer-thin veneer of legitimacy off this narrative, all one needs is to echo what the Palestinians themselves do and say.
A contrived people
The Palestinian Arabs are a contrived people and their professed national identity is bogus not because Newt Gingrich designated them as “invented,” or because some right-wing religious radical dismisses their claim on the basis of a divine dictate, allocating all of “Greater Israel” to the Jews. They are a contrived people and their professed national identity is bogus because they – and their Arab patrons – openly admit it.
As I have documented in detail in previous columns, the Palestinians characterize themselves not as a distinct people, but as part of the Arab nation, indistinguishable from other components of it. They openly confess that their national identity is neither authentic nor permanent, but merely a temporary contrivance to help the Arabs eliminate Israel. No less a figure than the spokesman of the Arab League revealed that pan-Arab policy is to refuse Palestinians wishing to acquire citizenship of Arab countries in which they have been resident for decades, so as to artificially preserve their identity – lest there be no “reason for them to return to Palestine.”
Even more tellingly, the Palestinians have no clear vision of a “homeland” in which they aspire to exercise their national sovereignty. They have put forward wildly divergent – even mutually exclusive – delineations of what comprises that “homeland.”
Significantly, until 1968, they not only explicitly eschewed any sovereign claims to the “West Bank,” but conceded that it was part of a another sovereign country, the Hashemite Kingdom, which up until 1988 claimed the territory for itself.
Clearly then, the Palestinians do not genuinely see themselves as a distinct people with an authentic national identity, striving to exercise sovereign rule in a defined territory. Rather their claim to nationhood is a thinly disguised device to thwart the exercise of Jewish national sovereignty and to undermine the Jewish nation-state.
Conveying this message assertively and articulately must be the primary mission of the nation’s diplomatic offensive and the vital precondition for the foundation of a viable TSS-alternative.
Depoliticizing the context
Deconstructing the Palestinian narrative and debunking the authenticity of Palestinian national claims are crucially important stages in terms of practical policy formulation. They comprise an indispensable step toward devising a comprehensive policy paradigm to replace the TSS that furnishes a valid rationale for ceasing to relate to the Palestinian Arabs as a cohesive political entity.
This “depoliticizing” of the context of the problem has huge consequences on two complementary levels.
On the one hand, it directs energies away from searching for solutions that require agreement with one, or more, Arab polity(ies). Since the express purpose of the contrived Palestinian national identity is to undermine the foundations of the Jewish state, the pursuit of such a genuine, sustainable accord with some Arab political entity is so implausible as to be irrelevant as an element of policy, as the experience of the past 100 years demonstrates.
On the other hand, it directs energies toward solutions that address the Palestinian Arabs, not as a coherent national collective, but rather as an amalgam of unfortunate individuals that has been continually mislead and misinformed by cruel, corrupt cliques whose overriding objectives were anything but the communal well-being of those whose fate they strove to control.
Atomizing the implementation
But depoliticizing the context of the predicament of the Palestinian Arabs will not, in itself, dissipate that predicament, or render the need to do so any less pressing.
What it will do, however, is open the door to solutions that circumvent the ruling cliques and directly engage the households, family heads and breadwinners in the wider Palestinian Arab public, without the agreement of any intervening Arab organization which might – and probably will – have a vested interest in preventing a peaceable resolution of the predicament.
Indeed, recognizing the futility of seeking a political solution underscores the need for a humanitarian one.
Accordingly, these notions of depoliticizing the conceptual context and “atomizing” the implementation of practical measures lead inexorably to a policy prescription based on the eminently liberal (as opposed to “illiberal” rather than “conservative”) doctrinal principles of: (a) eliminating ethnic discrimination toward the Palestinian Arabs – first as refugees and second as residents in the Arab world, and (b) providing individual Palestinian-Arabs the freedom of choice to determine their future and that of their families.
‘Hillelian’ humanitarian rationale
These doctrinal elements translate into a comprehensive tripartite proposal, based on a humanitarian “Hillelian” rationale, set out in the introductory excerpt, of sober recognition of the need to look after one’s own interest without descending into callous disregard for the fate of the “other.”
The three components should be seen as a mutually interactive, integrative whole:
• Dissolution or radical restructuring of UNRWA to bring the treatment of Palestinian refugees into line with that of all other refugees on the face of the globe.
• Resolute insistence on the cessation of ethnic discrimination against Palestinian Arabs in the Arab world and of the prohibition on their acquiring citizenship of the countries in which they have resided for decades.
• Generous relocation loans provided directly to individual Palestinian Arab breadwinners and family heads, resident in Judea/Samaria (and eventually Gaza) to allow them to build better futures for themselves and their dependents, in other countries of their choice.
Why these three components do, indeed, comprise an effective, interactive and integrative TSS-alternative mechanism that complies with the Hillelian prescription of preserving self-interest while displaying sensitivity to the fate of other actors – indeed, even antagonists – will have to wait until next week.
For despite the allure of discussing the nitty-gritty, I believe that elucidating how proposed practical measures are moored to their intellectual foundations is essential for comprehending the proposal itself and for convincing others to accept it.
Readers’ reservations
A persuasive enunciation of a comprehensive formula for the replacement of a dominant paradigm to a conflict that has proved intractable for over a century cannot be adequately conveyed in pithy sound bites. Out of the box proposals inevitably provoke a maelstrom of queries and critiques.
Indeed, previous columns have induced much animated responses – not all in the most courteous of terms.
Clearly the presentation hitherto has left much as yet unexplained. This should not be interpreted as an attempt at evading thorny questions.
In the final piece in this series I will deal with the major points that have remained unaddressed and questions/ reservations/criticisms that readers have raised in past weeks including topics such as:
• control of the decision variables;
• accusations of racism;
• fear of fratricide;
• allegations of ethnic cleansing;
• diplomatic and economic feasibility;
• identity of prospective host countries; and
• evidence of acceptability in Israeli and Palestinian societies.
Until then, allow me to leave you with this thought: If there is nothing reprehensible in advocating funding the voluntary relocation of Jews from Judea/Samaria to facilitate the establishment of what, in all probability, would be a failed micro-state and a haven for radical extremists on the fringes of Europe, what possible objection could there be for funding the voluntary relocation of Arabs from Judea/Samaria to prevent the establishment of such a forbidding entity?
@ dweller: In his book “Palestine Betrayed”, I think at page 139, Efraim Karsh said the Arabs in Palestine did not engage in the sharing that meets Augustine’s definition of nationalism. “A NATION,” WROTE AURELIUS AUGUSTINE, “is an association of reasonable beings united in a peaceful sharing of the things they cherish.
@ Wallace Brand:
That makes eminent sense to me. In fact, I’m surprised that that construction even appears in the original 1964 document. I know it shows up in the revised, 1968 version — issued after Israel’s acquisition of the heartland provinces — but 1964 seems a trifle early for that moniker to have appeared in print.
@ Wallace Brand:
Nor have I.
The name “Palestinian,” however, in reference to local Arabs (and without the “Arab People” tag), WAS attempted fitfully, I think, in isolated instances from ’48-’68, but it never gained purchase on the local Arab consciousness till Israel acquired the heartland provinces — this because, as Count Folke Bernadotte [1st UN negotiator in the ’48 war] observed, there was little nationalist inclination among the Pal-Arabs. His posthumously published journal, To Jerusalem, was released in 1951.
But ponder, if you care to, the intentions implicit in the naked broodings of early Palestine Arab agitator & propagandist, Musa Bey al-Alami:
“How can people struggle for a nation when most of them do not know the meaning of the word? The people are in great need of a ‘myth’ to fill their consciousness and imagination… [Adopting]…the [nationality] myth…[will forge an] identity…[and] self-respect…” [Musa Bey al-Alami, “The Lesson of Palestine” [“Ibrat Filastin”], The Middle East Journal, Vol. 3, no. 4, Oct 49]
In the words of retired law professor, Herbert Sunshine, “the ‘palestinians’, were never a people. A people gives a name to a land; a land does not give a name to a people, and thus there never was a ‘Palestine’ in all of history.” [Herbert B. Sunshine, “The Contractual Effect of Oslo: A Legal Analysis,” Sept 96]
Judea got its name because that’s where the Jews lived; not vice versa.
Hugh Fitzgerald [18 Mar 06] has the sense of it:
@ CuriousAmerican:
I’ve already shown you [post #33] that the Mufti was a privileged exploiter, not a nationalist.
But you must understand, as well, Curio, that he was not merely some isolated charlatan who regrettably appropriated an ‘authentic’ nationalist movement to his own self-serving purposes.
Nothing of the sort.
Hajj Amin al-Husseini was representative of the decay of Palestine — long-standing & well-entrenched — and he was FAR from alone in that respect.
David Kushner has noted that the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, Ali Ekrem, disdainful of both groups he had to deal with — the Arabs and the Jews — would often allude to the Jerusalem Arab a’ayan [“notables”] in one long, contemptuously run-together word, “Khalidi-Nashashibi-Husseini,” strung out in a single breath. Alternately, he would characterize these as, quite matter-of-factly, “the Corrupt.”
Numerous letters of Ekrem to the Ottoman palace in Constantinople during his 2-year tenure in Jerusalem refer to the difficulties attendant upon his encounters with both “the Jews and the Corrupt,” and warning the Ottoman Minister of the Interior about the “corrupt gangs of [Arab] notables, who regard the ignorant local population as their prey.”
[David Kushner, A Governor in Jerusalem: The City and Province in the Eyes of Ali Ekrem Bey, 1906-1908 {Hebrew: “Moshel haYiti b’Yerushalayim”} (Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, Jerusalem, 1995), p. 159]
It was arguably these, “the Corrupt,” who stood the most to lose to the Zionist venture in Palestine, and it thus comes as no surprise that it was ultimately they who would come to spark, organize & lead the Palestinian Arab ‘nationalist’ movement. The ‘greater good’ they served had been, unmistakably & from Day One, their very own.
BTW & FWIW: The Mufti was not entirely Arab.
His mother was a Circassian Muslim. (Circassians are native to the western Caucasus, nr Georgia.)
He had pale skin, blue eyes, reddish-blond hair & beard. Most of the existing photos of him are b/w, but even from them, it’s quite evident that, aside from image created by the attire he affected, he hardly ‘looked the part.’
Central Casting would’ve never hired him for the role. (Barry Obamamamzer, perhaps — but not Hajj Amin.)
@ CuriousAmerican:
I appreciate that you try to be rational, Curio.
What you have yet to discover, though, is that you are applying rationality to the wrong paradigm.
What drives the Palys — even to this very day — is not a straightforward nationalism.
“A NATION,” WROTE AURELIUS AUGUSTINE, “is an association of reasonable beings united in a peaceful sharing of the things they cherish. Therefore,” continued the man known to world lit & Church history as “St Augustine”:
— “to determine the quality [i.e., the ESSENCE — dw] of a nation, you must consider what those [shared, cherished] things are.”
Even if we leave aside the manifest un-reasonableness & obvious non-peaceableness of the party in question, the inescapable truth & flatly abiding reality is that the painstakingly fabricated entity composed of those local ethnic Arabs who, since the late-1960’s, have (with the indulgence of the world community) styled themselves “Palestinians” is not a nation at all, but, rather, an “anti-nation”: a thoroughgoing counterfeit, constructed wholly ex nihilo, whose “shared… cherished… things” — indeed whose entire purpose, direction, life’s meaning & motive energy — have been, from the very beginning, unmistakably derived from the fixed, compulsive, consummately pathological craving to destroy an existing nation.
Without the shape, the substance & the drive provided by such depraved hankerings, Palestinian ‘nationalism’ — you can bet the mortgage — would dissolve faster than a sand-castle at high tide.
You cannot accommodate somebody who lives to kill & replace you.
As long as they identify — in the aggregate — as Palys, that’s not gonna change.
That’s just not probative (let alone, conclusive) — and CALLING it so won’t make it so.
Invest in a good dictionary, and look up two words: EVIDENCE and PROOF.
— Not only are they not identical. They are not even synonymous. . . .
@ CuriousAmerican:
Who says it cannot?
Look, Curio, there may well have been a desire among the local Christian Arabs to distinguish themselves from the local Muslims, whom they may have regarded as more primitive than themselves.
But this is a far cry from a Palestinian-Arab nationalism; that was way, way down the road.
Bernard Lewis has noted that from the end of the Judean state [late winter, AD 135] to the beginning of modern-day, Brit administration [Dec, 1917] — and for the intervening two millennia of Roman, Byzantine, Persian & Islamic rule — Palestine was politically submerged. What’s more, because for those millennia the area had no separate political identity, the various ethnic groups who migrated there — unobstructed & unhindered in the wake of the Land’s loss of Judaic sovereignty — never acquired or developed any identity different from those they brought with them.
Thus, remarks Netanyahu, by way of elaboration,
@ CuriousAmerican:
Yes, Curio, it was indeed transreligious.
And, yes, it WAS a national identity.
“Palestinian” was the British mandatory authority’s attempt to BACKTRACK on the clearly stated intent in the Preamble of the Mandate Charter to lay the groundwork for the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the Land.
If they could create a non-specific Palestinian ‘nationality’ in the Land, they could thereby paper-over any strictly Jewish identity there.
Almost from the moment Balfour resigned the Foreign Office (to head the UK delegation at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference), and was succeeded as Foreign Secty by Lord Curzon, the fix was in:
— to begin jewing-down the Jews from the plans & pledges of Versailles, San Remo, etc. That objective proceeded unabated right up till the MacDonald White Paper of 1939 — when all pretense of fidelity to HMG’s Mandate obligations to the Jews was finally thrown to the winds.
The concoction of a ‘Palestinian nationality’ was an early Brit backtracking attempt.
However, the gambit failed
— because in the end only the Jews accepted the appellation of “Palestinian” (overwhelmingly so)
while the local ethnic Arabs (just as overwhelmingly) spat on it.
@ CuriousAmerican:
Less a traitor than a transplanted Hashemite interloper. (A traitor also, perhaps, for his willingness to come to an accommodation with the Jews — but the Arabs had had it in for him long before 1948.) The hit was ordered (and most surely engineered) by the Mufti.
Well, you got that right, Curio. But there’s a vast difference between the Mufti and any Palestinian identity.
His primary interest was not in ‘nationalism’ — but rather in preserving his privileges & those of his class.
If ever there existed — in concrete, historic reality — the classic, prototypical, archetypical, Marxist stereotype of the “wealthy, ruling class leadership of a feudal, economically blood-sucking, exploitative sector that lived off of the misery of the proletarian masses”’: if ever there was a living, breathing embodiment & personification of all those tired & tiresome, hackneyed phrases — the very template upon which to construct all the other templates — it had to have been this privileged class of a’ayan [urban gentry, “notables”] in Ottoman Palestine. Hajj Amin had very expensive tastes, and he viewed the Jews as representing the end of a very sweet deal to which his family had long been accustomed :
We are going to have to agree to disagree on this.
1) There seems to have been a Palestinian identity prior to 1964. I remember seeing a video of a newsreel, pre-1948, where a Palestinian Arab argues for a one-state solution, a unified Palestine, democratic.
He was not arguing for Jordanian annexation, nor Egyptian annexiation, etc.
Jordan annexed the land – with Israel’s support – (Click here) See (42:40) to see where IDF General Eldad admits it.
Palestine was never given a chance. It was aborted, and you cannot blame the Arabs unless you also blame Israel. Israel worked out an arrangement with Jordan to do it. Israel knew it could not annex all of Palestine, so it cut a deal with Jordan, who was the least hostile.
I AM NOT SAYING PALESTINE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BORN. I AM SAYING IT WAS NOT ALLOWED TO BE BORN AND IT IS NOT THE PALESTINIAN’S FAULT FOR THAT.
There was a sense of Palestinian ethnicity, probably stronger among the Westernized Christians than among the Muslims who were more used to the concept of an Ummah.
This cannot be denied.
Therefore to find peace with the Palestinians you cannot deny what drives them. You have to overwhelm it.
But you cannot deny it.
2) Chile’s Palestinos are but one proof.
3) Yes, you can find Arabs, idiots, who deny this. You can find Jews do deny that Jews are Jews. Arthur Koestler said Jews were Khazars, and now every Arab and Neo-Nazi on the planet runs away with it.
Shlomo Sand says Jews were invented.
So the sayings of Arabs mean nothing. There was a sense of Palestinian identity.
4) National identity can coalesce under battle. The American Revolution started years before the Declaration of Independence was signed.
There was an All-Palestine Government formed in 1948, recognized by every Arab government but Jordan – who had cut a deal with Israel.
There was a Palestinian identity of some sort. Some wanted a Jordan-Palestinian unity (NOT UNDER ABDULLAH). Others did not.
But there was an identity.
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To win this battle, you cannot deny the existence of the national feeling.
Israel has to overwhelm it, NOT deny it.
Sorry, Ted. But it felt so right! Won’t happen again.
@ dweller:Dweller, you say: “Having failed to prevent the birthing of the Jewish state, the self-appointed & self-serving Palestine Arab leadership now began — albeit, for the first 2 ensuing decades, with limited popular success (until Israel acquired unincorporated Judea & Samaria in the defensive war of 1967) — to appropriate “Palestinian” as their own name as an explicitly non-Jewish ‘nationality.’
I have found no evidence of the “self-serving Palestinian leadership” using the term “Palestinian Arab People” in the first 2 enuing decades. I found no use of that term until it was invented by the Soviet dezinformatsia in 1964 for use in the preamble of the 1964 PLO Charter drafted in Moscow. If you have found a use of that term by the “self serving Palestinian leadership”, prior to 1964, please provide some evidence of it. Calling someone a “Palestinian” won’t cut it any more than calling him a “Patagonian”. That just identifies the area he is from. What is needed for a claim of sovereignty is a “people”. There was no mention of a “Palestinian Arab People” until the Soviets used it in 1964 and in the ensuing years when they were busily engaged in creating liberation organizations in Palestine, in Columbia, Armenia, etc.
@ CuriousAmerican:
Only so as to distinguish themselves from the new country, Curio. This does not betoken identification with any Pali ethnicity. They wouldn’t have used the term if they were still living in the Palestine region. Only the Jews did that in substantive numbers (till 1948).
EVERY JEW BORN in the Holy Land prior to 1948 has a birth certificate marked “Palestinian.” The Palestine Symphony Orchestra, founded by the former child prodigy Bronislaw Huberman in 1936 (Arturo Toscanini conducting) — and, with the coming of statehood, renamed the “Israel Philharmonic Orchestra” — while by no means ethnically or religiously discriminatory, was originally made up wholly of Jewish musicians, many of them only recently (and narrowly) snatched from the congenial jaws of the 3rd Reich. The Palestine Post, est.,1932 by Gershon Agronsky (and, upon independence, renamed the “Jerusalem Post”) was a Jewish newspaper [Wallace, above, is quite correct], and continues to this day as an Israeli newspaper with uninterrupted publication for the past 80 years. I could give you dozens more of such examples, Curio.
The original “nakba” was not connected with the founding of the Jewish state in 1948 — but rather with the separation [at San Remo] of Greater Syria into a French Mandate in the North [later, the Republics of Lebanon & Syria respectively] and a Brit Mandate in the South [later, Israel & Jordan]. The Easter Pogrom of 1920 [aka, The Nebi Musa Riots] — instigated by Hajj Amin al-Husseini (later to become the Grand Mufti) was precisely over that separation. The local Arabs didn’t identify as ‘Palestinians.’ They regarded the Palestine region as nothing more than “southern Syria,” and they resented being separated from their northern Syrian brethren by San Remo — the conference for which had taken place just 10 days earlier. . . .
As late as the 1946 hearings before the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry, the foremost modern Arab historian, Lebanese-born Prof. Philip Khuri Hitti [1886-1978], Chair of Princeton’s Dept. of Oriental Languages & Lit, and founder (at Princeton) of America’s 1st Program in Near Eastern Studies — noted, upon testifying against partition (and Jewish independence), “Sir, there is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.”
Furthermore, the late Dr Hitti opposed usage of the word, “Palestine,” on maps — because he believed it was “associated in the mind of the average American, and perhaps the Englishman too, with the Jews.” (As, of course, it was — and with a plenitude of good reason.
More yet.
@ CuriousAmerican:
Very few Arabs of the Palestine region did so, Curio, in 1920. And those few who used the name did so not as a matter of ‘ethnicity,’ but rather, largely as a matter of maneuver: in response to the urgings of the British Military & later civilian Mandate Administrations.
To grasp the starkness of the eventual change of strategy (though not a change of intent) that the promotion of such a Pali “identity” represents, one need only note the indignant admonitions of local Arab leader, Aouni-Bey Abd al-Hadi, speaking in opposition to a Jewish Palestine independent & apart from the Arab world. Testifying in 1937 before the “Peel Commission” [the Palestine Royal Commission, which, like the General Assembly 10 yrs later, would ultimately suggest partition of the land] — he fumed: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no ‘Palestine’ in the Bible. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us; it is the Zionists who introduced it.”
An understandable enough (if faulty) assumption, to be sure, given the circumstances. Actually, right up until Israel obtained her independence in 1948, the only people broadly & consistently identifying themselves as “Palestinians,” or indeed their country as “Palestine,” were in fact the Jews.
What’s more, Palestine’s ethnic Arabs, if ”unlucky” enough, in those pre-State days, to be addressed by an observer as “Palestinians,” would, more often than not, have responded to such a gaffe w/ either the characteristic irritation evinced by the above-cited barb of Abd al-Hadi, or a deeply offended — downright scandalized — sense of insult at this graceless faux pas & insufferably ignorant violation of their identity & loyalty to the greater “Arab Nation.”
It was only with the 1948 Jewish Proclamation of Independent Sovereignty as the newly-named State of “Israel” & with the consequent designation of the infant state’s citizens as “Israelis” (thus, no longer as “Palestinians”) — together with the restored Commonwealth’s successful defense of that independence against the quarter century of continued pan-Arab attempts to abort or crush it — that the appellation of “Palestinian,” having fallen into disuse amongst the Jews (for whom, as noted, it had been common & even standard before statehood) — became available to the local ethnic Arabs (who, as I’ve also shown, had heretofore shunned it like the plague).
Having failed to prevent the birthing of the Jewish state, the self-appointed & self-serving Palestine Arab leadership now began — albeit, for the first 2 ensuing decades, with limited popular success (until Israel acquired unincorporated Judea & Samaria in the defensive war of 1967) — to appropriate “Palestinian” as their own name as an explicitly non-Jewish ‘nationality.’
More on tap.
@ Michael Devolin:
I am not replying to this comment. I removed one comment of yours that attacked Curious American in a totally unacceptable manner. I also noticed that in also everyone of your recent comments you employ the “fuck”. I know you can do better.
I have put you i9n moderation.
@ CuriousAmerican:
There was no Palestinian Arab identity among an appreciable number of Palestine Arabs till 1968, when the heartland provinces were under Israeli control.
EVEN THE LEFT-WING, Beirut-based, cultural anthropologist, Rosemary Sayigh, confirms the recency of “Palestinian” nationalism: “[A] strongly defined Palestinian [i.e., Arab Palestinian] identity did not emerge until 1968, two decades after expulsion…” [her word, obviously — dw] [Rosemary Sayigh, “Sources of Palestinian Nationalism: A Study of a Palestinian Camp in Lebanon,” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, 1977, p. 21]
The year 1968, which assertedly saw the emergence of that Arab Palestinian identity, was also, of course, just shortly after Israel had come into possession of the Gaza Strip & the heartland (i.e., “West Bank”) provinces of Judea & Samaria. Apparently as long as those territories had remained in Arab possession, no such ‘Palestinian’ identity had manifest.
There was certainly, during those years, no move toward Palestinian Arab sovereignty in the territories: no offer of such a move by the governments of Jordan or Egypt, nor indeed any demand for such a move by the Palestinian Arab populace of the territories.
One notes with interest, as well, the fact that Ms Sayigh’s above observation regarding the 1968 rise of Palestine Arab “identity” was itself MADE in 1977, scarcely 9 years later, and that her colleague in the field of cultural (i.e., social) anthropology, Ernest Geller, occasioned to bemusedly reflect that “nationalism [sometimes] invents nations where they do not exist.” [Ernest Geller, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell Univ., Press, Ithaca, NY, 1983)]
There’s more (QUITE a bit more) to say about this, but the system has been sending a lot of my comments into the ozone lately — so I’m going to offer this in tiny bites, in hopes of avoiding a delay in their posting.
“…they join with all the others in the ecumenical worship of the Golden Calf of our times: The Golden Exile.”
I onced asked, innocently enough, a Jewish friend why Rabbi Schneerson, if he was so wise about Jewish Halacha, didn’t ever do Aliya to Israel as did Rabbi Kahane (whom I consider to be the perfect example of Torah Judaism). This women never replied to my question, and I have never heard from her since.
You remind me SO much of my posek, Yamit. He says exactly the same thing as you on this very subject (although a subject unmentionavle and beyond the scope of a Noachide). HaShem always directs my path to good company. What a powerful statement.
@ CuriousAmerican:
Christians were a majority in Nazareth and Bethlehem. Till Arafat and his 40,000 banditos were allowed in.
You have heard the expression “Being more Catholic than the Pope”? Well your favorite Christians here in the Land of Israel while being in conflict with the Muslim overwhelming Majority were more anti Jewish than the Muslims. Being the intelligentsia they looked down on most of their Muslim brothers and when they could exploited them economically and in administration of civil institutions. The Jews need for simple labor after 67 forced them to hire the Mostly Muslim labor pool paying them a wage and social benefit package on a Jewish and Israel level. These same (kind) Christians hated us partially because we stole the best of their cheap labor pool and forced them to raise the wages of those who were still willing to work for them and it wasn’t many and not enough.
How do I know? Because I worked with them for a year and a half in Bethlehem.
Chaim Potok was a fiction writer (MHO: A lousy writer) not an expert in Judaism nor a historian. He is a reform Jew, meaning he comes from an anti orthodox Jewish POV.
While I disagree with Satmyr and other anti Zionists and can make a theological case against their position they do have a theological case or should I say did have before 48′, since then they are a Jewish embarrassment. I will note that slowly they are coming around to a more mainstream orthodoxy, religiously and politically.
Who cares what the Kooky cult of Satmyr says or believes they are not numerically strong and have no voice or influence on other Jews. There is a commandment to live or settle the Land of Israel and it is a commandment not time constrained but incumbent of every Jew at all times to fulfill the commandment period!! They are Jewish atheists who pick and chose what commandments to do. That is anti Judaism not just a negation of political Zionism but the Zionism of the Torah.
The “religious” Jew? Nay, say rather the Orthodox practitioner of Jewish ritual whose sojourn in an Exile two millennia old has corrupted and perverted the most basic of real Jewish values. Bearded and piously payotic; or cleanshaven and woolly skullcapped, they join with all the others in the ecumenical worship of the Golden Calf of our times: The Golden Exile.
Christianity = Edom
There is a credible objective source? 🙂
Not!!! unles you can prove your contention with more objective sources than you have so far submitted.
@ CuriousAmerican:In his book “The Iron Cage” Raschid Khalidi says that the Arabs living in Palestine were ignored when it came to passing out political rights.
Who is recommending moderation? I am recommending a buyout.
A moderate solution is a 2 state solution, which I am not recommending.
@ yamit82:What voice did the Arabs in Palestine have in establishing Ottoman law or policy, if any? They certainly had no vote in Turkish elections.
Rongrand says
Get rid of the moderation program. It sucks.
rongrand says:
September 12, 2012
Who said they had to necessarily had to be Muslim.
Palestine in 1900 was heavily Christian. The Christians were certainly aware of the Byzantine/Roman name of Palestine. They did not buy into a Muslim Caliphate/Ummah.
These could have been the guardians of Palestinian identity even as the early secular Zionists guarded Israeli identity, years before the rest of the Jewish world accepted it. Remember – if you ever read THE CHOSEN by Chaim Potok – at its inception, Zionism was considered a heresy.
It was Rabbi Kook who brought it to the mainstream; and even then it is not universally accepted. Even though I am American, I live next to a Satmyr colony in America. Zionism is considered heretical among Satmyrs.
Just as the early Zionists guarded Israeli indenity – they weren’t even sure if the new state would be called Israel or Judah – the Christians might have been the guardians of Palestinian identity.
Again, you have Palestnian Christian in Chile calling their soccer club Palestino in 1920.
Rashid Khalidi – who I am sure you disregard – refers to Palestinian stirring in the Ottoman reign.
But there was a Palestinian identity before 1920.
This identity means that Israel may have to buy these people out. Their identity is not artificial. They have a claim to the land. Not as good as Israel’s claim to the land; but strong enough that it cannot be dismissed.
Don’t get too upset Yamit. I was getting ready to fire back some shots at you when I was spam filtered out more than once.
Ted, please release my comment. Thanks.
Part of my comments were blocked by spam filter.
@ CuriousAmerican:
In 1900 the Arabs in the country did not see the Land as a separate or distinct land, nor did they have a consciousness of {being} a “Palestinian people.” The Muslim Arabs were loyal to the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, the scholars Zeine Zeine, an Arab, and Ziya Gokalp, a Turk, invalidate the notion of a separate Arab nationalism (let alone “Palestinian” nationalism) before the First World War. Zeine and Gokalp agree that the Ottoman Empire was a joint enterprise of Turks and Arabs. Zeine wrote, “The Arabs as Muslims were proud of Turkish power and prestige. The Ottoman Empire was their Empire as much as it was the Turks’… the Arabs did not consider the Turkish rule as ‘foreign’ rule…” (9) . Zeine quoted in Hans Tutsch, Facets of Arab Nationalism (Detroit, 1965), p 57; from Zeine N Zeine, Arab-Turkish Relations and the Emergence of Arab Nationalism (Beirut: Khayat’s, 1958), p 117 ff. {Kimmerling and Migdal admit that a “political and social identity of Ottomanism” developed among the notables as they benefitted from official Ottoman positions (p 72) and the Arabs generally accepted the Ottoman Empire since it was Muslim (p 73).}
Gokalp wrote, “the Ottoman state might even be called a Turkish-Arab state.” (10)
Ziya Gokalp, “The Ideal of Nationalism,” in E. Kedourie, ed., Nationalism in Asia and Africa (London, 1970), p 197
“In 1920, people were calling themselves Palestinians, who were Arab NOT Jewish.”
Our point is, there was never an exclusively Arab Muslim people referred to in history (except yours) as “Palestinian” (as Arafat mendaciously contended). Yasser Arafat and the Soviet KGB invented this people. You’re the only idiot here.
What is your point? What do you want here?
But the immigrants to Chile called themselves Palestinos.
Your wife’s parents called themselves Jews or Zionists.
These immigants to Chile called themselves Palestinians, and used the colors of the Arab revolt flag as their team colors, which is today the colors of the Palestinian flag. They did not use the British Mandatory colors. The Zionist flag was blue and white. The immigrants to Chile used Palestinian colors.
Like it or not, independent of your wife’s parents, there was a Palestinian identity.
As for this or that Arab’s stupid statements, I can get Jews who deny that that Jews ever existed.
Koestler thought they were Khazars. Shlomo Sand said Jews were invented.
Idiots abound.
But you have an incontrovertible fact. In 1920, people were calling themselves Palestinians, who were Arab NOT Jewish.
@ Michael Devolin:
Thanks Devolin.
@ yamit82:
Yamit (Uncle Nahum)it would be wonderful if the liberal American Jews would share this belief as you do.
None of us are better. We all need to be respectful of each other. Humble.
The world needs to understand His chosen have been returned to the land (The Holy Land) He so provided for them.
So please somebody, anyone tell those who call themselves Palestinians the Holy Land belongs to those who were returned.
Exactly, Yamit. Well said.
Happy New Year, all my Jewish friends.
@ Michael Devolin:
We Jews are chosen and proud of it. It is of no sense to fool Gentiles with the “we’re chosen but not better than you” tune. Of course, it’s better to be chosen than not. It’s hard to live chosen. Jews have many more religious obligations than Gentiles, and therefore more dangers of transgressing them. Being a good Jew is tremendously more difficult than being a good Gentile. Many Jews do not live up to their chosen-ness, but we don’t believe that the divine choice was in vain. The concept is not racist: unlike the black/white skin-color distinction, anyone can join the chosen people by converting properly.
Hatred of oppressors is a time-honored Jewish practice. Since Rabban Gamliel of the second century, we curse the sectarians daily in our Amida prayer and ask G-d to destroy them. The sectarians are not members of various Jewish sects, but those whose sects parted with Judaism—you know whom the rabbis mean.
THE MEANING OF BEING THE CHOSEN PEOPLE
There was a Palestino identity, there was also palestino soccer team, but there was no “Palestinian Arab People”. Neither a “Palestine Identity” nor a “Palestinian soccer team” will cut it for sovereignty. Has anyone ever heard of a sovereign soccer team? The territory has been named Palestine for many, many years first by the Romans. But a territory can’t have sovereignty either. It takes a “people” to have sovereignty. Sovereignty is dominion over a territory by a people. It is the right of that people to make the rules that will be observed in that territory, and to enforce them. So the collective noun to look for before 1964 is Palestinian Arab People”. Look all you want and you won’t find it. There no dispute on the fact that there was and still is an Arab people. Curious American wants to accept the Soviet dezinformatsia disinformation that there was a group of people in Palestine that wanted self government. One of the motives in drafting the charter was to give the Arabs local to Palestine an opportunity to lay a claim to sovereignty over CisJordan. But there is no evidence of such a group of people prior to the drafting of the PLO Charter in 1964. According the Zahir Muhsein that was still the case in 1973. First the “Palestinian Arab Peoople” were identified as all the Arabs in Palestine excluding those in Jordan, Judea, Samaria and Gaza — i.e. those inside the Green Line. Then all the Arabs Arabs outside the Green Line were added except those in Jordan. Then Arabs within the Green Line were claimed to have been subtracted — but never were. There was a movement for an Arab nation-state in the 20s but nothing came of it except the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. There is evidence that in the 20s and 30s Haj Amin al Husseini tried to attract Arabs in Palestine into a nationalism movement but all he could interest them in was an anti-Zionist movement.
So far as what to do about the Arabs local to Judea and Samaria after assertion of Israeli sovereignty, I would suggest the following approach but I am not stuck to it. I could be persuaded by evidence of difficulties in that approach that a different approach is better. First, my factual premises. 1. There are some Arabs that do not object to living in a state ruled by Jews and some even prefer it because of the freedom, the stability, the better economics, the lower corruption, and the rule of law. Others, because of their Muslim religion and the incitement they have been exposed to hate the Jews and hate the Government of Israel and some of these have murderous intent. 2. The number of Arabs in Judea and Samaria is far less that currently stated by the PA statistics. 2. Even if all Arabs in Judea and Samaria became citizens, the ratio of Jews to total population would drop only to 66% from 80%.
First, after assertion of sovereignty, I would require an oath of fealty to the Jewish State by everyone currently in Judea and Samaria who is not already an Israeli citizen. If they do not want to swear this oath of fealty, I would offer them compensation to leave voluntarily. If they choose not to go, I would let them remain as non-citizen permanent residents and keep an eye on them.
AFter takeover of Gaza, I would place Gaza under home rule. I would keep control of elections so that Israel could eliminate from any election contest people and parties that were terrorists. That would leave Israel in control over all matters external to Gaza including its air space. 3. My legal premise is that approach would not offend the limitation on non-Arab civil rights that appears in the Balfour Policy, the cession of sovereignty to the Mandatory Power in Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres, and the British Mandate for Palestine including the French process verbal which requires the Jews, when they assert sovereignty, not to require the Arabs to surrender any existing rights. The Arabs in Palestine under the 400 years of occuptation by Colonial Turkey never had the right to vote in Turkish elections nor to have any voice in Ottoman Policy.
@ SarahSue:
I like your dream and no dream for us is too big. What is fantasy for others usually turns into a reality for us. Yes, continue to dream.
100 years ago how many would have believed that Israel would ever exist and that almost half the worlds Jews would be living in their own sovereign Jewish country? There is a Jewish destiny and the route taken is mostly up to us,.. each of us.
wellllwjn@ CuriousAmerican:
In the bigoted midof Miles being an Apache or Wetback was equally hated by him.
The mandate of Palestine was a territorial identification not a National one.
My ex wife whose parents came in the 1930’s held British identity cards naming them as Palestinians. Did they consider-themselves as Palestinian nationals? Hardly, and almost nobody else did either including the Arabs.
Duh!! because the British defeated the Ottomans and revived the teritory they were mandated with as Palestine. Arabs residing as residents for more than a few months were given recognition as indigenous residents and could obtain passports and other national documents for travel by and from the British mandated Imperial ruling authorities.
Professor Azmi Bishara: There Is No “Palestinian Nation”, Never Was !
Translation:
Well, I dont think there is a Palestinian Nation at all.
I think there is an Arab Nation, I always thought so and I didnt change my mind.
I dont think there is a Palestinian Nation, I think its a Colonial invention Palestinian Nation.
When were there any Palestinians? Where did it come from? What
I think there is an Arab Nation, I never turned to be a Palestinian Nationalist, despite of my decisive struggle against the Occupation.
I think that until the end of the 19TH century, Palestine was the South of Great Syria.
I am also for the buy-out plan. I just disagree on where the money should come from. It would be fitting justice for the muslims themselves to finance their exit. It would probably be the first time they paid for anything of value.
And you are correct, Yamit, I would get rid of every muslim in Israel, those is Samaria, Judea, Gaza, the Golan and Israel proper. In fact I would not stop there, I would deport everyone that would not sign a loyalty oath to their country.
I appreciate Ted and Martin trying to deal with the political reality and facts on the ground. Yet it is Martin and Ted that has written many articles showing that the facts on the ground are because of a multiple of bad decisions. Trying to deal with a reality that these decisions have caused is an exercise in futility.
Rather than dealing with reality, I would prefer to deal in fantasy. Except for a few things God had kept for Himself, there are few things beyond mankind. Just talk to a few older people and they can remind you of how much has changed.
My fantasy is that Israel be given a chance to breath freely. That kids get to grow up and die of old age. That someone who puts Israel first becomes prime minister. That, in a nut shell, is my agenda for Israel. I support anything that will make this happen including ethnic cleansing and passing an apartheid law that makes muslims and islam persona non grata in Israel.
If I am going to dream, I might as well dream big.
SarahSue
Muslims are 35% of the youth in Israel.
You got to do something fast.
DO the Buy out or you will have a demographic disaster.
And if you can afford it, offer Israeli Arabs the option as well.
It indicates that Lennox street exists. You called your team Lennox Street, because Lennox street existed.
Using your logic … follow me here, since we are using your logic … Then a Palestino Soccer Club in 1920 is proof that Palestinian identity existed.
And Machester City exists. No one would deny that!
Likewise, those Palestinian immigrants called themselves Palestinos because Palestine existed.
Wonderful examples! They prove my point.
THANK YOU!
@ CuriousAmerican:
Not exactly accurate; He was willing to compensate pliable Arabs who agree to leave peaceably only for the value (real value) of their property,
Those who chose to resist by violence would be met by disproportionate violence in return. In all cases they would go, one way or the other.
Ethnic cleansing is not a Jewish concept it’s yours and we don’t accept it as a immoral or unethical. If the Jews and others were offered the possibility to leave Germany and Europe to anywhere, there would have been no Holocaust against the Jews and many millions of other Europeans and their progeny alive today. What you call ethnic cleansing is the most moral and ethical solution to political, religious and sectarian ethnic incompatibility. The Germans would have been within their national xenophobic rights to expel Jews but not to murder them.
You need to adjust your warped moral compass.
When Jews ethnically cleanse other Jews the world cheers and compliments our leaders. Funny how your ( Mostly the Christian world) is tolerant of such actions as long as Jews are victims. 😉 I say this as one maybe the only one commenting on this site who can claim to have been ethnically cleansed…Yamit