Text 1649, 209 rader
Skriven 2004-08-31 13:31:34 av Alan Hess
Ärende: Palestine belongs to?
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How Strong Is the Arab Claim to Palestine?
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 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.

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