http://pnews.org - TheGolemNone of the conquerers who controlled the geography of that which is today, the "Land of Israel" considered it anything but territories of which they were the occupiers.
"Each successive ruler subdivided his conquest as he saw fit, though none, since the Romans, considered "Palestine" as having a separate administrative or geographic entity." [Dr Motti Friedman] *
PALESTINA
"The name "Palestine", from the Greek Palaistina, originally from the Hebrew Pleshet (Land of the Philistines): a small coastal strip north east of Egypt, also called Philistia. The Roman term "Syria Palaestina" in the 2nd century BCE referred to the southern third of the province of Syria, including the former Judea. The name "Palestine" was revived as an official title when the British were granted a mandate after World War I: Encyclopaedia Britannica ill, Micropaedia, vol. Vll, "Palestine." [Friedman]
Also see recent posting by Professor Robert Wolfe from the archives: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/pnews-l.html
From Friedman's article, "The Ottoman Turks, who ruled this area from the year 1516 to 1917, regarded it as part of Southern Syria. The land later referred to as "Palestine" was divided into three separate districts....The area was underpopulated and remained economically stagnant until the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880's, * who came to rebuild the Jewish land. The country had remained "The Holy Land" in the religious and historic consciousness of mankind, which associated it with the Bible and the history of the Jewish people. Jewish development of the country also attracted large numbers of other immigrants - both Jewish and Arab. [Friedman]
Also see quotes from Howard Zachar, "A History of Israel, From The Rise of Zionism to Our Time" as posted to PNEWS-L from the archives:
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/pnews-l.html
"Among the many descriptions of Palestine's desolation prior to the Zionist immigration: ". . . a desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds - a silent mournful expanse . . . A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route . . . There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country:" Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim's Progress (1869)." [Friedman]
JEWISH NATIONHOOD
Jewish nationhood was destroyed in the hands of the Romans but has always remained a part of Jewish tradition and Jewish memory and each time Jews tried to assimilate they were brought back to that realization by the acts of others. See the articles at: http://pnews.org/art/art.shtml for background on the Dryfuss Affair, the blood libel -> http://pnews.org/bio/golem.shtml, etc.
"The truth was that throughout all the centuries of Jewish dispersion until modern times, Zion, hardly less than the Deity, functioned as a binding integument of the Jewish religious and social experience." [Howard Zachar - "A History of History From the Rise of Zionism to our Time", Alfred Knoff, (2nd ed) 2001]
"The May Laws, and the pogroms of 1881-1882 and their aftermath, shattered Russian Jewry's final lingering illusions of equality and achievement under tsarist rule. Even their faith int he redeeming value of enlightenment was blased, for Russian academicians and university students, no less than government officials and illiterate muzhiks, joined enthusiastically in the new anti-Jewish campaign. `I intended to devote my strength and energy to serving the interests of my country,' Chaim Chissin, a Jewish medical student, lamented in his diary, `and honestly to fulfill the obligations of a good citizen...And now suddenly we are shown the door. It is too much for a sensitive Jew.' Leve Levanda, one of the paladins of the Haskalah, opened his heart in the Russian Jewish journal "Rassviet" (Daybreak): `When I think of what was done to us, how we were taught to love Russia and the Russian word, how we were lured into introducing the Russian language and everything Russian in our home....and how we are now rejected and hounded...my heart is filled with corroding despair from which there is no escape.' But of course there had to be some escape. One reponse was the growth of Jewish socialism, a movement ultimately destined to embrace hundreds of thousands of Jewish workers and their families. Even among the Jewish proletariat, however, there as a strong undertwo of awareness that the most effective immediate solution was emigration frm Russia altogether. The United States regarded as the most likely sanctuary." [Sachar]
"Nevertheless, for other Jews a continuation of minority status among Gentiles anywhere was no longer an answer. Mose Lilienblum, the distinguished Jewish humanist, had spent two days cowering in a basement as Russian mobs churned through his neighborhood. `All the old ideals left me in a flash,' he wrote afterward. `There is no home for us in this, or any Gentile land.' Henceforth he regarded departure for Palestine as the one remaining solution of the Jewish question, and he pressed this view in innumerable articles. In 1882 he wrote: `This is the land in which our fathers have found rest since time immemorial--and as they lived, so shall we live. Let us go now to the only land in which we will find relief for our souls that have been harassed by murdered for these thousands of years. Our beginnings will be small, but in the end we will flourish.'" [Sachar]
NOT JUST A RELIGION - IT IS A NATIONHOOD
Judaism is not just a religion, it is also a nationalism. Jews form a distinct national identity with a central place, which is and always has been Israel - from time immemorial. That feeling and that reason to be Jewish never stopped for most of us.
And Ann Shapira writes that Jews while living outside of Israel have never been able to be normal. "The idea of `normalization' ws one of the basic concepts that animated the Zionist movement from its beginnings. The associated understanding, either explicit or implicit, was that the Jewish people, in its present situation, suffered from anomaly at best--and at worst from a condition that was altogether pathological" [Anita Shapira, professor of Jewish History and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University - and co-author and author of several books and many articles including the books: "Berl: The Biography of a Socialist Zionist" and also Power: The Zionist Resort to Fordce, 1881-1948" and the above quote is from "The Essential Papers on Zionism" (her introduction) a compilation of essays by several authors, 1996, New York University Press]
"The nature of this abnormality ws defined in various ways, depending on the point of view of the particular writer. There were some who saw the root of the Jewish malady in the fact that the Jews constituted a minority wherever they were, and there was no country in which they were considered to be the masters of their own house: the status of guests who are not hosts, as Pinsker observed, is the root of the Jewish sickness." [Shapira] [Also see: Leo Pinsker, "Auto-Emancipation," in "Road to Freedom: Writings and Addresses" (NY, 1944) - and see articles at: http://pnews.org/art/art.shtml]
"When they spoke about `normaliztion,' what they meant primarily was what Gershom Scholem termed `the utopian return of the Jews to their history' -- i.e., the acceptance of responsbility for their own fate, a reentry from the sacred world to the profane plane of practical existence in Eretz Israel." [Shapira]
And Israel only took on a territorial definition for the European world when after WWI, at the Paris Peace Conference (The Paris Peace Conference was held in January-June 1919 and ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. For a survey of the Paris Peace Conference's treatment of Middle Eastern issues, see Howard M. Sachar, The Emergence of the Middle East: 1914-1924 (New York: Knopf, 1969), pp. 252-290.), "the name `Palestine' was applied to a clearly defined piece of territory - the area which today comprises Israel and Jordan. It was agreed that `Palestine' was to become a League of Nations Mandate, entrusted to Great Britain." [Friedman]
[Any emphasis is mine--TheGolem]
As stated in Bard, "Myths and Facts", "Israel's international `birth certificate' was validated by the promise of the Bible; UNINTERRUPTED Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua onward; the Balfour Declaration of 1917; the League of Nations Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration; the United Nations partition resolution of 1947; Israel's admission to the UN in 1949; the recognition of ISrael by most other states; and most of all, the society created by ISrael's people in decades of thriving, dynamic national existence." [Mitchell Bard, American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE), 2001 - revised and updated]
"In 1921, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill severed nearly four-fiths of Palestine---some 35,000 square miles--to create a brand new Arab emirate, TRANSJORDAN. As a consolation prize for the Hejaz and Arabia going to the Saud family, Churchill rewarded Sherif Hussein's son ABdullah for his countribution to the war against Turkey by installing him as Transjordan's emir." [Bard]
The rest is also history. Hussein is the present king and Jordan is the state that was created from what was supposed to be part of Israel and given to this member of the Saud family. The Saud family has been made very, very rich by the West and it is no wonder that Saudi Arabia remains a staunch supporter, even if the people of Saudi Arabi do not.
"The British went further and placed restrictions on Jewish land purchases in what remained of Palestine, contradicting the provision of the Mandate (Article 6) stating that "the Administration of Palestine..shall encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish Agency..close settlement by Jews on the land including State lands and waste lands not acquired for public purposes." By 1949, the British had alloted 87,500 acres of the 187,500 acres of cultivable land to Arabs and only 4,250 acres to Jews." [Bard] [Aharon Cohen, "Israel and the Arab World" (Funk and Wagnalls, NY, 1970), p 172, and Howard Zachar, "A History of Israel......"]
"Nearly 80 percent of what was the historic land of Palestine and the Jeish National Home, as defined by the League of Nations, was severed by the British in 1922 and allocated to what becamse Transjordan. Jewish settlement there was barred. The UN partitioned the remaining 20 percent of Pealestine into two states. With Jordan's annexation of the West Bank in 1950, Arabs controlled approximatley 80 percent of the territory of the Mandate while the Palestinian Jewish State held a bare 17.5 percent (Gaza occupied by Egypt, was the remainder)." [Bard]
"At the time of the 1947 partition resolution, the Arabs did have a majority in western Palestine as a whole --- 1.2 million Arabs versus 600,000 Jews. But the Jews were a majority int eh area alloted to them by the resolution and in Jerusalem." [Bard] [Areh Avneri, "The Claim of Dispossession (Transaction Books, 1984)]
Partition was rejected because Arabs rejected a Jewish national presence in any part of the Arab region. Arabs went to war with Israel and in defeat lost portions of the land which would have been allocated to them in the partition. Yet other nation-states had their boundaries set by mandates of the French and the British.
"The boundaries of the Middle-East countries were arbitrarily fixed by the Western powers after Turkey was defeated in World War I..." [Bard]
"When Turkey was defeated in World War I, the French took over the area now known as Lebanon and Syria. The British assumed control of Palestine and Iraq. In 1926, the borders were redrawn and Lebanon was spearated from Syria....Britain installed the Emir Faisal, who had been deposed by the French in Syria, as ruler of the new kingdom of Iraq. In 1922, the British created the emirate of Transjordan, which incorporated all of Palestine east of the Jordan River. This was done so that the Emir Abdullah, whose familly had been defeated in tribal warfare int he Arabian peninsula would have a Kingdom to rule. None of the ocuntries that border Israel became independent until this century. Many other Arab nations became independent after Israel." [Bard] ["Egypt didn't achieve independence unti 1922, Lebanon, 1946; and Syria, 1946. Many of the Gulf states became independent after Israel: Kuwait, 1961; Bahrain, 1970; the United Arab Emirates, 1971; and Qatar, 1971" - quoted by Bard]
HOW COULD THE SETTLEMENTS BE ILLEGAL?
"Jews have lived in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since ancient times. The only time Jews have been prohibited from living in the territories in recent decades was during Jordan's rule from 1948 to 1967. This prohibition was anti-Semitic and contrary to the Mandate for Palestine adopted by the League of Nations, which provided for the establishment of the Jewish state, specifically encouraged `close settlement by Jews on the land.' Numerous legal authorities dispute the charge that settlements are `illegal.' International legal scholar Stephen Schwebel notes that a country acting in self-defense may seize and occupy territory when necessary to protect itself. Schwebel also observes that a state may require, as a condition for its withdrawal, security measures designed to ensure its citizens are not menaced again from that territory." [Bard] [American Journal of International Law - (April) 1970 - page 345-346]
THE ARAB STRATEGY
The image of a small weak state, which it was numerically, is not the image the world would see. Arab propagandists would change all that and Israel would become Goliath. "The image of Israel as a weak nation surrounded by enemies seeking its annihiliation evaporated (after 1967), to be replace by the image of an aggressive nation challenging world opinion." [Al-Haytham Al Ayubi, Arab strategist ("Future Arab Strategy in the Light of the Fourth War" - Beirut, Oct, 1974) anayzing Arab propaganda tactics in 1974 and quoted by Joan Peters in "From Time Immemorial..." new, revised edition, 2001
----Al-Haytham Al Ayubi was also called Abu-Hammmam, and was military head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Lt Colonel in the Syrian army]
And regarding Palestinian "national" identity, Rosemary Sayigh wrote in the "Journal of Palestine Studies", as noted by Joan Peters, "a strongly defined Palestinian identity did not emerge until 1968.." Anotherwords, it took a full 20 years after Israel's independence for the myth of Palestinian national identity to become a reality. It never existed before then. [See Rosemary Sayigh, "Sources of Palestinian Nationalism: A Study of a Palestinian Camp in Lebanon," Journal of Palestinian Studies, vol 6, no 4, 1977, p 21 and see also Sayigh, "The Palestinian Identity Among Camp Resident," from the Journal of Palestinian Studies, vol 6, n 3, 1977, pp 3-22] And the nationalism of the Palestinians was also a product of pan-Arabism which cannot be considered "Palestinian" identity but a kind of "Arab" regional nationalism.
It was recommended by Al-Ayubi that the "peace-talks" be for propaganda purposes. There never was an intent to resolve the conflict. The results of that are very much in evidence now.
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