Shameless Schamess

I’m afraid I hurt David’s feelings.

I called an entry on his blog vicious, uninformed and racist. The post in question states “The Palestinians aren’t really a people in the normal sense of the word. In a very genuine way, they are simply the dark shadow of the Israeli people…. Are the Palestinians nothing but Orcs?” “Orcs” are evil cannibalistic monsters depicted in JRR Tolkien’s novel, “The Lord of the Rings”. Was I wrong.

Without Israel, they have no reason to exist. The Palestinians were conjured up out of nothing to serve the specific purpose of demonising Israel, and if Israel were to disappear, the Palestinians would vanish right along with it.

 

Their entire existence is centered around a negation of someone else’s identity. Why do the Palestinians exist? To destroy Israel. What do they tell their children their purpose is? To kill Jews and become martyrs. What role should a Palestinian state fill in world history? To be the launching pad for the extermination of Israel.

 

Five seconds after Israel would be hypothetically destroyed (which God forbid of course) Syria, Egypt and Jordan would start fighting like wild beasts over how to divide the carcass up between them. Any Palestinians who objected would be shot out of hand. And there would be no Palestinian state.

 

Ever.

 

How long can “Palestine” exist simply as a shadow of someone else? Can hatred and nihilism and taking the enemy’s most sacred symbols and twisting them into some mockery serve as a basis for national existence? Are the Palestinians nothing but Orcs?

“I take issue with the accusation of ‘racism,’ David declares in his response. “More than that, I take issue with its characterization as ‘uninformed,’ since my position on the matter comes from my extensive reading on the subject.” Judging from what follows, his extensive reading consists of a single article by Joseph Farrar, from which he copies all of the quotations. “So, Andrew,” he writes, cleverly referencing a beer commercial: “this one’s for you…”

Mr. Farrar, to whom David refers as an Arab-American Journalist, is a Lebanese Christian. He publishes a libertarian/conservative news site called World Net Daily. Mr Farrar has come out on record as opposing a Palestinian state and supporting Israel’s settlement enterprise. In the article that David copies, he has cobbled together a series of odd, decontextualized quotes from various Arab sources, presumably proving that the Palestinian People do not exist.

 

There are oddities like a PLO official stating to a Dutch newspaper in 1977 that “There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.” Which demonstrates… what, exactly? That the PLO admits there’s no such thing as a Palestinian? Come on. The only thing it proves to me is that Mr. Farrar has nothing intelligent to say on this subject.

The existence of the Palestinian people seems altogether self-evident and not worth debating.

There are many people alive now who remember homes and villages in Palestine from which they were driven in 1948 and afterwards. Ask virtually any Arab living in Gaza, the West Bank or Israel, and she or he will identify as Palestinian. There are large numbers of expatriates living in other Arab countries, in Africa, in Europe and the U.S. who consider themselves Palestinian. Given this experiential evidence, one must ask, in what sense could it possibly be valid to say that the Palestinian people do not exist?

…the “palestinians” are not a race, nor a distinct nation of people (except for the purposes of being used as a tool against Israel)

..tracing the emergence of a distinct Palestinian national entity. This was fully developed by World War II. Its aspirations, like those of the Jewish people, were independence and statehood. In fact, it was the collision of these identical aspirations in the same geographic space that gave rise to the current conflict.

Revisionist historian Bennie Morris (“Righteous Victims” Vintage Books, NY, 2001) documents the emergence of Palestinian national identity before World War I:

It was at this time…that a distinct Palestinian local patriotism began to emerge… This tendency or orientation… gradually groped its way forward, largely in reaction to the burgeoning Zionist presence.

Morris mentions features of early Palestinian culture that were distinct from those of other Arab states, particularly the admixture of Christians with Muslims:

…important to the development of a distinct “Palestinian” identity were common religious structures, observances and festivities, both Christian and Muslim. For the Christians, Palestine was a single conceptual entity, the Holy Land… Among the Muslims the Naba Musa festivities, dating from the twelfth century days of Saladin and celebrating the birth of Moses, each year brought together, as the site near Jericho traditionally accepted as his grave, thousands of Pilgrism from various parts of Palestine. The growing sense of a distinct community was expressed and reinforced by the appearance in Jaffa in 1911 of a daily newspaper named Filastin. And in the decade befoe World War I the term “Palestine”… came into common usage among educated Palestinian Arabs.

I do not mean to assert that no agreement whatever is possible with the Arabs of the Land of Israel. But a voluntary agreement is just not possible. As long as the Arabs preserve a gleam of hope that they will suceed in getting rid of us, nothing in this world can cause them to relinquish this hope, precisely because they are not a rabble but a living people. And a living people will be ready to yield on such fateful issues only when they have given up all hope of getting rid of the alien settlers.

The Arab in Palestine need not be, and cannot be, a Zionist. He cannot desire that the Jews become a majority. Therein lies the real contradiction, the political contradiction, between us and the Arabs… The debate over whether there is an Arab national movement or not is so much futile verbiage. For us the essence is that this movement commands the support of masses. We do not see it as a movement for regeneration, and its moral value is dubious; however, in the political sense it is a national movement.

..by 1940 there existed a cohesive Palestinian Arab population distinct from those of the neighboring Arab states in their history, political outlook, leadership, economy, religious practices and culture.

The Jewish-Arab conflict under British rule came to a first head in the 1929 riots over rights to the Al Aqsa Mosque/Wailing Wall. The death toll consisted of 113 Jews and 116 Arabs.

On Friday, August 23, Arab mobs attacked Jews in Jerusalem, Motza, Hebron, Safed, Jaffa, and other parts of the country. The Old City of Jerusalem was hit particularly hard. By the next day, the Haganah was able to mount a defense and further attacks in Jerusalem were repulsed. But, the violence in Jerusalem generated rumors throughout the country, many carrying fabricated accounts of Jewish attempts to defile Muslim holy places, all to inflame the Arab residents. Villages were plundered and destroyed by Arab mobs. While attacks on Jews in Tel Aviv and Haifa were thwarted by Jewish defenses, there were Jewish deaths in Hebron, where 67 Jewish men and women were slaughtered and Safed, where 18 Jews were killed, as well as scattered other losses totaling 133 Jewish deaths, with more than 300 wounded.

 

The Arab violence in Hebron was one of the worst atrocities in the modern history of Israel. On the afternoon of Friday, August 23, 1929 Jerusalem Arabs came to Hebron with false reports of Jews murdering Arabs during the rioting there, even saying thousands of Arabs had been killed. Despite the fact that Jews and Arabs in Hebron had been on good terms, a mass of frenzied Arab rioters formed and proceeded to the Hebron Yeshiva where a lone student was murdered. The next day, the Jewish Sabbath, the killing continued as an Arab mob of hundreds surrounded homes where Jews sought refuge, broke in and murdered scores of Jews in a bloody rampage.

 

The dead Jews that day included Eliezer Dan Slonim, a man highly esteemed by the Arabs. He was the director of the local English-Palestine bank whose many clients were Arabs, and was the sole Jewish member of the Hebron Municipal Council. He had many friends among the Arab elders, who had promised to protect him. Twenty-two people died in Slonim’s house that day including his wife and two young children.

 

By the end of the riot, during which the British police did nothing to protect the Jews or stop the violence, sixty-seven Jews were dead and hundreds wounded. The survivors were isolated in a police station for three days while the Arabs rampaged through their houses, stealing and destroying Jewish property, unmolested by the British authorities. At the end of the three days the Jews were sent to Jerusalem, exiled from their homes for the crime of being a victim of the Arab riot. Hebron’s ancient Jewish quarter was empty and destroyed. For the next 39 years no Jew lived in Hebron, not until after it was liberated by the Israeli military during the Six Day War in 1967.

In subsequent decades, the Palestinian historical experience diverged even farther from that of the other Arab peoples. The Jewish Palestinian state was realized, the Arab one was not.

The 1922 White Paper (also called the Churchill White Paper) was the first official manifesto interpreting the Balfour Declaration. It was issued on June 3, 1922, after investigation of the 1921 disturbances. Although the White Paper stated that the Balfour Declaration could not be amended and that the Jews were in Palestine by right, it partitioned the area of the Mandate by excluding the area east of the Jordan River from Jewish settlement. That land, 76% of the original Palestine Mandate land, was renamed Transjordan and was given to the Emir Abdullah by the British.

 

The White Paper included the statement that the British Government:

… does not want Palestine to become “as Jewish as England is English”, rather should become “a center in which Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride.”

After the partition, Transjordan remained part of the Palestine Mandate and its legal system applied to all residents, both East and West of the Jordan River, who all carried Palestine Mandate passports. Palestine Mandate currency was the legal tender in Transjordan as well as the area West of the river. This was the consistent situation until 1946, 24 years later, when Britain completed the action by unilaterally granting Transjordan its independence. Thus the British subverted the purpose of the Palestine Mandate, partitioned Palestine and created an independent Palestine-Arab state with no regard for the rights and needs of the Jewish population.

 

According to Sir Alec Kirkbride, the British representative in the area, Transjordan was:

… intended to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the National Home for the Jews in Palestine, which [Britain was] pledged to support, became an accomplished fact. There was no intention at that stage of forming the territory east of the River Jordan into an independent Arab state.

Political pressure by proponents of partition was used to get the UN to pass the partition proposal. Most of the Jews accepted the proposal, in particular the Jewish Agency, which was the Jewish state-in-formation. The more extreme nationalist Jewish groups like Menachem Begin’s Irgun Tsvai Leumi and Yitzhak Shamir’s Lehi (group), (known as the Stern Gang) which had been fighting the British, rejected it. Numerous records indicate the joy of Palestine’s Jewish inhabitants as they attended to the U.N. session voting for the division proposal. Up to this day, Israeli history books mention November 29th (the date of this session) as the most important date in the Israel’s acquisition of independence. However Jews did criticise the lack of territorial continuity for the Jewish state.

 

The Arab leadership opposed the plan, arguing that it violated the rights of the majority of the people in Palestine, which at the time was 67% non-Jewish (1,237,000) and 33% Jewish (608,000). They criticised the amount and quality of land given to Israel. The Jews had been offered 55% percent of the land when they owned less than 8% of it. However, it should be noted that over 70% of the land area was not actually owned by anyone (Jewish or Arab) — it was desert under the control of the British Mandate. The population for the proposed Jewish State would be 498,000 Jews and 325,000 non-Jews. The population for the proposed Arab State would be 807,000 non-Jews and 10,000 Jews. The population for the proposed International Zone would be 105,000 non-Jews and 100,000 Jews.

Nor were the Palestinian Arabs in a position to merge into the surrounding countries.

It sometimes seems to me that the modern Zionist/expansionist movement would like to erase everything that came after the Balfour declaration and the 1922 League of Nations resolution.

David’s post is an example of the low ebb that Jewish scholarship has reached under the influence of the expansionist or neo-Zionist ideal. We are consigned to spreading transparent falsehoods in defense of a goal for which there can be no rational defense: driving others off their land, not to create or even maintain a Jewish state, but simply to annex additional territory to our existing state.

1. To use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one’s own.
2. To appropriate for use as one’s own passages or ideas from (another).

I’m afraid I hurt David’s feelings.

I called an entry on his blog vicious, uninformed and racist. The post in question states “The Palestinians aren’t really a people in the normal sense of the word. In a very genuine way, they are simply the dark shadow of the Israeli people…. Are the Palestinians nothing but Orcs?” “Orcs” are evil cannibalistic monsters depicted in JRR Tolkien’s novel, “The Lord of the Rings”. Was I wrong.