Axion said:
What?
You need to read some history. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Christian and Moslem, were driven out of their homes in current Israel in 1948. These are the present people in the refugee camps. As for the name "Palestine", the Holy Land was called that in the time of the
Romans. It is in itself a Latinisation of another word you might be familiar with, "
Philistine". Even in the time of the Kings Ancient Israel never inhabited the whole of the land, the Philistines and others inhabited the coastal region. The Israelites lived in the hill country. Current "Palestinians" are descendants not just of the Philistines, but of the other inhabitants of the area including Samaritans, Christianised, and Islamised Jews, and people settled after the Jewish revolt of AD 135.
Palestine was the name for the whole region of Israel and the West Bank before 1948.
Alien Arabs? These people have been living there for thousands of years! If the Palestinians are "alien", all the Americans better start packing their bags and moving back to Europe!
The simple fact is that this greed for other peoples land is ruining the best chances Israel will ever have for peace with its neighbours. The Palestinians might settle for a West Bank State. They won't settle for a few scattered "reservations" with Israeli settlements dominating and dividing up the land.
WHAT DOES "PALESTINE" MEAN?
It has never been the name of a nation or state. It is a geographical
term, used to designate the region at those times in history when there is
no nation or state there.
The word itself derives from "Peleshet", a name that appears frequently in
the Bible and has come into English as "Philistine". The name began to be
used in the Thirteenth Century BC, for a wave of migrant "Sea Peoples"
who came from the area of the Aegean Sea and the Greek Islands and settled on
the southern coast of the land of Canaan. There they established five
independent city-states (including Gaza) on a narrow strip of land known as
Philistia. The Greeks and Romans called it "Palastina".
The Philistines were not Arabs, they were not Semites. They had no
connection, ethnic, linguistic or historical with Arabia or Arabs. The
name "Falastin" that Arabs today use for "Palestine" is not an Arabic
name. It is the Arab pronunciation of the Greco-Roman "Palastina" derived
from the Peleshet.
HOW DID THE LAND OF ISRAEL BECOME "PALESTINE"?
In the First Century AD, the Romans crushed the independent kingdom of
Judea. After the failed rebellion of Bar Kokhba in the Second Century AD,
the Roman Emperor Hadrian determined to wipe out the identity of
Israel-Judah-Judea. Therefore, he took the name Palastina and imposed it
on all the Land of Israel. At the same time, he changed the name of
Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina.
The Romans killed many Jews and sold many more in slavery. Some of those
who survived still alive and free left the devastated country, but there
was never a complete abandonment of the Land. There was never a time when
there were not Jews and Jewish communities, though the size and conditions
of those communities fluctuated greatly.
THE HISTORY OF PALESTINE
Thousands of years before the Romans invented "Palastina" the land had
been known as "Canaan". The Canaanites had many tiny city-states, each one
at times independent and at times a vassal of an Egyptian or Hittite king.
The Canaanites never united into a state.
After the Exodus from Egypt probably in the Thirteenth Century BC but
perhaps earlier -- , the Children of Israel settled in the land of Canaan.
There they formed first a tribal confederation, and then the biblical
kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the post-biblical kingdom of Judea.
>From the beginning of history to this day, Israel-Judah-Judea has the only
united, independent, sovereign nation-state that ever existed in
"Palestine" west of the Jordan River. (In biblical times, Ammon, Moab and
Edom as well as Israel had land east of the Jordan, but they disappeared
in antiquity and no other nation took their place until the British
invented Trans-Jordan in the 1920s.)
After the Roman conquest of Judea, "Palastina" became a province of the
pagan Roman Empire and then of the Christian Byzantine Empire, and very
briefly of the Zoroastrian Persian Empire. In 638 CE, an Arab-Muslim
Caliph took Palastina away from the Byzantine Empire and made it part of
an Arab-Muslim Empire. The Arabs, who had no name of their own for this
region, adopted the Greco-Roman name Palastina, that they pronounced
"Falastin".
In that period, much of the mixed population of Palastina converted to
Islam and adopted the Arabic language. They were subjects of a distant
Caliph who ruled them from his capital, that was first in Damascus and
later in Baghdad. They did not become a nation or an independent state, or
develop a distinct society or culture.
In 1099, Christian Crusaders from Europe conquered Palestina-Falastin.
After 1099, it was never again under Arab rule. The Christian Crusader
kingdom was politically independent, but never developed a national
identity. It remained a military outpost of Christian Europe, and lasted
less than 100 years. Thereafter, Palestine was joined to Syria as a
subject province first of the Mameluks, ethnically mixed slave-warriors
whose center was in Egypt, and then of the Ottoman Turks, whose capital
was in Istanbul.
During the First World War, the British took Palestine from the Ottoman
Turks. At the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and among its
subject provinces "Palestine" was assigned to the British, to govern
temporarily as a mandate from the League of Nations.
THE JEWISH NATIONAL HOME
Travellers to Palestine from the Western world left records of what they
saw there. The theme throughout their reports is dismal: The land was
empty, neglected, abandoned, desolate, fallen into ruins
Nothing there [Jerusalem] to be seen but a little of the old walls which
is yet remaining and all the rest is grass, moss and weeds. -- English
pilgrim in 1590
The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore
its greatest need is of a body of population" -- British consul in 1857
There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent [valley of
Jezreel] -- not for 30 miles in either direction. . . . One may ride 10
miles hereabouts and not see 10 human beings.
For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee . . .
Nazareth is forlorn . . . Jericho lies a moldering ruin . . . Bethlehem
and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation . . . untenanted by any
living creature . . . .
A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to
weeds . . a silent, mournful expanse . . . a desolation . . . . We never
saw a human being on the whole route . . . . Hardly a tree or shrub
anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a
worthless soil, had almost deserted the country . . . .
Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes . . . desolate and unlovely . . . .
-- Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1867
The restoration of the "desolate and unlovely" land began in the latter
half of the Nineteenth Century with the first Jewish pioneers. Their
labors created newer and better conditions and opportunities, which in
turn attracted migrants from many parts of the Middle East, both Arabs
and others.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917, confirmed by the League of Nations
Mandate, commited the British Government to the principle that "His
Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a
Jewish National Home, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the
achievement of this object. . . . " It was specified both that this area
be open to "close Jewish settlement" and that the rights of all
inhabitants already in the country be preserved and protected.
Mandate Palestine originally included all of what is now Jordan, as well
as all of what is now Israel, and the territories between them. However,
when Great Britain's protégé Emir Abdullah was forced to leave the
ancestral Hashemite domain in Arabia, the British created a realm for him
that included all of Manfate Palestine east of the Jordan River. There was
no traditional or historic Arab name for this land, so it was called after
the river: first Trans-Jordan and later Jordan.
By this political act, that violated the conditions of the Balfour
Declaration and the Mandate, the British cut more than 75 percent out of
the Jewish National Home. No Jew has ever been permitted to reside in
Trans-Jordan/Jordan.
Less than 25 percent then remained of Mandate Palestine, and even in this
remnant, the British violated the Balfour and Mandate requirements for a
"Jewish National Home" and for "close Jewish settlement". They
progressively restricted where Jews could buy land, where they could live,
build, farm or work.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel was finally able to settle some
small part of those lands from which the Jews had been debarred by the
British. Successive British governments regularly condemn their settlement
as "illegal". In truth, it was the British who had acted illegally in
banning Jews from these parts of the Jewish National Home.
WHO IS A PALESTINIAN?
During the period of the Mandate, it was the Jewish population that was
known as "Palestinians" including those who served in the British Army in
World War II.
British policy was to curtail their numbers and progressively limit Jewish
immigration. By 1939, the White Paper virtually put an end to admission of
Jews to Palestine. This policy was imposed the most stringently at the
very time this Home was most desperately needed -- after the rise of Nazi
power in Europe. Jews who might have developed the empty lands of
Palestine and left progeny there, instead died in the gas chambers of
Europe or in the seas they were trying to cross to the Promised Land.
At the same time that the British slammed the gates on Jews, they
permitted or ignored massive illegal immigration into Western Palestine
from Arab countries Jordan, Syria, Egypt, North Africa. In 1939, Winston
Churchill noted that "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded
into the country and multiplied . . . ." Exact population statistics may
be problematic, but it seems that by 1947 the number of Arabs west of the
Jordan River was approximately triple of what it had been in 1900.
The current myth is that these Arabs were long established in Palestine,
until the Jews came and "displaced" them. The fact is, that recent Arab
immigration into Palestine "displaced" the Jews. That the massive increase
in Arab population was very recent is attested by the ruling of the United
Nations: That any Arab who had lived in Palestine for two years and then
left in 1948 qualifies as a "Palestinian refugees".
Casual use of population statistics for Jews and Arabs in Palestine rarely
consider how the proportions came to be. One factor was the British policy
of keeping out Jews while bringing in Arabs. Another factor was the
violence used to kill or drive out Jews even where they had been long
established.
For one example: The Jewish connection with Hebron goes back to Abraham,
and there has been an Israelite/Jewish community there since Joshua long
before it was King David's first capital. In 1929, Arab rioters with the
passive consent of the British -- killed or drove out virtually the entire
Jewish community.
For another example: In 1948, Trans-Jordan seized much of Judea and
Samaria (which they called The West Bank) and East Jerusalem and the Old
City. They killed or drove out every Jew.
It is now often proposed as a principle of international law and morality
that all places that the British and the Arabs rendered Judenrein must
forever remain so. In contrast, Israel eventually allotted 17 percent of
Mandate Palestine has a large and growing population of Arab citizens.
FROM PALESTINE TO ISRAEL
What was to become of "Palestine" after the Mandate? This question was
taken up by various British and international commissions and other
bodies, culminating with the United Nations in 1947. During the various
deliberations, Arab officials, spokesmen and writers expressed their views
on "Palestine".
"There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists
invented. . . . Our country was for centuries part of Syria. 'Palestine'
is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it." -- Local Arab
leader to British Peel Commission, 1937
"There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not" --
Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian to Anglo-American Committee of
Inquiry, 1946
"It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." --
Ahmed Shukairy, United Nations Security Council, 1956,
By 1948, the Arabs had still not yet discovered their ancient nation of
Falastin. When they were offered half of Palestine west of the Jordan
River for a state, the offer was violently rejected. Six Arab states
launched a war of annihilation against the nascent State of Israel. Their
purpose was not to establish an independent Falastin. Their aim was to
partition western Palestine amongst themselves.
They did not succeed in killing Israel, but Trans-Jordan succeeded in
taking Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem, killing or
driving out all the Jews who had lived in those places, and banning Jews
of all nations from Jewish holy places. Egypt succeeded in taking the Gaza
Strip. These two Arab states held these lands until 1967. Then they
launched another war of annihilation against Israel, and in consequence
lost the lands they had taken by war in 1948. During those 19 years,
1948-1967, Jordan and Egypt never offered to surrendar those lands to
make up an independent state of Falastin. The "Palestinians" never sought
it. Nobody in the world ever suggested it,much less demanded it.
Finally, in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Movement was founded. Ahmed
Shukairy, who less than 10 years earlier had denied the existence of
Palestine, was its first chairman. Its charter proclaimed its sole purpose
to be the destruction of Israel. To that end it helped to precipitate the
Arab attack on Israel in 1967.
