Israel Versus Palestine:
Punctuating History And Narratives In The Middle East
by
·
Published
Here is a way of looking at the history of the so-called Israeli occupation of so-called Palestinian land: History is narratives. Narratives are stories. Stories have beginnings, middles and endings. Human history has no end in sight so nobody knows how this story of our sojourn on Earth is going to end, or even if it will end. Many theories abound, all of them faith-based whether or not they incorporate God or Gods, or Holy Spirits, or vapors or black holes or nano-particles.
We have stories about how it all began and these stories are also faith-based. Every religion and every science has its story of human beginnings on Earth.
And, of course, there are stories within stories.
Israel versus Palestine is a story within the larger Middle East story. It used to be Israel versus The Arabs and then by the late 1980s this turned into Israel versus Palestine. So anyone born after 1980 probably sees the problem with Israel — let me call that the PWI — as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I wonder how many of us born in the 1960s and earlier remember how the PWI used to be the Israeli-Arab conflict. It is merely a matter of punctuation.
By punctuation I mean where we put our full stops, how we divide up our paragraphs and where we consider the story to have begun. (I know the latter two items are not considered punctuation for all you grammar geeks, but allow me some poetic license here, okay?)
Below is a list of possible punctuation marks in history. I think it becomes obvious how that changes the entire narrative.
If you only started paying attention to the story beginning in the late 1980s, when everyone really starting going on about Israeli occupation of Gaza, The West Bank, and East Jerusalem, then you believe that Middle East peace requires Israel to end an occupation. You may think that Judea and Samaria was always called The West Bank. You also think that there was once an Arab country named Palestine and an Arab people who were always called Palestinians and that they are indigenous to that country that you think once existed.
If you only started paying attention to the story, or believe it began shortly after the 6-Day War in June 1967 that saw Israel regaining control over Judea and Samaria, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, when the stage was set to invent the phrase “land for peace”, then you believe that if Israel would just relinquish land recaptured in that war, there would be peace in the Middle East. You might know there was never an Arab country called Palestine and that most Arabs would never countenance being called Palestinians before the mid-1980s. Then again, you might have known it once and since forgotten that fact.
If you think the story began in 1948, with Israel’s declaration of independence and recognition by the UN, then you believe that the UN created the State of Israel, and that Israel was created because of the Holocaust. You may believe that peace requires that the Arab world simply accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
You see the conflict as Israel against the entire Arab world, or more to the point, the whole Arab world against Israel. You know that the name Palestinians referred to the Jews before the declaration of Israel’s independence. You know that Jordan was created out of over 70% of the British Mandate of Palestine and that the Jews were supposed to build their nation on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. You know that the Arabs rose up in protest against that and so the UN offered to partition the part of Palestine still left to the Jews and offer more than half of that to the Arabs as another Palestinian Arab state; and you know that the Arabs rejected that, meaning that the modern State of Israel was still supposed to have been between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. And that is what it would have been had all the Arab countries not risen up and invaded the nascent modern state.
You probably think that the armistice lines drawn at the point the war ended were borders and yet you may recognize the fact that Jordan illegally annexed East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, renaming the latter the West Bank and forcefully exiling all the Jews from that land, those they did not kill, that is. Similarly, you may know that Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip and forcefully exiled all the Jews living there. You probably think the solution involves negotiations over the disputed territories, or, if you recognize that they only became disputed because the Arabs refused to accept sovereign Jews in their midst, you may believe the solution is for the Arabs to admit that they tried to defeat Israel, they failed, and life goes on so get over it already!
If you believe the solution is turning the clock back to before 1948, let us say to 1946 or 1947, then not only would the modern State of Israel cease to exist, but so would independent countries freed from the Soviet Union, Bangladesh, Jordan, Kuwait, North Korea, Pakistan, and others, and the following countries would no longer be sovereign but would return to their former colonial status: most of the current African sovereign states, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belize, Brunei, Cambodia, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Granada, Guyana, Jamaica and the other Caribbean island states, India, and more. If you are turning the clock back on one country, you need to do it for all countries. Otherwise, it just looks like pure antisemitism.
If you think the story began sometime after World War I, then you may be confused. But I will make it simple. In 1922, a legally binding memorandum was signed by the League of Nations in which sovereignty of the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea was recognized as belonging to the Jews. The only Palestine that existed then was the British Mandate of Palestine and the land under this mandate was divided into Israel and Trans-Jordan. Palestine of that time was a geographic and not a political region.
Had there been no PWI, in other words, had the Arabs not complained about having independent Jewish neighbours, then there would be Jordan on the east side of the Jordan River and Israel on the west side of it and peace would have reigned. However, while some Arabs have been pretending that history began in 1947, when they were offered the partition that they rejected, others are claiming it started with Balfour’s (cursed) letter. So if they want to go back to 1920-22, or even 1917, the year of the Balfour Declaration, then it is true that there would be no modern State of Israel. There would also be no Lebanon, Jordan, Syria or Iraq. There would also not be many other currently independent countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. Tibet would still not have been occupied by China. I doubt the world is prepared to set the clock back for any but the Jewish country, and as mentioned above that is antisemitism. Shush! Don’t tell anyone. Don’t want to upset people by calling them antisemitic when they think they are just being anti-Zionist.
If you think the story began about the year 600 CE, then you will know that Israel, or rather the Kingdoms of Judea and Samaria, had fallen to Rome so at that time there was no independent Jewish state (which means that you know that they existed). You will also know that there was no Islam at that time; Mohammed was born in 570 and apparently only began recording his prophesies at the age of 40. When he escaped Mecca for Medina in about 620, the latter was then a cosmopolitan center called Yathrib. The entire world at that time was a system of tribes, some nomadic, some sedentary, some peaceful and some warlike. Jewish tribes wandered freely and were settled extensively across the Middle East and parts of Asia.
There were few countries in the world then, none in the region of interest here, more a fluidity of changing boundaries and identities of kingdoms and empires as territories were won and lost. It was between 650 and 800 CE that the Muslim Conquest claimed most of the Middle East, southern Europe, northern Africa and stretched into Asia. So if you want to go back to 600 you can clear that slate and give the indigenous tribes of all those regions another chance to rewrite their histories to favour their own sovereignty. This means, of course, that Europe returns to being a collection of tribal kingdoms and there is no Canada, United States, Australia, etc etc etc.
Are you game to push the reset button to that period of Middle East and global history?
Wherever you want to begin telling the story of the Middle East, or
from whatever perspective you want to view the PWI, just know that
within most of known human history, you can find recognition of an
independent Jewish entity that predated almost all countries in the
world and therefore is decidedly not a UN creation but a British-League-of-Nations-UN-recognized
ancient sovereign nation. And absolutely nowhere you look will you find
a Palestinian Arab entity by that name or any other, other than the
modern state of Jordan that decidedly is a British-League-of-Nations-UN creation.
WHO CHANGED THE NAME OF JUDEA AND SAMARIA ( ISRAEL) TO PALESTINE?? READ UP
Arabs living in what Jews call the Land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria, call themselves “Palestinians” after “Palestine,” the non-Jewish term for the region.
They did not do so until quite recently, but nonetheless, many Arabs in the region and their sympathizers have co-opted the words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” to give their national movement a sense of longevity, credibility and ownership.
The word “Palestine” is not Arab or Middle Eastern in origin. It dates back 1,900 years and is derived from a people who were not native to the region — the Philistines, a people from the Aegean Sea who were closely related to the ancient Greeks. They lived on the coast of what is now the Gaza Strip and Israel, but had disappeared by the 6th century BCE.
The name associated with them, however, did not die out. The Romans, in a fit of spite, reapplied the term “Palestine” to the Land of Israel centuries later, after they defeated a Judean uprising in 135 CE.
In effect, the Romans sought to erase the association between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people.
The “Palestine” moniker continued to be used long after the Roman Empire fell. When Muslim armies conquered the region in 629 CE, they Arabized the name to “Filastin.” This term cannot be found in the Quran, while the name “Israel” is mentioned several times.
The regional name “Palestine” endured. During the Middle Ages, it became common in early modern English and was employed by the Crusaders. But for nearly 2,000 years, it never referred to a country or a group of people.
In short, for most of recorded history, there were never any “Palestinians.”
After World War I, the modern contours of “Palestine” were established. The British Mandate for Palestine originally consisted of present-day Israel, Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and Jordan.
During the British Mandate period, the term “Palestinian” usually referred to Jews living in the Mandate, as well as their institutions.
Before Israel was founded, several prominent Jewish and Zionist organizations used the name “Palestine.” These included the Palestine Post newspaper and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, which are now the Jerusalem Post and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
At the time, many Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine considered themselves part of Greater Syria rather than “Palestinians.” In 1937, a local Arab leader told the Palestine Royal Commission, “There is no such country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented! Our country for centuries was part of Syria.”
Arab historian Philip Hitti echoed this sentiment shortly before Israel declared independence, saying, “There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.”
The watershed moment for the “Palestinian” national movement came after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel won control of Judea and Samaria from Jordan. The words of author Walid Shoebat of Bethlehem sum up the profound shift in local Arabs’ identity: “On June 4, 1967, I was a Jordanian, and overnight I became a Palestinian.”
Since 1967, a whole national mythology has been created around the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian.” For example, the Palestinian Arabs have claimed to be descendants of the Canaanites who preceded the ancient Israelites and Philistines in the Holy Land.
In 2018, Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas told the United Nations’ Security Council, “We are the descendants of the Canaanites that lived in the land 5,000 years ago and continued to live there to this day.”
But most Palestinians trace their origins to prominent tribes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Egypt. Yasser Arafat was born in Egypt. Even the Kanaan family in Nablus (Shechem) traces its ancestry to Syria. In any case, the Canaanites had disappeared more than 1,600 years before the Arabs first arrived in the Holy Land.
Preposterously, Palestinians have even asserted that Jesus was a Palestinian. In a 2013 Christmas message, Abbas called Jesus a “Palestinian messenger.” In 2019, Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour posted on Twitter, “Jesus was a Palestinian of Nazareth.”
We beg the pardon of Mr. Abbas and his fellow fantasists, but Jesus was a Jew from Judea, which was named Judea because it was and still is the homeland of the Jewish people.
While Arabs in the region are free to call themselves whatever they
want, they are not free to hijack the 3,000-year history of the Holy
Land for themselves. In the end, the name “Palestine” represents the
Jews’ original dispossession of their homeland 1,900 years ago.
SO NOW YOU KNOW...
The ancient Romans pinned the name on the Land of Israel. In 135 CE,
after stamping out the province of Judea’s second insurrection, the
Romans renamed the province Syria Palaestina—that is, “Palestinian
Syria.” They did so resentfully, as a punishment, to obliterate the link
between the Jews (in Hebrew, Y’hudim and in Latin Judaei) and the province (the Hebrew name of which was Y’hudah). “Palaestina” referred to the Philistines, whose home base had been on the Mediterranean coast. _____________________________________________________
SO NOW YOU KNOW! .. MUSLIMS AND ISLAM HAVE BEEN USURPING JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY SINCE ITS INCEPTION. Read my post about I the Fake Religion of Islam!
https://john-gaultier.blogspot.com/2016/01/islam-is-not-connected-to-christanity.html
And more facts about the Bogus Palestinian State
https://john-gaultier.blogspot.com/2019/05/facts-about-bogus-palestinian-state.html
THE DANGEROUS GROWTH OF ISLAM
Just like its
EVIL
little Sister ... "Socialism"..
It wants to dominate the world.
https://john-gaultier.blogspot.com/2019/02/islam-is-dangerous-follow-its-bloody.html
John Gaultier
