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. 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. 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.
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Rea...e.asp?ID=14858