With Israel’s full-blown ground incursion into Gaza still looming, it’s time to go over The Palestine Myth again, i.e. just about everything your left-wing types spew about how Israel “dismembered Palestine” is wrong.
This is a map of the territory now known as the State of Israel, and many use it to support their argument that modern Israel has ‘stolen’ the lands of Palestinian Arabs.
But there was never a country called ‘Palestine’ to begin with. That name is for a territory, not an actual country.
So, the whole “Israel took land from a country” idea?
It’s not the full picture.
Let’s skip the ancient empires and zoom in on more recent history.
Specifically, to the Ottoman Empire that governed the territory in question for four centuries, from 1516 to 1917.
This is an essential context because, during their rule, the area we now refer to as Israel and Palestine was part of a much larger imperial jurisdiction, and not a sovereign state called ‘Palestine.’
The area had a relatively sparse population. Throughout their rule, the Ottomans encouraged Muslim migration to Palestine, primarily from Egypt and Sudan. This is, in fact, the origin of many of today’s Palestinians, as indicated by the surnames of major clans.
After WWI, starting in 1917, Britain took over the territory. They quickly issued the Balfour Declaration, which was the first nod to creating a Jewish homeland in Israel.
Pro-tip: If a lefty wants to debate you on the Middle East, bring up The Balfour Declaration. If they don’t know what that is, point out that they’re simply too ignorant of the most basic facts of the region to have an informed conversation and disengage. (There I go again, winning friends and influencing people…)
On Nov 29, 1947, the UN passed a partition plan dividing the territory of British Mandate Palestine between Jews and Arabs. It recognized both sides’ rights to establish a nation-state within agreed-upon borders, a move voted on and approved by UN member states.
The Jewish community fully embraced the UN’s partition plan, but the Arab population flatly rejected it.
Armed conflict against Jewish settlements started almost immediately, dubbed the War of Independence, even as British rule persisted.
On the last day of the British Mandate, May 14, 1948, a Jewish state was declared. The very next day, armies from Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt, with smaller forces from Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, invaded the territory, initiating the 2nd phase of the War of Independence.
After nearly a year of fighting, the young State of Israel successfully repelled invading foreign armies and internal Arab forces, capturing additional territories in the process.
The armistice lines of 1949 established that the West Bank would be under Jordanian control, and the Gaza Strip under Egyptian control. The remaining territories were incorporated into Israel. These borders held until the 1967 Six-Day War.
Which is when Israel captured the Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights.
In 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat visited Israel, marking the beginning of a peace process between the two countries. As part of this, Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Egypt, however, declined to retake control of the Gaza Strip, leaving it in Israeli hands.
The 1993 Oslo Accords led to a phased transfer of most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Palestinian control.
Fast forward to 2005, Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza Strip, evacuating all its settlements.
Since 2005, there’s been no Israeli presence—civilian or military—in Gaza. Since then, Hamas, a terror organization, effectively controlled the territory.
The last is not strictly true, since Operation Cast Lead (i.e., Israel reacting to the last time Hamas tried this bullshit) resulted in a short military presence in Gaza while the IDF thoroughly kicked Hamas’ ass.
His conclusion:
- There has never been a sovereign state called Palestine. In fact, as of today, the territories belonging to the Palestinian Authority are the largest ever held by an entity defined as Palestinian.
- The majority of Palestinians originated from migration from countries like Sudan and Egypt during the Ottoman Empire, with no proven historical connection to Israel.
- Arabs residing in Israel before 1948 were offered the chance to establish their own nation-state but chose to go to war instead. They can’t blame anyone but themselves for the outcomes.
- Regardless of history, millions of Palestinians currently live in Gaza and the West Bank, and a viable solution must be found for their peaceful coexistence.
- It seems that Palestinians have been the ones sabotaging solutions so far.
And how.
(Some Twitterisms like hashtags stripped.)
Tags: Arab-Israeli Wars, Foreign Policy, Gaza, Hamas, history, Israel, Israel-Hamas War, Jihad, Military, Palestinians, Six Day War, The Balfour Declaration, West Bank
The only argument that has any purchase with me (and probably many others) is one I recall Christopher Hitchens making: that there are verifiable cases of non-Jewish families (clans) with significant history in the land now Israel or the West Bank, and they either had it taken or it is threatened. Maybe the claims of unjust appropriation are actually false; as is usually the case, it’s likely pretty complicated.
It is true some number of people who aren’t Jewish (and aren’t all Muslim) can demonstrate this place was their home for a long time. It is also true, but overlooked, that over all the centuries, a small but significant Jewish community lived in the territory variously called “Palestine” or Israel or the Holy Land, etc.
Lost in all this is the fate of Christians who are reasonably “native” to the area. (What counts as “native”? Migration seems a constant in human history.) Their numbers have been declining for a long time.
All that said: if there were a will on the part of the “Palestinian” authorities to reach peace, I would bet serious money this specific issue could be settled fairly easily. As far as I can see, the “right of return” can be granted if it isn’t about millions “returning,” i.e., taking up permanent residence in, and taking over, Israel.
The epic tragedy is the repetition of missed opportunities.
I prefer Gazans for the people living in Gaza, as that skips past the whole artificial Paly identity thing and uses the standard everywhere else: Italians from Italy, Egyptians from Egypt, Swiss from Switzerland and so on.
The elected Gazan government attacked Israel, and so Israel is at war with Gaza.
As we all know only election deniers deny legitimacy of elections, even thoroughly corrupt coerced “elections” with scare quotes of murderous thugocracies like Hamas, so any contention that “Hamas does not represent Gazans” is simply unpossible.
“3. Arabs residing in Israel before 1948 were offered the chance to establish their own nation-state but chose to go to war instead. They can’t blame anyone but themselves for the outcomes.”
This one was always the clincher for me. It should be number 1, not because it’s so prominent as most significant cause, but because it’s actually happened twice.
Palestinians either as a whole or as different factions have had two opportunities to establish the “two-state solution”, and have rejected it twice.
Fuck ’em.
The important point is this: there is no “Palestine” or Palestinians.
90% of the people who call themselves “Palestinian” are 20th century immigrants brought to the Levant as immigrants from Somalia and Egypt. Mostly encouraged by the Ottoman Empire.
Close to 90% of the people in the Levant – on both sides -are 20th century immigrants. Palestinians are African immigrants. Israelis are European immigrants. The story being pushed by both sides is utter BS. Its none of our business how a few clans of testy immigrants of multiple religions fight for ownership of some desert land on the Med.
A wise man said “Kill’em all and let God sort it out.”
“ Palestinians are African immigrants. Israelis are European immigrants.”
Strictly speaking, the African immigrants are colonizers. The European immigrants (and many of those who emigrated to Israel were from Iraq) were dispossessed of their lands in 70 AD by the Roman conquerors.
Their return home is somewhat analogous to the Babylonian captives who ventured to reclaim Jerusalem and rebuild its walls and erected the Second Temple. That effort met with resistance but was ultimately successful.
The Jews will prevail once more.
A semantic argument, FM? The Palestinians live in Palestine just as much as they live in Gaza; more so, since the Arabs in the West Bank seem to still consider themselves the same people as those in the Gaza Strip. Nobody who doesn’t already agree with you is going to accept that argument.
It doesn’t help that you’re not even getting past the artificial identity, you’re just arguing about the nomenclature.
And we all know how, despite how much people disliked illegal aliens, they’re all for undocumented migrants.
The main argument for Israel vs. the Arabs is to be seen in the satellite photos. Examine the difference between Israel and surrounding nations: Israel, green and fertile. Elsewhere? Still desert.
That ain’t accidental. Arabs are basically indigent vandals, and it’s the greatest irony of history that the lazy bastards are sitting on top of all that oil. Imagine if the Middle East was as barren of oil as they are of human talent, ethics, and hard work… Be a bit different picture, wouldn’t it?
Boobah: I’m pretty sure no “argument” is going to move anyone who is happily on team-infant-decapitation. And the middle on this seems pretty thin – people either think a country has a right to eliminate an obvious manifest threat to its citizens, or they don’t.
Note I don’t count polling answers to feely-questions like “Shouldn’t we all get along?” or equivalent – there are always a percentage of mush heads in any sample.
Bottom line is Israel tried land-for-peace and ended up with neither. Going full defense, such as one person I read suggesting a sixty foot moat and a hundred foot wall, would just rinse and repeat with more paraglider and tunneling type attacks to kill civilians.
I really don’t see any alternative to cleaning up the mess in Gaza. And Hamas is the government in Gaza, not in any of the other places being stirred up.
Using language to make clear that demarcation, instead of feeding into any pan-Arab baloney, and getting the other groups leadership to answer their foot soldiers asking “So you want us die for the Gazans?” seems like a worthy effort.
“Regardless of history, millions of Palestinians currently live in Gaza and the West Bank, and a viable solution must be found for their peaceful coexistence.”
The Palis/Gazans don’t *want* “peaceful coexistence”, so calls for it are just calls for Israeli suicide.
It has been said that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Remember when they looted and destroyed the agricultural greenhouse complex in Gaza when the IDF pulled out in 2006? I’d say the mentality of the region’s population centers around the Arab custom of the “camel raid.” The area’s inhabitants feel that they’ll invade Israel, kill the Jews, take their all their stuff and live happily ever after in the homes the Jews leave behind.
The Gaza and West Bank Arabs are where they are because of poor choices they made. They could have turned their lands into little Switzerlands or some other model, but they chose to follow Satan’s path of envy and hate. Deliberately.
It’s a lot like Lebanon; Beirut was once the prime city in the Middle East for banking and trade. What is it, today? A wreck. Thanks to who? Oh, that’s right… Islamic Arabs. Who wreck everything they touch, if they can’t dominate it. Note the damage wrought on the actual historical monuments in Mecca and Medina by the Saudi government. Note the utter lack of real development or self-supporting industry in Saudi Arabia or the other Gulf Arab states. When the oil runs out, they’re all going to revert back to camels in the desert, and probably within a generation or two.
If you ever meet any of them, the really astounding thing is the arrogance and the sheer stupidity they demonstrate. That cousin-marriage thing just isn’t working out for them, at all… I had a brief acquaintance with a pediatric nurse there in Kuwait, and it was fascinating to hear her talk shop about the number and prevalence of birth defects in the Arab population there. Oh, and in England, her native country. Where she was from in the UK, the vast majority of the inbreeding-related birth defects were from the populations prone to cousin-marriage, which made up maybe 15% of the population in some towns, but which contributed like 85-90% of the birth defects to the NHS. Her comments about how many births that the average Kuwaiti woman had to go through in order to get a few “normal” kids was astounding… She mentioned that she was really glad for one of her clients that she’d finally had a “normal” kid, a boy, because now she could back off on pumping them out to make the in-laws happy. They were first cousins, she and her husband, in a family that had last had an outsider contribute their genes sometime back in the 19th Century…
I don’t think you’re going to see the next Einstein come out of any Arab/Islamic country that practices that cousin-marriage thing.
I like how Eric Weinstein put it in a recent Triggernometry episode across from Sam Harris. Countless times in the past 110 years, Palestinians had a choice between a state of their own, and a chant (“From the river to the sea” i.e. no Israel and no Jews in the land).
In each case, they emphatically chose: they do not want a state. They want Israel gone, and Jews gone.
How can there be a “two state solution” when one party DOES NOT WANT a state, but the eradication of the other?
Some very comfortable myths evaporated 10/7, and the world is all-too-slowly waking up to the fact. With the usual suspects kicking, screaming, and clawing to avoid seeing the truth.
For my part, I’d really like to see a “two state” situation happen. I just don’t see how. I personally don’t see it happening with Gaza and West Bank separated from each other; I’d rather see Palestinians concentrated in one place rather than two. I see ZERO POSSIBILITY so long as Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Turkey, Damascus have a major say in what happens.
If I could wave a magic wand?
• teleport all hostages out (hey, magic)
• flood the tunnels
• remove Hamas from the planet – especially their leaders living in Qatar, London, Berlin, etc
• put innocent Gazans in a really nice refugee camp with really good food (honestly)
• rebuild Gaza one more time, with good infrastructure, independent of Israel
• 2km moat between Gaza and Israel
• send Gazans back
• let the moat be a kind of “DMZ” patrolled by Isareli subs; no craft allowed, period, of any nation
… and if the above sounds absurd, of course it is. At least I’m admitting it’s magical thinking, unlike our illustrious leaders who believe in unicorn farts to solve our energy needs
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