Matthew M. Hausman:Recognizing “Palestine,” Rewarding Terror, Invalidating Israel
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/
Palestinian Arabs have no more historical entitlement to ancestral Jewish land than Germany had to the Sudetenland in 1938. The difference between appeasement then and now is that the west’s faux moral virtue today is an expression of its own antisemitism.
Progressive nations like France, Canada, Ireland, Norway, and Australia fell over themselves recently to recognize a Palestinian Arab state – though one never existed – for the sake of a people whose national identity is a twentieth-century political construct (would that they cared as much about violent antisemitism within their own borders).
There is no mention of “Palestinians” in the historical, archeological, or scriptural records – a fact well-known to the PLO’s founding generation in the 1960s and 1970s, who knew that a country called “Palestine”, with established borders, national culture and language, and institutions of nationhood, never existed. Their revisionist narrative is a myth created to repudiate Jewish history and obfuscate the fact that the only sovereign nations ever to include the territory between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea were the First and Second Jewish Commonwealths* and the modern State of Israel.
And unlike the Palestinian narrative, that’s historical fact – not propaganda.
No sovereign Arab or Islamic state ever stood on the land of Israel following the wars with Rome and dispersion from Judea(after which, in fact, many Jews remained in the land).
Rather, after jihad exploded out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, indigenous Jews were subjugated by Arab conquerors, who were merely the latest in a long line of real occupiers that included Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, and later Ottomans. The land passed from one empire to the next as unincorporated territory for nearly two-thousand years until modern Israel’s rebirth.
Neither Islam nor Arab culture are indigenous to the land of Israel – or anywhere else outside the Arabian Peninsula.
Those who claim ancestry from the early jihadists are the ones actually descended from colonizers. But most Arabs referred to as “Palestinian” today have a far shorter connection to the land, with perhaps the largest cross section descending from immigrants who came between the late nineteenth and middle twentieth centuries from Egypt, Lebanon, and what is today Syria.
The relative recentness of this influx was tacitly conceded by their institutional apologist, the United Nations Relief Work Agency (“UNRWA”), when it defined Arab refugees as those who established residency in the land between June 1, 1946 and May 15, 1948, lost homes and livelihoods during the 1948 War, and resided in areas accessible to UNRWA services.
If they were truly indigenous for hundreds of generations, why were they defined by a minimum residency requirement of only two years?
And unlike any other displaced group in history, why was “refugee” status passed down generationally (if not for propaganda value)? This never occurred with other wartime population transfers, like those involving India and Pakistan, Turkey and Greece, or Bangladesh.
Considering that nearly one million Jews were expelled from Arab countries where they had lived since the Babylonian exile – albeit as a persecuted minority (and long before Islamic conquest), it seems incongruous that they were not also considered hereditary “refugees,” though they greatly outnumbered the Arabs who left Israel in 1948 – often at the behest of invading armies from Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt. The difference is that Jewish refugees were taken in by their own people, primarily in Israel, rather than being kept stateless as a dissimulative tool for delegitimizing Jewish nationhood.
Furthermore, if Palestinian Arabs truly constituted an indigenous people deprived of ancestral sovereignty, it seems strange that their Arab brethren rejected UN partition in 1947 or that they themselves never lobbied for a state when Egypt controlled Gaza and Sinai and Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria from 1948 to 1967.
The issue of Arab “refugees” and their “right of return” to “Palestine” is a matter subterfuge, not justice. Repeated surveys show that most refuse to acknowledge the Jews’ history in Israel, a rebuff reiterated not only by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, but also by the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority. The PA’s charter rejects the concept of Jewish nationhood and refuses to acknowledge the Jews’ unbroken connection and lawful entitlement to their homeland. Its leadership instead demands acknowledgment that Palestinian Arabs occupied the land for millennia, though this claim is demonstrably false.
Indeed, the myth of “Palestine” is a tendentious ruse, as Yasser Arafat (Egyptian by ancestry) acknowledged in his authorized biography, wherein he stated: “The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.”
And as PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein expounded in a 1977 newspaper interview, stating: the “Palestinian People does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of ‘Palestinian people’, since Arab national interest demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”
With an antisemitic wink and nod, the world embraced the big lie despite there being no historical evidence. Arab leadership knew that by simply proclaiming the twin fictions of “Palestinian” indigeneity and colonial victimization long enough, they would be embraced by progressive movements and nations who reflexively endorse any group claiming to be colonially exploited – even if such claims are objectively insupportable.
In the wake of Hamas’s atrocities on October 7th, and after more than a century of Arab aggression, those nations who recognized an apocryphal state of “Palestine” engaged in performative virtue signaling, expressed shameless contempt for history, and rewarded those who started the latest war with a terror pogrom that killed the largest number of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. And though western enablers sanctimoniously draw feeble distinctions between Hamas and the Gazan population, surveys show how many Gaza civilians either participated in or endorsed the rape, murder, and kidnapping of Jewish men, women, and children or refused to condemn Hamas’s horrific crimes, even after two years of war.
As American Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman famously stated when describing the siege of Atlanta: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Sherman was referring to the scorched earth strategy intended to destroy the Confederacy’s means of production and will to fight. Unlike Gaza today, however, Sherman was not dealing with a populace weaned on religiously inspired genocidal hatred. Southerners then were not like Gazans now, particularly those who used job-related border access and false friendships with Israelis to provide maps and diagrams showing terrorists where to find Jews and who often participated in the massacres and concealment or torture of hostages.
War may be hell, but those who cheer it or participate in atrocities should not be surprised when they suffer consequences “middah k’neged middah” (“measure for measure”) of a conflict they started.
Since its inception, Hamas’s stated goal has been to destroy Israel and exterminate Jews; and consequently, those nations who recognized “Palestine” proclaimed solidarity with promoters of genocide, slaughterers of innocents, rapists, torturers, and kidnappers. Palestinian Arabs have no more historical entitlement to ancestral Jewish land than Germany had to the Sudetenland in 1938. The difference between appeasement then and now is that the West’s faux moral virtue today is an expression of its own antisemitism.
The situation is not helped by the misperception of President Trump’s twenty-one-point ceasefire plan as a peace agreement. It is not; nor should anybody be credulous enough to believe that it will – of its own accord – produce lasting peace. That cannot happen with implacable enemies who, as a matter of religious faith, believe Jews are dhimmi who lost the right to their homeland and must be exterminated according to eschatology set forth in the Hadith.
Trump’s plan – while laudable for facilitating the return of the surviving hostages – cannot offer permanence in the absence of true doctrinal and ideological reformation. Moreover, Hamas merely considers it a hudna, i.e., a strategic armistice necessary for buying time to consolidate resources for the next attack. That was the strategy undertaken by Muhammed in the Quran to exterminate the Jews of Khaybar in the seventh century and it is the strategy emulated by Hamas today.
Indeed, the ceasefires that concluded the four previous wars with Hamas enabled it to build more terror tunnels, fortify infrastructure, and ultimately perpetrate the atrocities of October 7th. And Hamas has already violated the current ceasefire by refusing to abdicate power and attacking Israeli troops, among other things.
Those who believe a ceasefire with Hamas offers permanent security for Israel or will spark the reformation necessary to foster widespread Islamic acceptance of Jewish sovereignty, are either ignorant of history or fundamentally naïve. If the former, they can always study the reality and revise their expectations to fit the facts; but if the latter, they will only be chasing a fool’s errand.
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