What Is Palestine?
By David Solway
The talented Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes in his memoir I Saw
Ramallah that “it is not enough to register the fault of others…we too have our
faults; our share of shortsightedness…But this truth does not absolve the enemy
of his original crime.” Typically, Barghouti never stops to look into the nature
of that “original crime” lest he discover that his own people and their
advocates are at its very source and are the real reason why he found himself a
refugee after the 1967 war, for which he has never forgiven the Israelis. A
lyrical style and a sensitive mind do not invariably lead to clarity, insight,
knowledge and moral honesty.
Barghouti systematically omits the underlying causes
for the various losses and disasters he continually bemoans. His explications
stop abruptly at a certain point—the point at which it would be necessary for
him to be candid and to go back to sources. But in truncating the historical
sequence and dropping critical links from the chain of events, he leaves the
impression that the Israelis were rank invaders, responsible for his sufferings
and those of his people, rather than providing the context which would enable us
to see that it was the Arabs, time and again, who were the invaders and Israel
which acted in self-defence.
The declared Arab intention to obliterate the state of Israel, the closing of
international waterways to Israeli shipping and the massing of armies on its
southern, northern and eastern borders which triggered the Six Day War, are, we
are meant to believe, issues of marginal importance and do not count in the
balance of Barghouti’s personal resentment. Note, too, that the Palestinian
fault is only “shortsightedness.”
Most observers have been completely taken in, not only by British legerdemain
during the Mandate period and United Nations jugglery, but by chauvinistic Arab
propaganda like Barghouti’s. The Palestinian narrative has also been promoted by
the ignorance or duplicity of Western intellectuals, which helped fertilize the
Palestinian identity in order to counter the historical thrust of Zionism,
accomplishing its purpose by a cynical rewriting of history.
To take a “distinguished” example. Ivy-league intellectual and current leader of
the Liberal Party of Canada, Michael Ignatieff, is simply mistaken when he
writes in The Lesser Evil that the Palestinians “have an equal history of
continuous occupation and the same right over the same land. There is
nothing about the Palestinian or the Israeli claim that gives one a moral
privilege over the other.” This, as we will see, is abject nonsense, an instance
of the usual binning technique of equivalent merits, founded in inexcusable
ignorance or willful inattention.
No one denies that indigenous Arabs have long dwelt in the region. But the fact
that the ancestors of a significant number of those now claiming the “right of
return” arrived from the surrounding Arab countries during the British
dispensation is rarely admitted. In line with the British policy of the time,
the 1931 census classified these Arab newcomers to Palestine, notably Western
Palestine, as part of “the natural population,” which they manifestly were not.
Nor does Ignatieff seem cognizant of the documentary ledger, for example, Albert
M. Hyamson’s comprehensive and indispensable edition of The British Consulate in
Jerusalem in Relation to the Jews in Palestine, 1838-1914, housed in many
university libraries.
There we can read the report filed by British Consul James Finn which
established that the Muslim census of Jerusalem in 1858 barely exceeded 25% of
the civic population. The Jewish population of the city was approximately double
that. An 1839 dispatch by the British Consulate in Jerusalem indicated that
Sephardic Jews were “numerous” on the ground. Other memoranda affirm that Hebrew
was a living language among the people and that, despite wholesale slaughters
and expulsions over the generations, Jews had maintained a permanent presence in
the Holy Land—a presence which, be it said, antedates that of the Arabs by
several thousand years. (The name “Israel” is first mentioned on the Merneptah
stele of 1207 B.C.E., now in the Cairo museum, which suggests that Israel must
have existed as far back as the Egyptian New Kingdom and even earlier.) Like so
many of the scholarly tribe, Ignatieff did not do his homework.
Moreover, in a “fact-finding” visit to the Middle East, Ignatieff, like
numberless others, fell for the Palestinian line that the Camp David
negotiations would have led to a Bantustan-type territory. This is now known to
be an apocryphal claim, which should have been evident to anyone who took the
trouble to follow the proceedings. The same fabrication was retailed in Noam
Chomsky’s 2003 publication Middle East Illusions, which claimed that Ehud
Barak’s Camp David proposal entailed the cantonization of the disputed
territories. But PA minister Faisal Husseini himself acknowledged, in the
Lebanese Al-Safir newspaper for March 21, 2001, that Barak had agreed to a
wholesale withdrawal from all of Gaza and 97% of the Territories in toto.
Indeed, as Mitchell Bard points out in a review of Jimmy Carter’s disreputable
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, following the Israeli pullout from Gaza and its
relinquishing of most of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, “the truth
is the entire territorial dispute with the Palestinians, assuming they were ever
to accept the existence of Israel, boils down to about 6% of the West Bank,” in
proximity to the Green Line (italics mine). It is also interesting to remark
that the Israeli proposal to retain this sliver of territory for defensive
purposes in exchange for an equivalent percentage of Israeli land has been
rejected by the Palestinian Authority.
But the question continues to be begged. We know there is a Palestinian
Authority but it is far from clear whether there is anything like an
authoritative Palestine. Certainly, there was nothing among the fellahin and the
absentee landlords, the distant effendi, resembling a sense of national cohesion
and entitlement. There was neither a mystical nor political feeling of
nationhood, of belonging to an existential totality called Palestine. Some
academics have suggested that there may exist traces among the fellahin of a
non-Islamic, that is, a Neolithic or Canaanite/Philistine ancestry, but such
ethnological distinctions remain evanescent. Middle Eastern scholarship has
determined that the Philistines were an Indo-European, not a Semitic people. In
any event, the Palestinian sense of belonging to a larger social classification
would scarcely have transcended the family, clan or phratry.
Palestinian ideologues are constantly asserting claims of priority, but if we
accept the principle of historical antecedence, the earliest extant people who
settled on the land are the Israelites. The Seven Nations mentioned in
Deuteronomy 7:1—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites,
Hivites and Jebusites—have all vanished from the stage of history. The only Arab
claim—and one which has not been made—that might have even a shred of historical
validity involves a temporal capillary to the tribe of Nabatean Arabs who
settled in the hills around Petra during the first century C.E. and produced a
governor of Damascus during the time of St. Paul.
But on the biblical time scale this was a community of late arrivals, surviving
mainly on brigandage, who were either absorbed, dispersed or Romanized, and
quietly faded from the annals of the Holy Land. Many were eventually converted
to Christianity. There was no “national feeling” stirring among these groups,
strung along the caravan routes half a millennium before the Arab invasion of
the seventh century, that could be later used to justify national entitlement.
Further, as the Reverend James Parkes has pointed out in Whose Land: A History
of the Peoples of Palestine, “from the Arab conquest until the British Mandate,
Palestine was a portion of some larger unit, whether Arab, Mamluk, or Turkish;
and its people were never conscious of themselves as a national unit.”
There
was, he reiterates, “no such thing historically as a ‘Palestinian Arab,’ and
there was no feeling of unity among ‘the Arabs’ of this newly defined area”
until modern times. The fact is that “the Balfour Declaration for the first time
established a unit called Palestine on the political map” while recognizing
“that there existed already a historic Jewish right.”
It is not the Palestinian claim to statehood that is the only problem but the
Palestinian projection of a spurious history on which that claim is predicated,
whose ultimate purpose is to delegitimize Israel’s right to existence on what
remains of its specific, mandated territory. To muddy the waters even further,
for many Palestinians the two-state solution is only a temporary stop on their
own road map to a single-state destination incorporating what is now Israel,
justified by the lie of an immemorial, Palestinian settlement on the land.
But whatever form the “Palestinian entity” may take—indeed, the idea of a
“single state” in any shape or form may be nothing but a chimera as what we call
“Palestine” has already fragmented into two clashing statelets in the Gaza Strip
and the West Bank—it would be a largely chaotic and notional polity, a “state”
that derives its international legitimacy more from worthless paper
ratifications and map parchment than from juridical authority, operational
viability or historical authenticity.
Whether it is a straight-up lie or a persistent misconception, the cannonade of
disinformation is unrelenting. Samir Rihani, Senior Research Fellow at the
Liverpool University School of Politics, writing in Palestine 4 online, takes it
as theophany that Israel is Palestinian: “One would have thought that the
creation of a Jewish state on land which has been home to the Palestinians for
centuries would have raised a few eyebrows…” Once again, a bogus assumption has
been transmogrified into a non-deniable verity and practically no one bats an
eyelid, never mind raising an eyebrow.
We hear the same tired refrain in Western intellectual and political circles.
Claire Rayner, president of the British Humanist Association, writing in the
Independent for April 21, 2002, dismisses the idea of a homeland for the Jewish
people as a “load of crap.” British MP George Galloway, a supporter of the
anti-Israeli boycott movement, in his relentless pibroch against the Jewish
state compares the Palestinians to the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. The apt
historical analogy would rather identify them with the Persian hordes attempting
to swarm the pass.
Similarly, American-based Palestinian human rights activist Susan Abulhawa, in
an article for the Paris journal Libèration on March 18, 2008, asserts that
Israel was established on “the ancient land of Palestine,” even though there was
no such thing except in the fevered imagination of the ideological zealot. There
is not a single allusion to “Palestine” in the Gospels or the Acts of the
Apostles. That she claims in the same article that “Jesus was Palestinian”
should go some way, in any sane intellectual climate, to moderating the
reception of her thesis.
Which does not seem to be the case. In their debunking study of the teaching of
Middle Eastern history in American schools, The Trouble with Textbooks, Gary
Tobin and Dennis Ybarra point out that many textbooks tend “to project the word
‘Palestine’ well backward into history when its use is inaccurate and
anachronistic.” The term “Palaestina,” cognate with “Philistinia,” was the name
given by the Romans to the area after quashing the Bar Kokhba revolt of 135 C.E.
This has not prevented McGraw-Hill’s Traditions and Encounters, a particularly
egregious text, from having Abraham migrate “to Palestine about 1850 B.C.E.,” or
Holt’s World History: The Human Journey from mapping the coastal region circa
1450 B.C.E. as “Palestine.” The intention is plainly to “discredit the
historical roots of Jews in the land of Israel” while positing a time-shrouded
and wholly meretricious connection between modern-day Palestinians and the Holy
Land.
Abulhawa’s canard concerning the identity of Jesus
is also workshopped in these manuals. Tobin and Ybarra enumerate many instances
which advance the thesis that Jesus was Palestinian. In particular, The World
(Pearson/Scott Foresman) includes a true or false question meant to be answered
“true”: “Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus?” These are
only a few representative samples of growing mainstream opinion: I have barely
skimmed a roiling surface.
But the argument for Palestine, despite its earnest and sympathetic prosecution,
is vitiated by a profound irony that nobody wants to acknowledge.
There is a
strong element of fraud in the ubiquitous preoccupation with the Palestinian
cause. Despite the overwrought rhetoric, the Arabs (and their Western backers)
really do not care about Palestine and never did. Their real goal is the
extirpation of Israel. This should be glaringly obvious when we consider both
the Arab and Western response—a better formulation might be lack of response—to
the Iranian menace to visit nuclear annihilation upon Israel. For if Israel
should be destroyed in a nuclear attack, Gaza, the West Bank and over one
million Israeli-Arabs would also be annihilated. Physical destruction, radiation
poisoning and total economic collapse would expunge Palestinian Arabs as
effectively as it would Israeli Jews.
Strangely enough, we do not hear a word about this. In so compactified a region,
the effect of nuclear ordnance launched against Israel would not be confined to
its Jewish population. Nearly five million Arabs throughout the territory would
share an identical doom. Poof! no more Palestine. The al-Aqsa Mosque would
disintegrate as surely as the Holy Temple. Hamas and Fatah would be unified in
death. The Holy Land would be a wasteland and its surviving inhabitants, whether
Muslim or Jew, equally dispossessed. Yet this inevitable consequence is never
considered and certainly never mentioned whenever Ayatollah Rafsanjani or
President Ahmadinejad issue their chilling calls to nuclear
holocaust—indisputable proof that the real agenda in play is not to liberate
Palestine but to liquidate Israel.
Even the Palestinians themselves do not seem to have caught on, either because
what we are dealing with is a veritable suicide culture that can tolerate its
own extinction or, to put it bluntly, with a people too stupefied by hatred and
fanaticism to realize that, under these circumstances, their very existence is
no less at risk than Israel’s. The fact remains that they have been sold out by
their Arab brothers and Western enablers who are perfectly indifferent to the
devastation Palestinians would suffer should Iran follow through on its threat
to unleash nuclear havoc on Israel.
The conclusion is inescapable. In failing to recognize or care about the fate of
the Palestinians under such apocalyptic conditions, it becomes evident that the
noisy and righteous concern with Palestinian welfare in Israel and Palestinian
statehood in Gaza and/or the West Bank is merely a covert operation to ensure
the disappearance of the Jewish state, whether violently, politically or
demographically. In the final analysis, so long as Israel can be rendered
desolate, the Palestinians can go hang.
What, then, is Palestine? Palestine is a national fiction. And what is its purpose? One way or another, the national fiction of Palestine is intended to eliminate the national reality of Israel.
-----------------------------------