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ISRAEL?S AMEN CORNER
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I suggest you read "Time Immemorial" by Joan Peters.
Also, read what Mark Twain had to say about the land in "Innocents Abroad".
Joan Peters, a former consultant to the Carter White House on Mideast affairs, claims in a monumental new book on the Mideast conflict that Arab claims about Palestinians having lived in present day Israel "from time immemorial" are no more than crude propagandistic fabrications invented by PLO and other ideologists. In her 600-page opus, which contains massive documentation to support her thesis, Peters expresses astonishment over the fact that so many liberal democracies have swallowed the Arab propaganda line. She also indicts circles in Israel for having accepted the PLO version of an uninterrupted Palestinian presence in the land of Israel. The book, From Time Immemorial (Harper & Row), had its genesis in the wake of a visit which the writer took to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Peters went to the camps, she says, out of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians and the desire to help them assert their rights against Israel. Ten years of vigorous research in British and other archival materials altered her posture; she still sympathizes with the refugees from a compassionate and humanitarian point of view. She no longer shares, however, their political or ideological views. Peters came to these conclusions slowly but methodically after observing a curious clause in the 1948 United Nations resolution pertaining to the definition of a Palestinian refugee. The definition had as a Palestinian refugee any one who had lived in Palestine for a minimum of two years prior to departing the country. If the Palestinians had lived in the country from time immemorial (according to Arab claims), why had it been necessary to introduce such a definition into the UN resolution? Peters' book answers that question - and a lot of other questions as well. Before the questions could be addressed, however, Peters found a wall of obstructionism erected against her. In trying to establish Arab population figures in Palestine from the time of the British mandate (1917) until the creation of Israel (1948) she found that British sources were confusing. The British kept careful note of Jewish immigration into the country; they did not take similar care to record the influx of Arabs from adjacent regions into their administered territory. When they did take population samples of the Arabs in Palestine the British inevitably attributed growth to "natural increase". By dint of tireless research, Peters uncovered a picture of Arab demographics in Palestine totally inconsistent with the "from time immemorial" hypothesis. In fact Peters discovered that the vast majority of Palestinians who left Palestine during or before the War of Independence, immigrated to Palestine or were themselves the children of immigrants. Between 1917 and 1948 hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, Syrians and other Arab-speaking people entered Palestine. They had two reasons: to profit from the dynamic economy spurred by the Zionist enterprise and, to assert against the Jewish population of the country an Arab presence. Joan Peters claims that the British deliberately obfuscated the question of the Arab influx into Palestine out of a desire to repudiate the promises made to the Jewish people under the terms of the Balfour Declaration. The more Arabs there were in Palestine, the harder it would be for the Jews to invoke their claim. According to the author, the idea of "from time immemorial" did not surface in Arab propaganda against Israel until fairly recent times and was given special focus only after the Six Day War when the Arab world was dispirited by its loss to Israel. Arab propagandists felt that the only way to maintain the hatred of the Palestinian refugees against Israel was to invent for them a pedigree tied to the land. That hatred was useful from the Arabs' long range goal of eliminating from their midst an anomaly with which they could not live - a Jewish state. Why the Arabs cannot tolerate the idea of a Jewish political entity in their geographical sphere is another question answered by Peters who presents a clear survey of the Muslim presumption to dominion over other groups. Peters, a researcher who has done her homework thoroughly, anticipates every objection to her thesis: "When the Arab claim based on fraudulent historical devices is exposed and thus discarded, another popular argument surfaces. After all, it is said, it doesn't matter when the 'nationalism' evolved. The important thing is that it exists; it's a violent nationalism now and the refugees - the 'Palestinians' - exist. "Yet, a violence born of unworthy incitation, aggravated by unnatural camp conditions and deliberate indoctrination to that violence, ought not necessarily command credence or respect because it calls itself 'nationalism'. "The movement, whatever its label - terrorism or nationalism - is no more a legitimate excuse for the attempt to destroy one small Jewish state than the 'repatriation' of other refugees around the world would be seen as reason for the destruction of any other state. "Throughout the Mandate, the British attempted to gain peace by appeasing intimidation and terror. It was a self-imposed intimidation to a perception of oil-power and force that the Western powers by themselves in fact evoked. "Yet others are considering a similar course. But the lesson ought to be clear by now that the West's continuation of the protected British policy of submission has not brought a peaceful life. As Winston Churchill cautioned in 1939, the acts that we engage in for appeasement today we will have to remedy at far greater cost and remorse tomorrow."
edit: bold type added
Mark Twain was awesome. I prepared an essay for a class about his work.
Innocents Abroad
An applicable quote from the text relative to this discussion:
Page 460:
"but in Damascus they so hate the very sight of a foreign Christian that they want no intercourse whatever with him; only a year or two ago, his person was not always safe in Damascus streets. It is the most fanatical Mohammedan purgatory out of Arabia."
Interesting material from ca. 1869. Mark Twain wasn't particular fond of religion - any religion, for that matter.
Well.... back to the Superbowl.
Moron.
riprorin:
palestinians are a recent creation? when i say palestinian i mean the arabs that have been living in what is now known as israel for the past 2 thousand plus years. i think my friend ehab, whose family used to live just north of jerusalem and who traces his roots for generations there would take offense to you calling him a 'recent creation'
look up the king crane commission report of 1919. fyi i studied history at ucla under 3 different professors who taught middle eastern history. you say it was barren desolate wasteland until it was developed by Jews - what are you, a jewish israeli? thats wrong and really arrogant.
"it was a barren, desolate wasteland until it was developed by the ***" thats what some twisted ethnocentric Americans once said when people discussed the conflict between native american indians and europeans over the land now known as america.
you hold israel and the jewish people living there in such high regard. what do you have to say about this -
take a look at the current and historical population make-up of the region of israel, gaza strip, and west bank.
the day israel becomes a true democracy is the day it gets voted out of being a jewish state. -
The Jews have been living there for over 2000+ years too. What's your point?
cmon, some beings cannot fathom the idea of a democracy in the middle east. why did we go to war in Vietnam, simple reason of democracy. afghanistan was next and we are working on a democracy for that government and now it is Iraq's turn. Israel is there is to help us with our view. we should be happy that we have them an an ally, they bring so much to the table that no one else in the world can.
i am not familiar with a country that does such a thing. Yes, there are people in the country that do it, but to associate the country with its lunatics is lunacy in itself. What you are saying is like me saying "any country that glorifies McVeigh blowing up the buliding in Oaklahoma does not deserve my sympathy" please think before you speak.
Tim
Darren, I'm far from an Israeli Jew. In fact, I'm a Christian who grew up and lives in Upstate NY. I'm a chemist, not a historian like yourself, but I have done some study on the Isaeli-Palestian issue.
PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat in his speech before the UN in 1974 declared, "The Jewish invasion began in 1881 . . . Palestine was then a verdant area, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture."
Is this statement true? Here are the facts as I understand them. Again you are more knowledgable than me so please refute as appropriate:
In 1738 Thomas Shaw observed a land of "barrenness . . . from want of inhabitants." In 1785 Constantine Francois de Volney recorded the population of the three main cities. Jerusalem had a population of 12,000 to 14,000. Bethlehem had about 600 able-bodied men. Hebron had 800 to 900 men. In 1835 Alphonse de Lamartine wrote, "Outside the city of Jerusalem, we saw no living object, heard no living sound?a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, in the highways, in the country?. The tomb of a whole people."
In 1857, the British consul in Palestine, James Finn, reported, "The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population."
The most popular quote on the desolation of the Land is from Mark Twain?s The Innocents Abroad (1867), "Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies?.Palestine is desolate and unlovely?. It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land."
The Romans had changed the name of the Land of Israel to "Palestine." From A.D. 640 until the 1960s, Arabs referred to this same Land as "Southern Syria." Arabs only started calling the Land "Palestine" in the 1960s.
Previously, the leaders of the Arabs in the Land, however, called themselves Southern Syrians and clamored that the Land become a part of a "Greater Syria." This "Arab Nation" would include Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan as well as Palestine. An observation in Time magazine well articulated how the Palestinian identity was born so belatedly in the 1960s:
Golda Meir once argued that there was no such thing as a Palestinian; at the time, she wasn?t entirely wrong. Before Arafat began his proselytizing, most of the Arabs from the territory of Palestine thought of themselves as members of an all-embracing Arab nation. It was Arafat who made the intellectual leap to a definition of the Palestinians as a distinct people; he articulated the cause, organized for it, fought for it and brought it to the world?s attention?.
If there was an Arab Palestinian culture, a normal population increase over the centuries would have been expected. But with the exception of a relatively few families, the Arabs had no attachment to the Land. If Arabs from southern Syria drifted into Palestine for economic reasons, within a generation or so the cultural tug of Syria or other Arab lands would pull them back. This factor is why the Arab population average remained low until the influx of Jewish financial investments and Jewish people in the late 1800s made the Land economically attractive. Then sometime between 1850 and 1918, the Arab population shot up to 560,000. Not to absolve the Jews but to defend British policy, the not overfriendly British secretary of state for the colonies Malcolm MacDonald, declared in the House of Commons (November 24, 1938), "The Arabs cannot say that the Jews are driving them out of the country. If not a single Jew had come to Palestine after 1918, I believe the Arab population of Palestine would still have been around 600,000?"
Jewish contributions and Jewish immigration continued to flow into the Land. The Jews created industry, agriculture, hospitals?a complete socioeconomic infrastructure. As job opportunities increased, so did Arab immigration. In fact, in 1939 President Roosevelt observed that "Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during this whole period."7 For one specific example, in 1934 between 30,000 and 36,000 Arabs from the Hauran Province in Syria left for "the better life" in Palestine.
On the other hand, Great Britain?s White Paper of 1939 closed the doors of Jewish immigration to their Land. Simultaneously, there was a large-scale Arab immigration to the new Land of opportunity during World War II. In 1946 Bartley C. Crum, a United States Government observer, noted that tens of thousands of Arabs had entered Palestine because of this better life?and they were still coming.
that makes no sense to me. Where would Israel be without the about 100 Billion of aid they have received from the US since the 50's? Israel is there to help us with our view? Countries exist to further their own interests, in this case without help from the United States they may have very well been obliterated, but who really knows. By building good relations with the US they have become one of the mightiest countries on the planet militarily, but if you look at the statistics you will realize that over the past 40 years or so the amount of palestinians killed in the conflict compared to the amount of Israelies is of the factor of 10 palestinians for 1 Israeli. It is indeed a tragic situation, which I wish the United States would take an active role in helping resolve. Instead we continue to support Israel who has a very decided advantage over any other country in the Middle East, and Israel takes advantage of that. It seems to me that more people mention the suicide bombers than the Israeli military killing innocents. I am guessing this is because the suicide bombings are much more reported here. Look around though, you'll see that neither side is very innocent.
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