Israel, Borders and US Foreign Policy

Many Americans are confused or simply ignorant about the history of Israel and "Palestine".  The following information is offered to provide some historical context, and is derived from several good sources.

A common misperception about Israeli sovereignty  is that all the Jews were forced into the Diaspora by the Romans after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E. and then, 1,800 years later, suddenly returned to Palestine demanding their country back. In reality, the Jewish people have maintained ties to their historic homeland for more than 3,700 years.

The Jewish people base their claim to the Land of Israel on at least four premises:

1) the Jewish people settled and developed the land;
2) the international community granted political sovereignty in Palestine to the Jewish people;
3) the territory was captured in defensive wars and
4) God promised the land to the patriarch Abraham.

Even after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the beginning of the exile, Jewish life in the Land of Israel continued and often flourished. Large communities were reestablished in Jerusalem and Tiberias by the ninth century. In the 11th century, Jewish communities grew in Rafah, Gaza, Ashkelon, Jaffa and Caesarea.

The Crusaders massacred many Jews during the 12th century, but the community rebounded in the next two centuries as large numbers of rabbis and Jewish pilgrims immigrated to Jerusalem and the Galilee. Prominent rabbis established communities in Safed, Jerusalem and elsewhere during the next 300 years. By the early 19th century — years before the birth of the modern Zionist movement — more than 10,000 Jews lived throughout what is today Israel. The 78 years of nation-building, beginning in 1870, culminated in the reestablishment of the Jewish State.

Israel's international "birth certificate" was validated by the promise of the Bible; uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua onward; the Balfour Declaration of 1917; the League of Nations Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration; the United Nations partition resolution of 1947; Israel's admission to the UN in 1949; the recognition of Israel by most other states; and, most of all, the society created by Israel's people in decades of thriving, dynamic national existence.

"Palestine"
The term "Palestine" is believed to be derived from the Philistines, an Aegean people who, in the 12th Century B.C.E., settled along the Mediterranean coastal plain of what are now Israel and the Gaza Strip. In the second century C.E., after crushing the last Jewish revolt, the Romans first applied the name Palaestina to Judea (the southern portion of what is now called the West Bank) in an attempt to minimize Jewish identification with the land of Israel. The Arabic word "Filastin" is derived from this Latin name.

The Hebrews entered the Land of Israel about 1300 B.C.E., living under a tribal confederation until being united under the first monarch, King Saul. The second king, David, established Jerusalem as the capital around 1000 B.C.E. David's son, Solomon built the Temple soon thereafter and consolidated the military, administrative and religious functions of the kingdom. The nation was divided under Solomon's son, with the northern kingdom (Israel) lasting until 722 B.C.E., when the Assyrians destroyed it, and the southern kingdom (Judah) surviving until the Babylonian conquest in 586 B.C.E. The Jewish people enjoyed brief periods of sovereignty afterward before most Jews were finally driven from their homeland in 135 C.E.

Jewish independence in the Land of Israel lasted for more than 400 years. This is much longer than Americans have enjoyed independence in what has become known as the United States. In fact, if not for foreign conquerors, Israel would be 3,000 years old today.

Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of most the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. When the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history, absolutely not."

Prior to partition, Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:

We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.

In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: "There is no such country [as Palestine]! 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria."

The representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations submitted a statement to the General Assembly in May 1947 that said "Palestine was part of the Province of Syria" and that, "politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity." A few years later, Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the PLO, told the Security Council: "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."

Palestinian Arab nationalism is largely a post-World War I phenomenon that did not become a significant political movement until after the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel's capture of the West Bank. Current left-wing UN and international pundits perpetuate this fallacy to suit  their biased political agendas to the detriment of the historical facts.

Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, recently entered into a pact with Fatah (the Palestinian Authority) which controls the West Bank. Hamas’ 1988 Charter clearly spells out it’s goal of the total annihilation of the Jewish State. President Obama and the U.N. can jawbone Israel until their faces turn blue – Israel rightly explains that they are not going to negotiate with an organization whose goal is their destruction.  Nor is Israel willing to go back to the pre-1967 borders. That would leave Israel only 9 miles wide at one point and thus expose it to the same kind of merciless rocket attacks that it has experienced after withdrawing unilaterally from Gaza.

Since the Palestinian Authority was established it has systematically indoctrinated young and old to hate Israelis and Jews. Using media, education, and cultural structures that it controls, the PA has actively promoted religious hatred, demonization, conspiracy libels, etc. These are packaged to present Israelis and Jews as endangering Palestinians, Arabs, and all humanity. This ongoing campaign has so successfully instilled hatred that fighting, murder and even suicide terror against Israelis and Jews are seen by the majority of Palestinians as justified self-defense and as Allah’s will. 


There won’t be any peace in the Middle East until Hamas renounces their charter, officially recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and comes to the negotiating table in good faith – something that up to now they have refused to do.

Frankly, I wish that President Obama were as concerned about Arizona’s borders as he is about the supposed borders of “Palestine”.

Comments

  1. Anonymous6:52 AM

    nicely said :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9:22 PM

    Great, Peter, but I have an addition and a correction:

    It should be known that the word in the Bible for Philistine is Pelishti, based 100% on the P-L-SH root, which means invasion, from outside to inside, and is commonly understood in Semitic languages to mean "outsider." To wit, the Ethiopians (in Amharic) call the black Jews from Ethiopia "Palasha," i.e. foreigners. Ironically, there is no P in Arabic, so the Arabs pronounce Palestine as "Filastin." This is clearly not an Arabic word.

    The Pelishtim (Philistines) were neither Arab nor Canaanite, but rather Minoans from Crete, a Greek origin.

    A correction is that Abraham (Jacob's grandfather) and his family sojourned in Canaan long before Saul. After the Exodus, Joshua conquered and settled in Canaan, also long before Saul.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for that @Anonymous!

    ReplyDelete

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