History Doesn’t Justify Either Israel Or Palestine – OpEd

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By Jonathan Power*

To be blunt, there is no Israel and no Palestine. At least not in a continuous historical sense, as there is a France or an Egypt, a China or a Thailand or an Ethiopia. Without the British there would be neither a modern Israel nor Palestine.

The Jews claim that they are merely returning to their roots, unwinding the clock to Old Testament times.

But if every group of ethnic kin with an ancient pedigree did this where would we be? The Indians could reclaim North and South America, the Moguls Russia and the Hottentots South Africa. Besides, the Jews, led by Moses, committed terrible crimes of genocide when they journeyed from Egypt to claim the Promised Land.

Read the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament and you will read how Moses commanded his generals to kill all the women and small boys of the Midianites tribe, even though his army had already defeated the men.

The Jews left what was relatively recently named Palestine a long time ago. In AD 70 after the Jewish insurrection the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and the Jews began a new exodus to Babylonia, in modern day Iraq. This large-scale Jewish settlement of Babylonia endured until the eleventh century. Other Jews went to Egypt, the Romans enslaved many and others were dispersed by war and catastrophe to Italy, Spain, Gaul and Eastern Europe. Judaism also spread by proselytising. By the late Middle Ages, the heartland of Jewish settlement was the Polish-Lithuanian state in present day Russia.

The Jews did not begin to settle again in Palestine until the late 19th century. It was only after the fall of the Ottoman Empire that the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, strongly backed by prime minister David Lloyd George, a religious man who saw the Zionist cause as one that must be supported by Christian charity, issued his declaration that the government “views with favour” the aspiration for a Jewish “national home”, that the settlement of Arab land began in earnest.

An overwhelming majority of the next generation of British politicians and Middle East administrators, faced with a bloody Arab revolt that they had to mercilessly repress, felt that Lloyd George and Balfour had made a terrible mistake.

But if there are reasonable questions to ask about the legitimacy of the Jewish colonisation of Palestine one can also question the roots of Palestinian nationalism.

Before British rule there were places called Palestine in the region, but they were not states and Jerusalem was not their capital. The states that did exist were not called Palestine. The name appears first in late Roman times as the name of a province and the name survived for a short while in the early Arab empire but then it disappeared. The people of these times had deep rooted, sometimes complex identities but being Palestinian was not one of them.

During the long Ottoman era Jerusalem was only the capital of a district of the same name. It and other districts in the area were under the authority of larger provinces, governed from Damascus, Sidon or Beirut.

It was the British who created a formal entity called Palestine with delineated boundaries and made Jerusalem its capital.

The British were perpetually strung on the horn of a dilemma. The Arabs were convinced that they had been promised a state of their own if they helped the British during the First World War overthrow the Turks and dismember the Ottoman Empire. This is why the Jewish historian, Tom Segev, describes this piece of land as “twice promised”. It is also why the UN in 1947 decided, given the reality of Jewish settlement and Palestinian nationalism, that what the British had ruled as “Palestine” had to be divided in two. 

Any modern-day prime minister of Israel has to try to ride the tiger of modern-day Zionism. Having himself or herself fed the beast for most of his or her political life with the meat of a Jewish return to all biblical lands if he attempts any compromise it risks the assassin’s bullet from those settlers still imbued with the Zionist dream. 

Yasser Arafat, the late leader of the Palestinians, for most of his political life held fast to the idea that the Palestinians did not want partition. They wanted it all, as the British had promised them. Arafat later appeared to mellow, yet what he told audiences when he spoke in Arabic sometimes suggested that the compromise of partition that he envisaged was but a first step to driving the Jews one day into the sea.

Neither side will find the road to peace unless there is some modesty in their approach to the other. In the end the two sides, if they truly want peace and development above all rather than their myths and dreams and the near continuous war they bring, must return to the principles of a reasonably fair division as negotiated at Camp David with President Bill Clinton, and refined at the subsequent negotiations at Sharm el-Sheik and Taba.

The truth is that neither side has a cast iron claim to their own state on the land the British called “Palestine”, and the sooner their leaders tell their people that the sooner there might be honest discussions about a peace. [Copyright @ Jonathan Power]

* Jonathan Power was for 17 years a foreign affairs columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune, now the New York Times. He has also written dozens of columns for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. He is the European who has appeared most on the opinion pages of these papers. 

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11 thoughts on “History Doesn’t Justify Either Israel Or Palestine – OpEd

  • February 2, 2023 at 8:03 am
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    You’re forgetting Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists who crave absolute control and millions of dollars given to them to keep the peace but are forcing clashes and terrorist actions very so often and imposing it on Israel.
    With them in power over the Gaza Strip it doesn’t matter what peace offerings Israel state will offer, their agenda is the total annihilating of Israel and everlasting rule of dictatorship over their people.

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    • February 3, 2023 at 8:38 am
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      Alon, I think you are starting from a position of bias. When you say “it doesn’t matter what peace offerings Israel state will offer”, you ignore the fact that the Jewish settlements are constructed on enclaves beyond Israel’s traditional 1970s borders, as recognised internationally. By Israel inserting its military and security forces into lands beyond its borders, there are many similarities to Russia sending its forces uninvited into neighboring Ukraine. Despite pro-zionist donations having ‘bought’ US congressmen, the international community cannot allow to stand any precedent of ‘taking of land’ from neighbors, whether by Russia or Israel.

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    • February 3, 2023 at 10:05 am
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      One cannot discuss Israel creation without mentioning the Holocaust just prior to formation of Israel. Where would Jews be able to live in relative safety if there was no Israel? As the first Israeli PM said: If Palestines put down their guns, there would be peace. If the Israeli government laid down their guns, there would be no Israel.

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  • February 2, 2023 at 8:41 am
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    This is an incredibly confused and shallow analysis! Most nation-states today are not historically “continuous” as Power puts it. “… a France or an Egypt, a China or a Thailand or an Ethiopia” are actually exceptions that prove the rule. Power doesn’t ask himself why Israel is not real, but South Africa or India or Singapore or Chile, and so on are real. Palestine is just as real. When a group of people share an imaged sense of themselves as a nation, they meet the key criteria for being a nation (as Benedict Anderson taught us). And, did Power really get into an analysis of the three thousand or so years old Hebrew Bible narrative of the conquest of the Land of Israel as a way to delegitimize the “reality” of today’s Israel, while at the same arguing that ancient connections to land cannot matter? Surely then, ancient delegitimizations of ancient conquests do not matter, or “where would we be.” Does anyone edit this stuff before eurasiaview.com publishes it?

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  • February 2, 2023 at 8:47 am
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    jonathan is right
    all we can do is ask to give the two people wisdom (as was given to Suleiman AS) to live side by side in peace… but neither side is certain if they want peace or war… what suits them politically right now is the best policy… who cares about suffering of the two unsecure people.

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    • February 2, 2023 at 9:50 pm
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      Ridiculous argument by the author. There has never been a Palestinian State, people, or even currency. These people labeled Palestinians are manufactured. They are from multiple countries, tribes and Bedouins. Foremost if you want to create a “Palestinian country it’s actually Jordan. 70% of the people in Jordan are the modern day Palestinians. No one wants to suggest this openly for fear the King will be overthrown. In the name of Peace Israel offered Arafat 96% of the territory he wanted an he turned it down. Additionally Palestinian leadership actually enjoys the conflict because their pockets keep getting bigger from money thrown at them throughout the world which never trickles down to the average person. The only chance for peace is if the surrounding Arab nations make peace with Israel first thus marginalizing foolish Palestinian leadership resulting in them coming to the table and perhaps making a temporary peace that one day could lead to lasting peace. Probability is strongly against a Palestinian state. It’s a joke that Jerusalem is important to the Muslims. it’s really a hoax. Muhammad never set foot in Jerusalem not even once. The only holy places for Muhammad and Muslims is Mecca and Medina.

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      • February 3, 2023 at 10:35 am
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        Your argument is unfortunately deeply flawed. Just because there was no independent political entity called “Palestine” does not mean the people did not live on the land. Rather they were part of broader entities and until the British carved out the territory the region was part of Greater Syria and the people would have identified with that. There were no boundaries – political or cultural – between Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria until the Brits and French came and messed up the region! Secondly, Jordan is Palestine? Seriously? Does it not occur to you that Jordan has such a high percentage of Palestinians because they were displaced from their homes in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa?! Just because they are in Jordan now does not make Jordan Palestine!

        After a century of conflict, neither side is innocent. But just as Israelis wants Palestinians to acknowledge their right to exist, the first step toward peace in my opinion is for Israelis and their supporters in the West to acknowledge that Israel was not created on an empty land and that gross injustices occurred in creating a home for the Jewish people at the expense of another people. This acknowledgement is the least one should expect from the people who survived the Holocaust, pogroms and so many other crimes at the hands of the Europeans. For them to turn around and oppress another people is a major hypocrisy that is perpetuated by shallow arguments that Palestinians did not exist historically or that Jordan is Palestine.

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  • February 2, 2023 at 1:20 pm
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    Jonathan, the Jewish exile to Babylonia occurred circa 586 BCE, not 70 AD.

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  • February 2, 2023 at 4:03 pm
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    Historically, the Palestinian “desire for statehood” and “need for liberation” was invented in large part by the Soviet Union. It is no coincidence that the blueprint for the PLO Charter was drafted in Moscow in 1964 and was approved by 422 Palestinian representative hand selected by the KGB. At that time, the USSR was in the business of creating people’s liberation fronts. The KGB founded the PLO as well as the National Liberation Army of Bolivia (1964) with Ernesto “Che” Guevara at its head and the National Liberation Army of Colombia (1965).

    These “liberation fronts” were seen by the USSR as centers of Marxist indoctrination and opposition to democratic and capitalist movements. In the Middle East, the only foothold of the democratic west is Israel; nurturing the PLO to undermine Israel was therefore quite natural for the Soviets, who not only helped fund and establish the PLO but also trained and supplied its terrorist operations.

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  • February 3, 2023 at 1:31 am
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    thank you. i was going to point that out and also that his mish-mash of the geography of the diaspora is equally ignorant. he fails to mention that there have been jewish communities (admittedly small) continuously for the ladt 2600 years. he may be more accurate in the second half of the 20th century, but its disputable.

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  • February 3, 2023 at 5:58 am
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    I agree with the ‘confected ownership’ (by both sides) proposed in article. One commenter noted that PLO have financial interest in war-like status continuing ad infinitum. But one also needs to mention input of pro-zionist groups in USA and elsewhere, funding from afar. For four decades, every US Republican nomination for president has visited Israel before the US presidential election, to pledge his undying allegiance to the Jewish cause. This is not because he in any way needs Israeli citizens to vote for him (as they can’t vote in US elections) BUT that pledge to support Israel brings in hundreds of millions in the US of pro-zionist donations towards his election. Then, if in office, the US sends billions in defense support to the defense of Israel. On my back-of-the-envelope calculations, this foreign aid from US taxpayers to Israel represents an approximate 10x repayment of the pro-zionist political donations put into US politics. So there are clear ‘entrenched’ financial interests on BOTH sides in the dispute. One could similarly question whether US donations to the IRA might have deferred the Good Friday peace settlement by a decade or two. The world community did use sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa to end a tyrannical govt. Now the world is using sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps better targeted sanctions might help bring forward a workable solution to Palestine. Obama told Modi that India could be a religious nation or democratic, but not both. The same applies to Israel, as entrenching theocratic principles is copying Iran’s philosophy.

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