Facts or Arab myths By Victor Sharpe
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There is much confusion in the minds of politicians, journalists, educators, religious leaders and the proverbial “man in the street” about the conflicts and origins of the many wars in the Middle East.
Foremost among these disputes is the seemingly endless Arab-Israel conflict, or what should more realistically be called the Islam-Israel conflict.
This is not a dispute over territory but a war of genocide by followers of Islam against a Jewish state, Israel, and a people who are non-Muslim.
The Arab and Islamic world will never accept the Jewish state even though its historic and ancestral roots in the land precede the 7th century beginnings of Islam by well over 3,000 years. Just read the Bible.
But to better understand the modern origins of the conflict we have to return to the emerging years after the First World War.
The victorious powers, primarily Britain, France and the United States, met in San Remo to carve up the corpse of the defeated Ottoman Turkish Empire, which had occupied the Middle East for 400 years. In so doing, they created artificial borders, which obliterated ancestral, religious and ethnic boundaries and have plagued the area ever since.
On April 25, 1920, one such cartographic invention was the Mandate of Palestine. This included the geographical territory stretching from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea up to the border of the then Mandate of Mesopotamia; later to be renamed Iraq.
No independent or sovereign state called Palestine had ever existed in that territory, nor does one exist today, although a hostile and terrorist entity calling itself the Palestinian Authority occupies land in what is called the West Bank, while the terrorist and junior branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, occupies Gaza. But more of that later.
The name, Palestine, was merely applied to a geographical area; just like other non-state territories in the world – such as Siberia or Patagonia.
The Roman emperor, Hadrian, in 135 AD deliberately imposed the name Palaestina – later anglicized to Palestine – upon Jewish Judea after the second Jewish war of independence from Rome.
He inflicted this insult by enforcing the name of the hated ancient and long since extinct Philistine enemies upon the Jewish homeland in revenge for his legions barely avoiding defeat from the fierce Jewish warriors.
For the sake of those readers still understandably confused, the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine included all of present day Jordan as well as Israel, Gaza, and the Golan Heights.
Judea and Samaria (which consists of the almost 4,000 year old ancestral and biblical Jewish heartland) was not called the West Bank until the Jordanian Arab Legion illegally invaded and annexed it during the 1948 Arab-Israel War.
Jordan occupied it for 19 years, drove out its Jewish residents in the Old City of Jerusalem and from the surrounding Jewish villages, and divided Jerusalem.
Only two countries ever recognized Jordan’s illegal occupation: Pakistan and Great Britain. It was finally liberated from Arab occupation by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, a war which was forced upon Israel by ever more Arab aggression.
In 1921, then British Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, convened the Cairo Conference to gift to Arab nationalism – and to ensure Arab oil supplies – almost 80% of “Palestine.” Some 35,000 square miles of the Palestine Mandate was torn away and given to Trans-Jordan; an artificial entity that had never existed.
As a result, all of the territory east of the Jordan River (the East Bank) was lost to Jewish hopes, especially a return of the three ancient tribal lands, namely those of Manasseh, Gad and Reuben. These three were part of the Biblical 12 tribes of Israel who had also settled east of the River Jordan.
When the Palestine Mandate was officially drawn up in 1922, Arabs had already acquired the lions’ share of the land – including the very territory designated and promised as a Jewish National Home in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
Present day Jordan, whose population is over two thirds derived from Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, is quite simply Palestine in all but name!
We should also find time to recognize that 35 million truly stateless people, the Kurds, who pre-dated Arabs in Mesopotamia by millennia, were brutally disinherited out of their own independence by international oil interests and Arab nationalism.
The non-Arab Kurds, whose ancestral lands straddle Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, deserve a sovereign nation state. Justice cries out for the Kurds.
But instead it is the fraudulent Arabs – those who call themselves Palestinians along with their Palestinian Authority terrorist crime family – which is the recipient of vast inflows of financial aid from the European Union, the U.S. State Dept., the U.N., and a large number of anti-Israel NGOs.
The so-called Palestinians are an Arab invention. No such people by that name existed in centuries past. An Arab leader and PLO executive committee member, Zuheir Mohsen, admitted this as long ago as March 31, 1977 in the Dutch newspaper, Trouw:
“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 a Palestinian people …”
Here are some other quotes from Arab leaders:
“There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented. . . . Our country was for centuries part of Syria. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it.” – Local Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937.
“There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not” – Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian to Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, 1946.
“It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.” – Ahmed Shukairy, United Nations Security Council, 1956.
During the British Mandate of Palestine, Arab immigration, mostly illegal, was condoned by London. From 1922, over 100,000 foreign Arabs entered the Mandatory territory from neighboring Syria, Egypt and Transjordan – even from as far away as Sudan – with the connivance of British officials.
But during the preceding 400 year old Ottoman Turkish occupation, Arabs and Africans had also been brought into the geographical territory; the Africans as slaves from throughout the vast Ottoman Empire.
The Muslim Arabs have said repeatedly that they do not want to have a state side by side with a Jewish state but instead of Israel.
That is why they have rejected breathtakingly generous offers by Israel of “land for peace,” which carry with them enormous and near suicidal risks for Israel’s security and survival and would reduce Israel’s narrow and most populated waist to a mere nine to 15 miles wide.
In 1929, the Arabs massacred the ancient Jewish community in Hebron while Britain occupied Mandatory Palestine. Hebron is one of the four holy Jewish cities, the others being, Safed, Tiberius, and the jewel in the crown: Jerusalem.
There was no reconstituted Israel in 1929 or the existence of any so-called Israeli ‘occupied territories,’ yet the Islamic hatred of non-Muslims existed then as it exists today, and tragically will tomorrow.
© Victor Sharpe
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