Dear Students For Victory–er, Justice–In Palestine by Gerald A. Honigman
What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy G_d ? … Micah 6:8
Justice, Justice, shalt thou pursue… Deuteronomy 16:20
But the stranger that dwells with you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God… Leviticus 19:34
Dear SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine:
While you are receiving this correspondence yourselves, I hope you don’t mind that it will be shared with many others as well. So let me begin…
Let’s be honest. That begins with the very name of your organization.
It’s not “justice” you seek, but victory.
Students For Victory In Palestine better characterizes your raison d’etre–along with others aligned with you.
The opening quotes are from the Hebrew Bible, written some twenty-six centuries ago in the land you claim Jews have no ties to. It was called Israel and later, by Greeks and Romans, Iudaea–Judaea. Not until Hadrian ended the costlysecond major revolt of the Jews for freedom in 135 C.E. was the land renamedSyria Palaestina–Palestine–with hopes to end the Jews’ struggle once and for all.
Judaea (as in land of the Judaeans–Jews) was thus renamed for the Hebrews’ historic enemies, the “Sea People” from Crete–non-Semitic, let alone non-Arab, Philistines. Open http://q4j-middle-east.com to see a Judaea Capta coin Rome issued after the first major revolt. Judaea Capta–not Palaestina Capta. Tacitus, Pliny, Dio Cassius, and Josephus were just some of the ancient Roman-sponsored historians who recorded these events.
Those quotes are just some examples of the subject of justice found in the sacred writings of the Jews. And they go far in explaining the difference between the Arab (for example, “Palestinian”) and Jewish approaches to this concept…especially with regards to others.
In reality, there can’t be justice in any conflict unless the needs and legitimate aspirations of all parties are taken into consideration. But, again, justice is not what SJP seeks. The so-called “justice” demanded is for Arabs only. Forget about “the other” in this vision…
When Muhammad’s successor caliphal armies burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E. and conquered, displaced, massacred, imposed dhimmitude, and/or forcibly Arabized scores of millions of non-Arab peoples, Arab settlers, with no prior connections to those lands, cared (care) nothing about “justice” for the other. The conquered and colonized accepted Arab terms of conquest or were dispatched from Planet Earth.
Victory, not justice…
When Jews were promised, after World War I, that the long-awaited resurrection of their sole, minuscule state (from which terrain frequently yields evidence of their millennial connections, along with volumes of written non-Jewish sources for historical corroboration) would come after the breakup of the Muslim, but non-Arab, Ottoman Turkish Empire, which controlled much of the region, this was part of the same vision that foresaw “Arabia for the Arabians, Armenia for the Armenians, Judea for the Judeans, Kurdistan for the Kurds.”
Unlike the typical Arab treatment of non-Arab owners of lands that they conquered, from Muhammad’s day to the present, it’s useful to consider for comparison what was offered to Arabs–many, if not most, who valid documentation shows entered the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine from elsewhere–to address their own aspirations.
Since groups like SJP repeatedly regurgitate the same arguments, the choice for those who differ is to respond or grant victory by default. And each year, on too many campuses, a new crop of starry-eyed, naïve students arrives for indoctrination rather than education.…especially if the subject has anything to do with the Middle East.
Regarding Palestine, in 1922 London chopped off almost 80% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine, where Jews were promised a reborn national home (while aspirations of others in the region were considered too), and handed it over to Hashemite Arab allies originally based in the Arabian Peninsula.
Facts like this, not Arab fairy tales, are routinely left out of Progressive classrooms and the likes of SJP programs and literature. The Brits soon shafted Kurds the same way in the Mandate of Mesopotamia (as did the French later to millions of non-Arab Berbers in North Africa)–all in the name of Arab nationalism, one species or another, and for their own imperial petro-political schemes. See my own research on this here…
In 1947, London offered to cut in half the 20 % of what was left of the original 1920 Mandate after the creation of what would become today’s Jordan on all the land east of the Jordan River. In other words, Arabs would have wound up with some 90% of the original land of the Mandate of Palestine, but 10% for the Jews was still too much.
Victory, not justice…
Arabs refused the ’47 partition plan for the same reason they refuse any meaningful compromise today. The only peace acceptable with Jews is the peace of the grave. Again, it’s not justice that’s sought–although this chant leads the misinformed and/or innocently ignorant to cheer on groups like SJP.
In the broader context, consider how this ruler-ruled mindset impacted 35-40 million pre-Arab, native North African Kabyle/Imazighen/”Berbers”:
In Algeria, Berbers forbidden to use own language, Tamazight…riots…reported in France but ignored elsewhere in West…America, of course, had been sufficiently subject to ARAMCO (the Arabian American Oil Company) propaganda, a payoff to Saudis by Big Oil, to allow latter to produce and market Arab oil. So, ARAMCO’s message was there is just an Arab world in this region in which there are no Copts, Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Turkmen…and, of course, no Berbers and no Jews–they all came to Israel, you see, from Europe for everyone in this region is just Arab (New English Review, January 17, 2008; https://kabylia.wordpress.com/2017/09/19/berber-autumn/)
Regarding that last tongue-in-cheek sentence, over half of Israel’s Jews are from refugee families from Arab/Muslim lands–the other side of the refugee coin that usually no one, besides Jews, ever talks about.
To further elaborate this predominant Arab disregard for “the other,” which SJP typifies, follow Belkacem Lounes (World Amazigh Congress) as he responded to Libya’s Qaddafi’s denial of the very existence of the Amazigh people…
The people of whom you speak…speak their own Amazigh language…every day live their Amazigh identity…What worse offense to elementary rights is there than denying the very existence of a people…30 million in North Africa? You menace the Amazigh, warning whosoever asserts his identity will be a traitor… no worse colonialism than internal colonialism–that of the Pan-Arabist claim that seeks to dominate our people. It is surely Arabism–an imperialist ideology that refuses diversity–that constitutes an offense to history and truth…
Victory, not justice…
Not in Palestine, not in Kurdistan, not in North Africa, not regarding native Copt descendants of Pharaoh’s Egypt, not towards native Jews, not towards anyone else not Arab… And not exactly how Jews–despite rare lapses–are nevertheless expected to treat “the other.”
It’s no coincidence that while Arabs periodically outlawed the language and culture of those conquered, Israel made Arabic the second national language of the nation. Furthermore, Israel was reborn on soil Jews have called home for over three millennia and as a result of legally-recognized partitions and such. Rather than “conquering,” a nascent Israel had to avoid conquest in an attack of some half dozen Arab armies upon its rebirth in 1948…and repeated attempts since.
As discussed previously, another 35-40 million ancient, non-Arab people, Kurds, already lost perhaps their one best chance at independence in imperial petro-political games being played by London in collusion with Arab nationalism.
After the League of Nations’1925 Mosul Decision, the oil of the Kurdish north in Mesopotamia was tied solely to a newly-created Arab Iraq instead of at least being shared with an independent Kurdistan in the north. The hopes of millions of Kurds who lived there for millennia prior to Arab conquest were simply abandoned. Find their saga on a typical university course reading list–I dare you…any of the same ones loaded with required readings about nasty Zionists.
While repeated compromises and partitions occurred/were offered to both national competitors in the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine–with Arabs granted the lion’s share of the land, despite claims to the contrary–there was to be no partition in the much larger Mandate of Mesopotamia to address aspirations of millions of Kurds and others who predated Arabs by millennia.
How dare any other people (i.e., not just those Arabs call kilab yahud–Jew dogs) but Arabs claim a sliver of justice in the region they claim to be solely “purely Arab patrimony.”
So, tell me, please, ye seekers of true justice…
What campus has a chapter of Students for Justice in Kurdistan…or in Kabylia or the Amazigh People on it? Or, for that matter, even has a professor who dares to bring up the plights of such peoples?
Does Harvard? Rashid Khalidi’s Columbia? How about UC-Irvine? Ohio State, or NYU’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies? I had, let’s just say, very intimate relations with those last two way back when…
Finally, for my last example revealing the duplicitous deception practiced by organizations like SJP, let’s turn to black Africa…
Here’s how Arabs and the Arabized have viewed their ongoing conquest which continues in places like the Sudan to this very day, with literally millions having been slaughtered, displaced, enslaved, and so forth over the years…
Ex-president, Gaafar Muhammad al-Nimeiry proclaimed, “The Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into… black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission (“Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics,” Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 11, no. 2, 1973, pp. 177-78).
While many are quick to identify examples like Rudyard Kipling’s late 19th-century poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” as typifying Western colonialist/ imperialist attitudes towards the Third World, why have such blatant Arab racist attitudes been routinely given a free pass? Maybe we should ask Louis Farakhan, Jeremiah Wright, or Al Sharpton for starters? A common designation for a black African in Arabic is ‘abd …slave.
Is it that for the SJP & Co. the Arab Man’s Burden is acceptable but theWhite Man’s is not? Are the SJP’s useful Hebrew idiots in J Street, Jewish Voice For Peace, New Israel Fund, and other kapo organizations concerned about such things?
Such is the deceit and hypocrisy which typify an admittedly imperfect Israel’s critics–both on campus, in courses of one-sided, duplicitous professors or in groups like Students for Justice in Palestine–and off, where one set of lenses and standards too often is used to judge Israel and the national liberation movement of the world’s longest oppressed people, Zionism, and a completely different set is used to study the rest of the neighborhood.
The plain truth is that, like Hamas and the so-called “moderates” of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority/Fatah, groups like their campus mouth pieces–SJP and such–reject a resurrected nation of the Jews, regardless of size.
Had Arabs granted Jews a tiny sliver of the same justice groups like SJP demand for themselves, they could have had their 22nd state–and second, not first, in the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine–numerous times over much of the past century.
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