THERE ARE SETTLEMENTS….AND SETTLEMENTS….GERALD HONIGMAN
Most people associate the word these days with Jews wanting to return to lands–beyond Israel’s 1949 UN-imposed, 9 to 15 mile wide armistice line existence–which they have called home, lived on, and owned property in for millennia but which much of the world now declares must once again become Judenrein.
As others have also noted before, after the official breakup of the centuries old Ottoman Turkish Empire almost a hundred years ago, the Minutes of the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission and other solid documentation described a huge influx of Arabs coming into the original 1920, and later post-1922, Mandate of Palestine. The original area included all of present day Jordan as well as Gaza, Judea and Samaria (“West Bank”), Israel, and even the Golan Heights. Arabs poured in largely because of the explosive economic activity going on due to the Jews.
While there were some Arabs living in the land earlier, the huge increase in their own population was no doubt related to this immigration from outside of the Mandate…Arab settlers setting up Arab settlements in Palestine.
Some critics of the return of the Jews from forced exile like to cite sayings of 19th century Christian theologians, “a land without a people for a people without a land,” as alleged “proof” of the unfairness of the Zionist endeavor.
Certainly, while all national movements are flawed and come with their own blindspots, one thing is certain to anyone who has studied the conflict between Arab and Jew in the land. While there was some naiveté, Jews did not simply opt to deny the Arab presence and repeatedly tried to reach fair accomodation. What compromises has Arab nationalism–in its many assorted species–ever made with any of its own competitors?
The most “right wing/hardline” of the Zionist leaders–the one which you might have expected the “worst” from–openly admitted Arab political rights in the region…but relative rights, not solely self-centered, absolute ones. Listen to these excerpts from Jabotinsky’s Evidence Submitted To The Palestine Royal Commission in London in 1937 on this very subject…
“I have the profoundest feeling for the Arab case, in so far as that case is not exaggerated…I have also shown to you…that…there is no question of ousting the Arabs. On the contrary, the idea is that Palestine on both sides of the Jordan should hold the Arabs…and…Jews. What I do not deny is that in that process the Arabs of Palestine will become…a minority…What I do deny is that that is a hardship.
It is not a hardship on any race, any nation possessing so many National States now and so many more National States in the future. One fraction, one branch…and not a big one, will have to live in someone else’s State: Well, that is the case with all the mightiest nations of the world…That is only normal and there is no “hardship” attached to that. So when we hear the Arab claim confronted with the Jewish claim, I fully understand that any minority would prefer to be a majority.
It is quite understandable that the Arabs…would also prefer Palestine to be the Arab State No. 4, No. 5. or No. 6 (today # 22)…but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus…starvation.”
Is it not a concern that the same scholars, diplomats, organizations, and other would-be sources of ethical enlightenment who enjoy taking Israel to task never seem interested in turning this issue around on the Arabs’ own nationalist agenda?
After all, there is no doubt that Arabs have too often acted as if lands that they had no prior connections to–but conquered and forcibly Arabized (clear up to the present day) from scores of millions of native, non-Arab peoples– were lands without peoples (at least peoples deserving of any of their own political rights) for a people not without land–but claiming all other peoples’ lands in the region as merely additional Arab possessions as well. The following is a typical example of how the Arabs and Arabized explained this…
The Sudan’s 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).
Now ponder that a moment…
While many are quick to criticize Jewish nationalism (Zionism) for its real and fictional human flaws and who readily identify Rudyard Kipling’s late 19th-century poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” as typifying Western colonialist and imperialist attitudes towards the Third World, why are such blatantly Arab imperialist and racist attitudes and mindsets routinely given free passes?
Is it that the Arab Man’s Burden is morally acceptable but that of the Jews’ and The White Man’s are not?
Okay, let’s return to the Arab settlement issue in the post-World War I Mandate of Palestine…
When the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) was set up to assist Arab refugees, after a half dozen Arab states invaded a nascent Israel in 1948 to nip it in the bud and their attempt backfired, the very word “refugee” had to be redefined to assist newly arrived Arab settlers.
So many Arabs were recent arrivals into the Palestinian Mandate that UNRWA had to adjust the very definition from its prior meaning of persons normally and traditionally resident to those who lived in the Mandate for a minimum of only two years prior to 1948. Please grasp the depth of what this is saying.
Hamas’s own virtual “patron saint,” Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (for whom the rockets and terror brigade are named), came from Latakia, Syria–along with numerous other newcomers. For more information on the much neglected Arab aspect of this settlement topic, please see http://nyjtimes.com/cover/03-08-05/ThinkingAboutSettlers. Leading contemporary politicians were aware of this huge increase in Arab population due to immigration as well.
Before leaving the virtually ignored Arab angle on this timely subject, there is another twist, hinted to above, on the settlement issue which involves another rarely-discussed topic–the Arabs’ own internal imperial and colonial policies…ones which led to their conquest and forced Arabization of much, if not most, of the region in the first place. This is how Arabs get to claim over six million square miles of territory, in almost two dozen states, solely for themselves (“purely Arab patrimony,” in their own words)–not to mention the heavy Arabization of other non-Arab–but Muslim–states as well. Israel sits on less than one half of one percent of the region.
As my own book http://q4j-middle-east.com documents in detail, such subjugation continues to victimize, to this very day, scores of millions of native, non-Arab peoples. In just one additional example, consider how a North African Amazigh (“Berber”) spokesman described this tragic situation. Unlike Arabs demanding a 22nd state on the ashes of the sole, minuscule, resurrected state of the Jews, he represents tens of millions of truly stateless people in the region.
Follow this Special Dispatch of MEMRI on May 3, 2007 written by Belkacem Lounes of the World Amazigh Congress. He was responding to Libya’s late Mu’ammar Qaddafi’s all-too-typical Arab denial of the very existence of the Amazigh people:
“The people of whom you speak…speak their own Amazigh language daily… live their Amazigh identity…What worse offense to elementary rights is there than denying the existence of a people…? You menace the Amazigh, warning that whosoever asserts his identity will be a traitor…identical problems in Algeria and Morocco…There is 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…”
Substitute the Arabs’ “kilab yahud” (Jew dogs), Kurds, Copts, black African Sudanese, Assyrians, and so forth for the above victimized Imazighen and you will see the consequences and scope of the Arabs’ own far more serious, subjugating settlement problem.
Moving on…
Perhaps even more disturbing than the highly selective Arab problem with the issue of settlements is the non-Arab approach to this topic.
Besides the Arabs’ own internal imperial games noted above, nations external to the region also have a long history of imperial conquest, colonialism, and settlement of other peoples’ lands–often thousands of miles away from home. Beyond ironic, these are often the same folks who lecture Jews that they have no right to live beyond their earlier assigned post-World War II, nine to fifteen mile-wide ghetto of a state in lands where not only Jewish kings were crowned, but Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs were buried, Jewish prophets preached, and Jews lived clear up to their slaughter by Arabs in the early 20th century.
While others besides Great Britain have been indulging in such disturbing behavior (the Obama Administration’s love affair with the alleged Saudi “peace” {pieces ?} plan comes to mind, demanding Israel abandon UNSC Res. 242’s call for secure, more defensible borders and return instead to the status quo ante of June 4, 1967), it’s the Brits’ continuous blatant hypocrisy which has prompted this latest response from me.
In a late May 2013 visit to Israel, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that settlements have cost the nation support in Britain and Europe.
My initial response was to laugh.
Firstly, it was one of Hague’s earlier colleagues, back in 1967, who was the chief architect of the final draft of 242. Here’s what Lord Caradon had to say about the issue of Jews being forced back into their sardine can:
“It would have been wrong to demand Israel return to positions of June 4, 1967 … those positions were … artificial … just places where soldiers of each side happened to be on the day fighting stopped in 1948 … just armistice lines. That’s why we didn’t demand Israelis return to them.”
Next, Hague represents the same Europe which has a legacy of almost two thousand years of demonization, dehumanization, ghettoization, massacre, expulsion, and genocide towards its Jewish population. In “enlightened” England, Benjamin Disraeli still could have never become Prime Minister had his father not converted him to Christianity as a boy.
After dealing with the supreme chutzpah of the moment, however, I then contemplated how truly disgusting such hypocrisy was/is. I have dealt with this earlier, such as when comparing Great Britain’s claims over the Falkland Islands off the Argentine coast (over 8,000 miles from the British Isles) with its complaints about Jews living in Judea http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2013/3/article173.htm
But the new pressure from the British Foreign Secretary (designed to assist Team Obama’s own attempts to squeeze the Jews since Arabs have repeatedly stated that, in any renewed “negotiations,” their task will simply be to accept what Jews will be forced to unilaterally concede) demands a further expose of just how outrageous such demands really are.
Settlements ?
Try these on for size…
The following is a list of Great Britain’s fourteen “Overseas Territories”–settlements, by another name. They form just a very small part of Great Britain’s current worldwide acquisitions and associations which exist via earlier British imperial conquests and colonial exploits. Many other territories (such as India) gained independence earlier:
Akrotiri and Dhekelia, Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands. Together, they include a land area of approximately 667,018 square miles (1,727,570 square kilometers).
Israel within its pre-’67 war, United Nations-imposed, 1949 Auschwitz/armistice lines was 8,019 square miles or 20,770 square kilometers–about the size of New Jersey.
Many other nations now demanding that Jews refrain from living in places like east Jerusalem–where the remains of the Jewish Temple of Solomon stand (with an Arab Muslim shrine of conquest deliberately built atop it) and where Jews have thousands of years of history linking them–have track records of foreign conquest and acquisition similar to, if not as extensive, as Great Britain’s.
American Samoa–but no Jew in Samaria…really ?
The point to all of this, of course, is that, amidst all the barbarism and turmoil daily going on in the so-called “Arab” world, in any discussion of the settlement issue regarding Arab-Israeli politics, the Arabs’ own internal imperial and colonial settlement policies must also be taken into account along with those of Israel’s other external critics. And that rarely–if ever–occurs.
Comments are closed.
