A Middle East Pax Romana

The conventional wisdom that talk, negotiation and compromise are the best way to resolve conflict is not true. It certainly wasn’t true of the Pax Romana, the American Civil war or of the case of the belligerents Germany and Japan at the end of WWII. Compromise has certainly done nothing to resolve the conflicts over Cyprus, Darfur, the Ukraine and the Korean peninsula.

Likewise, talk, negotiation and compromise certainly hasn’t worked in the Arab-Israeli conflict and in the current iteration of the so-called “Palestinian”- Israeli conflict. American policy has long been to prevent Israel from achieving a decisive military victory over the Arabs.

In 1956, President Eisenhower forced Israel to abandon its territorial gains from the Suez Crisis. Similarly, following the 1967 Six Day War, the U.S. helped engineer a U.N. resolution calling on Israel to return unspecified “territories occupied” in the war. The Reagan administration stopped Israel from obliterating Yasser Arafat’s PLO forces in Lebanon in 1982, and, most recently, the Obama administration pressured Israel to limit its objectives in its 2014 war with Hamas.  Roman, G. 2016.

By removing the consequences of failure, Israel’s adversaries need not fret over irrevocable loss because they know the international community will pressure Israel to return to the status quo ante.

In violent, armed, protracted conflict, one can only win if the other side loses and, for there to be peace in this current iteration of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the “Palestinian” Arabs need to undergo visible defeat as well as acknowledge that they have been defeated. Only then can pace be born. This will also need to be the case in the coming of the inevitable conflict with Hezballah in Lebanon.

But, beginning in 1964, and certainly after 1967, the Arabs have succeeded in creating an ancient nation and people called Palestinians who have been deprived of their indigenous rights by colonising Jewish occupiers.

Mainly to reduce the threat of terror on their own citizens in the air, as well to ensure a supply of vital petroleum, Western Europe went along with the Arab charade with difficult consequences for Israel.

It is as well to get this over and done with at this stage: No Arab or Muslim state of Palestine ever existed.

Prior to 1964, and after 16 years of continuing conflict between Israel and the Fedayeen, there was never a prior concept of an Arab OR Muslim Palestine as a people, nation or state.

Particularly between 1948 and 1967, Arabs in the nascent state of Israel who were caught in the middle saw themselves as of the same nation as the Arabs in Jordan, Egypt and Syria – they were not ‘Palestinians.’  So much so, that the League of Nations, and the UN, until 1967, meant the Jews when they wrote ‘les palestiniens.’……..

These recently discovered “Palestinian People”, who allegedly demand political “self determination” were created by the Soviet disinformation masters in 1964 when they created the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

The term “Palestinian People” as a descriptive of Arabs in Palestine appeared for the first time in the preamble of the 1964 PLO Charter, drafted in Moscow. and affirmed by the first 422 members of the Palestinian National Council, handpicked by the KGB.

Why in Moscow? In the 1960s and 1970s, much like Iran (Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas, al-Sabireen…) is doing today, the Soviets were in the business of creating and supporting “liberation organizations”: for Palestine and Bolivia in 1964, Columbia 1965, in the 70s “The Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia” that bombed US airline offices in Europe, and “The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine that bombed Israelis.” But the PLO, was by far its most enduring success.

In the PLO Charter preamble, the phrase “Palestinian Arab People” was used to exclude those Jews who had retained a presence in Palestine since Biblical times and had been a majority population in Jerusalem as early as 1845. But it was Romanian Communist dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, at Soviet urging, who persuaded Arafat to abandon his claim of wanting to annihilate the Jews in Israel in favour of “liberating the Palestinian People” in Israel.

It was the first step in reframing the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews from religious jihad to secular nationalism in a quest for political “self determination”, a posture far less offensive to the West.

And the west, desperate to stop Arafat and the PLO from blowing up its citizens in the tactic of plane skyjackings perfected by these Arabs, played along with the pretence.

So desperate was the west to keep the oil flowing that on April Fool’s Day, 2014, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas signed letters requesting that “the State of Palestine” be granted accession to 15 international conventions and treaties.

This action by the Palestinian leadership, and the consequent, hurried acceptance of the Palestinian applications by the UN which was expedited in an unseemly manner by the Swiss government, raised serious questions.

This was despite a 2011 UNSC ruling that rejected a Palestinian request for membership, citing disagreements on whether “Palestine” fulfilled the requirements set forth in the UN Charter for membership.

The reason that the “ancient” “Palestinian” people should be recognized as having a state was all the more ludicrous, in that nothing had changed in the interim.

Thus, the November 2012 UN General Assembly resolution upgrading the status of the Palestinian representation in the UN to that of a non-member observer-state did not establish a state, and therefore did not grant statehood to the Palestinians.

This is because the United Nations – whether the General Assembly or the Security Council – does not have the power to grant statehood. It only has the prerogative to invite existing states to apply for UN membership and to consider if such states fulfill the criteria for membership as set out in the UN Charter.

And, by all accepted international legal and customary criteria, no sovereign Palestinian state exists/ed because such statehood can/could be achieved only in accordance with the accepted international law criteria of a permanent population, a defined territory, government and the capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

As is manifestly clear today, Hamas, as Gazan “Palestinians”, cannot even enter into relations with their brother-“Palestinians” in Ramallah, let alone oversee a defined and agreed territory of any future Palestinian state.

But more than this, the whole notion of an Arab Muslim “Palestinian” “state” runs in direct contravention of the ill-fated 1995 Oslo accords which clearly stated in Article XXX1(7) that “neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (emphasis mine) pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”

Writing in 2014, Alan Baker presciently stated:

The enthusiasm with which the international community appears to encourage and pamper the Palestinians, and to play along with their attempt to accede to international conventions, under the flawed illusion that there exists a sovereign state of Palestine, will only serve to encourage the Palestinian leadership in its refusal to return to a negotiating mode in order to reach a final status agreement with Israel, solving all the relevant and outstanding issues that can be solved only through negotiation.

As such, the Palestinian leadership assumes that the international community will go along with any Palestinian demand, thereby obviating any need for negotiation and agreement.

One has only to view and/or read the vehement and violent “Palestinian” rejection of the 140 page Trump Peace to Prosperity Plan to understand better what Baker forecasted 5 years ago.

And so, to return to this article’s opening thesis, NO peace will be possible until the “ancient” “Palestinians” are thoroughly defeated in (the coming) war and where no constraints are made upon Israel.

It is time that the international community stopped lying to itself, stopped relying on cheap politicization rather than legal competence and international law, and accepts fully that this last vestige of the 100 year Arab-Israeli conflict has been protracted only through self-serving lies in that community which have nothing to do with either international law OR treaty.

When Negativity Masquerades as Considered Commentary

In the Jerusalem Post, Seth Frantzman has taken to the op-ed and commentary pages with a vengeance. This may be due to his new post as op-ed editor or even to his new position as Executive director of a forum he founded, but, here, I refer to the vacuous generalisations in his 25 June  2019 article “Five Takeaways from President Trump’s ‘Peace to Prosperity’ Palestinian Plan’

Frantzman’s article is a laundry list of negativity. I list his negative comments in chronological order with my commentary as appropriate.

1. To begin with, Frantzman’s use of scare quotes around ‘Peace to Prosperity’ in the title is not only an immediate give-away of the negativity to follow, but a hackneyed use of that strategy by a writer who gets paid to provide (hopefully readable) commentary that is not biased.
2. After some obligatory and bland background information, Frantzman then launches into the meat and potatoes of his blatant bias. “What is immediately striking is that much of the plan, which looks more like a brochure or a snazzy business concept, is generalizations.”

I will talk more about the uselessness of generalisations as scribed by Frantzman himself, but here I would merely like to provide a reference to negative comment number two by Mr Frantzman.

3. In like vein, Frantzman then moves on to negative comment three under his subtitle “Grants: Reinventing the wheel or putting a Trump brand on Palestinian issues”. In case the reader was not aware that Frantzman was writing a hatchet piece, he elucidates thus:

“Basically, it sounds like replacing existing models of funding for the Palestinians…The plan appears to have two main goals in 10 years: double the GDP of the Palestinians, and create one million jobs….It actually doubled since 2009, when it was estimated at $7.2 billion, according to the World Bank. So, in fact, it has already doubled in the last 10 years.” The Palestinian GDP is larger than that of Somalia and South Sudan…”

Frantzman here implies (states?) that because the “Palestinian” GDP is larger than that of Somalia and South Sudan, any further attempts to bring economic prosperity through additional grants which may lead to peace and stability is a re-inventing of the wheel. As he says, the GDP has already doubled, so why bother. And just to drive the point home Frantzman writes: “What is interesting about the plan is that in some of these cases, there were already existing models for supporting Palestinian civil society or careers for women. The US in this respect is reinventing the wheel with some of the proposed grants.” He concludes this section of his hatchet piece with “Some of this isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but putting the Trump brand on it.” In other words, while some of the Kushner roll-out could be of value, Frantzman demonstrably takes issue with it because it is a brainchild of the Trump administration. It has a Trump “stamp” on it. No other reason is offered.

4. In his next sub-section titled “Elephant in the room: Israel”, Frantzman complains that “The prosperity plan appears to be presented in a vacuum in which Israel’s role is hidden from view.” He then embarks on an itemisation of the ways in which Israel is responsible for running a trade barrier and flouting rule of law. He states that the stagnating “Palestinian” economy is due to Israel and the constraints it puts “Palestinians” under due to their inability to move “freely across borders”. Further, Frantzman writes that “In areas where Palestinians sought to build access roads, such as developing Rawabi in the West Bank, they ran into problems from Israeli bureaucracy. So the hurdle is not just about money, it is about Israel (emphasis mine) and the need to get Israel on board for this plan.” Nowhere in this long sub-section is the reason for restriction of access and resulting stagnating economy put at the feet of Hamas in Gaza and the PA in Ramallah who have sent waves of killers across the borders to kills Jews and thus necessitate crossing restrictions to save Jewish life. Frantzman now begins to read like a Ma’an op-ed.
5. Of course, there may well be a good reason for Frantzman’s Ma’an-like commetary. In his own words, “I used to lecture at a Palestinian university, and I wonder what my former students would think of this.”

I have no issues whatsoever with Frantzman having taught at Bir Zeit or wherever. Some of my best friends are Arabs. But what I do have an issue with is that when an op-ed editor  of a national daily and executive director of some forum or other uses his position to write a hit piece on possibly one the most inventive peace initiatives in the last 50 years.

In closing, Frantzman opines: ‘This plan, like so many before it, contains a lot of generalizations and hopeful words.” But nowhere in his commentary does Frantzman ever come up with a single concrete workable idea on how to achieve the peace that the current American administration is trying to establish. Frantzman’s article is full of generalisations and context-free statements that tell only part of a story of Arab intransigence over seventy one years.

In continuing desultory negative fashion, Frantzman finishes his commentary by asking in plaintive tones“…if you don’t consult them and ask what they want, then how can you help them?…”

He must surely be ignorant of the history of the past 71 years where the likes of the Mapam, Mapai Israeli labor and the HaShomer kibbutz movement , New Labor, and Blue and White AND whatever current iteration of the Labor party Ehud Barak currently dreams of forming, DID ask the Arabs what they wanted. He possibly doesn’t know that their unequivocal and unchanged answer was that they wanted the removal of an Israeli Jewish state from the Middle East (is Frantzman unaware of the goals of lawfare and BDS?) based on the ludicrous myth that the “Palestinians” are indigenous to the Levant and that their “land/country/nation” was appropriated by the Jews. Frantzman must also needs be ignorant (or recklessly dismissive) of the Barak and Olmert offers of statehood, the latter of which offered the “Palestinians” MORE land than even they bargained for. Saeb Erekat will vouch for that.

Frantzman would do well to be mindful of Kushner’s statement re generalisations instead of the litany of negativity and drag-downs he evinces: “When people criticize, the question I would ask them is what is your (emphasis mine) idea, what ideas are you putting forward….it is easy to be against things, but…it is not going to help the region…we’ve tried to…take the harder task of being for something. And we’ve put out 140 pages of details.”

For a dismissive Frantzman, and in his words, those 140 pages of carefully and painstakingly thought out details which in some areas echo the successful Marshall Plan to revive a wrecked Germany is nowt but “…a  brochure or a snazzy business concept…”

I am currently unsure whether Frantzman feels he is under pressure to publish given his new responsibilities, but, once again, he would do well to heed Kushner’s words in this regard: “The ways of the past have not worked…”

Here, Frantzman has no option but to agree, whether he considers Israel the “elephant in the room” or not because he came up with not a single concrete idea to push for peace. Questions and issues to “…be directed to Jerusalem and not Ramallah…” as he puts it , are nothing but vacuous more-of-the-same hitherto useless verbiage. And, finally, even Seth Frantzman  cannot gainsay Kushner’s parting words in his June interview when he states that that:”… Palestinians, don’t have a great track record in getting a deal done.”

In rising in the ranks of the hierarchy at the Jerusalem Post, one would expect Frantzman to be more balanced in his commentary because as a writer, he performs a public service. With “service” such as that provided in Frantzman’s June 25 commentary (sic), one could just as easily get one’s news and views from Al Jazeera.

Or Ma’aan.

Lies, Dissembling and Deceit

After 71 years of “pining” for their “ancient and indigenous” “homeland”, but with no political progress of any kind visible, over seven decades one must question whether the PA under Mahmoud Abbas is at all interested in peace and/or a negotiated settlement.

The short answer must clearly be “No” and is part of a decades-long exercise in double speak that some influential countries take as true statement of intent. This article will explain why, for over 70 years, the Levantine Arabs (PLO, PFLP {and derivatives}, Fatah, the PA and Hamas) have never been interested in peace.

The Palestinian Authority Charter dissected

The PLO, founded in 1964, became recognized and declared itself to be the legitimate representative of the “Palestinian” people wherever they are and the only agency empowered to negotiate on their behalf.

In 1964 too, during Arafat’s reign of terror, the Palestine National Authority (PNA) Charter was created which was a mixture of fiction and proven double-speak. Like the demonstrable history of dealing with the former mandate’s Levantine Arabs, the Charter stated highly debatable theories and some downright incorrect ones.

For example, Article 1 of the PNA charter states that: “Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people…” This statement is a lie because it makes no mention of the legal homeland of the Jewish people who lived there for the previous 3,000 years.

Article 2 states: “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate is an indivisible territorial unit….” Here we have some lexical sleights of hand . If Palestine “during the British mandate” was “indivisible”, then Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan have no right to exist. But Israel’s Arabs in Jordan and Lebanon have tried that already and got roundly smacked.

Article 3 continues: “The Palestinian Arab people possess the legal right to their homeland” Here is an example of verbal deceit. Arabs do indeed have a legal right to a homeland if they wish. However, the “Palestinian” Arabs in this particular scenario opted for war. Three times. And lost ever increasing amounts of territory which Israel has always maintained would be subject to a negotiated return in any final status settlement.

Article 5 “The Palestinians are …Arab nationals”. This is a confusing statement because if there is only an Arab Muslim ummah (nation) and no concept of state (See “indivisible territorial unit’ of Article 2), then the demand for a “Palestinian” “state” flies counter to the wishes of the ummah for an “indivisible” new and independent Arab entity called Palestine.

Peace Offers to end all Peace Offers

Anyhow, in 1993, it was the PLO which negotiated the Oslo Accords with Israel, which set into place, in 1994, the Palestinian Authority in certain specific regions of Gaza and Judea & Samaria.

Theoretically, the PA could speak only for those in those areas, under its authority. But over time, Israel began dealing only with the PA and not the PLO even though the offices of the PA were filled in the main by PLO people and where Arafat’s money-man and successor, Mahmoud Abbas, was head of both the PA and the PLO.

Thus it was that when Ehud Barak offered Arafat a state in 2000, he was speaking to him as head of the PA. In 2008, Abbas, as upholder of the PA Charter Article 22: “The People of Palestine believe in peaceful coexistence…” refused Olmert’s historic offer of peace AND a state, including forgoing sovereignty of Jerusalem because Abbas (mis)calculated on getting a better deal seeing that GW Bush was on the way out and that Olmert was finished politically. In 2009, Abbas was quite content to display the PA Charter’s Article 12 on Arab unity (“The Palestinian people believe in Arab unity….”) when the December 2008 Israeli operation against Hamas in Gaza (Cast Lead ) was initiated because it would politically and physically weaken his Arab “brothers”.

The flips and flops of the Arabs continue into 2019 when Abbas’ PA refuses to attend the latest peace initiative aimed at ending conflict. Dubbed the “Deal of the Century”, this stage-driven economic revival plan for Gaza and the “West Bank” as a precursor to a negotiated border settlement has also been vetoed by Abbas.  Given his refusal to two stunning previous Israeli offers which included more than 100% of the land he claims he wanted for a Palestinian state, it is no big surprise Abbas has announced that the PA has already rejected Trump’s peace proposal in his yet unpublicized “deal of the century”.

Orwell at the UNSC

Abbas’ fine words (and some downright porkies: We are the descendants of Canaanites that lived in the land of Palestine 5,000 years ago…) to the UN Security Council in February 2018 make the casual reader gasp as to the Orwellian nature of his address.

I do not here intend to counter these items of Abbas’ speech because to do so would give the man’s claims a veneer of legitimacy. The reader can make the judgement for her/himself.

For example, Abbas stated “We have been committed to fostering a culture of peace, rejection of violence, pursuit of sustainable development…agricultural farms and technological production, as opposed to establishing weapons factories…”

As another example, in Feb 2018, Mahmoud Abbas said, “The Palestinian people…have made contributions to humanity and civilization witnessed by the world.”

And, just to pick a third and final example of systemic dissembling by the PA/PLO, Mahmoud Abbas stated at that same meeting that he had been on “…a long journey and efforts to create a political path based on negotiations and leading to a comprehensive and just peace, as you are aware, we participated in the Madrid Conference in 1991 and signed the Oslo Accords in 1993…”

It thus becomes difficult to reconcile these fine words with Abbas’ adherence to the PA’s 1964 Charter where Article 9 states: “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.”

Nor does Abbas apparently suffer any intellectual dissonance by supporting Article 10 of the Charter he espouses: “Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war. This requires its escalation, comprehensiveness, and the mobilization of all the Palestinian popular and educational efforts and their organization and involvement in the armed Palestinian revolution.”

And when we remember Abbas’ stirring words to the UNSC in 2018 about the value of history and the incontrovertibility of its facts, Abbas then supports Article 20 of his organisations Charter which states  “The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history.”

Demonstrably, the “Palestinian” leadership will say (and has said) anything you want to hear in order to achieve its goal.

Jerusalem: the Mecca we don’t know about

But in this 71 year old “quest” for “Palestine’s “ “indigenous Arabs to “regain” their homeland, with the ancient and holy Muslim city of Jerusalem as their capital, never once is Jerusalem mentioned as an issue in the Charter. Not heard of even, in 1948. Not in 1964. And not in 1968 (their revised Charter…). Only the refugees and right of return is mentioned.

As is well known, Jerusalem is not the place to which Muslims pray, this “sacred” Muslim city is not once mentioned by name in prayers, and it is connected to no mundane events in Muhammad’s life.

The city never ever served as capital of a sovereign Muslim state, and it never became a cultural or scholarly centre. Little of political import by Muslims was initiated there (Pipes, 2001).

In fact, it was only a long time AFTER the death of Mohammad that the Umayyads, a Muslim dynasty from Damascus, Syria, built a second mosque in Jerusalem, again on the Temple Mount, and called this one the Furthest Mosque (al-masjid al-aqsa, Al-Aqsa Mosque). It is only through this subterfuge that the Umayyads retroactively gave the city a role in Muhammad’s life….

Like everything else in the so-called “Palestinians” “struggle” for a “homeland”, Jerusalem, Israel’s capital was used only as a political pressure point to delegitimise Jewish legitimacy in the ancient city.

To illustrate this, Muslim scholars over the centuries had variously theorized about the prophet tying horse to the eastern or southern walls—but not one of them before the Muslim-Jewish clashes at the Western Wall in 1929 ever associated this incident with the western side. Once again, politics drove Muslim piousness regarding Jerusalem (Pipes, ibid).

In other words, its non-mention in the PA Charter notwithstanding, Jerusalem, for Muslim interests, served merely as a powerful vehicle for mobilizing Muslim opinion internationally. In this regard, post-1929 claims of newly-found passionate Muslim attachment to Jerusalem were only part of a public relations exercise to delegitimise Jewish history and indigeneity in the region.

This is echoed by June 6, 2019 article by Pinhas Inbari in his article in JCPA (vol 19; no. 8) where he says that the refugee issue (and not Jerusalem) is the “essence” of the PLO, and without the Palestinian refugee problem, the PLO would not exist.

Abbas’ PA and the Gazan dictatorship are given far too much credence as potential negotiating partners. They are not interested in peace with the Jews.

Of Might and Men

Published in English only in 1972, PFLP spokesman Ghassan Kanafani in his seminal pamphlet on the 1936 Arab revolt against the British nominates three main enemies of the Arabs. These enemies were: “the local reactionary leadership; the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine; and the imperialist-Zionist enemy.”

In 2019 as in 1936, it has been made clear that the neighbouring Arab regimes have no sympathy for the “Palestinians” and the three most brutal examples of this deep dislike were the Jordanian massacre of “Palestinians” in 1970, the Chrisitan Arab Phalango massacre of same in Lebanon in 1982, and the recent 2015 massacre and wipe-out of “Palestinian” men, women and children in the Yarmouk camp in Damascus in 2015.

With regard to the massacre of the Syrian “Palestinians”, as the fate of the obliterated Palestinian Yarmouk camp became known, Abbas rejected a secret European initiative to transfer the refugees from the camp to the abandoned site of Aqbat Jaber in Palestinian-controlled Jericho, a fully PA administered area in what is popularly referred to as the “West Bank”.

Mahmoud Abbas rejected the initiative, on grounds that the right of return does not apply to territories in the Palestinian Authority but to Israel. In private conversations, however, senior Palestinian officials said that the Palestinian Authority did not want the refugees from Yarmouk within its boundaries because they supported Hamas.

Mahmoud Abbas will lie, dissemble and deceive regardless of the terrible cost in human lives and suffering of the people he says he fights for. How else can we reconcile his 2018 words to the UNSC (“Seventy years have passed since….6 million Palestine refugees continue to suffer from the cruelty of exile and loss of human security. “) with his documented refusal to save his own “people” from a known massacre in progress in Damascus?

For their part, the “local reactionary leadership” so bemoaned by Kanafani in 1936 continued its path of chaotic alliances and enmities. In 1969, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) split from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). And both the PFLP and the DFLP who’d had bitter experience of the Jordanian and Lebanese authorities, advocated overthrow of their Arab brothers in unity in alliance with local parties as well as later being violently opposed to Sadat’s Egypt.

As far as Kanafani’s “imperialist-Zionist enemy” is concerned, 71 years after the declaration of the State of Israel, unending conflict remains the strategy of the PA, Fatah and Hamas to attain the goal of dismantling the State of Israel.

In spite of this, Israel has for decades cultivated secret ties with the monarchical Arab dictatorships in the Gulf.   Saudi Arabia in particular has dropped any pretence or semblance of lip service to the Palestinian cause. The Sultan of Omar hosted Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the country. Qatar has direct channels of communication with Israel and Bahrein defended Australia’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of “Israel” – in a tweet in Arabic, no less.

Those Who Ignore the Lessons of History…

With Trump’s economic summit on the future of “Palestine” only days away, it should come as no surprise that Abbas and his advisers will revert to past behaviour to torpedo even these measures to bring an end to the conflict and to underline that nothing the United States can offer will be enough.

This is arguably because the Palestinian National Charter of 1964 (amended in 1968) has never been about peace in the Middle East. It has ONLY been about the removal of the Jewish state from the Middle East.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that the time for a negotiated peace is long past. It is now time for an imposed peace with an annexation of parts of Judea and Samaria in return for a guarantee for an autonomous Palestinian Arab entity where Israel has military control of the Jordan valley.

Seventy one years of Arab terror against Israel has shown the world where their hearts truly lie. And seventy one years has shown that if peace is not imposed, the Levantine Arabs will continue to lie, dissemble and deceive. Too many lives have been lost to allow this to continue.

 

 

The Cairo redux

A recent Reuters article penned by Samia Nakhoul on June 2 outlines a laundry list of reasons why Trump’s peace initiative is unfair to Arabs and doomed to failure.

However, Nakhoul skirts around a number of core issues which reveal the actual focus of her opinion piece.

Nakhoul starts by saying that the initiative is essentially “…a plan to finish off the Palestinian cause.”

For 71 years, and particularly after 1964, the unequivocal “Palestinian cause” has demonstrably been the dismantling of the Jewish State.

In 71 years since Israeli independence there has not been a single “Palestinian” peace initiative. There have, however, been continual calls for Israel’s destruction.

Nakhoul quotes an unnamed “Arab source’ as saying that the peace initiative will not “… give justice to the Palestinians.”

On the question of “justice” for “Palestinians”, it is worth noting that Nakhoul’s understanding of political justice includes Arab rule over Jerusalem, a right of return for 5 million “Palestinian” ”refugees” in perpetuity, and a standing Arab army within the borders of the additional Arab state he envisions.

Nakhoul continuously refers to the term “Palestinians” as if this entity exists historically. A cursory look through the history books will show that such an entity has never existed. It is true that for around 30 years, the term Palestinian referred to the Jewish inhabitants of the British Mandate Levant after the defeat of the Ottoman Turks.

It is also true that Palestinian bodies/organisations such as the Palestine Post, the Palestine Orchestra founded by Bronisław Huberman in 1936, and the United Palestine Appeal were in fact Jewish entities which became the Jerusalem Post and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and the United Jewish Appeal as we know them today.

The same is true of the 1939 Palestine soccer team which played a series of games in Australia. That team consisted of player names like Ginzburg, Resnik, Werner, Viner and Liberman – an all-Jewish team of players who played for Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel.

For their part, Mandate Arabs of the time eschewed the term “Palestine” as being “Jewish” and “Zionist.” For them, they were Muslims first, and “Southern Syrians” second.

Undeterred, Nakhoul ignores the fact that there has never been an Arab OR Muslim nation, state, country or people called Palestine/inians. Indeed, until the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Cairo in 1964, “Palestine” and “Palestinian” had no meaning for Mandate Arabs. As late as 1967, even the UN did not refer to the term “Palestinians” merely calling them “refugees” (Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967).

Even other Arab states did not recognise this political group (PLO) until the Rabat Summit of 1974. For the Mandate Arabs and for the PLO (or PA of today), “Palestine” was just a part of the “Arab Muslim national homeland” that had to be liberated from the “infidel” Jews. Nakhoul further finds no cognitive dissonance in the fact that Levantine Arabs called their homeland, “Jazirat al-Arab” or “Island of the Arabians”. This is quite understandable given that, in general, a people give their name to a country, and not vice-versa. And as a final offering on this point, I suggest that in order to be considered a separately identified people, those people would need a common culture, history, often language, etc. that is different from other people. Today’s “Palestinians” have none of those things; they are totally indistinguishable from any other Arab with the exception that their “history” goes back less than 60 years….

In other words, the name “Palestine” and many other specific features of the 1922 Palestine Mandate were too closely associated with Jews and Zionism to have offered much of an attraction for Muslim Arabs. The term was appropriated by Arafat in 1964 merely as a bridgehead to delegitimise the right of Jews to a Jewish state.

Nakhoul then quotes Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy as saying that Trump’s peace initiative based on “positive economic proposals could be lost by the attempt to skirt around Palestinian rights.”

The casual reader might wonder what are “Palestinian rights” now that the veneer of Palestinianism has been peeled back to reveal what it is historically.

Those “rights” were enshrined in the 1947 U.N. General Assembly resolution recommending the partition of the territory of the national home for the Jewish people into two new independent states, the one Jewish and the other Arab. By refusing the recommendation and opting instead to declare war in May 1948, the Arabs lost any right to a “state” of their own determination by an definition of the laws of armed conflict. The Arabs of Palestine and their supporting neighbours then compounded their error with two further full scale wars in 1967 and 1973. There is no need to add anything further regarding “Palestinian rights” for an entity which has consistently demonstrated that they want not a homeland for what are today’s Israeli Arabs, but rather the destruction of a Jewish one.

In 2019 as in 1947, the issue is well summarised by Walter Russell Mead who stated:

“The real problem is exactly what it has been for sixty years: deeply rooted Palestinian opposition to a two-state solution. While many Palestinians are ready to accept that solution, many of those see it as only a temporary step on the road to a single, Palestinian state, and a very large group of Palestinians stands with the Hamas leadership in rejecting the legitimacy of Israel on any terms.”

 

The intentions and meaning of Donald Trump and the American peace plan remain in inverse proportion to meaning and intent of the declarations and actions of the Palestinians.

In the Middle East, more than anywhere else perhaps, blood begets blood, and the latest outright refusal of the PA and Hamas to consider peace and prosperity for their constituents in addition to a negotiated political settlement, is but another “NO” in the long line of Arab Muslim “nos”  in this 100 year war.