By Gerald A. Honigman, INN
And then, there are settlements.
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.
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 tha 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, ed.); 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 click here. 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 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 excerpts from 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.
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 article.
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 yet more key excerpts–these from 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
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 ?
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.
Actually, the British Mandate originally included the territories of both Jordan and Iraq which the British chose to hand over to a family from the Arabian peninsula to fulfill their (the British) dream of a pan-Arab entity under British control with Jews as a tolerated minority (Dhimmi) at most.
Professor Eugene Kontorovich may be right a 100% as to who the “West Bank” really belongs to but, unfortunately, the government of Israel as well as most of the Jewish Israelis DISAGREE with him, and, instead, take the side of King Hussein, the “Palestinians” and “the world community”, otherwise they would have settled the “West Bank” a long time ago and would have utterly refused to both negotiate with the “Palestinians” and to utilize their invented terms (“Palestinians”, etc.)
The idea of Israel expelling the Arabs is so preposterous, it makes me laugh.
They are going to be inviting more of them in without visas from the UAE and other “friendly” Arab countries!
Israel has been dismantling the results of the Six Day War for almost 40 years now!
The way it is proceeding, it seems like they’ve actually started dismantling the Jewish state (got bored with the experiment?)
How come so few Jews have noticed?
Israel Legal Rights to Judea/Samaria
@ Edgar G.:
Edgar, Edgar… The devil is always in the details:
But thank you for that incomplete piece of information – I never knew that Hussein handed it over to the PLO in order for that terrorist organization to chop off some more percent of the Mandate from the Jewish state and eventually “liberate Palestine” from you-know-who.
I also have to add that Hussein did it because Israel apparently showed weakness and caved in to the PLO terror campaign, and since both Israel and the US now are literally begging to start negotiations with the “Palestinians”, they also agree with Hussein that the PLO is/was the sole representative of the “Palestinian people”.
@ Edgar G.:
I forgot to add that in about 1988 (?) Hussein competely renounced any claim to YESHA and signed the Peace Treaty which described the Internationally recognised boundaries of Jordan being the Jordan River, with a slight adjustment or so.
How the blazes did you not know this. You are so good at unearthing difficult items , I mean this, but you ignored an important fact..
@ Reader:
How could a guy be so wrong, EVERY time he answers or poses something for consideration.
Youare totally WRONG. Jordan’s “annexation” was recognised only by the UK, whose client they were, and Pakistan, which was in a turmoil and which nobody ever listened to. The REST of the civilised world rejected the “annexation” as illegal. I was THERE ..I read the Newspapers and listened to the radio AT THE TIME OF HAPPENING. And I have a very good memory. Ahem…600.000Jews…..and….1.8 mill Arabs…and a little over half that in 1948..
Besides, don’t accept what I say, just look at the history books. As Abe Potash said to Mawruss Perlmutter..,..”dunt badder me no more abot dese noddinks…”
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Not yet!
@ Bear Klein:
So? Did Israel get to keep all of its territory? Does Israel now have all of its territory? Spain wasn’t liberated overnight, either.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Israel was reborn in 1948.
@ Reader:
Sometimes I get such a headache from all of this that I long for the simplicity of the Spaniards who just called the liberation of their country, “the reconquest.”
@ Edgar G.:
By your logic all the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria are illegal because Jordan annexed (claimed sovereignty in) the West Bank in 1948, and the faster the Jews get out of there and give it back to Jordan, the rightful owner, the better.
And most of the population there is Arab – 2.5 million vs. 700 thousand Jews…
What is there to argue about, right?
Now I’ve finally figured out what everybody wants from Israel, the illegal occupier.
In terms of what Israel lost because of the Gaza expulsion – open this link and scroll down to the very last paragraph:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-of-jewish-settlements-in-gaza
@ Reader:
No it’s not the same. France was Sovereign there, and the population was NOT expelled. Israel claimed no sovereignty in Gaza, although included in the LoN decision, and although after 1967 10,000Jjews lived there. The Arab population was not Israeli, but mainly Egyptian. No treaties had been made with Egypt about Gaza.
NO comparison…except perhaps peripherally. Gaza exported 14% of Israel’s flower industry in and before 2005. I’m just recalling something I read many years ago, so accuracy can be questionable. TODAY… Israel is the 3rd biggest producer, exporting $200 mill annually. Perhaps you have better info.
@ Edgar G.:
Why? It’s the same legal concept. And the 10,000 Jews weren’t just idly sitting there, they were a major part of Israel’s economy, and their lives were completely ruined by the expulsion, just as the lives of the 14 million French would be if they were expelled from Alsace-Lorraine.
If the government of a country is willing to put their citizens and economy through this to remove them from a piece of land, does it mean that the government STILL wants this land and considers it its own? I think not.
Especially if this piece of land has long been a disputed territory which each side of the dispute thought important enough to settle as proof of its rights to the land.
@ Reader:
You are too contentious about pilpulim. There is no satisfying you. Comparing 10,000 Gaza Jews to 14 million French, apart from the fact that Alsace-Lorraine has been French for centuries in modern history…(I think ever since Charles the Bold was killed and his daughter married off) ….I give up.
We are standing on the Lof N British Mandate For Palestine document. issued in 1922. not 3-4000 years ago.
@ Edgar G.:
You mean if France suddenly decided “To hell with Alsace-Lorraine, it’s too much bother, we are disengaging from there and expelling all the Alsace’s Frenchmen back to the “mainland” whether they want to stay or not” but didn’t officially transfer it to anybody (like Germany, for example), Alsace-Lorraine would still belong to France and not have the status of “free for the taking” by anyone who is not French, and France could return to it and take it back any time she wanted to, even if by that time it would be completely settled by, for example, ethnic Germans convinced that they live in a German province.
Interesting.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
He was accused of taking bribes from a guy named Appel, something to do with a Greek Island and a casino there. His son was also involved, and I think went to jail where Sharon might have joined him, except for his stroke.. I think it was a different son who was found guilty of illegally raising loads of outside money for his election campaign. The whole thing was bubbling, and finally was coming to a head just around the time of the Gaza departure.
I can’t recall the exact timeline, but many pundits said that the Gaza evacuation was to try to distract the public from his family corruption.
To find a politician of several years standing who is strictly honest, is like finding the needle in the haystack. Except, for now, Netanyahu, as all his charges are so obviously politically motivated and not regarded as crimes anywhere.
Feiglin might qualify, but he is not really a politician, more of a dreamer and ideologue.
@ Reader:
I know al the rest of it except the beginning of your post. At that time Sharon “could do no wrong”…stemming from his 1973 War victories. It could be “assumed” that ‘they gave it away”, and, although you say he was not alone in this matter , he was the Kingpin, and would get his way. They didn’t call him “The Bulldozer” for nothing….
I saw a newspaper report that “he forced it through” against the wishes of most of his party…
What universally recognised, legal entity did they transfer Gaza to..? By that I mean a normal State with recognised boundaries, and established legal form of government. etc. I don’t think Hamas qualifies as a State, except as a Terror State. And there’s no other group there. The PA also does not qualify. In fact, I believe that if the matter were ever to be brought before a legally installed Supreme Court, say the U.S.A Supreme Court, it would be refused, or, if adjudicated found not to be a valid, permanent “give away”..
Just my candig apinium….as a Thackeray footman says, in (I think) either the “Yellowplush Papers”. or “The Book of Snobs”.
Edgar G. Said:
This is news to me. I never understood his turnaround. Could you elaborate further? Rabin went through the same kind of over-night transformation. Could he have been corrupted, as well? I don’t remember whether Peres was always a dove/appeaser.
@ Edgar G.:
Yes, they gave it away. The decision was not made solely by Sharon although he pushed it.
Basically, if you look at the last 50 years in a wider perspective, Israel has been gradually giving away the lands retaken in the Six Day War and has been preparing the ground (literally) for a “Palestinian” state.
Once the “Palestinian” state comes into existence, Israel will become indefensible and will be forced to negotiate from a position of weakness (to “preserve and protect Jewish lives”).
The next development may be Israel in the “three sausages” as per 1947 partition recommendation.
The original post-war British idea (and what the EU AND the US, and the rest of them are working toward) was an uninterrupted area of Arab states/settlement where Jews would exist along the seacoast as a tolerated minority (no Jewish state) within Islam.
Of course, the population (both Arab and Jewish) would remain under the British control.
This is what everybody (apparently, including some Jews – consciously or not) is working to accomplish.
Of course, one is free to indulge in all sorts of fantasies and imaginings to the contrary but if one is realistic, this is where the things are heading now, and this will continue if no one will stop it.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
I think the Greeks started it, to try to infiltrate the language, culminating in banning all religious practices as well, to stamp out their stubborn practices-we all know the history of that.. As for “Judah”, well…..why should it be anglicised.. It’s a Jewish area, and named in Hebrew Yahudah-or Yehuda- ot Yahud-. So it could as easily be called by any of those variations. Anyway, it is today just a historical application, as the country is Israel. Going further why should it not be called Yisra-el. ?? Did Ben Gurion send out an English translation of his Declaration, referring to it as “Israel”..?
We also have the question of whether they were named in Aramaic, or Hebrew…? I’m getting a headache……..
@ Reader:
I’ve never understood that “they gave it way” legally, just that, to avoid further violence they decided to leave the Arabs to “stew in their own juice. I always thought that things were going well in Gaza, they had massive industry with the EU, and were part of Israel. I still regard Gaza as part of Israel, which it is politically inexpedient to take over because of the criminal crowded population. But, maybe in 10-20-50 years , things will be different.
It was only later that Sharon’s criminal involvement, along with his son’s was revealed, showing the REAL cause, to distract the public with the Gaza departure…or perhaps it was the price demanded by those who knew his private criminal dealings.
@ Edgar G.:
Good point. Shouldn’t we, then refer to it as, “Judah” instead of “Judea?” If we are going to use the Anglicized version. I have never read anybody actually using “Yesha” except to fellow Jews. And, while we are on the subject, was “Samaria” pronounced differently before the Romans mucked with the language? On a different note, the Left usually attacks the language first, redefining everything, going way back. Though Marx accepted existing usages, interestingly enough, as he opined that it was necessary to have a common frame of reference in which to communicate. Did the Romans start it? Where does that come from?
Edgar G. Said:
Good point. Shouldn’t we, then refer to it as, “Judah” instead of “Judea?” If we are going to use the Anglicized version. I have never read anybody actually using “Yesha” except to fellow Jews. And, while we are on the subject, was “Samaria” pronounced differently before the Romans mucked with the language? On a different note, the Left usually attacks the language first, redefining everything, going way back. Though Marx accepted existing usages, interestingly enough, as he opined that it was necessary to have a common frame of reference in which to communicate. Did the Romans start it? Where does that come from?
Apropos of nothing, I am reminded of this hilarious skit:
Life of Brian – ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8
And this tribute to it
Canadian Bacon (10/12) Movie CLIP – Language Police (1995) HD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyO1ILQAGsU
@ Edgar G.:
YESHA is now actually YESH becuse they gave away Gaza (Y-Yehuda SH- Shomron A-‘Aza).
I wish they’d just start and keep building and quit screaming and shouting ABOUT building (here is the expected – and desired? – response):
Note: only 1000 units were actually approved (very loudly) out of the 5000 by the “Supreme Council”.
Couldn’t they finally DO something quickly and quietly WITHOUT paying attention to the “external critics” who dream about pushing the 7 million Israeli Jews into the sea?
@ Sebastien Zorn:
A very GOOD question. I myself always refer to YESHA , never “Judea”, I think the Greeks named it Judaea.
Excellent article but I have a question which I have never seen anybody address. Why do we now say, Mumbai instead of Bombay, Myanmar instead of Burma, Kampuchea instead of Cambodia, and Beijing instead of Peking, but Judea and Samaria instead of Yehuda and Shomron when speaking English?
Good article.