Compare . . .
1 Palestinians have little basis for their claims against Zionists to the land:
A fundamentalist Christian view:
Since becoming a nation in 1948, the Israelis have developed a productive, fertile and wealthy nation in a desert wasteland. They have been outstanding custodians of their homeland. . . .
. . . . many Palestinian Muslims believe they also have a religious claim to the land of Palestine. That is why they have fought and will continue to fight so ferociously for it.
When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there, and the majority of them had arrived in recent decades. Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of most of the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. When the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: “There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.” In fact, Palestine is never explicitly mentioned in the Koran . . . .”
Prior to partition, Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:
We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.
In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”
The Jewish Policy Center:
“A land without a people for a people without a land” is a phrase that gets under the skin of most Palestinians, who think that the authors of the phrase looked at Ottoman Palestine, did not see them, and instead saw an empty land. Yet perhaps this phrase would have made sense if we zoomed in on the meaning of the word “people.”
Whoever coined the phrase that became a Zionist slogan did not use the word people to describe a bunch of humans dwelling on a certain land. People, in this phrase, is used to mean a nation, a state or a nation-state.
Before 1948, the Arabs who lived in Palestine had never organized themselves in a state, but had, for centuries, lived as subjects of empires that ruled them from faraway capitals, such as Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, and Istanbul. In the history of the Arabs, Jerusalem never served as the seat of any dynasty and never practiced sovereignty. At best, the city served as a provincial capital. In this sense, when the Zionists looked at Ottoman Palestine, they did not see a nation-state. They saw Arab provinces of successive empires, Arab or Turkish. This is why the land looked one without a people, that is without a nation state.
Historically, the word “Palestinian” did not refer to Arabs living in the region, but to the region itself. Some 100 years ago, the land was administered by the British, and its inhabitants were Jewish, Christian and Muslim – all of whom were identified as “Palestinian.” However, for most, their primary identity was not their nationality, but their religion.
Indeed, many Arabs bristled at being called “Palestinian,” voicing strong opposition to the label. Instead, they saw themselves first and foremost as Arabs or Muslims. Only in the mid-1960s was the word co-opted to mean Arabs.
Hence, before 1948, it would not have made sense to talk about Palestinians as opposed to Jews. The population was divided into two primary groups: Jewish and Arab.
This makes sense because a sovereign Palestinian state never existed. Therefore, there were no “Palestinian lands.” Rather, the land was part of the Mandate for Palestine, a geographical area controlled by the British after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.
From The Rohr Jewish Learning Institute:
The Palestinian peasant was indeed being dispossessed, but by his fellow-Arabs: the local sheikh and village elders, the Government tax-collector, the merchants and money-lenders; and, when he was a tenant-farmer (as was usually the case), by the absentee-owner. By the time the season’s crop had been distributed among all these, little if anything remained for him and his family, and new debts generally had to be incurred to pay off the old. Then the Bedouin came along and took their “cut”, or drove the hapless fellah off the land altogether.
This was the “normal” course of events in 19th-century Palestine. It was disrupted by the advent of the Jewish pioneering enterprise, which sounded the death-knell of this medieval feudal system. In this way the Jews played an objective revolutionary role. Small wonder that it aroused the ire and active opposition of the Arab sheikhs, absentee landowners, money-lenders and Bedouin bandits.
Comment:
. . . . Note that the local Arabs never claimed that they had a sovereign country.
. . . with
2 a humanist perspective, stripped of Eurocentric beliefs in the primacy of nationalist feelings:
[This history] refers to the groups that as a rule live outside the realm of politics and power. . . . The narrative is clear; it begins with a society in Palestine as remote as possible from politics in the late Ottoman period . . . .
They are not one mass of people. They are grouped according to choice in small social units, usually households. But, with time, they prefer to define themselves via ethnicity, gender, occupation, class or culture. They change at will, but at times are forced to, not always to their advantage. Their world is a mix of material necessity and spiritual solace. Many of them are closely connected to the land where they live or chose to settle on. They cling to the land or to their property not from a national imperative to protect the mother/fatherland, the entity, but for much more mundane and at the same time humane reasons.
These local actors are leaders as well as ordinary members of the community. They are Palestine’s women and children, peasants and workers, town dwellers and farmers. They are defined according to their religious or ethnic origins as Armenians, Druzes, Circassians, or Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews, as well as to their views on religion, whether secular, orthodox or fundamentalist. In writing about them, definitions call for a balance between their own claims and the author’s understanding of what groups them together. Feeding a family, staying on the family land or attempting to make a new life on foreign soil can be portrayed as patriotism or nationalism: for most people it is an existentialist and survivalist act. (bolding added)
So begins (pages 8-9) the history of the land by a Jewish historian:
- Pappé, Ilan. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
(I am reminded of the way our nineteenth century ancestors (who had migrated thousands of miles from their homeland) erroneously portrayed the Australian aborigines as “nomadic”, with the implication that they had no notion of attachment to any land. It is a colonialist mind-set that has always “justified” ethnic cleansing and genocide. (I use the word “genocide” according to its meaning as defined by the originator of the word, Raphael Lemkin.)
Neil Godfrey
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Moral considerations apply to individual people. They are concrete particulars. “Peoples”, in the tribal/“nation” sense, are not. It is debatable whether any moral considerations can apply to them. Thus, it makes no moral difference whether the native people of Palestine were a “people” or not. Denying them their rights, and dispossessing them was morally wrong.
The false notion seems to be that Judaism was a uniform religion, nation and culture that vacated the region after the Romans and has returned as a continuation what they were 2000 years ago.
I imagine that the Palestinians are in fact the continuation of the Jewish and other Caananite people who did not leave. Their culture evolved during that time, most either being Christians or Muslims now. This includes the oldest continuing Christian community in the world!
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/25/why-does-the-christian-west-ignore-palestinian-christians-plight
The genetic evidence would of course confirm that Palestinians are closely related to the Jewish people today apart from the European addition to the latter.
I imagine most religious claims base their concept of land claim to a cultural heritage, and suppose that the Rabbinic Judaism practiced today is the pure cultural line of descent. It is of course a concept that is assumed more than being possible to prove.
Muslims of Palestine have been so engrossed in their identity as Muslims and as Arabic speakers – History remembers them as Arabs (that is ethnic Arabs … remnants of a past Arabic invasion of a Hebrew land) – that they missed a trick when European Jews came along claiming a right to the land their distant ‘cousins’ failed to do.
Let it be considered that Muslims in Palestine may be Arab in that they speak Arabic – but they are not ethnically Arabs – And so is the case with the Lebanese and the Syrians. Rather Palestinians are more than likely to be ethnically Hebrew. Descendants of converts from Judaism to Christianity and in turn both to Islam.
Nationalism is a modern Western concept and certain Jews embraced it along with other Europeans — though a little later than their European hosts. Zionist and many Westerners in general have often taken “nationalism” or “nationalist identity” as a norm from the natural order of things and on that basis dismissed indigenous rights in all lands both European powers — and eventually the Zionists — colonized. The indigenous populations have routinely been mischaracterized in various ways (the “Arab” focus is often code for nomads on camels wandering hither and thither) that deny them genuine attachments to their homes.
A minority of Jews in Babylon, after being freed to leave by Persia, said they were going to “return” to Israel which they described as “an empty land”. Same BS as “A land without a people for a people without a land”. It was “land-grabbing” pure and simple by those who had the “might makes right” to do it.
We are mostly all the descendents of colonizing land grabbers.
What we describe as a distinct “culture” has a unique language, customs and history which for Jews began around 950BC and became even more defined under King Josiah in the 7thC BC. Every indigenous tribe threatened with starvation due to drought, famine or disease went to war with their neighbors and if they conquered them took possession of their land, women and children. They executed the men who fought and made slaves of the rest. This was no doubt the remedy of the earliest groups of homo and is well true of many mammals. What people who fall under the spell of modern globalists forget is that Western Colonizers brought more well-being, prosperity, health, lengthened life-spans and comforts than most other populations historically overall. The exceptions have become the favored and oft-repeated cudgel of the left and lack perspective, knowledge and context.
I do think if you read a little about the lives of various indigenous people prior to colonization of the Europeans you might be surprised at how much better off they were back then than they are today. Australian aborigines, for instance, are today plagued with ill health and short life spans in many poverty stricken communities whereas we know from the records of early pioneers what fine and strong physical persons they were, how their life span was into the 70s and 80s, and how much happier and rewarding their lifestyles were. Western colonizers have brought diseases and massacres and removals (genocide, if you will) to North America and Australia and are bringing the same to the Palestinians today. The colonizers regularly view the indigenous inhabitants of the lands they invade as the ones who have no inherent right to the land and need to be removed in various ways to make room for “civilization”.
And as noted by Carroll, Robert P. “The Myth of the Empty Land.” In SEMEIA 59. Ideological Criticism of Biblical Texts, 79–93. SBL, 1992 …..
It’s another instance of “terra nullius”
I am constantly amazed by a third perspective, which often goes unmentioned: What about simple humanity? If someone who lived next door to me had a loathing, hatred for me and promised death and destruction to me and all of my family no matter where any of us lived, I would not have another glass of soy milk and go shiver in my tree house. If I could not reach some accord with them where they would completely eschew and renunciate their pledge, then I would try to stop them by any means available. Why would not any rational human, much less any man, do the same?
It’s not clear what you mean here, but if, in your example, your neighbour hated you because, I dunno, you had reduced them to second class citizens through a system of apartheid, set up snipers who regularly took potshots at his children on their way to school, killed a certain percentage of his friends family on a regular basis and called it ‘mowing the lawn’, and imprisoned without due process thousands of his friends and family – then, in this sort of case, perhaps the ‘any means available’ might include looking at your own behaviour. And it would certainly put any purported ‘loathing and hatred’ into perspective.
But perhaps that’s not what you mean, and I so apologise if I misconstrued you.
Hi, Neil. I previously found this website , it’s a collection of Brian Holtz’s writings on religion. I noticed that he engaged that infamous Christian apologist Robert Turkel (Pseudonym J.P holding)a lot of times. However, I found that Holtz’s latest response to Turkel was not contained in a link there. (He wrote: “My response (already completed for his 2002-06 effort, and now being extended to address his later 2nd effort.” But there is no link of that response.) Do you know Brian Holtz? Do you know where his latest response to Turkel is? Even though it was long time ago but I would still like to read it.
Oh, I forgot to put the link of that website. It’s here: http://humanknowledge.net/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Theology/Trilemma.html
I could not imagine the situation getting worse, but with Israel now enacting the “General Plan” while the world was occupied elsewhere, I think we are now at the stage where ethnic cleansing is just carried out overtly without even an attempt to cover-up.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/11/the-israeli-army-admitted-its-staying-in-north-gaza-heres-the-next-phase-of-its-plan/
I have no connections to Palestine, but I am finding this traumatic. For me it is the helplessness of seeing such depravity without anyone in power caring.
Yes, ethnic cleansing of Gaza is well under way now that we learn the Gazans who on Israeli orders fled from the northern part will not be allowed to return. Is anyone surprised? It is what anyone who has been following Israeli and Zionist policies since the 1930s (let alone since 1948 and 1967) fully expected. If we use international law and the international court as our standard, then Israel and the U.S. are rogue states. Our “Western” “rules based order” cliché is code for unilaterally flouting the standards set down at the founding of the UN after WW2.
If the nations that outnumber the western ones in the UN are predominantly from those who were once colonized by the westerners, then I wonder if part of the reason so many of us are willing to fully support Israel is that we relate to the colonial notion of cleansing the land of inhuman barbarians for the sake of a “superior culture”.
That line has of course been made all the easier to swallow given the postwar guilt over the treatment of the Jews (by those who “liquidated” large numbers of them and those who refused them timely refuge) — but hey, now it’s the turn of the Zionists to earn their own land just the way European (and American) peoples got theirs — by genocide and ethnic cleansing of the “unspeakably cruel and inhuman barbarian” who have “no notion of historical or sentimental attachment to land”.
Islamophobia has helped fuel that image of Palestinians, too, of course, — ignoring the past history of Palestinian resistance led by socialist, atheist, Christian as well as Muslim Arabs. This image is adorned with biblical tropes of turning the desert into a land of milk and honey. It can justly be called a “desert” and “unproductive” after the colonizers have destroyed the olive trees and cultivated land of the Palestinians, of course.
The US government along with the British, Australian and most European governments, know exactly what Israel is doing and they so fully support it that they are now attempting to foster a climate — by means of media, legislation and courts — of fear to speak out for Palestinians against what the world court deemed a “plausible case for genocide”. Do you want to be seen as an anti-semite who supports the terrorism of the resistance?
It’s a very obscene time right now. Our leaders and media will go down in history as the terrorists — but by that time it will be too late for the tens of thousands of Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, Yemeni dead.
I do not believe that Penny Wong supports the current genocide, but I do wonder at this attempt to walk a middle path. I imagine she still thinks that the solution lies in a two state solution which is established by mediation.
Maybe this was once a perfectly admirable goal, even if imperfect in its proposed end game, but now it seems to be just a facade that gives some false respectability to our hopeless position. The position is that both sides need to come to the table, both sides need to make concessions. It is now just a ridiculous proposition, that somehow there is any concession Palestinians could now offer that Israel has not already taken by force.
Is our government still captive to a powerful pro-Israel lobby? I am aware that ‘Friends of Israel’, did once boast of the parliamentarians who supported them. This being a Christian Zionist group, they mostly had influence with the Liberal Party. The Labor friends of Israel group does not seem to be so extreme, but maybe they are more dangerous in the their ability to use the word ‘nuance’ like a weapon of obfuscation?
You can see the talking points, which are just one-sided excuses of ‘we try to have peace but….’
https://www.laborfriendsofisrael.au/obstacles-to-peace/
It is so convenient that the media have for so long toed the line that every negotiation has failed due to some party that was not Israel making unreasonable demands. Talk to any psuedo-expert on this crisis, and I am sure you will hear this repeated!
I don’t think the Labor government is evil, but they have become morally complicit by their allegiance to a left-wing fantasy idea of Israel that never really existed. They just cannot let it go. It is Labor’s story – lost in a sea of lobbyists, and unable to see anything beyond!
Under this regime, we are at least free to express our anguish. But, with the next government, it seems likely we will see certain antisemitism laws introduced to stifle Palestinian expression.
Do we need to follow America’s path and hit rock bottom and hope for something more substantial by political rebirth?
Surely the bottom line is that the ALP has chosen to be a lapdog of the US. Subimperial Power by Fernandes is the best encapsulation of Australian foreign policy and place in the world that I have read. Whatever the US says, the ALP jumps into it no questions asked. Yes, they are trying to out-do the LNP and shut down any possibility of being accused of risking Australia’s security at election time, but the policy is more deepseated than that.
The evidence indicates that the last time Australia had a genuinely independent foreign policy, Gough Whitlam was in all likelihood ousted with the help of the CIA.
Politicians are trained to answer questions in a way that side-steps the real issues. I expressed my concerns about a Brisbane manufacturer here producing the unit that holds and releases bombs for the Israeli aircraft currently bombing Gaza and he fell right into an emotional spiel about how terrible everything happening in Gaza was — coming across as feeling great concern. Only after he finished and one had the chance to process all he said and appeared to feel so bad about — then one realized that there was not a word of condemnation of Israel or in support of Palestinians. Very clever. I ditched my previous tendency to vote for him and switched to the Greens.
I should have added that the country most comparable to Australia in relation to the U.S. is — in Clinton Fernandes richly supported analysis — Israel. Just one of many details addressed….
Fernandes, Clinton. Subimperial Power: Australia in the International Arena. Melbourne University Press Digital, 2022. pp3f. 51f