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Fact Number 8: Legitimacy of Jewish Settlement

Two items that have become part of the conventional wisdom are that Jewish settlement in the heart of the Holy Land is illegal and that the Jews are occupiers in Palestinian Arab Land. The purveyors of these items have followed the advice of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, who developed the concept that if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough, it will be accepted as true.

The real facts and their implications can be deduced from the terms of the British Mandate for Palestine which was granted by the League of Nations in 1922, and an analysis by Professor Eugene V. Rostow.

The purpose of the Mandate was to secure the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, "it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil or religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." The omission of the word "political" from the list of the rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine to be protected during the period of creating the Jewish National Home was not accidental. The Palestine Mandate was intended to fulfill a policy of self-determination for the Jewish people, while the Arabs of the Ottoman Empire were given many states for development of self-rule.

Under the Palestine Mandate "the Jewish people" have the right to make "close settlements" in those areas - a right later protected by Article 80 of the United Nations Charter, which provides that until trusteeship agreements are concluded for certain territories, nothing in the Charter shall be construed "to alter in any manner whatsoever the rights of any states or any peoples or the terms of international instruments to which members may be parties."

The Palestine Mandate provided that, if circumstances made it necessary, the Mandatory Power could "postpone" or "withhold" the Jewish right of settlement in what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan- that is, the part of Mandatory Palestine east of the Jordan River. This was done in 1922; the Mandate authorized no other interference with the Jewish right of settlement. In short, the entire area of Palestine west of the Jordan River was reserved by the Mandate for Jewish settlement. While the Mandate ceased to be applicable in Israel and Jordan when these two countries were formed and recognized, the areas of Judea, Samaria, Gaza and East Jerusalem have not been generally recognized as parts of either country, and therefore remain subject to the Mandate notwithstanding the passage of time. Great Britain gave up its trusteeship voluntarily in 1948. In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly had recommended that the Security Council terminate the British administration of the Mandate and implement a plan for partition for Palestine west of the Jordan River. The Security Council never acted on that recommendation because the first Arab war broke out against Israel and the Security Council concentrated on ending the war.

What the Arab argument boils down to is the proposition that a claim to self-determination is universal and transcendent; whenever a group of people make that claim with respect to any parcel of territory they must immediately be granted sovereignty. The UN Charter makes no such assertion, not does customary international law. The claims of, for example, the Basques of Spain, Kurds of Iraq, and French of Canada are not recognized. And the Jewish right of settlement has not been abrogated.

One could draw further conclusions that experts in international law could quarrel about. For example, it can be argued that the State of Israel is not a "Jewish National Home". Rather, it is a secular, bi-national state, which prides itself upon being a pluralistic society, the goal of which is the preservation of its democratic regime. All communities in Israel have equal political rights in contra-distinction to the goals of the Mandate. Further, since Judea, Samaria, and Gaza are unresolved Mandatory territory, Israel does not have the right to determine who is to gain sovereignty in that area and, conversely, any group which claims to represent that entity known as the Jewish people has the right to claim sovereignty. And Article 80 of the UN Charter would prevent Israel from interfering with Jewish settlement in those areas. Under the Mandate which is still in effect in these areas, it would not merely be legitimate for a Jewish National Home to be established therein, it is "mandated" that such a home be established therein.

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Fact Number 9: Semantic infiltration, the Refugee Problem, and Palestinian Identity

Senator Patrick Moynihan defined the term ???semantic infiltration???. Semantic infiltration is the repetitive use of specific words to establish mind-sets. In the case of the Arab-Israel conflict there are several primary terms, one of which is ???refugees??? to refer only to the approximately 450,000 Arabs who left willingly or were forced out of the territory that became Israel in 1948-49. Some were encouraged by Arab leadership to leave temporarily to make way for the invading armies of the Arab states; others fled in fear; still others were forced to leave under the kinds of conditions that happen in war. This definition of "refugees" ignores the 800,000 Jews who left Arab countries voluntarily or under coercion at the same time and were resettled in Israel. What happened, in fact, was a population exchange in which one side welcomed its brothers and integrated them into the new state. The other party chose to keep its brethren in abominable conditions for two generations in order to use them as a political tool against Israel. They were quite successful with this ploy. Of the millions of refugees that have appeared on the international scene since the end of World War II, the Arabs of the former British Mandate are the longest festering sore on the conscience of the world - and their suffering has been cynically extended by Arab leadership. The perpetuation of the Arab refugee problem by the Arab states has the same central purpose as its creation: to bring about the destruction of the State of Israel.

To provide perspective, consider: since the Second World War there have been more than forty million refugees in the world. The vast majority was either driven physically from their homes of fled under the immediate threat of physical danger or political oppression. Immediately after the war, some twelve million Germans were driven into Germany from Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania. They left all their property behind. This was done with the approval of the powers participating in the Potsdam Conference - the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States. In 1947, India was partitioned and fourteen million people became refugees within a few months. Also in 1947, Finland was compelled to give up almost one-eighth of her territory and at the same time receive nearly half a million Finnish refugees expelled by the Soviet Union. In 1950, Bulgaria expelled 150,000 Turks with whom they had fought a war two generations earlier.

Tens of millions of refugees were absorbed by their own people, speaking the same language, with basically similar cultural backgrounds. Some were absorbed by foreign countries which owed them nothing except common humanity. A minority - rather more than a million - was settled in a variety of countries through the efforts of the International Refugee Organization.

The Arab nations, with their vast territories and resources, could have readily absorbed the approximately 450,000 Arabs who left Israeli territory in Palestine. In fact, the vast majority of the original refugees were absorbed. The oil-rich state of Kuwait initially took in large numbers of Palestinian Arabs but forty years later expelled them when they sided with Iraq in the war in 1991. From Judea and Samaria, which were controlled by Jordan from 1948 to 1967, some 400,000 Arabs left voluntarily, primarily to the Persian Gulf states, without aid, to better themselves. However, the remainder of the original refugees were kept in camps supervised by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The original number of refugees was distorted by the fact that the United Nations had defined an Arab refugee any person who had been in Palestine for only two years before 1948. In other parts of the world the more or less universally used description of eligibility to be considered a refugee included those people forced to leave "permanent" or "habitual" home. The number of Arab refugees further ballooned by births, failure to report deaths, addition of non-refugees who came to benefit from the handouts, food, medical supplies, and shelter. These camps, in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and the Gaza area, became, under UN supervision, fertile grounds for educating generations in hate of Israel, and breeding grounds for terrorism - paid for and sponsored by the United Nations.

And most egregiously, the refugee camps were the incubator in which the child known as the "Palestinian People" was nourished and developed. Had there been a Palestinian Arab nation or people it would have been mentioned in the treaties, news reports and other documentation concerning Palestine and the Middle East. However, major instruments such as the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the United Nations resolutions concerning Palestine and others, are completely devoid of this term.

In truth, for hundreds of years, the population of Palestine was a mixed group that came from many sources. The full details of the population history can be found in "From Time Immemorial" by Joan Peters (particularly Chapter 6) Peters shows that the concept of an Arab Palestinian people is a myth and that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Jews did not displace Arabs here - but rather the opposite. The book states on p. 168-9:

"The peoples who roamed the country in the 19th century were not... indigenous to the land. They did not stay on the land. Of the sparse population who were later counted as 'original' settled 'Arabs' in the 19th century when the arriving Jewish immigrants united with the native Palestinian Jewish population, many were in fact imported Muslim peoples from Turkey and other lands. [They were brought by] the Turks, in many cases, to protect against the wandering Bedouin tribes...

Kurds, Turcomans, Naim, and other colonists arrived in Palestine around the same time as the Jewish immigration wave began. 18,000 'tents' of Tartars, the 'armies of Turks and Kurds,' whole villages settled in the 19th century of Bosnians and Moors and 'Circassians' and 'Algerians' and Egyptians, etc. - all were continually brought in to people the land called Palestine."

" The concept of a Palestinian peoplehood is an invention of the Arab world to match the Jewish history by inventing an identity for the Palestinian Arabs that would counter Zionism. Thus has been largely accomplished the cynical rewriting of history, which in turn can only result in a perversion of justice."

A few additional observations by experts and observers on the topic of the population of Palestine and the existence of a Palestinian nation include the following:

From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries..

"There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not"

"It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."

An unbiased observer should ask the following questions: If there was a Palestine state through most of recorded history", then when was it founded and by whom? What were its borders? What was its capital? What were its major cities? What constituted the basis of its economy? What was its form of government? Can you name at least one Palestinian leader before Arafat? Was a sovereign Palestine ever recognized by a country whose existence, at that time or now, leaves no room for interpretation? What was the language of the country of Palestine? What was the prevalent religion of the country of Palestine? What was the name of its currency? Choose any date in history and tell us what was the approximate exchange rate of the Palestinian monetary unit against the US dollar, German mark, British pound, Japanese yen, or Chinese yuan on that date. And, finally, since there is no such country today, what caused its demise, and when did it occur?

And here is the least sarcastic question of all: If the people mistakenly known as "Palestinians" are anything but generic Arabs collected from all over -- or thrown out of -- the Arab world, if they really have a genuine ethnic identity that gives them right for self-determination, why did they never try to become independent until Arabs suffered their devastating defeat in the Six Day War?

Despite the above, it has to be admitted that the hoax of Palestinian peoplehood has become a reality. The world has accepted the existence of a Palestinian people for a variety of reasons, including but more serious than semantic infiltration, which are beyond the scope of this article. And the indoctrination of the Arabs in the refugee camps and in the rest of the Arab world has resulted in their internalization of this self-identity.

Thus, for all practical purposes, there is today a Palestinian people. The primary characteristic and goal of this newly established identity is the destruction of the Jewish state, an objective defined by the Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization, conceived in 1964, updated in 1967 and presently in effect.

And this newly born Palestinian people has a congenital problem that reinforces its primary goal: it came into being as a loser. And in the Arab world, where honor is a prime factor in determining behavior, the Palestinian people cannot come to terms with its loss other than by erasing it through defeat and destruction of the enemy - Israel - that caused its failure. This need to restore honor is reinforced and symbolized annually on May 15 by Nakba day, the commemoration of the "tragedy" of the creation of Israel. From the perspective of the Palestinians, there can be no peace until this tragedy is compensated for. And who were the other refugees created by the Arab-Israel conflict - refugees that no one speaks of?

Of more than 850,000 Jews in Arab lands before the establishment of Israel in 1948, it is presently estimated that there are fewer than 20,000. Most of the Arab states have been rendered virtually free of Jews - what Hitler called Judenrein. In Saudi Arabia Jews are not only prohibited from living (as in Jordan) but they are also banned from entering. In Iraq in 1948, as in Germany in the 1930s, Jews, whose roots in that region go back more than 1500 years before Islam, were ousted from government service, deprived of licenses as doctors, the universities were cleansed of Jewish students, severe restrictions were imposed on Jewish merchants and banks. Zionism was made a crime punishable by hanging. In March 1950, the government enabled Jews to leave provided they renounced Iraqi citizenship. Emigrants were allowed to take only a small amount of cash, their property left behind was legally confiscated by the government in 1951. (Interestingly, now that the United States has occupied Iraq, there may be a possibility for those who left Iraq virtually penniless to recover some of their losses.). The situation was quite similar in Egypt, including indiscriminate street arrest, imprisonment and a general reign of terror. Arbitrary confiscation of property was legalized and emigration was encouraged.

Thus, in varying degrees of harshness, some 850,000 Jews were arbitrarily driven or forced out from the Arab countries -Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Morocco and Yemen. There number is about double that of the Arabs who left their homes in Palestine in 1948. Some 700,000 were brought to Israel and were absorbed into the country. Almost all came with nothing. Their property, which certainly far exceeded the abandoned property of Arabs in Israel, simply enriched the states which had driven them out.

Neill Lochery, director of the Centre for Israeli Studies, Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College, London wrote The Israeli government has taken the first steps toward making a compensation claim against Iraq for the 123,000 Iraqi Jews who were expelled from that country following the creation of Israel in 1948. This, however, is just the tip of the iceberg, as between 1948 and 1960 some half a million Jews were forced to leave Arab and North African countries to come to Israel. Today the legal questions that surround these Jewish refugees have become central to the success of the road map and the wider Middle East negotiations???the Jewish refuges are often referred to as "the forgotten refugees." Collectively they are known as the Orientals - or by their Hebrew name, Mizrahim. Their arrival placed a massive strain on an Israel that was already experiencing severe economic difficulties, with many of the Orientals being initially housed in tents and transit camps away from established population centers. Soon many of these camps assumed the permanence of small or medium-sized towns known as development towns (some 33 were established between 1948-57, mainly in the Galilee and Negev). The rest of the immigrants were absorbed into around 300 agricultural communities established between 1948-54.

Israel's reaction to the Orientals, while by no means perfect - there was initial widespread discrimination against this group from established Israelis - compared favorably with the reaction of Arab governments toward the Palestinians who sought refuge in their countries. Here the central aim of Arab regimes has been to stop the transit camps in which the Palestinians arrived from taking on the appearance of permanent towns. In this respect most of the camps were not allowed to develop the infrastructure needed for even the most basic comforts such as sewage systems and secure housing.

Arab leaders argued that any sign of permanence would diminish the Palestinians' claim to the "right of return" - to their original houses in Israel. Privately, the same leaders confessed, and still do today, that any attempt to formally incorporate the 1948 refugees into Arab states would lead to political and social instability. For the past 50-plus years the Palestinians have been living in disgraceful conditions as the result of the Arab leadership's use of them as political pawns with the aim of securing international sympathy for the Palestinian cause and condemnation of Israel, which - in their eyes - caused the tragedy??? [the Jews] were expelled by order from Arab lands. The rationale that Arab leaders used for the effective expulsion: The Jews were removed in retaliation for the Palestinian exodus from Israel???Recent research on the plight of Iraqi Jews has revealed this to be rubbish. Even prior to the Palestinians exodus plans were being shaped to remove the Jews???The current Arab leadership is, unsurprisingly, extremely sensitive about these charges. One of the shrewdest politicians in the Arab world today, Farouk Shara, the Syrian foreign minister, addressed this charge directly at the United Nations in 1991, stating that Jews living in Muslim lands had never experienced any discrimination.

What the current Arab leadership fears is documents coming to light in liberated Iraq that will provide enough hard evidence for Israeli and American lawyers to build a compelling case for compensation for the Jewish refugees. Sadly, it's highly probable that other Arab regimes are busy shredding all remaining evidence of wrongdoing. Unlike their Palestinian counterparts the Jewish refugees do not seek the right of return to their country of origin. After much initial hardships the Oriental Jews have come to play a full and exciting role in making Israel the great melting pot it is today.

What the Jewish refugees desire is recognition of their plight from the world - and compensation for what they were forced to give up such as homes and businesses. As for the Palestinians, they should start proceedings against the Arab states that have hosted their refugees in appalling conditions for the past 55 years.

To sum up: if there is a refugee problem in the Middle East, it is not one-sided. Twice as many Jews were driven from Arab lands than left what is now Israel. The difference is that the Jews took in their brethren while the Arabs kept their kinsmen in deplorable conditions for four generations for political reasons - to use against the Jewish state. As King Hussein of Jordan said in 1960: 'Since 1948, Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem in an irresponsible manner???They have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and, I could say, even criminal.'

 

>>> Continued in Part 6