There is Already an Arab State and Even a Palestinian State
There is Already an Arab State and Even a Palestinian State
By: Dr. Yoram Shifftan
In 12 September 2003 Maariv, we find top Palestinian negotiator, Saeb
Erakat, saying: "Yasser Arafat was the first Palestinian leader to
recognize the existence of the state of Israel in 78% of historical
Palestine i.e. in the borders of 1967. He agreed to the establishment of
a Palestinian state next to Israel in the rest of the 22%". Two days
earlier in the BBC program 'Hard Talk' he also referred to Cisjordan as
the "historic Palestine". In both cases he was not challenged. This is the
usual Arab present terminology, that the West Bank and Gaza constitute
22% of Palestine, a terminology which was unfortunately adopted not
only by Arafat but also by his co-laureate for the Nobel Prize, Israel
ex-minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Shimon Peres. [A Nation Working Against Itself]
"Both Cisjordan and Transjordan made up historic Palestine." (p. 22,
Julius Stone, Israel and Palestine: Assault on the Law of Nations. The Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1981). Furthermore, this historic
Palestine is the same Palestine that appears in the international legal
documents, e.g. in the documents of the League of Nations. Equivalently,
both the present kingdom of Jordan and Western Palestine comprise
Palestine.
The West Bank and Gaza constitute 22% of Western Palestine (Cisjordan)
i.e. 22% of one fifth of Palestine, not 22% of all of Palestine. It results that according to the false Arab Terminology, even if Israel
gave the totality of the West Bank and Gaza to be an additional Arab
state, the claim will arise that this is still unfair because the
"Palestinian people" get only 22% of Palestine and the Jewish people get
78% of Palestine.
But if the truth were told, then it is seen that there is already a
"Palestinian State" which is furthermore located in four-fifths of
Palestine. In other words, the correct use of words changes everything
as to the perception of the Arab-Israel conflict and its resolution.
In fact, even the above statement that there is already a Palestinian
state in four fifths of Palestine is superfluous since it is based on
the false assumption that there is differentiated Arab Palestinian
Nation (which deserves a separate state), which even the Arabs and the
Palestinians themselves did not claim until very recently, see also
Julius Stone, 1981.
The Arabs always emphasize that they are one "Arab nation" (see, for
example, the founding documents of the Syrian and Iraqi Baath parties.
An Arab claim is that they are one nation that was divided and ruled by
the colonial powers). Indeed from cultural, historical, religious,
demographic, linguistic, ethnic, the Arabs are one nation. It is the
custom of national self-determination that one nation deserves one state
only. Which means for example one vote only in the U.N. It results that
according to the Arabs' own logic they deserve one state only. Which
means that they should reduce the number of their states and not
increase it further. The present existence of more than twenty Arab
states is an unparalleled concession to the Arab nation. It is a glaring
injustice in particular in view of nations like Tibet and the Kurds that
do not have even one state.
It is well documented (Julius Stone, 1981) that when the principle of
self-determination was applied in 1917 on the occasion of the land
distribution following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, a Jewish
and Arab national movements appeared simultaneously as liberation
claimants. Only one undifferentiated Arab nation was put forward by the
Arabs themselves in 1917 and it was only in the 1960s that Palestinians
began to claim to be a separate nation.
Until about the beginning of Oslo the truth was championed by Israel's
Ministry of Foreign Affairs but it has been concealed since the beginning of Oslo. Amazingly,
even now, some Israeli politicians say, for example, that there will be
a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza if only terror will stop.
From this the world can only conclude that there is no Palestinian state
already. Furthermore, if some Israeli politicians and other assume that
the Palestinians are a separate nation, and that there is no Palestinian
state already, and that Palestine is only Western Palestine, then why
should they expect on the basis of these three assumptions that they can
obtain peace in a situation where the Palestinian nation obtains only
22% of Palestine. It would be unfair to give the Israelis 78% of
Palestine. In other words, even the maximum envisageable Israeli
concession still looks unfair.
The wrong terminology, and the concealment of objective, historical and
legal facts if they have a pro-Israeli implications, also carry a cost
in Jewish blood. It increases the sense of unfairness and frustration of
the Palestinians and their friends since many of them genuinely do not
know the truth, so the wrong terminology and the concealment of the
truth increase their motivation to attack Israel and destroy Jewish
life. It is irresponsible to indulge in this. Using the right
terminology and telling the truth is not only a requirement of
intellectual honesty (which requires that a factual truth is asserted in
a manner invariant to one's political position) and a question of
effective Hasbara policy but is an imperative of life-and-death. Why not
say the truth even if only to assuage the murderous motivation. What a
degree of self-hatred and/or ignorance and/or intimidation and/or a need
to appease and buy Arab vote within Israel, that produces such a
self-denial? This irresponsibility is only comparable to the
irresponsibility involved in forgetting to proclaim that according to
International law Jewish settlement in the whole of Western Palestine is
to be actively encouraged. [Jewish National Rights and the Road Map]
Again by avoiding to declare this legality some may conclude that the
blood of the settlers is free. Wrong Hasbara = spilled blood. Wrong
Hasbara costs life and is therefore against Jewish and universal ethics.
The Israeli government should never have stopped, what it still did in
the eighties, emphasizing that there is already a Palestinian State
which furthermore extends on the larger part of Palestine. That in fact
the whole of Palestine was meant to be, according to the original
decision of the League of Nations, a Jewish State. That there was never
an intention by the international bodies to create an independent Arab
State in Transjordan (Eastern Palestine). There was no such an intention
even during a later decision (September 1922) of the League of Nations
"to withhold","to postpone", the application of the Jewish National Home
in Transjordan.
Not all Jews agreed with this postponement, and those that agreed did so
very reluctantly since even the earlier allocation of the whole of
Palestine towards the fulfillment of the Jewish people's right of
self-determination was already a tiny allocation as compared to the vast
areas and resources allocated to the Arab nation. In the words of Julius
Stone, 1981, p.16: "the territorial allocation made to the Arabs (as now
seen in about a dozen Arab sovereignties in the Middle East [not to
speak of many Arab sovereignties elsewhere]) was more than a hundred
times greater in area, and hundreds of times richer in resources than
the "Palestine" designated in 1917 for the Jewish national home.".
After all, Jews and Arabs lived for centuries all over the Middle East,
Asia and Africa and in many places the Jews preceded the Arabs. So there
was no reason to favor the Arabs to such an extent and to allocate to
the Jews Palestine only. It is not for nothing that the Arab
representatives in the Versailles Peace Conference were very happy and
satisfied (and they expressed it explicitly) with the allocation of the
whole of the Middle East - apart of Palestine - and its vast resources
to the Arab nation.
But even those Jews that reluctantly agreed to withhold the right for
Jewish self-determination in the Transjordan part of Palestine did so
with the clear assurance that Jewish self-determination in Cisjordan, a
fifth of Palestine, will be realized soon and be unchallenged. This was
indeed unambiguously formulated in the "MANDATE FOR PALESTINE CONFIRMED
BY THE LEAGUE COUNCIL ON JULY 24, 1922, AND THE BRITISH MEMORANDUM
RELATING TO TRANSJORDAN APPROVED BY THE COUNCIL ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1922"
(Julius Stone, 1981, pp 148-151).
The earlier concessions made by the Jews and imposed on the Jews, namely
that less than one percent of the Middle East will be destined for a
Jewish state, and the later concession that Jewish rights will be
"withheld", "postponed", even in four fifths of this tiny allocation,
are never mentioned now. But to determine the justice of the situation
we have to consider a span of time large enough.
It is safe to assume that the Zionists of 1922 would not have been able
to imagine even in their worst dreams that Jewish National rights would
be challenged even in Western Palestine (one fifth of Palestine) in
contradiction not only to many assurances in the past, Jewish history
and the principle of self-determination, but also in contradiction to
the formal written principles of the League of Nations, the United
Nations and the International Court of Justice, as is so well explained
in Julius Stone, 1981.
Julius Stone also explains that according to the Principles of the
international law and the United Nations, it is not permissible to
injure an existing state created by earlier application of the principle
of self-determination via the League of Nations and the United Nations.
Thus Palestinian claim that there should not be a Jewish state (a state
where the majority are Jews and the dominant culture is Jewish) at all,
is against international law. It is also racist and discriminatory
(anti-Semitic). This is in addition to the fact that in the heart of the
Palestinian charter there is a logical contradiction. It says there:
"The Palestinians believe in self determination to all, but not for the
Jews since the Jews are only a religious group and not a nation". But
self-determination means by definition that members of the group
themselves self determine their nationhood and not members external to
the group.
In the above arguments we have been mainly formal and referred to
international law and did not appeal to the self-evident truth that
there is no other group of people as the Jews that so deserve to be a
nation and the state of the Jews should be in Palestine. The absurdity
of the claim that the Jews of all people are not a nation is glaring.
Jewish cohesion as an ethnic group over thousands of years is legendary;
the long history of the Jews, their distinct culture and their
contribution to humanity is unparalleled. The universal modern ethical
values of the present civilization were enunciated by the Jews
thousands of years ago. Jewish cultural and national values are
intrinsically associated and based on the Land of Israel (Palestine)
over thousands of years. Jewish presence in Palestine was uninterrupted
for thousands of years. Even those Jews that were exiled prayed in the
direction of Jerusalem and prayed for the rain according to the seasons
in Palestine (the Land of Israel). The only sovereign state that ever
existed in Palestine was the Jewish state. All the other presences in
Palestine were either of the nomad type or of empires that were only
temporary and never regarded the land as their national home (state).
These are facts substantiated by many documents and vast archeology.
When Rome destroyed the Jewish state it commemorated its victory with
vast numbers of coins, still available for all to see, that bore symbols
of Judea degradation and Rome further antagonized the Jews by calling
their land Palestine after the great historical enemy of the Jews, the
Philistines. Now the Palestinians say that they are descendants of these
Philistines. This is so absurd that it is not worth a refutation. But
in other times the Palestinians say that they are the descendants of
the historical Jews. They cannot be both. Yet in other times they say
that the Wailing Wall and the Temple Mount has always been Islamic and
never had anything to do with the Jews. So who are those captives
bearing the menorah (a uniquely and most ancient Jewish national symbol)
and the vessels of the Temple that are sculpted in the triumphal arch at
Rome commemorating Titus' victory. Would the Romans engrave in stone, in
Rome, an Islamic symbol of the menorah and Islamic vessels of an Islamic
Temple some seven centuries before the emergence of Islam?
Arafat, an Egyptian, is projecting a non-existent Palestinian Arab
National history when he dismisses Jewish National history.
It is simply an historical fact that there was no Palestinian Arab
socio-political-cultural distinction in all the twelve centuries since
the Arab conquest in the Seventh century and Palestine had no
geographical or political distinction . The Arabs of the Land of Israel
(Palestine) saw themselves as a part of southern Syria. There is much
documentation to prove that the notion of a distinct Palestinian people
that deserves a distinct Palestinian state is not only recent but was
invented precisely as a temporary ploy to destroy the only Jewish state,
see e.g. Julius Stone, 1981 and A Nation Working Against Itself.
One demonstration that the claim for an (additional) Palestinian state
is only a ploy to fight Zionism is the following logical contradiction
prevalent in Palestinian and Arab propaganda: "All the Arabs are one
nation. The Palestinians are a separate nation". But the Palestinians
cannot be an integrable part of the Arab nation and a separate nation
simultaneously despite their claim to be so.
The Palestinian Charter opens with the statement that the Palestinians
are an integrable part of the Arab nation but it later attributes
nationhood to the Palestinians. Apparently the authors of the document
felt that there is a contradiction here so later in item 12 of the
Charter they try to explain it away by saying: "the Palestinians believe
in Arab unity and to obtain this unity they need in this stage of the
struggle to emphasize the Palestinian identity". There is here an
admission that a separate Palestinian national identity is only a
temporary ploy in the struggle against Zionism and Israel.
A basic thesis in this article is that Palestine is made up of both
Cisjordan and Transjordan and not only of Cisjordan as in Arab
propaganda and this in turn shows that many "Palestinians refugees",
whether moving within Cisjordan or crossing the Jordan, were in fact
moving within Palestine in a manner reminiscent of one's movements in
his own country in a search for work or joining the family, thus most of
them were not refugees in the usual meaning of the word; "even those
Palestinian Arabs who moved from CisJordan to TransJordan were in fact
only migrating from one part of Palestine to another, over relatively
short distances, averaging perhaps 50 to 100 miles. They continue to
live within a similar cultural, demographic, linguistic, religious,
and even climatic environment." (Julius Stone book p. 25). Palestinians
in Jordan are not only the majority but take an active part in all walks
of life with equal rights and even Palestinians from Gaza have the right
for a Jordanian Passport. It is also worth remembering that most
Palestinian Arabs were attracted to Palestine in the first place only
recently as a result of the economic success of Zionism in Palestine. Now
contrast the Palestinian refugees with the Jewish refugees from Arab
countries that are not only more numerous than Palestinian refugees and
were dispossessed from more property than Palestinian refugees left,
these Jewish refugees were forcefully driven out of places where they
often preceded the Arabs and were transported over great distances; e.g.
from North Africa to Israel. Many of these Jewish refugees suffered
pogroms and much killings also in the period before they had to leave
the Arab countries. Yet the international bodies continue to support
financially for more then half a century only the Arab refugees and
maintaining them artificially as refugees and thus contributing to the
perpetuation of the conflict. This fate of the "Palestinian refugees"
stands in stark contrast to the fate of Jewish refugees from Arab
countries that were absorbed by Israel without such international
financial aid.
It is also worthwhile to note that the Palestinian Arab state called
Jordan is purely Jew-free, whereas the Palestinian Jewish state called
Israel even in its pre-1967 borders contains about 20% Arabs. In the
Israel-Arab wars no Arab village or city were involved in military
warfare if they did not initiate aggression. Israeli authorities, even
in the face of aggression by the Arabs, adopted the policy of begging
the Arabs to stay and not to leave and become refugees. One can still
now see the written manifestos distributed by the Hagana and also by the
Jewish workers of Haifa in which they implore the Arabs to stay and not
to leave. That the Jews begged the Arab Palestinians to stay, in clear
contrast to pogroms in Jews in Arab countries and the confiscating of
Jewish properties in Arab countries by the authorities, is also
confirmed by the international non-Jewish bodies. For example, the
respectable research organization in the Hague, Holland, that
specializes in research on national migrations, and whose objectivity
is known world-wide, has issued a report in March 1957 in which they
say that " from the first months of 1948, orders were given by the
Arab League, instructing the Palestinian Arab population to find a
temporary shelter in the neighboring countries, and promising this
population that it will return to its homes in the footsteps of the
victorious Arab armies, and that this population will receives its share
in the loot that will be taken from the abandoned Jewish property...The
supreme Arab committee characterized as "traitors" those that will not
leave"
It is important to permanently keep in mind how small Israel is in
absolute terms and also how small it is in relation to the Arab world,
both are seen from the following figures.
We began this article with a citation of Palestinian top negotiator Saeb
Erakat, who is also the person that announced to the world the Jenin
atrocities that never happened. It was in the same Jenin that corpses of
animals were used to fabricate the stench of the massacred bodies, that
funerals were fabricated and filmed only to have the victims becoming
alive, etc., all these are typical to Israel's Hasbara problem: Both the
fundamentals of the conflict such as what is Palestine, and the current
events such as who deliberately target civilians and who sacrifices its
own life to save civilians, are falsified. Often reality is precisely
the opposite of what is being presented by the Palestinians: 23 Israeli
reservists lost their life because they fought on the ground in Jenin in
an unparalleled (as compared to other democracies that would have used
the air force and artillery) attempt to save civilian life. Yet the lie
of the massacre of Jenin is still prevalent. So we have to permanently
explain that the M.E. conflict is not only a universe where the
Palestinian side never keeps signed agreements but it is also an
Orwellian universe where lies are permanently propagated. Also words are
used to mean what the Palestinians decide they should mean like Humpty
Dumpty does. An indiscriminate killer becomes a freedom fighter, a fifth
of Palestine becomes Palestine, and Zionism becomes, instead of the
self-determination movement of the Jewish people, something sinister.
A typical enemy of Israel often tries to be politically correct and he
says that he is not anti-Semitic but only anti-Zionist. But anti-Zionism
is anti-Semitism since it singles out the Jewish people. Already the
reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the great champion of Human rights,
pointed out that the "anti-Semite must constantly seek new forms and
forums for his poison. How he must revel in the new masquerade! He does
not hate the Jews, he is just 'anti-Zionist.' When people criticise
Zionism, they mean Jews, this is God's own truth...So know this:
anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so."
About further literature:
The subject 'that there is already an Arab state and even a Palestinian
state' is further developed by Yoram Shifftan in Hamodia, 31.12.01. That
there is already a Palestinian state is expounded in Julius Stone, 1981,
pp 22-25, in the section entitled:"THE KINGDOM OF TRANSJORDAN (JORDAN)
AS A PALESTINIAN ARAB STATE", and also in the article of Sidney Zion:
The Palestinians Have a State, August 5, 2003.
For general survey of the legal rights under international law of the
Jewish people in Palestine see the book of Julius Stone mentioned above
and ACPR (Ariel Center for Policy Research) Policy Paper No 147 (2003),
by Howard Grief, entitled: "LEGAL RIGHTS AND TITLE OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THE
JEWISH PEOPLE TO THE LAND OF ISRAEL AND PALESTINE UNDER INTERNATIONAL
LAW".
Related documents such as the San Remo Resolution, the Mandate for
Palestine, and many more, can be found in the document section of the
book of Julius Stone. Some of the documents are also found in the May
2003 issue of Nativ, another publication of ACPR, where one can also
find relevant articles of Howard Grief and Talia Einhorn. ###
Submitted September 18, 2003
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Dr. Yoram Shifftan has published many articles on Israeli hasbara, in publications such as Ha'aretz, Ma'ariv, Hatzofeh, Hamodia and Ha'Uma. He has also presented a special series about hasbara on Arutz7 radio.
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