Israeli Jews didn’t deny Palestinians statehood

The condemnation by the government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines to the proposal announced by the government of the United States to exile temporarily or permanently the two million Moslem Arab inhabitants of Gaza because peace could never be achieved between these people and the State of Israel contains several egregious errors.

Underlying Donald Trump’s bold effort to solve the Palestine dilemma is the aphorism that insanity means doing the same thing over and over again, each time expecting a different outcome — in this case attacking Israel over and over and expecting lasting peace between the Moslem Arab inhabitants of the Promised Land and its sovereign Jewish inhabitants.

According to the SVG government news release, “This proposal is self-evidently contrary to international law and the fundamental, natural right of the Palestinian people to own and live, in peace and security, in lands that have belonged to them from time immemorial, not as mere occupants, but as citizens, in pursuance of their own State,” a view with no factual basis.

As war between Israel and its many terrorist foes –Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Islamic Jihad, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and others whose overarching goal is the destruction of the only Jewish state in the world — has reached a temporary ceasefire, a relentless myth never ends. That myth is that Israel has always prevented the Palestinian people from achieving their goal of statehood. 

That myth is groundless.

In 1937, the Jews accepted the partition plan of the Peel Commission, while the Arabs categorically rejected it, demanding that all of Palestine be placed under Arab control and that most of the Jewish population of Palestine be “transferred” — ethnically cleansed — out of the country. (See featured photo)

Israel acceded to Palestinian statehood on numerous occasions: in 1937-1938, 1947-1948, 1967, 2000-2001, and 2007. But whenever statehood was offered, it was soundly rebuffed by a Palestinian leadership and its regional and global supporters who rejected any two-state solution that would have seen the presence of an Arab state next door to a Jewish one.

The Peel Commission

In 1937, for example, the British, who by then controlled much of the former Ottoman Empire, published the Palestine Royal Commission Report (also known as the Peel Commission Report).

That report called for a partition plan to resolve what it characterised as “irrepressible conflict … between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country.” The report also stated that given the intensity of the antisemitism of Arab and other Moslems, “national assimilation between Arabs and Jews is … ruled out.”

The Peel Commission concluded that partition between a small Israeli state and a much larger Moslem one was the only solution.

The commission also argued that partition would offer Europe’s Jews a haven from Nazi prosecution.

Jews, both inside and outside the report’s two unconnected territories, reserved for a new state of Israel accepted the Peel partition plan. The Arabs said no, insisting instead that all of what was then called Palestine be placed under Arab control and that nearly all its Jews be deported — read “ethnically cleansed” — from that area because “this country [cannot] assimilate the Jews now in the country”.

Although not clearly stated by the Peel Commission, it seemed evident from the Arab reply that their aim was not independent statehood for the “Palestinians” but rather a deeply rooted antipathy to Jewish sovereignty over a small portion of the Biblical Promised Land where Jews had become the majority people by 1937.

As Alan Dershowitz has recently stated:

“The Arabs of Palestine wanted to be part of Syria and be ruled over by a distant monarch. They simply could not abide the reality that the Jews of Palestine had created for themselves a democratic homeland pursuant to the League of Nations mandate and binding international law. Even if turning down the Peel proposal resulted in no state for the Arabs, that was preferable to allowing even a tiny, non-contiguous state for the Jews.”

After the conclusion of World War II, the United Nations also called for the partition of the area into two states, one for Arabs and one for Jews. Once more, this was rejected by the Arabs and accepted by the Jews.

Still, sanctioned by the UN call for a separate Israeli state, the Jewish leadership declared statehood in the tiny area granted to it. As for the Arab leadership, the response was “a genocidal war against the new state of the Jewish people. They did not want a Palestinian state. And they wanted there to be no Jewish state.”

The resulting war of liberation saw Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon invading the new sovereign state of Israel, supported by Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Libya. The Arab armies aimed to eliminate the new Jewish state and exterminate its population Nazi style.

The same intransigence characterised offers to negotiate a partition following the Six Day War of 1967, the 2000-2001 attempted agreement spearheaded by and the 2007 deal offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

A refusal to share the land with the Jews is enshrined in the 2017 Hamas Charter which reads:

Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the West and from Ras al-Naqurah in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit. It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.

In short, it is the zealous and bloody Palestinian effort to displace Israeli statehood with a Judenrein — a region cleansed of Jews — Moslem Arab land, perhaps destined to be soon incorporated as part of an expanded state of Syria and/or Jordan, that lies at heart of inability of the people only recently calling themselves Palestinians to obtain a state of their own.

As Alan Dershowitz also wrote:

“No one, therefore, should believe that it was Israel that has made the Palestinian people stateless. It was the Palestinians themselves, through their anti-Jewish leadership. The current anti-Israel protesters in the West are not calling for a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel. They, like the failed Palestinian leadership, just wants to end Israel’s existence. It is not going to happen. Until the Palestinians recognize this reality, they will be denying themselves any possibility of statehood.”

Statehood denial myth

None of these facts prevented a group of Toronto Metropolitan University law students from issuing an inflammatory anti-Israel letter on Oct. 20, 2023, less than two weeks after Hamas’ heinous invasion of Israel, supporting of “all forms of Palestinian resistance” because Israel “is not a country” but rather “the brand of a settler colony.”

“So-called Israel has been illegally occupying and ethnically cleansing Palestine since 1948, when the British unlawfully conceded Palestine’s territory,” claimed the students’ letter. “The apartheid state referred to as ‘Israel’ is a product of settler colonialism.”

The second reason for questioning the statehood denial myth involves the belief that the Palestinians once had a state of their own that was stolen from them by other people, the latest one being the Jews of Israel.

To begin with:

• Before Israel, there was a British mandate, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the British Mandate, there was the Ottoman Empire, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Ottoman Empire, there was the Islamic state of the Mamluks of Egypt, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Islamic state of the Mamluks of Egypt, there was the Ayubid-Kurdish Empire, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Ayubid Empire, there was the Crusader Frankish and the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Kingdom of Jerusalem, there were the Umayyad and Fatimid empires, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Umayyad and Fatimid empires, there was the Byzantine empire, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Byzantine Empire, there was the Sassanid-Persian Empire, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Sassanid-Persian Empire, there was the Byzantine Empire again, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Byzantine Empire, there was the Roman Empire, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Roman Empire, there was the Jewish Hasmonean state, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Jewish Hasmonean state, there was the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Hellenistic Seleucid empire, there was the empire of Alexander the Great, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the empire of Alexander the Great, there was the Persian empire, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Persian Empire, there was the Babylonian Empire, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Babylonian Empire, there were the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, there was the Kingdom of Israel, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the Kingdom of Israel, there was the theocracy of the twelve tribes of Israel, not a Palestinian state.
• Before the theocracy of the twelve tribes of Israel, there was an agglomeration of independent Canaanite city-kingdoms, not a Palestinian state.

The absence before 1948 of any sense of Palestinian identity

In sum, there have been many governments in the present-day State of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, but never a sovereign state called Palestine.

This begs the question of whether the newly invented ethnic group called the “Palestinian people” deserves special recognition and treatment based on legitimate historical and cultural realities, given that the Palestinians have never had a sovereign country of their own called Palestine that was lost or stolen from them.

What history reveals is the “so-called” label attached to Israel by historically ignorant radicals rightly belongs to the Palestinians.

Since the destruction of the second kingdom of Judea (the southern half of the alleged “occupied territories”) in the second century, the land the Roman conquerors re-named Syria Palaestina (to obscure Jewish association with the land of Israel) has been governed by one foreign power after another. The name Syria Palaestina disappeared, and “Palestine,” the Gentile name for the land of Israel, ceased to exist as a separate entity after it became part of the Arab-Muslim empire in 638. For nearly 13 centuries, from 638 to 1917 (when the British took charge following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire headquartered in Turkey), no separate administrative or socio-cultural entity called “Palestine” existed: the Ottoman Turks who ruled the Middle East from 1516 to 1917 regarded the geographical region of Palestine as part of Southern Syria. For most of human history, Palestine has only existed as a Western Christian term to describe the Jewish Holy Land and its Hebrew and Christian inhabitants. From the beginning of recorded history until nearly the present, neither foreigners nor residents recognized a unique people – other than the Jews themselves – called “Palestinians” living in a place called Palestine.

The absence before 1948 of any sense of Palestinian identity, apart from the occupation of lands that were always owned by outsiders such as the Ottoman Turks, is because there is no unique and separate Palestinian language, religion, nationality, or culture. The people who began calling themselves Palestinians mainly after 1948 are the Arab Moslem descendants of numerous localized lineages, clans, and tribal groups. A strong sense of pan-Arab identity and belief in Islam, not some fictitious ethnic identity, are what has always united the “Palestinians.”

Throughout human history, whenever the word Palestine was used, it referred to a place in the Middle East whose most distinctive feature was its continuous Jewish occupation. According to nearly all traditional definitions, Palestine is the land of the Jews: the country of the Hebrews; the Holy Land; the Promised Land; and the location of Zion. The Jewish people were called Palestinians during the British Mandate (1922-1948). It was the Israeli capture of the West Bank from Jordan in the Six-Day War in 1967, not some ancient sense of nationalism, that gave birth to an organized demand for an autonomous Palestinian state. And it was not until 1988 that the Palestine Liberation Organization declared its aim of creating a Palestinian Arab state separate from the neighbouring Arab ones.

It has often been claimed that, like all other peoples, the Palestinians deserve a state of their own.

But there are thousands of unique ethnic groups today — peoples with distinct languages, cultures, religions, and histories stretching back millennia — few of which have their own country. The Palestinians have a far weaker claim to statehood than most of these age-old ethnicities, including the predominantly Muslim Kurds whose 35-50 million people were denied a promised state of their own in 1920 but continue to live in exploited minority status in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria with hardly a word of outrage from the outside world. The Palestinians, in turn, already have a state of their own —the Kingdom of Jordan — a dictatorship headed by an imported monarchy where they culturally form most of the population and where it is illegal for Jews to live.

This is not to deny that the practicalities of present-day geopolitics suggest that the Palestinians should be granted statehood. Still, their claim is no greater than that of the Tibetans, the Chechens, and other stateless groups like the Kurds. These other age-old ethnicities, unlike the Palestinians, have never even been offered statehood, let alone repeatedly turned it down.

Also, unlike the Palestinians, these ancient peoples are not calling for the genocidal extermination of their overlords, countries like China, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and others.

As for Israel, its disappearance is not going to happen. Until the so-called Palestinians and their regional and global enablers accept this reality, they will never be granted the statehood their history and culture do not deserve.

C. ben-David

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