Sunday, May 22, 2011

There is No Palestine

By Alan Caruba

Despite a very forthright speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Sunday in which the President stated his “unshakeable” support for Israel and cited evidence of it, the greatest obstacle he must overcome with American Jews in particular and the public in general is a growing distrust of anything he says.

When it comes to the Middle East, Palestine, and the long history of Israel as a nation, past and present, President Obama doesn’t seem to “get it.”

Simply stated, there is no Palestine. In an effort to obliterate the nation of Israel, the Roman emperor Hadrian ordered that its name be changed to Palestine, a Greek word for Philistine, but other than this there never was a Palestine nation, nor is there one now.

To be a nation, it has to have been founded and it has to have specific borders. It has to have a capitol, major cities, an economy and currency of its own, and a stable government. It has to be recognized as a nation by other nations. None of these factors exists for the so-called West Bank and Gaza.

If the so-called Palestinians deserve their own state, why not the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey, and many other groups that could be deemed equally deserving?

What is referred to as Palestine is the wholly-owned creation of the United Nations through its UN Relief Works Agency, a strange invention that has existed solely to maintain the Arabs in the two areas mentioned as permanent refugees for generations. Sustained by millions in “relief” after the areas in question were lost in wars perpetrated against and lost to Israel in 1948 and 1967

There is never any mention of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who, over the course of the wars against Israel, became real refugees, forced to flee to Israel from Arab nations. In 1948, 140,000 fled Algeria, 75,000 fled Egypt, 135,000 fled Iraq, and 265,000 fled Morocco, along with others from Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. They were absorbed by Israel.

The West Bank and Gaza, historically part of Israel, are myths created to regain territory lost in the wars waged against Israel by Jordan and Egypt. In the 1967 war, Jordanians were driven out of Judea/Samaria and out of Jerusalem. The Gaza Strip had been occupied by Egypt. The Golan Heights had originally been ceded to Syria by a British-French agreement and likewise was lost to Syria in war.

The suggestion that Israel “return” to its 1967 borders is ludicrous. Obama might just as well suggest that Texas, the Southwest and California be returned to Mexico. All were prizes of war. All constituted parts of the North American continent settled by British and European immigrants to the New World.

By contrast, Israel became a nation in 1321 BCE, 2,000 years before the rise of Islam. Arabs only began to refer to themselves as Palestinians in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the State of Israel. The only period in which there was Arab control followed the conquest in 635 BCE and it lasted only 22 years. For 3,300 years, Jerusalem had been the Jewish capital. It is mentioned more than 700 times in the Torah, the Jewish Holy Scriptures and not even once in the Koran.

Until recently, the Palestinian Liberation Authority and Hamas were in a state of war with one another, the PLO was the creation of Yassir Arafat and Hamas is the wholly owned creation of Iran, as is Hezbollah. They exist for no other purpose than the annihilation of Israel.

Neither “Palestinian” group has ever accepted any effort to establish a separate state for self-rule, asserting instead that Israel must be destroyed. What has Israel done? It withdrew from its occupation of southern parts of Lebanon, only to be attacked again from there in 2006. It forced Israelis to abandon their homes and businesses in Gaza, ceding the land in an effort to encourage negotiations toward a two-state solution.

There is no Palestine and there never was. The name was imposed by a Roman emperor in retribution for the resistance of Jews against Rome’s control of their land. The name was adopted by Yassir Arafat as the self-proclaimed leader of the Arabs left behind by the wars and living, as is commonly asserted, in “occupied territories.”

Not once has any representative of the so-called Palestinians ever accepted a negotiated path to separate statehood. Instead, the “Palestinians” have sent suicide bombers and rockets into Israel and storm its borders to celebrate the “Nakba”, an Arab word for catastrophe, commemorating the wars waged against and lost to Israel.

The “Palestinians” and Arabs do not want peace. Whatever peace exists between their nations is tenuous at best and the citizens of many of those nations have been in full revolt against the dictators that ran them from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Syria to Yemen. The only thing that “unites” them is their irrational hatred of Israel, a hatred shared by many European Union nations and, of course, the United Nations.

In just over 600 days President Obama’s regime will end. He will no doubt link arms with former President Jimmy Carter to become another huge embarrassment to the United States of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

7 comments:

Zilla said...

Excellent history lesson, Alan, great job! I shared it at a right minded political information page that I run at facebook here:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/ANTI-CRAPTASTIC/127576023926747

Barb said...

Thank you for all of us who believe in the one God of Jews and Christians. It saddens me to see tiny little Israel stand alone facing the world who wants to wipe out the Jews once and for all. It must be for God to prove to the world once again the Jews are His chosen people. This shall be soon.
Barb

Barb said...

Thank you for all of us who believe in the one God of Jews and Christians. It saddens me to see tiny little Israel stand alone facing the world who wants to wipe out the Jews once and for all. It must be for God to prove to the world once again the Jews are His chosen people. This shall be soon.
Barb

Ronbo said...

@Alan:

I did a tour of Israel in 1977 with U.S. military families stationed in Cold War Berlin.

In those days, the so-called "Palestine" did not exist and there were no official borders between the Muslims and the Jews, but a casual glance out the window of the tour bus informed one whether it was a Muslim neighborhood of Jewish one.

The Jewish neighbors were clean, modern and very peaceful. The Muslim neighborhoods were dirty, ancient and buzzing with hatred and mistrust.

It was in one of these filthy and dangerous neighborhoods on the West Bank that a couple of American Army wives with our tour group were assaulted and robbed when they entered one of these "combat zones" by mistake and without male escorts.

The Israeli authorities responded quickly and professionally. The beaten up and robbed wives were treated at a local hospital free of charge(minor injuries) and the IDF immediately launched a raid into the Muslim neighborhood to arrest the usual suspects.

However, they turned down help from 40 or 50 very P.O.'d male American soldiers in the Berlin tour group wanting paybacks.

Rich Kozlovich said...

Alan,

Good job. All of this history is well known. Are we to believe that no one in authority is unaware of the actual history of "Palestine"?

There are a number of conclusions to draw from here. One, they don’t know the history. Two, they don't care about the history. Three they know, they don't care and have a separate agenda other than the one they describe. Either way...they should all be fired.

Longstreet said...

In my opinion, it is rampant ANTI-SEMITISM in the White House, the European Union, and the United Nations. There simply IS NO OTHER EXPLANATION!

J. D. Longstreet

Alan Caruba said...

@Longstreet: At the heart of the behavior and actions taken (or not taken) anti-Semitism appears to be the fundamental reason.

Sadly, the Anti-Defamation League (B'ai B'rith) and some other Jewish organization whose name I do not recall are supporting Obama.

You would think the Holocaust would have taught Jews, subsequent generations, to spot anti-Semitism when it rears its ugly head. It hasn't.