The Merkley Report. Who are the Palestinians?
Paul Merkley is a retired Professor of History from Carleton University in Ottawa. His teaching specialties were in the History of the United States in the Twentieth Century and in the Religious Factor in American History. He has published scholarly books and articles on Christian theology of History and on aspects of the role of Christian faith in American politics.Who are the Palestinians?
Saturday, 25 April 2009
Paul Charles MERKLEY
Paul’s interest in Israel goes back to 1981 when he spent six months with his family in residence as a visiting Professor at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where he taught courses in History of Religion in the United States. He has made several subsequent research visits to Israel.
- by Paul Charles Merkley.
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Consider this insight into the earliest history of the Arab-Israeli conflict:
The assassination of Arab brethren like Goliath, by Jewish sheep-herders like David, is the sort of shameful ignominy that we must yet set aright in the domain of the occupied Palestinian homeland.
Lest anyone imagine that we could simply pass by this sort of imbecility, we have to note that this is an excerpt from a speech [1] by President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who declared himself the champion of the Palestinians at the time of the Camp David Accords (1978), and is today widely acclaimed in the West as a prescient statesman, one of the inaugurators of the effort to achieve peace through negotiation in the Middle East.
Sadat’s right to pose as the champion of “the Palestinians” was vehemently denied by all the other Arab leaders and indeed the whole Arab world -- and this not because his historical knowledge seemed to any of them to be defective, but, rather because it was not vivid enough. Chairman of the PLO Yassir Arafat, during a press conference, September 2, 1983, at a U.N. meeting in Geneva, Arafat stated:
We [the “Palestinian people”] were under Roman imperialism. We sent a Palestinian fisherman, called St. Peter, to Rome; he not only occupied Rome, but also won the hearts of the people. We know how to resist imperialism and occupation. Jesus Christ was the first Palestinian fedayeen [freedom fighter] who carried his sword along the path on which the Palestinians today carry their cross. [2]
Statements like these seem to bear out the thesis of the great archeologist, William Foxwell Albright: that a Moslem historian is a contradiction in terms. The Israeli archeologist, Benjamin Mazar, recalled that Albright “liked the Arabs very much ... and knew Arabic. But he used to say that a Moslem is unable to become a historian. He believes in the Koran, and in the Koran, Maryam the sister of Moses, is the mother of Jesus Christ! Now if such a thing is determined as the basis of historical study, how can he be a historian? To become a historian is to escape from Islam.” [3]
* * *
Prior to the question, “Who are the Palestinians,” is the question, "What is Palestine?"
The name “Palestine” is not an invention of the Arabs. It is an invention of the Romans. The Romans chose the name Palestina precisely because it insulted the Jews and their History, memorializing, as it does, the already long-vanished Philistines. These were the people who had invaded this area from the sea about the same time as the Israelites began their conquest of it by land under Joshua, becoming their long-enduring enemies. The distinct life and culture of the Philistines had been swept away centuries before the Romans showed up. (In recent years, following several spectacular archeological expeditions, it has become possible at last to reconstruct some features of that life and culture.)
In the Second Century BC, the name Palestina was applied by the Romans to what had been the homeland of the Jewish nation, as part of a deliberate policy of obliterating remembrance of the Jewish nation from this place where their sovereign Kingdom had once been, and where they had lived continuously as part of the subsequent empires of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Romans -- this people whose resistance to Rome's tyranny had set such a dangerous example for their other subject peoples. This Roman insult is perpetuated and given yet another twist by the hijacking of the name “Palestine” by the Arab populations of that part of the world today and by their anti-Zionist supporters elsewhere in the world – and, of course, by the UN. These newly-minted “Palestinians” have, of course, no more historical connection to the Philistines than do the Jews
Prior to 1948, opposition to the project of the Zionists was carried out in the name of the “Arab” people -- or the “Arab people of Palestine”. This terminology reflected the fact that (as Bernard Lewis shows) “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; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a large entity.” [4] Nowadays, the term “Palestinian nation” serves to give color to a claim to aboriginal habitation and possession of the vicinity -- as the term “Arab”, of course, does not. Yet, there never was an Arab state of Palestine, or even an Arab nor an Ottoman Province of Palestine.
Even the very name Palestine fell into disuse among the Arabs, only to be revived by the British. At that point it was (unwisely) appropriated by the Zionists. They believed that it would strengthen their proprietary claim to the land to employ the local term preferred by the British. All over the political landscape during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, there were organizations like the Palestine League, the Pro-Palestine Committee, the Christian Council on Palestine, the American Christian Palestine Committee, and so on -- and all of them were lobbies on behalf of the Jews, on behalf of Zionism! That's what “Palestine” and “Palestinian” meant. (Students who are new to the history of modern Israel usually experience something of a jolt when they first encounter this inversion of nomenclature in the documents.)
Secular Zionists had another motive as well for appropriating the title “Palestinian”: because the name affirmed contemporary geographical associations it served to distinguish their vision of the past and the future of the Jewish people from that of religiously-inclined Zionists, to whom the reality of past and present belonging of the Jews was better conveyed by the term Eretz Israel. (Incidentally: for a while during the 1920s and 1930s the more zealous secularists took to calling themselves “Canaanites” -- but that vogue eventually passed.)
In any case: this usage (“Palestinian” for Jewish) was no more accurate from a historical point of view than the current usage (“Palestinian” for Arab.) But this matter does illustrate a hazard that seems to be peculiar to late Twentieth Century political rhetoric: namely, that, in the absence of general respect for historical knowledge, the key concepts in political discussion are handed down from journalists, who derive them from the slogans of contemporary politicians.
Prior to 1967, Arab leaders never talked of a Palestinian nation. In the Arab Covenant of 1919, proposed by the Arab Congress in Jerusalem in 1919, we read: “The Arab lands are a complete and indivisible whole, and the divisions of whatever nature to which they have been subjected are not approved or recognized by the Arab nation.” In the same year, the General Syrian Congress expressed quite another view: “We ask that there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine.” In 1937 the local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul Hadi, testifying before the British Royal (Peel) Commission that was to come up with a partition plan, said: “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. 'Palestine' is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it.” In 1946, another Arab spokesman, Princeton University History professor Philip K. Hitti, then widely regarded as the foremost historian of the Arab people, told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry: “There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.” This view had been endorsed in 1939 by the Arab historian George Antonius, who identified Palestine as part of “the whole of the country of that name [Syria] which is now split into mandated territories.” And as late as 1956 a Saudi Arabian United Nations delegate said: “It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria.” This is still the real view of Syria’s President Assad, despite that state's window-dressing support of liberated “Palestine”: “Palestine is not only a part of our Arab homeland,” Hafez al-Assad used to say, “but a basic part of southern Syria.” [5]
* * *
Sometime after the Six Day War of 1967, Arab rhetoric took a 180 degree turn. Now the Arab-speaking people who were the rightful owners of the vicinity became “the Palestinian people,” the aboriginal inhabitants. The concept first appears with full clarity in the same “Palestinian Covenant” that rejects the legitimacy of the concept “Jewish people/nation” and calls for Israel's destruction. Henceforward, Arab politicians everywhere nodded agreement as Yassir Arafat explained that the “Palestinian people” were in place before the Jews arrived. They were, moreover, the carriers of a civilization higher than any that has ever been seen anywhere else. This he described before the Assembly of the United Nations 1983:
[Before the “Jewish invasion”, which “began in 1881,”] Palestine was then a verdant land, inhabited by an Arab people in the course of building its life and enriching its indigenous culture.... It pains our people greatly to witness the propagation of the myth that its homeland was a desert until it was made to bloom by the toil of foreign settlers, that it was a land without a people, and that the settler entity caused no harm to any human being. No, such lies must be exposed from this rostrum for the world must know that Palestine was the cradle of the most ancient cultures and civilizations. Its Arab people were engaged in farming and building, spreading culture throughout the land for thousands of years, setting an example in the practice of religious tolerance and freedom of worship, actions as faithful guardians of the holy places of all religions.... Religious brotherhood was the hall-mark of our Holy City [Jerusalem] before it succumbed to catastrophe. Our people continued to pursue this enlightened policy until the establishment of the state of Israel and their dispersion. This did not deter our people from pursuing their humanitarian role on Palestinian soil. Nor will they permit their land to become a launching pad for aggression or a racist camp for the destruction of civilization, culture, progress and peace. Our people cannot but maintain the privileged task of defending their native land, their Arab nationhood, their culture and civilization, and in safeguarding the cradle of the monotheistic religions. [6]
Travelers’ accounts of the land belonging to the period described by Arafat afford quite a different picture. Alphonse Lamartine described the scene in 1835:
Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw indeed no living object, heard no living sound. We found the same void, the same silence as we should have found before the entombed gates of Pompeii or Hercalaneum ….A complete, eternal silence reigns in the town, in the highways, in the country … the tomb of a whole people.]
Mark Twain traveled to the Holy Land in 1867 and recorded this:
[It is] Desolate country, whose soil is rich enough, but given over wholly to weeds -- a silent mournful expanse…. A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action…. We never saw a human being on the whole route.... There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country. [7]
These observations, recorded en passage by literary men, may not carry the day with all readers. If so, here is a description dating from 1913, appearing in the records of the Palestine Royal Commission:
The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts ... [N]o orange groves, orchards or vineyards were to be seen until one reached Yabna village ... Not in a single village in this area was water used for irrigation ... Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen ... sanitary conditions horrible ... schools do not exist ... Many ruins of villages were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants.
And here is a report by the Director of Development, appointed by the British Government, 1933:
We found it inhabited by fellahin who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely from the prevalent malaria.... The individual plots ... changed hands annually. There was little public security, and the fellahin's lot was an alternation of pillage and blackmail by their neighbours, the Bedouin.
Irrefutable testimony to the situation in Palestine at the time of the Mandate is found in the work of Walter Lowdermilk, Assistant Chief of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, and author of foundation scholarly studies on global natural resources. For over twenty years he conducted vast field research on all the inhabited continents to find the lines of causal connection between the use of land and the prosperity of nations. In his book, Palestine: Land of Promise (1944), he draws upon the huge body of field research which he and his associates had done in Palestine under the auspices of the U.S. Conservation Service to review the history of the area of the Mandate as he found it revealed in the archeological record and in the condition of the land in the late 1930s.
An Arab legend tells us that once upon a time an angel, carrying a sack of stones, flew over Palestine; suddenly the sack burst and all the stones were strewn about upon the hills. The true story reads differently. Once upon a time the hills of Palestine were covered with rich red earth and protected by forests, smaller vegetation and terraces. Then the trees were cut down, the terraces were neglected, the fertile soil was washed away by rain and finally only the stones were left on the fields.... Two thousand years ago Palestine, with its neighbors, Egypt and Syria, represented one of the most advanced economic areas of the Roman Empire…. [T]he breakdown of agriculture ... took place between the seventh and twentieth centuries [under the early Muslim rulers.] In this period of decay, agriculture, which had previously achieved remarkable refinements in conservation, declined under exploitation by ignorant rulers and repeated invasions of nomads.... After the expulsion of the Crusaders and a new invasion by Arab nomads, the decline of Palestine proceeded at an accelerated pace .... Desert Arabs poured into the land and to the very gates of Jerusalem, stealing and plundering on the roads throughout the country….The country became a desert land with no one to till the soil .… During these years of decline, Palestine had been gradually depopulated; the lowest point was reached about 1850 when the total population was below 200,000.
Visiting Mandate Palestine in 1938, Lowdermilk found Jewish colonies struggling to reverse the effects of all those centuries of neglect and abuse of the soil.
[There are] about 300 colonies defying great hardships and applying the principles of co-operation and soil conservation to the old Land of Israel.... Here in one corner of the Near East, thoroughgoing work is in progress to rebuild the fertility of the land instead of condemning it by neglect to further destruction and decay…. Mandate officials had little success in their attempts to get the Arabs to plant trees, even though the seedlings were free and assistance in planting was given…. Along with the need for improved techniques in the use of land and the development of industries, Palestine, like the rest of the Near East, must have a larger population if it is to be restored to full activity and prosperity. [8]
A summary of the local history which appears in an official report of the British government in 1937 re-enforces Lowdermilk’s conclusions:
In the twelve centuries or more that have passed since the Arab conquest, Palestine has virtually dropped out of history.…In economics as in politics Palestine lay outside the main stream of the world's life. In the realm of thought, in science or in letters, it made no contribution to modern civilization. Its last state was worse than its first. [9]
* * *
Ignoring these abundantly-recorded realities, champions of “Palestinian liberation” developed in the 1960s and 1970s the narrative of the “Palestinians” as the autochthonous population of the region. They are the descendants of the Philistines, and of the Jebusites, its First Nation, present in the land “from time immemorial.” There are innumerable problems with this historical argument however -- although not markedly greater than those that arise to a thinking person who is asked to consider the claims of all the other tribes and nations of the world who ask us, with a straight face, to consider them “autochthonous”(which means, “self-seeding” – a ridiculous term.) The Philistines, according to all reliable historians, were not a Semitic people, but a people of Aegean origin who settled on the southern coast of Palestine in the 12th century BC, shortly before the arrival of the Israelites. The Jebusites, likewise non-Semitic, but also not nearly related to the Philistines, once possessed many of the cities of the highlands of what became Israel, and were finally dislodged from their most important stronghold, Jerusalem, by David, somewhere shortly before 1000 BC.
There is an unavoidable logical problem facing anyone wishing to combine this claim to autochthonous standing in the region with the other claim, that of Arab ancestry -- given that none of the oldest pre-Israelite inhabitants seems to have been Semitic at all -- and certainly none were Arabs. Yet, when the polemical occasion requires it, the same “Palestinians” do double-service as “Arabs”. “Our nation is the Arab nation, extending from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and Beyond, “ Arafat declaims (on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.) Zuheir Muhsim, member of the PLO Executive Council, March, 1977 let the cat out of the bag long ago:
Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel … In fact, there is no Palestinian people ... Only for political reasons do we speak of a Palestinian identity. [10]
The Arabs entered the area with the Moslem conquests in the Seventh Century. During those early years of Arab empire, the vast majority of those subjects of that Empire who lived in the Hold Land were Christians and Jews. Jews and Christians still worked the land during the centuries of early Arab rule because the Arabs, being Bedouins, had only contempt for agricultural life. The probability is that few of the original Arab conquerors of Seventh century survived subsequent wars and disease. In documents deriving from the succeeding period, “the word Arab reverts to its earlier meaning of Bedouin or nomad, becoming in effect a social rather than an ethnic term.” [11]
Arriving in the last decade of the Eleventh Century, the Crusaders (to the everlasting shame of our civilization) carried out a far-reaching slaughter of Muslims in Jerusalem; and thereafter the Latin Crusaders’ oppression of the Eastern Christians (mainly Greek Orthodox and Eastern, and mainly Arab-speaking) reduced the Arab component further. After the Latin Kingdoms had been closed down by Muslim re-conquest, the new rulers replenished the population by introducing Turks, Kurds, Africans, Berbers, Balkan Slavs, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Persians, Georgians, Circassians and many others. Travelers in the region today see the evidence of this abundant racial variety in the faces of the local people.
Thus “Arab rule” (as distinct from rule by subsequent Moslem conquerors who eventually used the Arabic language) is extremely brief -- in fact, coinciding virtually with the years of the regime of the first Muslim conquerors, the Umayyads (660s to 750.)
Felix Bovet, a Swiss scholar who visited in 1858, describes the visible impact of Arab conquest thereafter:
They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers in the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them thither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their passage through it. [12]
Another way to measure this matter of Arab belonging to the area is this: that, “in the twelve centuries of the Arab presence in Palestine before the return of the Jews of modern times, the Arabs built only a single new town: Ramleh.” [13]
* * *
All responsible debate about what is Palestine and who has rights and what they are in Palestine, begins with the Balfour Declaration of November, 1917:
His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
What, then, was this “Palestine”, to which the Balfour Declaration casually alludes? The last edition we have of the Encyclopedia Britannica prior to the Balfour Declaration defines “Palestine” as follows:
PALESTINE: ... conventionally used as a name for the territory which, in the Old Testament, is claimed as the inheritance of the pre-exilic Jews.... We may describe Palestine as the strip of land extending along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea .... Eastward there is no such definite border. The river Jordan, it is true, marks a delimitation between western and eastern Palestine; but it is practically impossible to say where the latter ends and the Arabian desert begins.
In all of the record of all of the deliberations of the British and the French and the Americans leading to the Balfour Declaration it is always taken for granted that what is being proposed is a homeland for the Jews in some part of what (as this encyclopedic definition makes clear) has always been defined as that part of the world where the Jews once had their inheritance. There was simply no other way of defining this area.
For over three thousand years, from the time of the conquest of these lands by the Israelites from the Canaanites and the Philistines (and others) until the twentieth century, Israelites have been present in this land. Jews greatly outnumbered Christians in the last centuries of Roman rule inPalestina. The estimated five million Jews who lived there before the Revolts of 66- 70 AD and 132-136 AD were probably reduced, by massacre or by flight, to perhaps three million by the beginning of the Third Century. Roman law forbade them to live in Jerusalem; but after a while the authorities pretended not to notice the remnant that continued to cling to the city during all this period. The centre of Jewish, culture, however, moved to Yavneh, and then to Tiberias and then to Safat in the Galilee.
After the conversion of the Empire to Christianity, persecution of the Jews began again - just as the Roman authorities were showing signs of wearying of it. Then, having lived for three centuries in humiliation under Roman-Christian (that is, Byzantine) rule, the Jews made the mistake of showing support for the Persian invaders who overthrew the Byzantines in 611-614. This regime lasted only a little more than a decade, and the Jews paid the price of yet another massacre for their “disloyalty” when Byzantine rule was restored. When the first of the Moslem conquerors in turn overthrew the Byzantines forever (633), the Jews, much reduced in numbers and in substance, welcomed the restoration of Muslim rule as relatively temperate.
When the Crusaders came, they massacred thousands of the Jews, and forbade the survivors from entering Jerusalem again. This is believed to be the nadir in the story of Jewish presence in the Holy Land. Probably only a few thousand Jews remained in the Holy Land. Again, when Islamic rule returned -- this time under Saladin of Damascus, a Kurd -- the Jews had reason to rejoice in the relative improvement of their condition. Under the Ottomans, Jewish numbers increased again -- perhaps to about 30,000 by 1881. By the middle of the Nineteenth century, the total population of the whole region that became the British mandate of Palestine was about 400,000 -- less than 4% of today's population. By World War I, 600,000 lived in Western Palestine (i.e., present Israel). Of these, about 80,000 were Jews.
Anyone who has any respect for the history of that region knows that by the time of the Balfour Declaration of November, 1917, Jews were a minority in Palestine as a whole -- only about 83,000 in 1922. And so one is not surprised to find that the Balfour Declaration clearly says that the work of making a Jewish state here is going to have to deal as justly as possible with the claims of those other populations. The other populations, however, are never identified as “the Palestinians” -- certainly never by themselves. Apart from small pockets of several other nationalities, the majority were mainly Arabs.
Palestine had never been a Province of the Ottoman Empire, and had, indeed, never been governed as a distinct unity but for most of Ottoman history as a region of a large jurisdiction dominated by Syria/Lebanon. Throughout all of the tangled and noisy history of this area from 1917 until 1948 it never occurred to any responsible figure to use the term in any other than a regional-geographical sense.
In 1922, the League of Nations assigned to Great Britain a Mandate on its behalf over “Palestine.” As defined by that Act, “Palestine" included what is now Israel, as well as what is now generally (and inaccurately) called the “West Bank” and the Gaza Strip, as well as everything on the other side of the Jordan all the way to desert portions of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Shortly after, the British government attempted to take into account the unwillingness of the Arab people of Palestine to live in a Jewish state by partitioning this historic region This they did, by severing everything East of the Jordan river, calling that the Kingdom of Transjordan, later Jordan. The portion of land assigned to this kingdom was about four-fifths of the whole of Mandate of Palestine: 35,000 sq. miles. Today, Jordan roughly the population of Israel and is publicly (and gleefully) declared to be free of Jews.
Incidentally: most Western commentators and most governments of Western nations as well as the UN, refer to the predominantly Arab-speaking central portions of what was once Palestine as “the West Bank,” and treat with scorn the use of the terms “Judea and Samaria.” We are told that use of these terms marks one as a “biblical literalist” or “fundamentalist”, and/or as a tool (witting or unwitting) of religious zealots. In fact, Judea and Samaria were the terms used by the British during the Mandate period. These are the terms that appear on the maps. It is the term “West Bank” which is the politically-loaded newcomer to the debate. Until sometime after 1967, the term “West Bank”, had application only to a river; henceforth the term (in capital letters) was kept alive by Jordan to bolster its case that it had been deprived of half of its Kingdom – the other “bank” -- even though the Britain and the League of Nations had established the Jordan River as the western frontier of the Kingdom of Transjordan, and even though the UN had decided in 1947 that this territory would belong to the new Arab state which should be built within the confines of the Balfour mandate, as defined I947. Then, after the King of Jordan abandoned his claim to rule in this region, and designated the PLO as the natural leaders of the Palestinian People, the West Bank by a further twist of logic became the usual designation for everything extending westward from the actual west bank of the River Jordan, up to the tops of the mountain ranges, and then halfway down the other side towards the Mediterranean Sea.
* * *
Bernard Lewis demonstrates that very notion of an Arab national identity, in the sense now promulgated, is an invention of the early Twentieth Century and derives from Western habits of thought. Using European analogies, our politicians and our scholars speak of “the Arabic-speaking people” as a nation or group of sister nations in the European sense, united by a common territory, language and culture and a common aspiration to a political independence. No one denies that there were many centuries of Arab rule over the region which we call the Holy Land. These centuries were, however, by no means uninterrupted. There were also periods of Persian rule, Seljuk rule, Egyptian rule, and lastly there were four hundred years (exactly) of Ottoman rule. When the British were locked in their life-and-death struggle with the central Powers and Turkey, they made a dramatic bid to all the non-Turkish races of the region, promising them whatever they wanted to hear. In particular, they tapped into the movement of Arab nationalism (whose roots, in any case, were in the recent history of European nationalist movements.) Arab-speaking politicians who wished to participate in the overthrow of the Ottomans, abetted by Lawrence of Arabia and other nationalist romantics, championed “Arab nationalism.” In playing to these “Arab-nationalist” forces the British agreed to minimize the presence in the whole region of such non-Arab peoples as the Assyrians (who were Christians of ancient standing), the Kurds (whom were read about in today’s newspapers still) and many many others. Arab nationalists, for their own purposes, have always magnified the Arab part of the story.
* * *
It is logically impossible to make the case that “Palestine” belongs to the local non-Jewish population because they belong to the Arab Nation and simultaneously to speak of the immemorial existence of the Palestinian nation. An argument based on either of these premises is in any case incompatible with the clear teaching of Islam which is that all Muslims belong to the nation of Islam, the dar al-Islam.
While it is historically insupportable, therefore, to speak of “many centuries of Arab rule,” it is perfectly correct to speak of many centuries of Muslim rule.
The majority [of the inhabitants of Mandate Palestine] belonged to ...the nation of Islam...[and] thought of themselves primarily as Muslims. When further clarification was necessary, it might be territorial -- Egyptians, Syrian, Iraqi -- or social -- townsman, peasant, nomad. It is to this last that the term Arab belongs. So little had it retained of its ethnic meaning that we even find it applied at times to non-Arab nomads of Kurdish or Turkoman extraction. [14]
Many Christians who regard themselves as realists and also as people of goodwill ask: What does it matter if the case for the Palestinian people lacks historical substance? Would it not be better if we all simply nodded agreeably as the “Palestinians” recited their alternative “narrative” and then get on with the work of reconciliation ?
In recent years, Christian liberals have found support for this thinking in an unlikely place: in the thinking and the writing of those Israel politicians of the left who were the authors of the policy of seeking peace through negotiation with the Palestine Liberation Organization -- the process which brought about the ruinous 1993 Oslo Accords. Shimon Peres, the Israeli politician who invested more than any other in this process, suggested in a book written in 1993 what might be called a Gordian knot approach to the embarrassment of dealing with the Palestinians arguments about their history. After reviewing the story more-or-less along the lines which we have just followed he concludes:
Until the 1948 War of Independence, the Palestinian people did not exist as a separate entity, either in their own consciousness or in the minds of other people, including the Arab nations .... During the British Mandate, Palestinian nationalist consciousness was defined as being part of the greater Arab nation, giving Palestinians a different, separate identity from that of the Jews living in the region ...[Their slogan was:] PALESTINE IS ARAB. Rather than claim ownership of the land in the name of a particular nationality, they did so in the name of pan-Arabism. They also asked for and received Arab solidarity before the 1948, on ideological grounds of unification, not a particular national identity.
An attempt to combine these general and particular nationalist trends is found in the PLO's Palestinian Covenant, which asserts that Palestine is the national homeland of the Palestinian Arab people; it is an integral part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation. In other words, even the founding document of the Palestinian national movement does not lay claim to the land on behalf of Palestinians alone ... Only during the ideological struggle against the State of Israel and the Zionist movement did the ideologues of the Palestinian camp begin to speak about a specific historical Palestinian connection to this controversial land, a connection that is independent of any pan-Arab context. At that time, the Palestinians began to be described as the descendents of the ancient Jebusites, and some even suggested that the Palestinian people existed "from time immemorial."
But then he sweeps away all these merely historical considerations:
These facts [my emphasis] do not question the legitimacy of Palestinian national consciousness. The modern democratic outlook recognizes the validity of forming a new national association, termed "people building" in the professional literature, based on the consciousness of independence by any group that establishes such a national association.
In short: facts, schmacts. Anybody can invent a nation any time that it serves a purpose!
The Palestinians became a people when they decided to do so and when they began to act as a national collective. Questions of how they began to act as a national collective and what factors led to this awakening are of interest to historians and sociologists, but the speculations make no difference in determining strategy. Strategy depends upon present reality. . . . Just as we Jewish people did not ask the Palestinians for permission to become a state, neither do they need our permission to become a people. [15]
Thus Peres dismisses the integrity of three millennia of historiography, leveling all recitals of the past to the moral and intellectual standing of myth. Perhaps such contempt for historical fact makes sense to a man who could say (1n May of 1994): “Today we have ended the Arab-Israeli conflict. Utopia is coming.” [16]
People who dismiss “mere historical facts” for the sake of “realism” will eventually learn that there is nothing more real than historical fact. Historians, and others who take history seriously, have reason for concern regarding the recent habit of such Christian organizations as the Middle East Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches of patronizing the fantasy-histories of self-declared “aboriginal” people and others who claim to be victims of “Eurocentrism,” “linear thinking” and other alleged vices of the Western mind. It used to be better understood than it is today that Christian faith depends upon the historical validity of certain entirely specific events, which appear in historical documents and which have been subject to critical examination for over nineteen hundred years, and which are alleged to recapitulate the largest meanings in human history. This realization is at the heart of the entirely unique preoccupation with the determination of historical fact which has always characterized Western civilization. But respect for historical fact is not widespread in an age when historical thinking is generally despised and historical content has been almost entirely driven from the curriculum of schools.
The point of historical research is not to move us along the path of peace and reconciliation. It is to find truth. It is simple fantasy to talk of a well-developed Arab civilization in the region and equally fantastic to ground the claim of its present Arab-speaking residents in a calim to aboriginal title.
I have found for my sins that Christian pro-Palestinian zealots will scream at you that all your historical generalizations come out an evil heart, that you are deaf to the need of love and understanding. They claim to know that your generalizations are all the opposite of truth, but they do not step forward with historical documentation.
Parties who will not listen to arguments about truth are never going to be moved down the path of reconciliation. We must not let fear of appearing to be an enemy of peace and reconciliation make us enemies of historical truth.
……………….
Paul C. Merkley.
[1] Quoted in Ramon Bennett, Philistine: The Great Deception (Jerusalem: Arm of Salvation, 1995), 137.
[2] Quoted in Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmim: The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam (London: Associated University Presses, 1985), 145.
[3] Leona Glidden Running and David Noel Freedman, William Foxwell Albright: A Twentieth -Century Genius ( New York: Two Continents/Morgan, 1975.), 384.
[4] See Bernard Lewis, "The Palestinians and the PLO: A Historical Approach," Commentary, January, 1975.
[5] All the quotations in this paragraph derive from Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (London: Michael Joseph, 1985), 139-140.
[6] Speech to United Nations General Assembly, New York, November 13, 1974.
[8] The specific portions which I have quoted come from Walter Lowdermilk Palestine: Land of Promise (New York: Harper, 1944), pp. 133, 59, 28, 5-6, 80-83. Lowdermilk’s research materials are in the file, “Walter Lowdermilk,” in Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.]
[9] Palestine Royal Commission Report of 1937, cited in Peters, 140.
[12] Quoted by Netanyahu, 43.
[13] Netanyahu, 43-44.
[14] Lewis, The Arabs, 15, cited in Peters, 152-154.
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