#875 10/8/17 Iranian Mosques in Europe: “Palestine is the Home of the Palestinians.” So What’s Our Answer to That?

Iranian Mosques in Europe:  “Palestine Is the Home of the Palestinians”:  So What’s Our Answer To That?

The Jerusalem Post ran an article Friday that Iranian-controlled mosques in Europe have been proclaiming a seemingly plausible statement:  “Palestine is the home of the Palestinians.”  That seemingly simple, straight-forward statement is certain to seem self-evident to a great many people.  Once again, as with, e.g., our [legally and legislative-intent correct] argument that when UNSC Resolution 242 called for Israeli withdrawal from territory captured in the 1967 war, the resolution didn’t say “the territory” or “all the territory,” we’re on the long and convoluted-explanation side of making a case the other side of which sounds plain and simple, eminently understandable to the great mass of people who don’t have a lot of time to spend on the complexities of the “Israeli-Palestinian” [n.b.]  conflict in Palestine.

Of the “10 Misleading Expressions” Lee and I include in our Powerpoint talk on media bias, based on our book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, misleading expression #4 is “U.N. Sought to Create in Palestine Jewish and Palestinian States.”  E.g., AP 3/16/08, “envisioned Jewish and Palestinian states”; McClatchy, 5/8/08, “proposed separate Jewish and Palestinian states”; AP, 2/28/09, “separate Jewish and Palestinian states.”  In point of fact, the U.N., DID NOT PURPORT TO DO THAT.  What it said, over and over, in its non-binding Palestine partition resolution was “ARAB and Jewish States” [emphasis added].  In that very resolution, it called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs, who numbered at the time c. 600,000 and c. a million, respectively, “the two Palestinian peoples.”

Partitioning Palestine between between “Palestinians” and Jews sounds as balanced as partitioning Pennsylvania between “Pennsylvanians” and Jews, the sometimes-planet Pluto between “Plutonians” and Jews.  It begs the question of who are indigenous natives and who intruding outsiders.  (You can hear me ranting away from a synagogue bimah on this on our website, www.factsonisrael.com.  Click “Videos,” then “10 Misleading Expressions.”)

We have to stop letting those who openly seek our Jewish homeland’s utter destruction twist history so they can speak in clear, catchy phrases to publics in Europe and America, like the current “Palestine is the home of the Palestinians.”  The answer is not for us to say, “No, it’s not,” but for us to reclaim, adamantly, Jewish equity in the term “Palestinian.”

Does this seem unrealistic and naïve to you?  Yes, we will be portrayed as such by the mainstream media, which, btw, calls the Hebrew-origin names “Judea and Samaria” the “biblical names” of “the West Bank,” (e.g., AP, 3/7/17: “Judea and Samaria is the biblical term for the West Bank”) in contempt of the realities [1] that the names “Judea and Samaria” remained in use throughout post-biblical centuries, including by the U.N. in its very partition resolution of 1947 (“The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River …”), and [2] that the invader Jordan invented “West Bank” in 1950 for the same reason the Romans invented “Palestine” [in memory of the long-gone Philistines, not Arafat’s ancestors] in 135, to disassociate pieces of the Jewish homeland from Jews.

We have sound historical foundation to claim Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian.”  Here are two major Jewish leaders on it:

Prime Minister Menachem Begin in his 1977 Foreword to Katz’s classic work Battleground:

“The impertinent campaign of the Arab propagandists in appropriating to themselves the name of ‘Palestine’ (as though theirs was the land) and Palestinians (as though they owned it) has unfortunately borne a good deal of fruit.  The fact that Palestine wa simply the name given over the centuries by non-Jews to the country of the Jews; that Palestine as the Jewish heritage is an ineffaceable fact of world history, indeed of the Moslem as well as of the Christian tradition, has been obscured by the weight of heavily-financed and admittedly efficient Arab propaganda.  So much so that even many Jews have been drawn into the semantic trap.  Battleground provides an incisive corrective to this erosion of the truth.  The most moving chapter in the book is that on the continuous Jewish presence in Palestine.  I was glad to learn that this particular chapter has been disseminated in special editions in several languages.”

And here is ZOA leader Mort Klein in September on Breitbart:

“The Jews are indigenous people of Israel, including Judea/Samaria and Jerusalem. The word “Jew” comes from “Judea” – because this is where the Jewish people lived. (Jordan renamed Judea/Samaria “the West Bank” during Jordan’s 19-year (1948-67) illegal occupation of the area, as explained below). Jewish kings and kingdoms reigned in Jerusalem and Judea/Samaria for hundreds of years (c.920 BCE – 597 BCE). For over 3,000 years, there was always a Jewish presence in Israel, even after conquests and dispersions of the Jewish people.

“. . . .  Moreover, Jerusalem was never the capital of any country except Israel. Jews were also the largest religious group in Jerusalem since at least the first census in the 1840s. . . .

“By contrast, there has never been a Palestinian Arab state or kingdom in Israel, Jerusalem or Judea/Samaria. Ever. “Palestine” is not an Arab name but is a Roman name, named by the Romans in 135 CE for the geographic area, to attempt to de-Judaize Israel and Judea/Samaria, after destroying the Second Temple in 70 CE and crushing the Jewish Bar Kochba Revolt (133-135 CE).

“Israel thus does not “occupy” land belonging to any Palestinian-Arab foreign sovereign – for no Palestinian-Arab foreign sovereign ever existed.

“Israel fell into desolation under Ottoman rule (1517-1917) and was sparsely populated then. Mark Twain wrote in 1867 that Israel was a “desolate country… We never saw a human being on the whole route… There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere.”  [emphasis original]

“Most Arab “Palestinians” are not indigenous to Israel. Most “Palestinian”-Arabs immigrated into Israel from Arab nations and northern Africa (Algeria, etc.) after waves of Jewish communities started rebuilding Israel in the mid-to-late 1800s through mid-1900s. “Palestinian” Arab last names such as “al Masri” (meaning “from Egypt”) and “Mugrabi” (“North African”) reveal some of the Palestinian Arabs’ origins.

“Indeed, the world always understood that ‘Palestinian’ meant ‘Jew.’ [emphasis added]  The media used to refer to Arabs in Judea/Samaria as ‘West Bankers’ not ‘Palestinians.’”

So, should we take back Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” along with “Judea and Samaria,” instead of “West Bank,” and just plain “Jerusalem,” instead of perpetuating an “East” Jerusalem that existed for the 19 years of the Jordanian seizure that Israel ended half-a-century ago?  Or should we, in the present case, passively avert our eyes from Iranian-et-ilk “Palestine is the home of the Palestinians,” and to the effectiveness of this perversion of history in the minds of millions of Christians and even some Jews in Europe and the U.S.?

Jack Yampolsky

Ferne informed us this week of the passing of Jack Yampolsky.  He and his father had aided “Peter Bergson” in the 1940s, first, in seeking American Jewish involvement in saving European Jews from the Holocaust, and then in supporting the struggle for sovereignty of the Jewish homeland in Palestine.  “Palestine” is what Jews called the homeland then, as here in, e.g., “The American League for a Free Palestine,” and there in, e.g., “the Palestine Post,” today’s “Jerusalem Post.”  If you never heard Jack Yampolsky’s moving account of those Peter Bergson days, you missed hearing a moving first-person account of American Jewish involvement in a seminal moment of our people’s three-millennia history.