#879 11/5/17 – This Week: Answering Abbas’ Op-ed that Israel Displaced ‘The People Already There’

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Abbas just wrote a “Britain must apologize for Balfour” Guardian op-ed, to which Adam Levick just wrote a worthy point-by-point response.  Let’s focus on Levick’s first point – refuting Abbas’ claim that Balfour and Israel disregarded the rights of “those who already lived there,” i.e., “the Palestinians.”  All the other Jewish homeland-delegitimizing claims flow from that. 

This Week: Answering Abbas’ Op-ed that Israel Displaced “The People Already There”

Adam Levick’s Alegmeiner article Friday (113/17) answered a recent op-ed by Palestinian Authority leader Abbas:  “Abbas’ Guardian Op-ed Illustrates the Dishonesty of the ‘Palestinian Narrative’.”

Abbas, in claiming that “Britain must atone for the Balfour Declaration – and 100 years of suffering,” wrote that Balfour disregarded “the political rights of those who already lived there” (emphasis added).

Levick responded:

     “The language used by Abbas (‘those who already lived there’) buttresses the broader narrative, advanced repeatedly by Palestinian leaders, in their media and education system, that falsely frames Jews as interlopers with no historical or religious connection to the land of Israel. [emphasis original]

     “In fact, Jews ‘already lived there’ when Balfour was issued.  Jews are an indigenous people to the land, and small Jewish communities remained even after their exile in 70 CE, during the Byzantine, Muslim and Crusader rule.  There has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Land of Israel for more than 3,000 years.”

Levick’s excellent Algemeiner article went on to challenge other misleading statements Abbas made in his “British must apologize for the Balfour Declaration” Guardian op-ed, but let’s focus on this one, which by me is the foundation of all the others.

Abbas and his fellow Palestinian Arab leaders are not alone in claiming that Israel’s 1948 attainment of independence (they prefer to call it Israel’s 1948 “founding”) did injustice to “the people who already lived there.”  I’ve several times quoted President Obama telling the whole world from Cairo in 2009:  ““It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding.”

And here are the words, per Haaretz 2/28/17, uttered  by another U.S. politician:

“… the founding of Israel involved the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people already living there, the Palestinian people….”  [emphasis added]

These were the words in  a speech by a Jew, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, to the 2017 J Street Conference in Washington, 2/27/17, and we were still learning this week just how incredibly close Sen. Sanders came last year to becoming the current President of the United States.

“The Jews were already there” – Is that True?

So, IS IT TRUE, as Adam Levick wrote Friday on Algemeiner, that Jews were already living there when Balfour was announced one hundred years ago in 1917, and when Israel attained its independence in 1948, and that they had continuously lived there, not as a few stray individuals, but as the organized, openly Jewish, homeland-claiming Yishuv, from biblical times to the present?  Yes, all that is true, but, alas, what is also true is that we do not drive the significance of this point home to people in the West as adamantly as Arabs and their allies drive home “Palestine is the home of the Palestinians.”

Let’s start with two of Lord Balfour’s own countrymen.

[1]  Re the number of Twentieth Century Jews in the land, in 1947, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin [no friend of ours] told Parliament:

There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews.  For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”  (Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 433, col. 988, quoted in Bell, Terror Out of Zion, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, p. 188)  [emphasis added]

[2]  As for the Jews’ continuous presence, in 1970 British historian Parkes wrote in Whose Land?  A History of the Peoples of Palestine (p. 266) a bitter critique of the Jews for not making this very point.  Parkes wrote that while “it was, perhaps, inevitable” that Zionists should hark back to the Maccabees and Bar Kochba in staking their claim, “their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.”  (emphasis added)  Parkes’ criticism of the Jews was that this continuous presence “page of Jewish history” found no part in Jews’ making their homeland case, and that the omission allowed the Arabs to paint “a picture of The Land as a territory which had once been ‘Jewish.’ but which for many centuries had been ‘Arab.’  In point of fact, any picture of a total change of population is false, as the previous chapters have shown.”

A few years ago, I wrote a book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3,000 Year Presence in Palestine  (Pavlion Press, Amazon), which set out to trace what Parkes had called that heroic endurance all through the centuries that had written the Zionists’ real title deeds.  I invite your personal perusal of how well I succeeded.  [There’s a bit more in the book.  My first draft set the opening scene in 70 CE in the Second Temple’s smoking ruins.  The publisher fired back, “But what about King David and all of that stuff?”  What about it, indeed?  I first answered that “If we can’t connect the dots between Hadrian and Herzl, then King David and all of that stuff doesn’t matter.”  But it does matter, vastly, of course (chapter 1 became chapter 4), and I also think the Hadrian to Herzl dots are connected.]

Go and see, but let me leave you, at least, with these historical summary points contradicting Israel’s “1948 founding” having displaced “the people already there.”

[a]  Modern Israel is the Land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.  Without exception, every ruler in between was a foreign empire invader (and mostly non-Arab at that) – Romans-Byzantines, briefly Persians, Omayyad-Abbasid-Fatimid dynasties (begun as Arab but fading to Turk), European Crusaders, non-Arab Mamluks (200+ years), non-Arab Turks (400 years).

[b]  The Romans did not “exile” the Jews.  Not in 70 CE (to which even Levick refers), not in 135 after defeating Bar-Kochba (as President Carter has written).  Continually unearthed Roman-Byzantine era synagogue and other Jewish presence remains, Roman recognition of the Patriarch as head of the homeland community until the Fifth Century, the writing of the Mishnah and Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud, and self-mustered battalions of 20,000 or more homeland Jews fighting alongside the 614 Pesian invaders, and Jewish aid to the Muslim invaders, all testify to this.

Pilgrims and others left documents testifying to Jewish presence during the foreign Muslim dynasty rule between that of the Byzantines and the Crusaders.  More were found in the Cairo geniza.  Archeologist Bahat, in The Forgotten Generations, compiled a map showing a hundred Ninth Century Jewish communities in this place the size of New Jersey.

The Crusaders themselves wrote that “Jew, Turk and Arab” confronted them at Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.”  They wrote that Haifa’s Jews, fighting “with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians” had held them off for a month.  Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela, and others, wrote of the Jews in the land.

We have much documentation of Jews in their four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and elsewhere in the land during Mamluk and Turkish rule times.

[c]  Centuries of Turkish misrule had driven the land’s population down to less than a quarter-million, maybe well less than that, by the early 1800’s.  See, e.g., Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad.  In 1947, Bevin wrote that the land held 1.2 million Arabs [Katz argued in Battlground that the Arab population was smaller] and 600,000 Jews.  But for the British pre-Holocaust White Paper and during-and-post-Holocaust British blockade, and massacres by their predecessor foreign rulers and subjects going back through Crusaders to Rome, there would have been many, many more homeland Jews.

[d]  For all that Jewish homeland detractors write of Israel’s “creation” and “founding” in 1948, as though artificially and suddenly, often claimed “because of the Holocaust,” it was a homeland army of homeland Jews that threw back the instant invasion of multiple neighboring Arab states.  Not bad for a state having been just “created” and “founded.”  (The U.S. had an arms embargo, and the British were arming the Arabs.)

[e]  And for all that Jewish homeland detractors portray Israelis as European colonialist invaders who displaced indigenously Middle Eastern Arabs, Israel absorbed more indigenously Middle Eastern Jews displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel.  These Jews’ descendants, and the descendants of the pre-state Yishuv, form a major segment of Israel’s population today.

Chaim Weitzmann, whom nobody would call “right-wing,” told the British that Jews (as such) had been living in Jerusalem “when London was a marsh.”  They were.  There may be no people on earth with a longer continuous, thrice sovereign homeland connection than that of Jews to their homeland of Israel.  It’s senseless for us to talk about “Israel’s ‘founding’s’ displacement of the people already there . . . West Bank … East Jerusalem … settlers and settlements . . . occupation of Palestinian territories beyond Israel’s 1967 borders,” etc., etc.  Instead, we should assert the Jewish homeland claim to the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, and that Palestinian-Arab-majority Jordan, 78% of the original Palestine Mandate, is the Palestinian Arab state.  This is without prejudice to possible territorial compromise, but you can’t give up something in compromise unless you first claim it.

= = = = =

If you haven’t been there recently, take a look at two new pages on our website, www.factsonisrael.com.  One is “Dirty Words,” listings of anti-Jewish-homeland pejoratives, with explanations of how they hurt us.  The second new feature is “Guest Column.”  Under “Latest News” on that page, see Philly area Zionist Henry Frank’s just-posted article on the same theme – Jewish homeland delegitimizing pejoratives we of all people shouldn’t use, and how they hurt our homeland claim.  Thank you, Henry.