#885 12/17/17 – This Week: The Arab-Jewish Palestine Conflict and What To Call It

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: BESA ran a sound article this week that the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” isn’t “the Middle East Conflict.”  Agreed, but it’s not the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” either, but the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine, even “The Arab War for Israel’s Destruction.”  We have to make clear to the West that the Palestine Conflict isn’t between outsider Jews and “The Palestinians,” but that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel and broader Mideast.  To that end, Happy Hanukkah!

This Week:  The Arab-Jewish Palestine Conflict and What To Call It

The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies this week (Fri, 12/15/17) published a valid point-making article by Bar-Ilan University Professor Hillel Frisch, “Is the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict the ‘Middle East Conflict’?”  He answers, and I agree with him, “No.”

The problem with calling the conflict between Arabs and Jews over Palestine “the Middle East Conflict” is that it super-charges seeming world-need for urgently solving it.  And since the world’s “Middle East Conflict’s” solutions currently center upon irrevocable tangible Israeli concessions (“land”) in exchange for instantly-revocable non-tangible Arab promises (“peace”), calling that conflict “the Middle East Conflict” is a disservice to us.

Prof. Frisch cites the vastly greater casualty counts and foreign forces’ involvements in the Syria, Iraq and Yemen conflicts than in the Palestine conflict between Arabs and Jews.  And it is no longer fashionable to conclude that if that Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict would just go away, all the other Mideast conflicts would too.

But where I differ from Prof. Frisch is that I don’t think calling the Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” does justice to our side either.

David Bar-Illan, late editor of the Jerusalem Post and its path-finding “Eye On The Media” column, argued at length in his columns that “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” seemingly pits big Israeli “occupiers,” not against hundreds of millions of Arabs in vast Arab lands who initiated the 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars, but against tiny outsized and outclassed “Palestinians”:

“The Arab residents of this country during the British Mandate resented the appellation Palestinian.  They called themselves Arab, and named all their institutions–from the Arab Higher Committee on down–“Arab,” not Palestinian.  Only the Jews, when referring to themselves and their institutions in English, used the name Palestinian:  The Palestine Post (still the incorporated name of this newspaper), the Palestine Symphony, the United Palestine Appeal are typical examples….Applying the term Palestinian to Arabs of Palestine probably began in the 1960’s, but neither Security Council resolution 242 of 1967 nor 338 of 1973 mentions Palestinians at all.  It was only in the mid-1970’s that the term became popular/” (p. 166-67 of Eye On The Media compilation)

“…there is a distinct public-relations disadvantage in being a part of the Arab nation:  it is difficult to elicit sympathy for people who belong to a nation of 200 million people which possesses land almost twice the size of the US.  Nor is it easy to portray them as an underdog against four million Israelis occupying a tiny two-by-four country.

“Distinct Palestinian nationalism was born, then, to separate the Arabs of Palestine from other Arabs.  The Arab-Israeli conflict thus became the struggle of the “Palestinian nation” against the Israeli occupiers.”  (Eye On the Media compilation, p. 370)

 So, then, what should we call it?  Recovering ex-AP reporter Matti Friedman put it this way (Tablet, 8/26/14, emphasis added):

“It is accepted that the conflict is ‘Israeli-Palestinian,’ meaning that is a conflict taking place on land that Israel controls – 0.2 percent of the Arab world – in which Jews are a majority and Arabs a minority.  The conflict is more accurately described as ‘Israel-Arab,’ or ‘Jewish-Arab’ – that is, a conflict between the 6 million Jews of Israel and 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries….  This is the conflict that has been playing out in different forms for a century, before Israel existed, before Israel captured the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and before the term ‘Palestinian’ was in use.

“The ‘Israeli-Palestinian’ framing allows the Jews, a tiny minority in the Middle East, to be depicted as the stronger party….  This definition also allows the Israeli settlement project, which I believe is a serious moral and strategic error on Israel’s part [he introduces himself as “a liberal” and critic of many Israeli policies], to be described not as what it is – one more destructive symptom of the conflict – but rather as its cause.”

Indeed, there are those of my persuasion who’d go further and outright call that Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict “the Arab War for Israel’s Destruction” that it is.

Where I think we did our own cause the most damage was in not just acquiescing but gratuitously joining in calling Palestinian Arabs “The Palestinians.”  It’s difficult to make a persuasive case that Palestine west of the Jordan is the historic homeland of Jews when you yourselves call today’s non-Jewish residents of that Palestine “The Palestinians.”

Citing archeology and post-biblical demographics and history, religious texts including the Hebrew Bible and even passages in the Koran, and recognition in twentieth century international documents including San Remo and the Mandate, and using terms that don’t paint Arabs as indigenous and Jews as outsiders, we have to make crystal clear to people in the West that Jews have been and are indigenous to the land of Israel and broader Mideast, that Jerusalem – capital of three states, all Jewish, in the past 3000 years – has had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule, and that today’s State of Israel is the land of Israel’s (Palestine’s) next native state after the Hasmonean state [Hanukkah anyone?] of Jewish Judaea.