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Friday, June 8, 2012

Part 2 of Looking at our History: From 1967 On: Well, What About the Palestinians?

Nadene Goldfoot
When the 5 Arab states attacked Israel and lost, this meant that Israel was now the victor with the result that Israel now occupied the "West Bank" after defeating the Jordanian aggressor.  Jordan had illegally  annexed the land, or occupied it from 1948 to 1967.  Jordan had had no mandate.  They had taken advantage and just stole it.  This was Judea and Samaria and was figured to be a part of the Jewish Homeland originally.

For the very first time the PLO with Arafat at the helm claimed sovereignty to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.  This was a claim asserted only against Jews.  This is because their original Covenant explicitly recognized Judea, Samaria, and the eastern portion of Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip as belonging to "other" Arab states.  The only "homeland" it sought to "liberate" in 1964 was the state that belonged to the Jews, that being Israel.  They planned to drive Israel and Israelis into the sea.

Jordanian occupation of the West Bank and the Egyptian control of the Gaza Strip amounted to brutal totalitarian repression.  As told by Arafat himself, in 1948 the Egyptians herded Palestinians into  refugee camps, kept them behind barbed wire, sent in spies to murder their leaders, executed those who tried to flee.  This information comes from Arafat's authorized biography, "Arafat:  Terrorist or Peace Maker," by Alan Hart, 1982.  The Palestinians were not in a position to complain and there was no talk of self-determination.

Palestinians claimed that they had been driven out at the conclusion of the 1967 War from Judea and Samaria.  This is what really happened.  There was no pressure, no promises, no threat of life from the Israelis.  Some 200,000 Arabs in Judea and Samaria just packed up their things and crossed the Jordan.  This went on for days  Of course there were many foreign newspaper correspondents there with photographers and talked with them.  Three weeks after the war, Samuel Katz, writer, visited the area and watched the progress.  He spoke to one well-dressed man who said he was an employee of the Jordanian government stationed in Bethlehem and had been instructed to  report to Amman, Jordan..Once across the river the Arabs were interviewed and everyone claimed to have been driven out by the Jews.  Truth was, they weren't.

A similar thing happened in Judea and Samaria under the king of Jordan from 1949 to 1967.  some 400,000 Arabs just packed up and left for other parts of the Arab world as well.  They are living and working as citizens in Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, and Kuwait, that very prosperous little Arab state.  

Arabs had not been thinking about wanting their own nation or even of themselves being a separate people, which Joan Peters points out in her book, From Time Immemorial.  They were people from all the surrounding lands and had one thing in common; they were Arabs.  There was never a state of Palestine, no country had Palestinians.  The area, Palestinians said, was historically part of southern Syria, and for centuries had been known as the country of Damascus to them (balad esh-sham)  The term "Palestinian was used only to define Jews who were living in Mandatory Palestine.  The Arabs in the region were called "Arabs."

March 31, 1977's interview with the newspaper Dagblad de Verdieping Trouw, an Amsterdam-based paper's executive Zahir Muhse'in said:  The Palestinian people do not exist.  The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity.  In reality, there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.  It's only used for political and tactical reasons.  Even today the Syrian 5th Grade social studies textbooks show "Greater Syria" as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.

After the Holocaust ending in 1945, even Western liberals do not favor genocidal terrorism so have taken up the call of "an oppressed people struggling to be free".  Arafat's terrorist propaganda just invented lies of Palestinian National Identity and Israeli occupation and oppression.  Israel has tried to be the liberators, not the oppressors, but it didn't work out as planned.  Since March 2006, the Palestinian Authority "Fatah" has been control of the Palestinians in the West Bank."  So when people say, 'How about the Palestinians,"  it's up to the Palestinian Powers of Fatah and Hamas to sit down and make peace with Israel.  Israel's hands are tied.  They can't make peace with one and not the other very well.  Even Hamas and Fatah have not been in agreement for much of the time.

Israel feels that as long as Fatah and Hamas will not make peace and keep shooting at Israel, Israel will keep building in Judea and Samaria in the allowed sections of land already agreed to.  This does not set well with many people who feel that the intractable position the Arabs have taken should still not affect Israel's right to build in land won defensively in the battle of 1967.  For 45 years the Arabs have not made peace.  In fact, they've added on a few more wars, such as the 1972 war and the 1982 war and the constant shooting since 2000.

Reference: David Meir-Levi, publication of the David Horowitz Freedom Center
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_National_Authority
Battleground-fact and fantasy in Palestine by Samuel Katz
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2012/06/07/3097586/israel-announces-851-new-housing-starts-in-west-bank

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