Dean's World: Mideast Humor, and a Digression

April 26, 2002

Mideast Humor, and a Digression

I've said I'd stop commenting on the Middle East, but, as others have pointed out, it's constantly at the top of the news, and hard to entirely avoid. So, for now, I've resolved not to comment on it more than once or twice a week. That being the case, here's something worth looking at:

Larry Miller has a funny and somewhat informative article in The Weekly Standard about the Israeli/Palestine situation. It's worth reading, and I have a response I'd like to make....

Mind you, this response makes little sense unless you read his article first. Go ahead, click the link above and read it--it's funny, and perceptive, and not all that long.

Okay, so here's my response: The only area where I take issue with Miller is the supposedly fictional nature of the designation "Palestinian." Unfortunately, while this perspective has its merits, it's basically wrong. In the vast sweep of history, nations and nationalities (and most ethnicities) exist because the people living in an area say so, and have both the means and the fortitude to continue to insist on the matter. There is no more objective standard, no other way of measuring it.

A whole generation has now grown up in a place called Palestine--there are people with grandchildren who have considered themselves Palestinians for their entire lives. Ipso facto, Palestine is a place, and "Palestinian" is a valid designation.

Of course, if you were to ask me, I'd say they should be considered Lebanese or Syrian or Jordanian, and they ought to be every bit as angry at those nations as Israel, if not more so. It also seems to me that Zionists would be doing themselves a favor if they would point that out more often, rather than deny that Palestine is a real place--in the long run the latter is a pointless argument that just makes Israelis look cruel.

Also, let's face it, it's not as if Israelis, whose designation is only 54 years old, are in any position to scoff at people that have only called themselves "Palestinian" for three or four decades. Yeah, I know, the history of the Jewish people goes back thousands of years. But here's my wacky, arbitrary rule of thumb: if you leave a place for over 1,800 years, you don't just show up one day and declare, "Honey, I'm home!" and expect everyone to give you a hug and say, "welcome back!" Fair or unfair, the world just doesn't work that way.

On the other hand, that's water under the bridge. And it's not as if those places called "Syria," "Lebanon," "Jordan," et. al. are any less artificial than Israel or Palestine are. Yeesh, the only nation in the whole region that's existed for more than a hundred years is Egypt.

So, frankly, much of this is moot. Israel exists as a nation and (damn those stubborn Jews!) its inhabitants insist that they be allowed to continue to breathe. Meanwhile, the people in Palestine continue to stubbornly insist that they exist. Clearly, some accomodation must be made; we're far past the point where we can just say, "let's call the whole thing off." Israel is there, and Palestine is there. What I find most unfortunate is that so many people who side with the Palestinians advocate policies that, in my view, only worsen the Palestinian situation.

Posted by esmay | PermaLink

Discuss This Article!

Dean, you would do well to re-visit the post-history of World War I in the Middle East. There is an excellent site for you here:

http://www.bible411.com/currentevents/ce990424.htm

Allow me to summarize:

When the victorious Allies were carving up the Turkish Empire after World War I, both Jews and Arabs requested independent states. The world powers were generous in the extreme to the Arabs by granting them twenty-two independent Arabs states—encompassing 5,414,000 square miles.

The Jews asked for less than one percent of that vast territory. The Allies agreed to this request in granting a territory whose boundaries iincluded land on both sides of the Jordan River. This was part of the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1920 San Remo Conference of World Powers.

In other words, as of 1920, Palestine was what we basically NOW call Israel, the West Bank and Jordan.

It gets worse.

In 1921 Great Britain reneged on the Balfour Declaration, and lopped off 77 percent of the Land promised in the Balfour Declaration and set up the Arab Emirate of Transjordan.

This is what we now call Jordan. In other words, 77% of "Palestine" was ceded to the Arabs, 23% to the Jews. So in 1922 the League of Nations gave Great Britain a Mandate to prepare the remaining 23 percent of Palestine (including Samaria, Judea, Gaza, Golan Heights and Eastern Jerusalem) for a Jewish National Home.

But wait there's more...

Under French pressure, in 1923 the Golan Heights was ceded by the British to the French Mandate of Syria.

Do you see a pattern emerging here, Dean?

It gets even worse.

Time passes. Oil is discovered. Arabs are appeased. World War II breaks out, but not before immigration to Palestine is banned.

How many Jews might have been saved? We'll never know, but we DO know how many died in the concentration camps.

It gets worse.

After the war, the victors, guilt-ridden after defaulting on their promise since 1922, felt a moral obligation to grant the Jews an independent state.

But, unfortunately, the UN Partition Plan of 1947 further reduced the size of the new Israeli State, ceding about 50% of the area west of the Jordan River to the Arabs. This was resolution 181.

OK. That's 50% of the 23% that was left after the original Balfour Declaration. But that's OK because apparently that's demographically where all the Jews are?

Or that's where all the Jews are going to be....put?

Let's definitely NOT go here: had immigration been allowed during World War II, who knows how many Jews might have moved to Palestine?

I leave that to you.

Oddly enough, the plan enjoyed the warm support of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite governments. Josef Stalin hoped that the new Jewish state would be a bulwark against British imperialsim.

The United States likewise supported the partition plan, despite reservations that the Jewish state might not be viable, having been cut by 3/4 and then again by 1/2.

Given that, would you like to know how the Arabs voted on Resolution 181? Not a single Arab state voted in the affirmative.

So after losing the vote, they tried to win the final sliver of land that was left by attacking the newly independent state of Israel.

In advance of this attack, it was the Arab print news media and the muftis urged the Arab population to stand aside while the Jews were pushed into the sea. Thousands of refugees willingly left the territory.

Armies from six Arab nations defied the UN resolution by invading the newborn State. The rest is history.

Outnumbered 100 to one, Israel's ragtag army pushed back the invaders and, in the process, took more of its rightful Land than UN Resolution 181 defined.

The world was shocked, to say the least.

Flash forward. The PLO is born in the 60's. It creates a charter that contends (in Article 2, it's still there check it out) that "Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit."

Hmmm. That would certainly seem to encompass at least ALL of Jordan, wouldn't it? Could it be possible that the Palestinian homeland is in Jordan? After all, the majority of Jordan is made up of "Palestinians".

So, in fact, they went after THAT territory. In other words, the "L" in PLO meant the liberation of Jordan.

Cut to the chase: Jordan (who, oddly enough, did not want to give up THEIR claims of sovereignty, the stiff-necked bastards that they are) kicked their asses out of Jordan, but not before a spectacular couple of years of aiplane hijackings, war-time atrocities and, yes, accusations of Palestinian genocide and massacres, political betrayals amongst so-called Arab allies, the death of Nassar which only made things worse, and so on and so forth. Dean, at one point the slaughter of the Palestinians by the Jordanian forces was so great that many sought asylum -- asylum! -- in Israel.

The story of Black September 1970 is a riveting one. All the more so because the central player and only survivor of that fiasco is none other than Yasser Arafat. Arafat escaped the bloody denouement in Jordan by going to Lebanon where he organized the infamous Black September movement that assassinated Arab officials with impunity, hijacked everyone's airplanes and blew up electrical plants in Europe.

Soon enough, they turned their sites on Israel, attacking towns in northern Israel from Lebanon; the Israelis retaliated via aerial bombardment of the "refugee camps".

I was in Beirut in the summer of 1974 when all of that was happening. We'll save that story for another day.

Suffice it to say that an historic opportunity was lost by the Arabs to abosorb the "Palestinian refugees" into Jordan, or any other Arab land for that matter.

Here's the bottom line: the historic "Palestinian peoples" are the majority in Jordan.

It is bizarre: the ruling minority in Jordan are the Hashemites with King Abdullah (son of King Hussein) on the throne. And until relatively recently, the monarchy considered the West Bank part of Jordan.

As Bob Dole used to say, "Where is the outrage?"

Posted by Ara Rubyan on April 27, 2002 at 10:42 AM

Ara's comments are well-taken, and more people need to understand the history he shares (some of which I knew, some of which I did not). Misinformation about the history of that region is common. Not long ago a relative of mine asserted that the British and the Americans set up the state of Israel after World War II as an intentional means of preventing the "legitimate" natives of the region from developing into a super-power.

Mind you, this is a relatively intelligent, college-educated woman. I'm not even joking.

Nevertheless I repeat a basic observation: in the vast span of human history, just about the only way any nationality has come into existence has been by force. If the people living in a region declare they exist, and have both the will and the power to insist on the matter, then, they simply do. If enough people think they are Palestinians, then, sui generis, it is simply so.

Anyone who looks to history for "fair" in the relations between peoples will be looking long and hard for it, unfortunately.

Posted by Dean Esmay on April 28, 2002 at 4:16 PM

Dean's comments about a female relative are true.

FYI - Everyone!

THIS WAS NOT HIS WIFE. NOT HIS WIFE.

Posted by Rosemary Esmay on April 28, 2002 at 6:16 PM

Well all right then, Rosemary. I'm glad you clarified that.

Posted by Ara Rubyan on April 29, 2002 at 9:00 AM

While I understand where Ara is coming from, I do not agree with her opinion of how the Jews were treated unfairly in the Israel/Palestine issue. I think the Palestinians were the ones who got the shaft. First, roughly three-fourths of their land was made into Jordan. Then what was left of their country was divided, and more than half was given to Jewish immigrants who wanted a nation of their own. The Zionists had the support of Britian and the US because they thought a Jewish nation would be more cooperative with western endeavors than an Arab nation. Then the Israelis - with military backing of the British - successfully conquered the rest of Palestine by defeating their poorly trained and eqipped army.
The 77 percent of Palestine that was given to Abdullah and formed Transjordan, is not a Palestinian nation. The 23 percent that was left is what was to be Palestine, but Israel conquered about three quarters of that, and the rest was claimed by either Egypt or Jordan. So Palestine didn't even appear on the map.
Also, the question of Israel would not have even arisen without the waves of Jewish immigrants into Palestine - with British permission, but against the wishes of the Arabs.
Palestine had all of their land given away, taken away, or conquered, and people wonder why they're upset and are trying to take away poor Isreal's land.

Posted by Meredith on April 23, 2003 at 9:46 PM

millers article is not funny or informitive
its all propaganda not one thing more

Posted by jake on June 04, 2003 at 2:44 PM

millers article is not funny or informitive
its all propaganda not one thing more
see skolnickreports.com

Posted by jake on June 04, 2003 at 2:45 PM

Hi! Nice site! Please visit our site also http://www.someviagra.info/ . (Viagra) see you soon

Posted by John on September 30, 2003 at 10:10 AM

tremendous site

Posted by casino on January 06, 2004 at 9:14 PM

Well thought out blog entry, though I'm not sure I entirely agree with the point being made! However saying that everyone has their own point of view and is entitled to it.

Posted by free casino on January 19, 2004 at 10:31 PM

great site, well done. very nice and informal comments. i enjoy being here.

Posted by klaus on January 21, 2004 at 4:23 AM