Again, "Palestinian Nationality"

From a new retelling of the Sabra and Chatilla incident

The soldiers forced their way in and began questioning Bayan while searching for documents. One officer found her husband’s old Palestinian passport, from his childhood in Jaffa, where he was born and raised during the British Mandate. The soldiers were amazed as they looked through its pages.
“Your reaction is no surprise to me. I am sure you have never seen such a document,” Bayan told them. “As you can see, the text is written in all three languages: Arabic, English, and Hebrew. It comes from the time when Palestine had enough room for everyone, regardless of his religion or sect.”
The soldiers confiscated the cherished passport, despite Bayan’s attempts to get it back, as she recounted tearfully to her husband when they were reunited some days later. In his memoirs, Shafiq al-Hout recalled the incident with obvious pain, conveying a message from the story, “that the Zionists’ perpetual objective is the elimination of Palestinian national identity. Why else would they insist on continuing to eradicate all physical, spiritual, and cultural trace of our presence in Palestine?”

The simple facts are

a. Arabs residing in the area of the Palestine Mandate viewed themselves as Southern Syrians as "Palestine" was part of Syria, they claimed. 

b. They demanded, into the mid-1920s, to dissolve the British Mandate and that the area by rejoined to Syria and continued, into the mid-1930s, to write about they being properly Syrians.

c. "Palestinian nationality" came to be as a result of the Jewish and Zionist claim to the area. Note the language of Article 7 of the Mandate decision:-

The Administration of Palestine shall be responsible for enacting a nationality law. There shall be included in this law provisions framed so as to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews who take up their permanent residence in Palestine.

I've touched on this topic previously, here and here and will recap.

If anything the concept of a "nationality" and a "citizenship", specifically of "Palestinians", was invented by/for the Jews, not the Arabs.

It was created, fashioned and conceived, at least on the Jewish side, which over many centuries, viewed themselves as belonging to a very specific country, whose boundaries are delineated in Biblical and Talmudic texts scores of centuries earlier.  And these texts were not some ancient dead letter but they were studied, at least weekly, all throughout the Diaspora existence and Jews were very much aware of this element of what we call 'identity'.

The international legal process - via the Balfour Declaration, the Versailles Peace Conference deliberations, the San Remo Conference decisions and those of the League of Nations between 1917-1922,  - all declined, studiously, to mention Arabs in the context of the country called Palestine.  They were included in a group called "non-Jews".

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I Am Temple Mount Confused

On August 25, this news item appeared (and via Google Translate):-

Jerusalem is warning Israel after an Israeli court ordered Jews to pray at al-Aqsa

The story:

The Islamic Waqf (Islamic Endowments) Department in Jerusalem on Saturday warned Israel against taking any decision that would harm the Islam of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by allowing non-Muslims to pray there.

Wow. How destructive can pray be?

A lot less than emptying out the southern section and dumping archaeological and historical remains, I would suggest.

The ministry said in a statement that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is the 144-acre Haram al-Sharif Mosque and all the roads leading to it, an Islamic mosque and an authentic part of the faith of all Muslims.

But why exclusive? Is not Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs shared?

The Department of Awqaf said that this statement comes after the various media outlets yesterday reported that the Israeli High Court demanded that the Israeli police and other government bodies provide reasons behind the continued prevention of Jewish extremists from breaking into the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the performance of the prayers there.
In its statement, the Supreme Court of Israel, the highest judicial body in the government of Israel, granted 60 days to respond to the reasons for preventing Jewish extremists from performing Talmudic prayers in the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque.
...Israel allows non-Muslims to enter Al-Aqsa Mosque at specific times without praying there.
According to a statement issued by the Awqaf Department, Al-Aqsa Mosque will not be subject to any laws of the land, and the Israeli court has no jurisdiction over the mosque.
Al-Aqsa Mosque squares witnessed clashes between worshipers and Israeli police during the last period, which led to the closure of the gates of the mosque, forcing the worshipers to pray on its gates before being reopened later.

Clashes? Or attacks by Waqf guards and other Muslims on innocent Jews and non-Jews?

Am I confused or is the Waqf trying to confuse us all?

_______________

P.S.

Now the answer was published:

In a speech before the PLO Executive Committee in Ramallah on September 15, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas repeated the old libel that Israel was planning to establish special Jewish prayer zones inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Abbas claimed that Israel was seeking to copy the example of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, where Jews and Muslims pray in different sections.

Abbas did not say what his lie was based on. He also did not provide any evidence of Israel's ostensible plot against the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He said, nevertheless, that the Palestinians, together with Jordan, were planning to bring this issue before the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

Abbas's allegation was quickly picked up by several media outlets in the Arab world, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The headlines that appeared on websites affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second largest terrorist group in the Gaza Strip, claimed that Israel is planning to permit Jews to pray inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Needless to say, there is no Israeli plan to allow Jews to pray inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque. However, in the past few years Jews, like all other non-Muslims, have been allowed to resume their perfectly legal visits to the Temple Mount. Thousands of Jews have toured the holy site under police protection, despite provocations and violent attacks by Muslims. It is worth noting that any kind of prayer of "religious displays" by Jews or Christians anywhere on the Temple Mount are completely forbidden by the Israel Police.

Why is Abbas's false accusation significant and dangerous? Hours after reports were published of Abbas's allegation, a 17-year-old Palestinian from the town of Yatta in the southern West Bank fatally stabbed Ari Fuld, a 45-year-old Israeli-American citizen and father of four, in a shopping center in Gush Etzion, south of Bethlehem.

According to Palestinian terrorist groups, the terrorist, Khalil Jabarin, decided to murder a Jew in response to Israeli "crimes" against the Al-Aqsa Mosque in particular and Islamic holy sites in general.

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They Meant Well

In a letter to the Irish Times, Jackie Goodall, the Director of the Ireland Israel Alliance, while dealing with the British Labour Party’s anti-Semitism controversy, includes this bit of history-in-error:

It should be remembered that the modern state of Israel was not created as a response to the Nazi genocide. The initial immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine began in 1882, with a second wave returning just prior to the first World War, both as a direct result of vicious persecution.

The first sentence is quite true.

But why begin the theme of "initial immigration" with "refugees"?

As I have detailed (eight years ago), the Jews were always either in the Land of Israel or going to it, or being expelled from it, all throughout the centuries of dispersion and loss of political independence while being ruled by foreign conquerors and occupiers.  They were there because they believed they were commanded to be there, because they viewed that territory as their national patrimony and, based on that reality, as appears in the League of Nations Mandate decision,

Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country

the establishment of the Jewish national home and the development of self-governing institutions are to be secured.

I wish to inform our Irish friends and supporters that Jews immigrated to then Palestine as did the students of the Vilna Gaon in 1808-09;  in 1838, Hungarian Jews immigrate; in 1777 over 300 Chassidim immigrate; during 1740-50 thousands immigrate to Eretz Yisrael under the influence of Messianic predictions of Rabbi Moses Haim Luzzatto and Kabbalist Rabbi Haim ben Attar; in 1855, Moses Montefiore bought land for agricultural purposes and acquired Mishkenot Sha’ananim, outside of the old city walls in Jerusalem for residential purposes.

This list is long - mine is over 12 pages long - but the point is that Jews repatriated themselves back to their homeland, mostly out of religious or ideological motives. Yes, after the Russian pogroms, the need to flee lands of dispersion became more pronounced.

Zionism is not a movement reflective of negativity - of pogroms, persecution and the like.  It is a most positive Jewish force.

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An Exercise in Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a literary term indicating "a critique of the relationship between text and meaning ".

I found this poem, "Everything in Our World Did Not Seem to Fit" by Naomi Shihab Nye here.  It is an example of "new Palestinian poetry".  Excuse me, "Arab Palestinian poetry". Ms. Nye's family roots are in Sinjil, just down the road from Shiloh where I live.

I realized that here poem is a literal work of deconstruction - of history, of Jewish national identity, of politics and of simple rational logic.

The poem:


Once they started invading us.
Taking our houses and trees, drawing lines,
pushing us into tiny places.
It wasn’t a bargain or deal or even a real war.
To this day they pretend it was.
But it was something else.
We were sorry what happened to them but
we had nothing to do with it.
You don’t think what a little plot of land means
till someone takes it and you can’t go back.
Your feet still want to walk there.
Now you are drifting worse
than homeless dust, very lost feeling.
I cried even to think of our hallway,
cool stone passage inside the door.
Nothing would fit for years.
They came with guns, uniforms, declarations.
LIFE magazine said,
“It was surprising to find some Arabs still in their houses.”
Surprising? Where else would we be?
Up in the hillsides?
Conversing with mint and sheep, digging in dirt?
Why was someone else’s need for a home
greater than our own need for our own homes
we were already living in? No one has ever been able
to explain this sufficiently. But they find
a lot of other things to talk about.


Let's deconstruct that literary work.

Once they started invading us.

Actually, the Arabs invaded Eretz-Yisrael in 638 CE. Moreover, despite the loss of political independence, Jews continued to reside in the Land of Israel, if in small numbers depending on the conditions and crcumstances of the various occupiers.

Taking our houses and trees, drawing lines,
pushing us into tiny places.

Throughout the Zionist resettlement enterprise, almost all the land was purchased from its owners.

It wasn’t a bargain or deal or even a real war.

The Arab terror war against Jews in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-1939 and the 1947 war was real as were the fedyeen and the PLO's launching in 1964.

To this day they pretend it was.

No. Arabs pretend.

But it was something else.
We were sorry what happened to them but
we had nothing to do with it.

If you mean the Holocaust, your leader, Haj Amin Al-Husseini surely did.

You don’t think what a little plot of land means
till someone takes it and you can’t go back.
Your feet still want to walk there.

You mean what was done to the Jews of Hebron, Gaza, Jerusalem's Old City and neighborhoods like Shimon HaTzaddik, Atarot or Gush Etzion?  What was a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Now you are drifting worse
than homeless dust, very lost feeling.
I cried even to think of our hallway,
cool stone passage inside the door.
Nothing would fit for years.
They came with guns, uniforms, declarations.

We wouldn't have arrived if King Hussein had not fired artillery shells into Israel or invaded its territory in Jerusalem.

LIFE magazine said,
“It was surprising to find some Arabs still in their houses.”
Surprising? Where else would we be?
Up in the hillsides?
Conversing with mint and sheep, digging in dirt?
Why was someone else’s need for a home
greater than our own need for our own homes
we were already living in? No one has ever been able
to explain this sufficiently. But they find
a lot of other things to talk about.

We had no 'need for a home'. It was the Arabs who decided we Jews should have no home.

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Arabs-called-Palestinians and De-Nazification

As I was saying goodbye to a group of students who had come to Shiloh to hear the 'other side' of the story, an accompanying adult pressed me as to how I saw the future.

I informed him that one of the central elements of the Arab conflict with Israel and Zionism was the inability of the Arabs, it seemed to me, to acknowledge any Jewish national identity in this area. Moreover, with no such groups as a "Peace Now" or "Yesh Din" within the Arab society, without pro-Israel demonstrations in Ramallah and Hebron, the extreme inequality of the populations and their perceptions make the situation worse. In addition, as a result of 25 years of the Oslo Process with the establishment of a "Palestinian Authority", today's 25-year old Arab's thinking has been conditioned by the educational system Arafat and Abbas created.  That system, as has been documented, has inculcated the very worse of the 1920s and 1930s Mufti-thinking along with erasing Israel from maps, calling Jews dogs, inciting to violence and terrorism, glorifying such and excluding any educational programming that would facilitate coexistence, if not peace.

The very first thing I'd suggest is dealing with this younger generation to condition them for peace and acceptance of the Jew-as-Zionist.

I then began saying, "without making any direct comparison, if, after World War II, there was a need by the Allies to institute a de-Nazification program..." but was loudly interrupted.  My interlocutor raised his voice a bit: "you cannot make any comparison with the Nazis." 

I attempted to respond, saying, "I precisely prefaced my remarks by saying I am not comparing Arabs to Nazis but drawing attention to the program that was instituted..." but could not finish. I had wanted to continue and say, "and a similar program should be in place for a decade amongst the Arabs of the Palestinian Authority" but I could not. The man was getting agitated, was refusing to listen and someone thought better to move him, gently, on to the bus and end the exchange.

There surely exists a problem with that post-WW II program, as Frederick Taylor notes:

"Germans loathed the hypocrisy and the arrogance of the allied assumption of superiority"

and so, it cannot be force.  It must come from a realization by the PA leadership that the failure of the PA by developing a consciousness of pure negativism in their attitude to Jews, Israel and Zionism is wrong and needs be corrected.  As with Germany, the PA must accept

how a violent pariah state can cleanse itself

Besides the fact that I did not compare Arabs to Nazis, the subject does come up.  In the first place, I never heard of or read of a Nazi on a suicide mission to kill Jews. It would seem only Arabs are capable of that. So there is no comparison there.

Many books have been published that trace the leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement, Haj Amin El-Husseini, and his identification not only politically and diplomatically with the Nazi movement and its leader, as well as mobilizing Muslim troops for the German armed forces and intervening to prevent Jews escaping Europe but philosophically, too. (See: Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam; The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years; The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin Al-Husseini; Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World; and an early study - The Mufti and the Fuehrer: the rise and fall of Haj Amin el-Husseini).

And then there was the Nazi-replicated crematoria plans for Palestine.

Let's recall that

Two months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933 al-Husseini had his first meeting with German General Consul Heinrich Wolff in Jerusalem. Al-Husseini’s Arab Revolt “took place against the background of the swastika: Arab leaflets and signs on walls were prominently marked with this Nazi symbol; youth organizations… paraded as ‘Nazi-scouts,’ and Arab children greeted each other with the Nazi salute.” On 2 October 1937 al-Husseini met with Adolf Eichmann in Palestine. 

On September 12, 1938, on the eve of the Munich Conference, at the Nuremburg Rally of that year, Hitler drew an analogy and compared the situation of the Sudenten Germans in Czechoslovakia to another:

Under no circumstances, however, am I willing to quietly stand by and observe from afar the continued oppression of German Volksgenossen in Czechoslovakia. 
It’s all tactics. Herr Beneš talks, wants to organize negotiations. He wishes to resolve the question of procedure in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and hands out little favors to placate the people. Things cannot go on this way! This is not a question of empty diplomatic phrases. This is a question of right, the question of a right not granted. What we Germans demand is the right to self-determination, a right every Volk possesses, and not an empty phrase. Herr Beneš is not supposed to grant the Sudeten Germans any favors. They have a right to their own way of life, just as any other people do...I am simply demanding that the oppression of three and a half million Germans in Czechoslovakia cease and that the inalienable right to self-determination take its place.

We would truly regret if this were to cloud or damage our relations to the other European states. Yet the fault would not be ours. It is the business of the Czechoslovakian Government to come to terms with the true representatives of the Sudeten Germans and, in one way or another, to reach some form of understanding with them. Nevertheless, it is my business and, my Volksgenossen, it is the business of all of us to take care that justice not be perverted into injustice. After all, this matter involves our German Volksgenossen. I am not in the least willing to allow foreign statesmen to create a second Palestine right here in the heart of Germany. The poor Arabs are defenseless and have been abandoned by all. The Germans in Czechoslovakia are neither defenseless nor have they been abandoned. Please note this fact.

Indeed, the Arabs of Palestine were very much in Hitler's thinking. Does that make them Nazis? No. But it does indicate that Nazi diplomacy very much had the Arabs of Mandate Palestine in mind. Their's was a situation to be employed to further Nazi aims. They were to be defended by the Nazis.

With all this, something similar to a de-Nazification program is very much a necessity.  Protests withstanding.

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Jordan: Israel High Court of Justice Has No Right to Adjudicate the Temple Mount

Google translated from this Arabic-language web news site:

"Awqaf" denounces a judicial ruling recognizes Talmudic prayers at the Haram A-Sharif

03-09-2018 

Saraya - The Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs condemned the decision of the Supreme Court of Israel, which "responded to the request submitted by the extremist Israeli society (the Temple Mount Faithful of the alleged temple) to be granted the right to perform prayers in the mosques of Al Aqsa Mosque." [no one wants to pray inside a mosque]

"This decision is rejected and there is no authority or sovereignty over the Al-Aqsa Mosque because it does not have the authority to do so," Abu al-Basal said in a press statement. "The Al-Aqsa Mosque is a pure Islamic mosque by decree. We warn of the consequences of any decision by the occupation authorities' to harm the Islamic Al-Aqsa Mosque, influenced by the extreme right-wing parties that seek to stir the feelings of Muslims all over the world, leading to the outbreak of religious wars In the region has long been warned." The occupation authorities are displaying political adolescence in order to achieve political goals and electoral interests desperate...

He added that the decision of the Israeli occupation court to allow Jewish extremists to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque "will constitute a change to the historical and religious situation, contrary to international and humanitarian law, and contrary to the decisions of international organizations." This is a flagrant violation of Islam and Muslims worldwide. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the occupying Power in 1994, and a major measure of the historic Hashemite trusteeship over the Islamic and Christian holy sites, "recalling the Hashemite role spanning the ages since the reign of Sharif bin Ali, the founder of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and Talal bin Abdullah the warrior on the walls of Jerusalem with the soldiers of the Jordanian Arab Army, and King Hussein Bin Talal, who founded the Committee for the reconstruction of Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock supervised by Jordanian law Hashemi in 1954, God bless them all, to His Majesty King Abdullah II Based on the implementation of guardianship and care for holy sites in Jerusalem.

H/T=EOZ

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A Fact Falsifier and An Adulterator of History

Nimer Sultany is Senior Lecturer in Public Law, the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London and a member of its Center for Palestine Studies. Sultany expresses an affinity and identification with "radical left theoretical thought and radical left practice". At that Center, a graduate student, and undergraduates as well I would presume, 

will develop an understanding of Palestinian history, political structure, development, culture and society. 

As for Israel, insight into the school's agenda perhaps could be gained from what Sultany published in one of his early articles on Israel's Supreme Court, he paraphrases David Grossman's, The Yellow Wind, writing of "occupation" that

With one stroke, the West Bank becomes Judea and Samaria, Nablus becomes Schem, al-Khalil turns into Hebron, and the Occupied Territories become the Area, the administered Territories or the Territories. Language becomes a mechanism to disguise and conceal the reality, a mechanism to present an alternative reality by giving it new packaging.

I would maintain that that semantic sleight-of-mind is exactly what the Arabs-called-Palestinians have done and do to Eretz-Yisrael.  By the way, Nablus is the Arabic pronunciation of Neapolis, the Roman name for Shchem, just as Filastin is the approximation in Arabic pronunciation (the language has no 'P' sound) of Palestina, the Latin term the Romans awarded vanquished Judea.

He now has an essay, in Critical Legal Thinking — Law and the Political" no less, which attacks Zionism as imperialist, non-democratic, illiberal nationalism, settler colonialism, etc., and challenges liberals when he writes

modern day-liberals deny the Palestinians’ the ability to meaningfully resist their servitude

There is much too much there to fisk and illustrate the lack of academic integrity, factual presentation and historical misrepresentation, like the "illiberal and anti-democratic genesis of Zionism" (whatever that means and as if 'Palestinian Arab' politics are somehow democratic and liberal), but I did comment on one assertion of his. I wrote:

I am still digesting all this but at the end you mention a Palestinian "right of return". Two points:

a. is there truly a "right" of return or but an option; the other being compensation?
b. since UN 190 originally was to be applied to "Palestine Refugees" (not "Palestinian Refugees" as if only Arabs somehow were to be numbered) which, of course, included over 10,000 Jews (20,000 if the Jews forced to move from their homes during 1920-1948 due to an Arab campaign of ethnic cleansing are counted), can not Jews make an equal-value claim for a right to return to Hebron, Gaza, Shchem, etc., where Jewish communities had existed, many for centuries and even before the Arab conquest and occupation of 638 CE?

Basing himself on Hannah Arendt, Sultany states that "the fertile ground for the rise of Zionism" was predicated on "the secularization of European Jewry" and "anti-Semitism and the rise of assimilated Jewish intelligentsia." If I am to fathom that, am I to understand that religion, culture and a 3000-year history the Jews possessed had little if anything to do with Zionism? No tribal federation, kings, priests and prophets in Eretz-Yisrael?  I can relax knowing Sultany will not accuse me of Biblical messianism?

Totally out of time and place, I think he is somewhere in the 1920s, he again seeks out Arendt to justify his racism, his ignorance and his prejudices:

Arendt (The Jewish Writings 180-181, 354) points out that “Zionism has never been a true popular movement..."

That is not true. With the majority of Jews in Israel, it patently is not true. Even then, the Bund, Zionism's main competitor for the "gasse", the Jewish street, was down and out in Soviet Russia. The waves of post-1948 waves of immigration also prove Arendt wrong then and surely today.

He purports that Zionists who seek to separate between 1967 and 1948, between consequences and origins, err in that they are engaged in "reducing the ongoing nature of the settler colonial enterprise into an event". So what were the Jews in Eretz-Yisrael doing when they revolted in 132 CE under Bar Kochba's leadership, in 363 CE when they responded to the permission decree of Justinian to rebuild the Temple, in 400 CE when they finished redacting the Jerusalem Talmud and on and on throughout the 1800 years of loss of political sovereignty when, despite that situation, the lived, immigrated to, planted and built prior to the appearance of political Zionism of Herzl.

How much is a professor at a London university allowed to lie, fabricate and mislead?

Two leading anti-Zionists are praised as having provided "cool-headed warnings". Quite the academic terminology there.

And how does he 'prove' Zionism is "colonialism"?  In part by quoting Moshe Hess, "a founder of Labor Zionism" [?], who 

envision[ed] in his Rome and Jerusalem (1856) “the founding of Jewish colonies in the land of their ancestors”

as if the term "colonies" had anything to do with the charge he is making against a people returning to the land of its fathers and mothers, as if the League of Nations knew nothing about this when they wrote in its 1922 Mandate decision that

recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country; 

Sultany, his students should know, is but a cheap propagandist, a falsifier of facts and an adulterator of political, social and cultural history.

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