On Arabs as Conquerers and Occupiers of the Land of Israel

I mentioned this new book previously and have my own issues with it but, nevertheless, it has its uses. Here from a new reveiw in the LATimes:

The book's title and subtitle, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World," suggest that Carroll intends to demonstrate that the tumultuous past of these religions is vital in understanding why Jerusalem and, of course, Israel and the Palestinian territories have become a hotbed of political, nationalist and religious conflict and violence. But Carroll, a newspaper columnist, prolific novelist and the author of the popular "Constantine's Sword," a history of 2,000 years of Christianity's anti-Semitism, has something else in mind.

And here is the historical truth:

A second turning point came in AD 638, six years after the death of the prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam. The caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second successor to Muhammad, captured Jerusalem from the Christians that year. Although Muslims believed that Gabriel had led Muhammad to heaven from the stone on which the temple once stood, Jerusalem did not occupy the most exalted place in Islamic cosmology. Mecca, where Muhammad was born, was the holiest city of Islam, and Baghdad, Damascus and Cordoba soon became larger and more developed cities than Jerusalem.

Arabs are "occupiers" of "Palestine", the Jewish patrimony and ancestral homeland which all the world knew and accepted and which led to the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Conference and the decision of the League of Nations to grant Great Britain the Mandate over what they knew as "Palestine" to develop the Land of Israel so as to give "recognition...to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country;".

What they did, beginning in 1920 in an organized politically-driven fashion, was to attempt to thwart that internationally legal decision.

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