More "Inventiveness"

Daoud Kuttab, who I have debated, has an opinion piece, "We Are Palestinians", in the Int'l Herald Tribune.

I picked one * inventive sentence from it:

Palestinian Arabs attempted to become independent after the British mandate ended, but the British pledged Palestine simultaneously to Jews and Arabs.

Note:

a) the "attempt" was prior to the end.

b) and it was launching a war against Jewish civilians on November 30, 1947, on the morrow of the UN recommended partition plan to establsih an Arab state and a Jewish state.  In fact, attacks against Jews had begun a few months earlier when it became apparent that the UN was going to decide something.

c) the British had not "pledged Palestine simultaneously to Jews and Arabs".  In the first instance, that phrase belongs to the 1920s.  Secondly, there was no simultaneous promise.  There were parallel promises.  And the 1947 promise was, as noted, of the United Nations.

d) in any case, what is TransJordan, now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, if not an Arab state in Palestine?

The Jews and the Arabs were awarded states.  We took our opportunity despite yet another whittling down of the terriroty of the Jewish national home.

All the Arabs wanted to do was to deny Jews a state on any territory.  It turned out to be the precedent of the "suicide bomber" phenomenon of a later period.  They preferred to lose a chance at statehood just so the Jews should not achieve their national aspirations.

Kuttab is engaged, as most Arabs who consider themselves "Palestinians" are, in inventiveness - either relating to their own history or in relating to Jewish history and heritage.

And inventiveness is not enough to build a society, construct governmental institutions or formulate and carry through economic policies.

But it works well on the pages of a hostile press to Israel.

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P.S.  I just caught this from Jerry Auerbach:

...Palestinians plunder modern Jewish history — and tragedy — for their own purposes. They have cast themselves as the new “Jews,” who are oppressed by Israeli “Nazis.” Palestinian teen-agers, comparing themselves to Anne Frank, claim to suffer from a “holocaust.”  The recent Palestinian flotillas to Israel have been modeled on the Exodus and other refugee ships that tried to transport desperate Jews to Palestine before independence. In the Palestinian version, Israel becomes the oppressive British government that prevented Jews from reaching their promised land.  With their appropriations from Jewish history, ironically, Palestinians have inadvertently cast themselves as the biblical Jacob, stealing the birthright...it is a fragile foundation for building a nation, as the Palestinians continue to discover...

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*

Another

The historian Rashid Khalidi, in his book “Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness,”...traces the development of the Palestinians’ identity to the late Ottoman area, “when they had multiple loyalties to their religion, the Ottoman state, the Arabic language, and the emerging identity of Arabism, as well as their country and local and familial foci.”

So, all was new.  But that still does not adequately explain the demand as late as 1922 to be considered Southern Syrians even after the Mandate was being finalized and the reality of the Jewish National Home was being fixed.


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