Rebbe Nahman's Eretz-Yisrael Hasbara

Here is a quotation from a follower of Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav (who died in 1810) which posits a core principle of modern Hasbara, that one needs to assert rights, even if only verbally, as a prerequisite to claim them later found in Likutei Halachot, Hoshen Mishpat:

Despite our land and inheritance being stolen by non-Jews

and we have not the power to remove it from their hands,

due to a fault of ours,

we pray and we shout out that

the Land of Israel is ours and is our patrimony

and that is our response to the Other Side,

the possession of non-Jews is not a valid possession

the Land of Israel is ours and in the end,

we will extract it from their hands.

With God's help.

I'll add now the full section from Likutei Halachot, Choshen Mispat, M'talt'lin

"And even though we have been shouting and begging for so many years to return to Israel and we are still far from there, yet no prayer and cry is lost, even that of the least of the least, because with every cry and prayer we conquer some part or point of Israel until the seventh day, when all the points we conquered in our prayers will be gathered together and we will return to Israel, as is the saying of the Rebbe, on the article of Rabbah: "He will gather you up, etc." (S. 2:31). And even if someone is very damaged and does not have the strength in his cry and prayer to conquer any point or part of Israel, yet his cry is very effective, because his cry that shouts and prays to return to our land is in essence a protest explained in the law of land possession, as long as he protestsץ"

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Private - or Putative - Land?

As my friend Moshe Dann writes in the JPost

Accusing Israeli Jews of “stealing private Palestinian land,” condemning “settlements” as “illegal,” “violations of international law” and “the occupation” are powerful weapons in the war to demonize and delegitimize Israel...[However,] Because land on which most settlements are built is not agriculturally useful, Arabs did not claim ownership until recently.

He has done a good job in his recent op-ed, "Blood libel: The myth of ‘private Palestinian land’" [and covers more than my 2006 op-ed there but doesn't mention the land that Jews owned in Judea & Samaria] and I bring you some highlights:

...what constitutes “private Palestinian land” and who decides what is and what is not private Palestinian land? If it is true that Jews are stealing land, this violates Jewish and Israeli laws and values and justifies calls for boycotts, sanctions and even the elimination of the state, since it applies to areas acquired after 1948 as well as in 1967. A devastating moral and legal indictment, it would undermine Israel’s moral foundation, its raison d’etre...Promoted by Arab propagandists and their supporters...[it is] A poisoned narrative based on ignorance and/or misunderstanding, it is a lie.

Based on titles and deeds, land that is registered becomes private property. But what if there are no documents to prove ownership?

...Until the modern period, land registration, especially in sparsely populated areas like the Middle East, Africa and North Africa was not widely practiced.

According to international agreements such as the San Remo Accord (1920) and the League of Nations (1922), the Mandate for Palestine was intended as a “Jewish National Home.” This anchors the rights of the Jewish people and Israeli sovereignty in law...[{I would have added that Article 6 of the Mandate permits the use of "state and waste lands" for "close Jewish settlement" which only strengthens our claim}]

...According to Dr. Dov Gavish, who wrote the only extensive study of this topic, Survey of Palestine, 1920-1948 (2005)(*), [during the Mandate period] maps were drawn based on where inhabitants were found and on verbal claims, usually by local mukhtars (chiefs) and sheikhs, not on documents or land registration. [here is some more important background information] Based on aerial photos and evidence of cultivation, villages were arbitrarily divided into 60-hectare (about 148-acre) blocks, which were then sub-divided among local peasants. Highly inaccurate, these fiscal maps nevertheless became the basis for taxation. They did not and do not reflect legal ownership...the registration process lacked legal procedures for determining proper (actual) ownership...Most of what is called “private Palestinian land” is claimed – and some registered – based on policies that legitimized squatting after the fact and by counting land as “owned” when in fact it had been leased, or simply used.

...Because land on which most settlements are built is not agriculturally useful, Arabs did not claim ownership until recently, when anti-settlement NGOs asserted that these lands belonged to Arabs, individually and/or collectively based on hearsay, maps and documents that are grossly inaccurate and often false.

Assertions by NGOs and Arabs that land is privately owned, however, even when approved by politically motivated government and judicial officials, including the State Prosecutor’s Office and Civil Administration, are not necessarily true...

________

(*)

Actually, this book is also quite excellent:

The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs, 1878-1948 by Aryieh L Avneri.

Description
This study sheds new light on the historic background of the contemporary Palestinian problem. Avneri traces the spread of Jewish settlements over the seventy-year period before the establishment of the State of Israel, in order to see how it affected the existing Arab community's economy and social and cultural institutions. He demonstrates that there is no historical evidence for the eviction of the Palestinians from Israel previous to the founding of the state. Most of those who left afterwards did so on their own volition.

And back in 1985, Eyal Zamir, now at Hebrew U. and Harvard, authored "STATE LAND IN JUDEA AND SAMARIA – THE LEGAL STATUS" (The Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, Jerusalem, 1985) 75 pp., including Summary in English, which also affords an understanding of the issue.

Did you know the IDF has a site dealing with some of the issues of land?



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Peace Now Takes the Criminalize Route

As I noted previously, construction at Shiloh, the object of a Peace Now High Court appeal which failed, is a simple matter of administration and bureaucracy, of parcelization and zoning (see what is on the books in the UK).  The ownership, as if it is "stolen privately-owned land", is not the issue but if land originally set aside for agriculture can be used for building homes.

Trust me, living here, no real agriculture can be developed there where the building is.  The original designation was simple an off-hand decision at the time.

There is nothing criminal in the procedure but our Peace Now Zionists won't give up.

Read on from a JPost report: Shiloh construction may bring criminal probe

The State Attorney’s office is weighing the possibility of ordering a criminal investigation into illegal construction [it isn't illegal] in the West Bank settlement of Shiloh, even as the Defense Ministry has said it plans to legalize the building.

...The panel of three justices – Miriam Naor, Esther Hayut and Neal Handel – heard a petition filed by Peace Now over alleged illegal construction of residential housing units in Shiloh, northeast of Ramallah.  Peace Now claims the construction, on three areas of designated state land, is unlawful because the Binyamin Regional Council has not received appropriate planning permits from the Defense Ministry.

Monday’s hearing came after the state informed the High Court on Sunday that the Defense Ministry has decided to retroactively approve building plans in Shiloh, a move that will legalize 119 residential units in the settlement. [a move that happens all the time all over Israel as well as in kibbutzim]

...Peace Now had asked the court to order the Defense Ministry to explain why it had not taken all necessary actions to prevent the houses’ construction and to investigate and to prosecute those members of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council responsible for the building.

...The petition relates to three different areas in Shiloh, one of which was officially zoned as agricultural lands, and which cannot be used for residential building. [well, if you change that status, the land can be used.  is Peace Now asserting that the government can't change its mind?]

In order to legalize building on that land, the state must now undertake a public process, during which members of the public will be allowed 60 days to voice any opposition to the zoning changes.  The other two areas are already zoned as residential, but Peace Now argues that the houses built on that land were constructed without a proper permit. [Peace Now turns here, turns there and wants us to get dizzy]

...Peace Now had contacted the Judea and Samaria regional police and the deputy attorney-general asking for a criminal investigation into alleged illegal construction by the Binyamin Regional Council.  However, the state said in its written response that such an investigation was “not a simple matter.”

In Monday’s High Court hearing, attorney Michal Friedlander, for the state, said that that a decision has not yet been made regarding the criminal investigation...Friedlander said that a decision would be made on the matter within several weeks.

...After the hearing, attorney Akiva Sylzetsky, for the Binyamin Regional Council, told The Jerusalem Post he was optimistic the court would decide not to intervene in the matter of the housing construction.  Regarding the police investigation, Sylzetsky said it would be “difficult to start an investigation in a place where the process of legalization has already started,” and that any investigation would not necessarily result in indictments being filed.

According to Sylzetsky, the state’s move to legalize housing construction in Shiloh is part of a trend that has developed over the past year and-a-half in reaction to petitions like this one, filed against building on state (public) lands in the West Bank.  The petitions have given the state the impetus to legalize settlement construction on state lands, which lacks the necessary permits. The land is considered public and there are no Palestinian private land claims against it, Sylzetsky says, because the High Court has forced the state to give an answer about the land.

“Peace Now’s petitions have been having the opposite affect to that intended,” he added. “In several places, the state has legalized construction because of petitions, whereas if the settlers themselves had asked for legalization it would never have happened.”...The state can legalize the houses because they are built not on private Palestinian land but on so-called “state lands,” land considered public property under Ottoman law. [not only that, sir, but the League of Nagtions Mandate decision specifically charged that state and waste lands were to be used for "close Jewish settlment", Article 6]

According to that law, which was in force when Israel took the area from Jordan in 1967, land in the West Bank is considered state land unless an individual has occupied, cultivated and paid taxes on it for at least 10 years.

Meanwhile, also on Monday, the High Court of Justice decided to postpone a hearing of a petition by civil rights watchdog Yesh Din into alleged illegal construction on private Palestinian land in the Kochav Ya’acov settlement.  The decision came after the state agreed to carry out a land ownership survey. Lawyers Michael Sfard, Shlomy Zecharya and Avissar Lev filed the petition on behalf of Ali Barakat, head of the village council of Akeb, whose constituents allegedly own the land.

One day, the real criminals will get their comeuppance.

That is not a threat but an expectation and observation.

P.S.  What to buy some property?

P.P.S.  Did you know that as of May 1968 a land survey was done by the Israel Lands Administration, the General Staff's Settlement Department and the Department of Agriculture. These were its findings: 50,000 dunums were in private Palestinian lands.
(see: Shlomo Gazit, The Carrot and the Stick: Israel's Policy in Judea and Samaria, 1967-68, B'nai B'rith Books, Washington, D.C., 1995) and that by November 1992, one year after the Madrid Peace Conference and the start of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, land held by Israel potentially for the use of Israeli settlers constituted more than 60 percent of the total area of Judea and Samaria and 35 percent of the total area of the Gaza Strip. Prior to 1948, Jews bought lands in the Judea and Samaria and when the Jordanian government took over, it passed the Custodian of Enemy Property Law and established the office of a Custodian of Enemy Property under whose administration the lands that had been bought by Jews were placed. These amounted to some 30,000 dunums out of the total area of 5.5 million dunums (see: Gazit, op. cit., p. 126).

As this pro-Arab source explains, land ownership is complicated and compounded by refusals to register such.


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Oh How The Pals. Lie

After the Areikat fiasco, when this senior Pal. official pronounced, yet another time, an apartheid racist policy of not allowing Jews to reside in "Palestine" ("Maen Rashid Areikat, the Palestine Liberation Organization's ambassador to the U.S., was described in a USA Today report early in the day as saying that the future Palestine should be free of Jews. "After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated," USA Today quoted Areikat as saying."...Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews, said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council official.), Nabil Shaath went on the Galei Tzahal Radio, after realizing what great harm had been done by that statement.

Arutz 7 has it:

In an interview with Army Radio Sunday, Palestinian Authority negotiator Nabil Sha'ath...was asked, what about comments made by PA officials that no Jews would be allowed to live in a PA state? Sha'ath said that he had “checked those comments, and I found that they were inaccurate. No Palestinian official said this. What they said was exactly what [Defense Minister Ehud] Barak said, that at the beginning of our state the two populations should be separated.” [???]

When asked whether he would agree to allowing current Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria to remain in their homes, he said “if they act like all other citizens and buy the land and accept Palestinian citizenship, why not?”

JPost:

Presented with statements attributed to the Palestinian Authority envoy to the United States last week that a Palestinian state would be without Jews, Shaath said that Maen Areikat "never said 'Jewish free,'" but rather "that at the beginning of our peace, we want to separate."

Asked whether settlers would be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state, he added, "If [settlers] decide to accept Palestinian citizenship and buy the territory that they have and live as individual citizens, then why not?"

So?

Well, let's remember that the

Palestinian Authority prohibits purchase of goods produced in Israeli settlements

and taking that a step further:

In violation of international law, the Palestinian Authority bars any Jews from purchasing property and from residing on and developing any property they own.

Let's make that plain and simple:

Palestinian land laws...prohibit Palestinians from selling Palestinian territory lands to "any man or judicial body [corporation] of Israeli citizenship living in Israel or acting on its behalf." These land laws were originally enacted during the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank (1948–1967), and are deemed by the Palestinian Authority as being necessary to prevent further expansion of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories and to "halt the spread of moral, political and security corruption". The law carries a sentence of the death penalty.

Why didn't the Galei Tzahal interviewer know to ask about that?

Pals. lie and prevaricate.

__________________________


And LBD points out:

Shaath was also repeating the policy set by Abbas in December 2010:

Abbas vows: No room for Israelis in Palestinian state

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced on Saturday that when a Palestinian state is established, it will have no Israelis in it. “We have frankly said, and always will say: If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won’t agree to the presence of one Israeli in it,” Abbas told reporters in Ramallah.

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"Settlement Posts" - Devouring 1% But Controlling 42%

Yes, we have another term:

Israelis Have Set up 440 Jewish Settlement Posts in West Bank

Source here.

And how about this math:-

the posts include 144 known settlements, 207 settlement blocs including 109 blocs set up outside the settlements and 96 blocs in the vicinity of settlements, besides 50 Israeli army bases or camps that devoured 1 percent of the West Bank land but control 42 percent of the West Bank''s territory

Can you figure that out?

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Guest Input: Dani Dayan on the B'tselem Report

From Dani Dayan, Yesha Council Chairman, on the B'tselem Report which makes an outrageous claim of land control:

Here is the full B'tselem report:

http://www.btselem.org/Download/201007_By_Hook_and_by_Crook_Heb.pdf

Look at table 3 in page 9.

The relevant data is the column labeled: סה"כ שטחים מוניציפאליים של ההתנחלויות

They say it is 9.28.

I say 9.19%. The difference is irrelevant.

But the data that they publicized is 42.8% that includes also the column labeled

סה"כ שטחים
מוניציפאליים, כולל מועצות אזוריות

That is a complete non-sense.

They took the contour of the area of the regional councils and counted everything comprised within.

But Avi Roeh [Binyamin Regional Council Head - YM] does not have any jurisdiction on the Arab villages, the roads, the open areas comprised within that contour line.

It is a totally misleading data.

Dani

It's Not Where It Stops But Where It Starts

JPost reports

...the Defense Ministry plans to move their small hilltop community to the nearby settlement of Adam, just northeast of Jerusalem on the way to Ramallah...the decision to implement the plan was taken only on Monday, during a meeting between Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

The Yesha Council Chairman is quoted

"It's nothing very dramatic," said Dani Dayan, who heads the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. Three months ago his council voted to approve moving Migron to a nearby legalized location in the West Bank.

So Monday's decision was simply another step in the process, said Dayan. He added that his council had yet to agree on its preferred option for relocating Migron.

But Avi Ro'eh, chairman of the Binyamin Regional Council, tobjected to the Adam move, he prefers

...instead to see the families relocate down the hill, next to a new winery under construction across the road from the gas station off of Route 60. "But it doesn't matter because the whole process will take years to sort out," Ro'eh said.

Up on Migron,

the families are so determined to stay put that they oppose even Ro'eh proposal to move them down the hill.

Although a voluntary move is the essence of the deal reached in August regarding Migron between state and Dayan's council, the Migron families have yet to agree to any relocation.

Dayan has argued that throughout the history of the settlement enterprise, boundaries have been adjusted to require families to move to alternative locations. What is happening here, he has said, is that by relocating slightly, a way has been found to legalize Migron's status.

But Migron spokesman Gideon Rosenfeld said the homes on their hilltop were already legal, despite the High Court ruling to the contrary.

To agree to move even a short distance would be tantamount to admitting that their presence there was illegal, he said. "The land in Judea and Samaria is ours," said Rosenfeld.

He feared relocating would create a domino effect and that the legalized settlements of Ofra and Beit El would be next.

"Where would it stop?" he asked.

Well, it should stop where is should have started, with a proper planning of the communities making sure all legal questions of ownership, zoning and other issues were assured.

When Shiloh was established, the legal advisor of the government, Pli'ah Albeck (*), personally toured the area to ascertain that no private Arab lands were to be utilized. This could, and should, have been done all over even when Sharon told us we should run to the hilltops.

We have the rights and we should use them properly and wisely.



-------------

(*)

Pliah Albek, “What are State Lands? – The State Lands in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip,” Ha-Lishka (5759-1999) 46, pp. 9-11.

A Matter of Land Ownership

My friend Judith first brought this issue to my attention and I managed to catch an article on it (in Hebrew) in The Marker of today.

Seems that the Proslav Russian Church which brought tens of thousands of pilgrims to the Holy Land in the 19th century, also purchased extensive property holdings. It is estimated that 235,000square meters is theirs in Israel, the disputed territories of the Palestine Authority, Syria and Lebanon. In Israel, most prominently, this includes the Russian Compound in Jerusalem.

In that The Marker report, it seems that the PA will be returning some 35,000 sq. m. of land in Jericho and the Mt. of Olives.

Some people, understandably are quite upset about this development but as I am an optimistic person, I tried to see the 'good'.

Here it is:-

If after 150 years, the Pals. are recognizing land purchases by Russians, and actually awarding them title and use, well, then, land purchases by Jews should be no problem: in Hebron, Shchem, Jenin, etc.

Land, Nationalism of the Arabs of Eretz-Yisrael

Excerpts from Benny Morris' review, The Tangled Truth, of Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948 by Hillel Cohen, who I have known for more than 30 years:-

The hills of the West Bank--Judea and Samaria--are dotted with well-ordered, red-roofed Jewish settlements. Clearly, they make the partition of the land of Israel/Palestine into two states more difficult, and as such they constitute an obstacle to peace. [or an impediment to an independent Arab state, "Palestine", that would prove an existential threat to Israel]. This is certainly the view in Washington, Brussels, and Tel Aviv, the bastion of center-left Israel. But for most Palestinians (who, incidentally, do not really want a two-state settlement--vide their support of Hamas in the elections in 2006), the settlements represent something far more sinister. They are highly visible agents and symbols of Israel's design to steal their land. [which they stole from the Jews]

...On the one hand, there always were Arabs, in very large numbers, ready to sell their labor and land to the Jews, and to inform on Arab militants, and even to fight their fellow Arabs who were fighting the Jews (and the British, who were regarded as the Zionists' patrons). On the other hand, Arabs were willing to battle against land sales and cooperation with the Jews, and to kill Jews (and Britons) and collaborators. And sometimes it was the very same people, at one and the same time or within a short span of years, who hotly denounced Zionism and secretly helped the Jews. (The Nazi German consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, in 1933 contemptuously cabled Berlin that these nationalists "in daylight were crying out against Jewish immigration and in the darkness of the night were selling land to the Jews.")

In his important book, Hillel Cohen, the author of fine studies of Israel's Arab minority, succeeds in presenting an objective view of "collaboration," ignoring for the purposes of analysis the bad name that the phenomenon received during and after World War II.

...Already in the 1920s, Husseini began calling his opponents, primarily the notables of the rival Nashashibi clan, "traitors"--this at a time when there were no clear policy differences between them. (Both the Husseinis and the Nashashibis wanted all of Palestine for the Arabs, opposed all Jewish immigration, regarded the Zionists as aggressive usurpers, and so on.) Cohen argues that the Husseinis' routine use of the terms "traitor" and "collaborator" denuded them of all moral weight or political significance...The value of Cohen's erudite book lies in its meticulous recounting of the history of Arab-Zionist cooperation and collaboration, period by period, region by region, family by family. There are many eye-opening--and pathetic--tales, often well-told.

...A major area of cooperation or collaboration, dating from the start of the Zionist enterprise in the 1880s, was Arab land sales to the Zionist movement--a phenomenon that permanently blighted Palestinian Arab nationalism, sowing suspicion, confusion, and moral disarray. By the end of 1947, Zionist institutions and individual Jews had bought close to 7 percent of Palestine's land surface (which, in all, encompassed 10,000 square miles or 26,000 square kilometers). Almost all the purchases had been from Arabs. (A small quantity of land was bought from Europeans.) Most of the land was purchased from rich absentee Arab landowners, or effendi, who lived in big cities in Palestine or abroad, though many tracts, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, were sold to the Jews by smallholders. "Thousands of Palestinians sold land to Jews during the Mandate," asserts Cohen. He may be slightly exaggerating; but it was this land that made possible the grid of Jewish settlements that served as the core and the shield of the state that was established in 1948.

From the start, both the Arabs and the Zionists understood that legal possession of land "was a necessary condition for realizing [each of] their national idea[s]." Already in 1911, a Jerusalem mathematics teacher named Mustafa Effendi Tamr published an article denouncing Arab land-sellers: "You are selling the property of your fathers and grandfathers for a pittance to people who will have no pity on you, to those who will act to expel you and expunge your memory from your habitations and disperse you among the nations. This is a crime that will be recorded in your names in history, a black stain and disgrace that your descendants will bear, which will not be expunged even after years and eras have gone by."

...It is relatively easy to trace the spoor of those motivated by personal interest, especially pecuniary gain. Sheikh Taher al-Husseini, the nephew of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, contacted the Zionist officials Chaim Margaliot Kalvarisky and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi simply because he wanted Hajj Amin's job as mufti of Jerusalem. Later Taher's son, Zein al-Din al-Husseini, sold land to the Jews. But for many others, especially from the middle and upper classes, the motivating factor was a realistic assessment of the balance of forces...A few were driven by a sympathy for the Zionist cause and an appreciation of Zionist achievements, though almost none agreed to Zionist dominance or to Jewish statehood alongside a Palestinian state in a partition settlement. Hasan Shukri, the Arab mayor of Haifa during World War I and again in the years between 1927 and 1940, cabled the British government in 1921 denouncing those Arab nationalists who demanded that Britain renounce Zionism: "We do not consider the Jewish people as an enemy.... We consider the Jews as a brotherly people sharing our joys and troubles and helping us in the construction of our common country. We are certain that without Jewish immigration and financial assistance there will be no future development of our country as may be judged from the fact that the towns inhabited in part by Jews such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Tiberias are making steady progress while Nablus, Acre and Nazareth where no Jews reside are steadily declining." Another public figure, Muhammad Tawil of Acre, wrote: "I cannot recognize Hajj Amin al-Husseini as the leader of Palestine because his direction has brought no benefit to the country"--though he later became disaffected with the Zionists who had employed and then discarded him, pointing to a phenomenon that, sadly, would characterize Zionist- collaborator relations down the decades. (This ugly phenomenon survives in the abandonment of some South Lebanese Army veterans after the final IDF pullout from Lebanon in 2000.)

Some Palestinian collaborators were animated by personal friendship, empathy with Jews, or even ideological sympathy. Ezra Danin, one of the founders of the HIS (Haganah Intelligence Service), recalled in his memoirs an Arab who was employed as a guard in a Jewish-owned citrus grove and was involved in land sales on the side: "He believed in the return to Zion and wanted cooperation with the Jews.... I remember an instance in which I once said to him: 'You do it for the money, of course. [So] why do you get so angry if they tell you that you are a hired spy?' He said: 'I for money? I work only for the idea.'" The principle of good neighborliness, a time-honored Arab tradition, also played a part. Some Hebron Arabs, including Ahmad Rashid al-Hirbawi, the president of the town's chamber of commerce, supported--against Husseini's line--the return of Jews to the town after the massacre of 1929, when they had abandoned it.

...But some Arabs, it seems, were won over by Zionist achievements rather than Zionist power. Consider a letter of invitation by a group of Bedouin sheikhs in the Beit Shean (Bisan) Valley to the British high commissioner Herbert Samuel in 1923: "We don't meddle in politics.... We are simple people who live in tents and deal with our own affairs only. We agree with everything the government does.... We have seen no evil from the Jews. We have sold the American [sic] Jewish Agency some of our lands, and with the help of the money we received we are developing and cultivating the large tracts that still remain ours. We are pleased with these Jews, and we are convinced that we will work together to improve our region and to pursue our common interests." This letter, says Cohen, may have been drafted by Chaim Margaliot Kalvarisky, who simultaneously orchestrated outreach programs and ran the Arab Bureau's espionage network.

...Cohen's learned book, especially its lengthy citations from Zionist intelligence reports and from Arab letters and memoranda, incidentally sheds light on a rarely illumined aspect of Palestinian nationalism (and one that indirectly "explains" at least some of the collaborators). From the first, the nationalism of Palestine's Arabs was blatantly religious. Almost all the "nationalist" statements Cohen quotes were couched in religious or semi- religious terms. We are dealing here with an Islamic nationalism. Indeed, when the Palestinian national struggle turned significantly violent, against the British in 1936-1939 and against the Zionists in 1947-1948, the struggle was defined by the movement's leaders as "a religious holy war," a jihad. And those rejecting Husseini's leadership, in peacetime as in wartime, were deemed heretics as well as traitors. The gang that murdered a collaborator in Balad al- Sheikh, a village near Haifa, hung a placard in the village square reading: "We hereby inform you that on 8 March 1939, Nimer the policeman was executed ... as he betrayed his religion and his homeland.... The supreme God revealed to those who preserve their religion and their homeland that he betrayed them, and they did to him what Muslim law commands. Because the supreme and holy God said: 'Fight the heretics and hypocrites; their dwelling-place is hell.'"

This Islamism colored the Palestinian national movement from its conception. When, in 1911, the Jaffa newspaper Filastin attacked land-sellers, it declared: "All land belongs to God, but the land on which we live belongs to the homeland [watan], at the command of God." "Islam does not forgive traitors," village mukhtars were told by urban nationalists in 1920. In 1925, the mufti of Gaza, Hajj Muhammad Said al-Husseini, issued a fatwa forbidding land sales to Jews. The Jews, he said, were no longer a protected people (as they had been in the Islamic world during the previous thirteen centuries). Muslims who helped them were to be treated as heretics, and Christians who aided them were to be deported.

...In their book The Palestinian People: A History, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal wrote that Palestinian nationalism can be traced back to 1834, when a group of peasants in the Nablus area rebelled against their then-Egyptian rulers. Most historians disagree, and locate the birth of Palestinian Arab nationalism in the 1920s (and the start of general Arab nationalism only a few years before). But for years thereafter, Palestinian Arab nationalism remained the purview of middle- and upper-class families. Most peasants, and perhaps many among the urban poor as well--together, some 80 percent of the Palestine Arabs--lacked political consciousness or a "national" ideology. The masses could be periodically stirred to action by religious rhetoric (Islam certainly touched them to the quick), but this failed to bind them in a protracted political engagement, especially when the price had to be paid in blood. Cohen writes, too hesitantly in my view, that "the conduct of Palestinian society [during 1917-1948] might lead to the conclusion that ... [its] national spirit was not sufficient to the task at hand."

But of course the Palestinians were to change. Indeed, the disaster and the dispersion that befell them in 1948 was itself a major milestone in the formation of a truly "national" consciousness; and the results of the war in 1967 certainly abetted this development. By the time of the intifadas, millions of Palestinians had rallied to the cause, and many thousands were prepared to engage in political action and combat, and to pay the price in blood and imprisonment. By then it was incontrovertible that there was a Palestinian people. Palestinian nationalism may not have been during the Mandate, and may not be today, quite the secular, democratic, and open nationalism of modern Western Europe; and it may still be defined in large measure by what it wishes to destroy rather than by what it hopes to build. It is intolerant, violent, and--above all--religious. But it is most certainly a variety of nationalism.

And I found this comment there:-

Jacob Field

Stop calling them settlements. All that you are doing is helping to enable the redefinition of Israeli Jews as colonizers and foreign settlers with no legitimate right to the land, which is part of the Big Lie perpetrated by Muslims. Israel is a legitimate and sovereign nation voted imprimatur by the United Nations. The fact is that the Israelis living in the West Bank and Hebron do not pose either a moral or a pragmatic problem. Their communities are natural outcomes of Israel's control for almost forty years of areas that are integral to its current defensibility and/or historical heritage. And since the word "settler" is loaded with negative connotations of "intruder," it would be best to cease applying it to Israelis who live legitimately in parts of the Land of Israel that are part of the state of Israel, and whose ultimate disposition remains open. Please drop the immoral paradigm insinuating that Jews must be forced from their homes. Would that you would pay more attention to the illegal houses built by Arab squatters in Hebron who proudly display in a sign that they live on land stolen from Jews.