Saturday, September 24, 2011
‘So, Class…When Does One Plus One Equal Three?’
Middle East piece by
Gerald A. Honigman
Answer… When the subject is “Palestine,” and the Arabs and their assorted mouthpieces and rah rah squads are doing the counting.
After the centuries old Ottoman Turkish Empire was dismantled after World War I, many different long suppressed peoples had visions of freedom, self determination, and independence in the new age of nationalism emerging in the region. Diplomats like America’s President Woodrow Wilson, Great Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes, and others encouraged this with their “Fourteen Points” and statements such as “Arabia for the Arabians, Judea for the Jews, Armenia for the Armenians, Kurdistan for the Kurds,” etc. and so forth.
There was just one problem with this, however--and we are living with the tragic consequences of it to this very day…
From the mid-7th until the mid-13th centuries of the Common Era, much of the region had been conquered by Arabs who had burst out of the Arabian Peninsula, waging murderous jihad in all directions in the name of both Arabism and the Dar ul-Islam. Countless millions of native, non-Arab peoples were slaughtered, enslaved, forcibly Arabized, converted, and/or subjugated in other ways in the process--going onto this very day. That’s how Arabs got to the native, non-Semitic Copts’ Egypt, Aryan Iran, Amazigh ("Berber") North Africa, native Semitic--but non-Arab--Lebanon, Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan, black African Sudan (and beyond), Judea/Syria Palestina--the Roman/Byzantine-conquered land of the Jews, the Indian sub-continent, etc. and so forth…Keep in mind that these are the same dudes complaining about an allegedly expansionist Israel.
Based on these earlier Arab imperial, colonial conquests, Arabs then declared that they--and only they--were entitled to any political rights in “their” region…purely Arab patrimony, in their own words. In an example that I like to use, this excerpt from the constitution of the Syrian Arab Ba’th Party sums this mindset up nicely…
The Arab fatherland belongs to the Arabs. They alone have the right to direct its destinies.... The Arab fatherland is that part of the globe inhabited by the Arab nation that stretches from the Taurus Mountains, the Pacht-i-Kouh Mountains, the Gulf of Basra, the Arab Ocean, the Ethiopian Mountains, the Sahara, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea.
Please keep this all in mind as we get down to the specifics…
When the Allies finished off the Ottoman Turkish Empire after World War I, much of the land was divided up into Mandates as a prelude to later independence. For the sake of this analysis, we will focus on the Brits.
Having already been in Egypt since the 19th century, London added both the Mandate of Mesopotamia and the Mandate of Palestine to its regional acquisitions.
Having promised the Kurds independence in at least part of Mesopotamia, after receiving a favorable decision regarding the oil-rich Kurdish north from the League of Nations in 1925, the Brits abandoned their promises to the Kurds and allied themselves solely with Arab nationalist interests. A united, Arab-ruled Iraq arose instead. There would be no partitions of the Mandate to address anyone else’s rights except Arabs--even though Kurds (and others) predated them in the land by millennia. Keep this in mind as we advance to a discussion of the Brits’ other Mandate.
To this date, over thirty-five million Kurds in the region remain stateless as a result. And while Arabs can go to the United Nations demanding their 22nd state (as they did on September 23rd), no one makes such demands for a roadmap for Kurdistan. My doctoral research on this topic, by the way, has been listed on Paris’s acclaimed Institut d’Etudes Politique--Sciences-Po’s--recommended reference list since the early 1980s.
And that brings us to our math problem of the day… When does 1 + 1 = 3?
Several years prior to the time that the Brits would shaft the Kurds in the Mandate of Mesopotamia, they were backtracking big time with the Jews in the Mandate of Palestine as well.
Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill convened the strategic Cairo Conference in 1921. As a result, and in the aftermath of its various twists and turns, among other things, in 1922 Arab nationalism was awarded all of the Mandate of Palestine east of the Jordan River…almost 80% of the total area. King Abdullah called this “an act of Allah” in his memoirs (quoted in my own book). The Brits’ East Bank representative, Sir Alec Kirkbride, had much to say about this in his book, A Crackle Of Thorns.
Now, as there was competition between various national interests in Mesopotamia, this was going on in Palestine as well. The two rivals were Arabs and Jews.
Before we go any further, allow me to sidetrack a bit…
The name “Palestine” was bestowed on Iudea (Judea) after the Jews took on the Soviet Union of its day--the Roman Empire--for their freedom and independence. After they wiped the entire 22nd Roman Legion (according to the Romans’ own accounts) in the second major revolt, the emperor, Hadrian, became so enraged that, after his final defeat of the Bar Kochba revolt, he renamed the land itself after the Jews’ well-known historic enemies, the Philistines. The latter were not only not Arabs, they were not even Semites. They were the “Sea People” of Egyptian records, David and Goliath fame, and such whose origins were the islands off of Crete.
Here’s a favorite quote I like to use from the era of the first revolt written by one of the leading Roman historians, Tacitus…
It inflamed Vespasian’s ire that the Jews were the only nation which had not yet submitted...Titus was appointed by his father (Vespasian) to complete the subjugation of Judaea...he commanded three legions in Judaea itself...To these he added the twelfth from Syria and the third and twenty-second from Alexandria...amongst his allies were a band of Arabs, formidable in themselves and harboring towards the Jews the bitter animosity usually subsisting between neighboring nations ( Vol. II, Book V,The Works of Tacitus).
Oh yes, one more thing…There never ever ever was an Arab kingdom, nation, emirate, state, etc. of “Palestine.” When Arabs ruled it, they did so out of Damascus or Baghdad as part of their imperial Caliphal conquests and prizes.
Okay...back to math…
Returning to the events of 1922, right from the get-go, one of the two main competitors in modern Palestine--the Arabs--was thus awarded with the lions’ share of the territory.
Arabs at the time gave their loyalty to where Arabs usually do--family, clan, tribe, and so forth. Those who started to think in bigger terms in the age of nationalism were either advocates of a “Greater Syria” plan for Arab unification or Pan Arabism on an even larger scale. The one thing they most certainly were not was “Palestinian.” Indeed, the folks in the Mandate who were labeled and who called themselves that were the Jews.
So, in a discussion of the division of rights between the Mandate’s two nationalist camps, we had Jews on the one side and Arabs on the other, and observers such as Kirkbride above and others saw the separation of Transjordan (eastern Palestine)in precisely these terms.
The problem we face today stems from the fact that Arabs now demand that a fictitious 3rd party also be entered into this apportionment...the “Palestinians.” Before I make any further comments on this, I’ll let one of those “Palestinians” himself do the talking. Please listen carefully to PLO executive committee member Zuheir Mohsen, on March 31, 1977, in the Dutch newspaper Trouw…
The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism…
Comprenden mis amigos? Get the picture?
Thus, after also making off with almost 80% of the entire territory of the original 1920 Mandate, Arab nationalism--in another one of its many different stripes--demands a second share.
Regardless of the internal competition going on between the Arabs’ various groups and sub-groups, they have no right denying other peoples their own rights because of all of their own subdivisions…but that’s exactly what they do--and not only to Jew…not by a long shot.
Think about this for a moment…
There are Jews in Israel from numerous different countries. Do they get to demand multiple states instead of just one in Israel because of this?
Kurds live and predate Arabs and Turks in the region by millennia. Do they get to have a half dozen states in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and so forth as a result of the same claims Arabs use in their Palestine games? How about some thirty-five million subjugated Imazighen/Berbers native to North Africa, who predated and fought the Arab conquest for centuries? And the list does not stop here…
No, even though we use Arabic numerals, Arabs do not have the right to change a basic mathematical truth…
1 + 1 = 2…not 3...especially since Arabs demand that their additional, undeserved state replace Israel, not live peacefully alongside it. Check out Mahmoud Abbas’s “moderate” Palestinian Authority emblems and maps if you doubt this.
Gerald A. Honigman
http://geraldahonigman.com/
HowardWasRight 
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