|
Re: Obama Admin Is Anti Israel
"From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a larger entity.
Bernard Lewis, "The Palestinians and the PLO, a Historical Approach," Commentary, January 1976, p. 32-48
In other words, it appears that Palestine never was an independent nation and the Arabs never named the land to which they now claim rights. Most Arabs do not admit so candidly that "Palestinian identity" is a maneuver "only for political reasons" as did Zuheir Muhsin. But Arab world, until recently, itself frequently negated the validity of any claim of an "age-old Palestinian Arab" identity.
The Arabs in Judah-cum-Palestine were regarded either as members of a "pan-Arab nation," as a Muslim community, or, in a tactical ply, as "Southern Syrians." - Yehoshua Porath, "Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian National Movement," in Society and Political Structure in the Arab World, M. Milson, ed. (New York, 1973) pp. 101, 107, 119.
The beginning article of a 1919 Arab Covenant proposed by the Arab Congress in Jerusalem stated that, "The Arab lands are a complete and indivisible whole, and the divisions of whatever nature to which they have been subjected are not approved nor recognized by the Arab nation." - Marie Syrkin, "Palestinian Nationalism: Its Development and Goal," in Michael Curtis et al., eds. The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), p. 200. Syrkin found that Haj Amin al-Husseini - the notorious Mufti of Jerusalem himself - "originally opposed the Palestine Mandate because it separated Palestine from Syria."
In the same year, the General Syrian Congress had the opposite view, it expressed eagerness to stress an exclusively Syrian identity: "We ask that there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine..." - According to Neville Mandel, Arabs and Zionism Before World War I (Berkely, 1976), p. 152, n. 49: "After World War I, when the nature of an independent Arab state and its component parts were being discussed, the term, 'Greater Syria' was advanced to embrace the Fertile Crescent and its desert hinterland. Palestine, as an integral part of that area, was dubbed 'Southern Syria'. But these terms were not in use in 1913 and 1914, when very few nationalists contemplated complete Arab independence."
The Arab historian George Antonius delineated Palestine in 1939 as part of "the whole of the country of that name [Syria] which is now split up into mandated territories..." - George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (Philadelphia, New York, Toronto: J.B. Lippincott, 1939), p. 15, n. 1.
As late as the 1950s, there was still a schizoid pattern to the Arab views. In 1951, the Constitution of the Arab Ba'ath Party stated:
"The Arabs form one nation. This nation has the natural right to live in a single sate and to be free to direct its own destiny...to gather all the Arabs in a single, independent Arab state." - The Ba'ath Party "describes itself as a national, popular revolutionary movement fighting for Arab unity, Freedom and Socialism,'", in 1951. Syrkin, "Nationalism" in Curtis, et al., Palestinians, p. 200.
A scant five years later, a Saudi Arabian United Nations delegate in 1956 asserted that, "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria." Ahmed Shukeiry, as head of the PLO, to Security Council on May 31, 1956, cited by Syrkin in "Nationalism", in Curtis et al, Palestinians, p. 201.
In 1974, Syria's President Assad, although a PLO supporter, incorporated both claims in a remarkable defintion:
"...Palestine is not only a part of our Arab homeland, but a basic part of southern Syria." - President Hafez Assad of Syria Radio Damascus, March 8, 1974.
The one identity never seriously considered until the 1967 Six-Day War - and then only as a tool - was an "Arab Palestinian" one, and the absence was not merely disregard. Clearly there was no such age-old or even century-old "national identity". According to the British Palestine Royal Commission Report:
"In the twelve centuries or more that have passed since the Arab conquest Palestine has virtually dropped out of history...In economics as in politics Palestine lay outside the main stream of the world's life. In the realm of thought, in science or in letters, it made no contribution to modern civilization. Its last state was worse than its first." - Palestine Royal Commission Report, Chapter 1, pg 6, para. 11.
__________________
|
Linear Mode
