Lauder Ad Responses I: A Palestinian State - Why Not?
Lauder Ad Responses I: A Palestinian State - Why Not?

From Leelia Cornell [email protected]:

A Palestinian state would not be conducive to stability in the Middle East or to the world as a whole. Falsely promoted as land for peace, this would instead spell the destructionof the State of Israel. The ultimate goal of the Palestinians with the establishment of their state is the destruction of Israel, a threat loudly proclaimed by Iran.


Who are the Palestinians? After Irsael was scattered from their Land, the area became known as Palestine. It eventually was ruled by the Ottoman Empire until WW l. However, few people lived there, and it wasn't a nation. There was no no government in this region for centuries.  Mark Twain once visited Palestine. He wrote of his disappointment at finding few people with no structured society there. He reported it was mostly an empty land.  The Jews began to return after WW  l, but the population remained small, and had no formal government. A decade later,during the early days of Hitler, Nazis went to the area to stir up Arabs there against the Jews. At that time no one there was known as a Palestinian.


Why should there be a homeland for people who never existed but were citizens of various nations all over the Middle East who emerged from a terrorist group organized by an Egyptian?
When the UN voted for Partition of the region known as Palestine, November 29, 1947, they created two states, Israel for the Jews and Jordan for the Arabs.  The UN created a state for the Arabs! This became reality May 14, 1948.  The moment Israel became its own state, Arabs from all the Arab nations surrounding them attacked Israel. Against overwhelming odds, Israel won that war.  They also won, from the spoils of war, territory in Jerusalem. Some Arabs who lived in that area were displaced from Jerusalem as a result, but those who dictated the displacement if the Arabs were their fellow Arabs not the Jews.


When the cease fire came, many Arabs from all over the Middle East who had come to fight were ready to return to their homes, however their native countries refused to allow them to return home. The Jews welcomed them to be a part of their country and enjoy equal rights with them, but most refused. That is how the refugee camps came into being, Arabs from various countries who weren't allowed to return home, but who also refused to become Israeli citizens, ended up in camps around Israel.


Arafat, an Egyptian, formed the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, made up of Arabs from all over the Middle East in order to fight against Israel. The people in this organization weren't called Palestinians, but they were Arabs belonging to an organization called Palestinian Liberation Organization. It wasn't until the 1990's that the name Palestinian began to emerge about the same time references to the PLO drifted out of news reports. Until then, no one referred to themselves as a Palestinian. There never were Palestinian people, so why should there be a homeland for people who never existed but were citizens of various nations all over the Middle East who emerged from a terrorist group organized by an Egyptian?


Israel is the only Democracy in the Middle East. Israel took a desert and caused it to bloom like a rose. They export much food and other vital products all over the world.  Their technology is more advanced than many western countries. They are always first responders to crisis including the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan with its tsunami. They are making a positive difference in the world.


Arab nations are increasingly becoming more violent, especially since the "Arab Spring".  Except for oil their exports and technology are little to nothing. Why would anyone desire to limit a nation such as Israel while giving more land to violent peoples? Look at the map. Israel is the size of  New Jersey.  The Arab and Muslim nations have vast territory all around the world. 

How is taking more land from the small state of Israel, giving it to Arabs who have vast territories making peace or improving the world?  Will this move bring peace? Are we seeing peace among the Arab world even between themselves?


Israel gave up Gaza on the pretense of bringing peace.  Instead Israel now receives rockets almost continually from Gaza. Israel won't return attacks coming across their border with the Sinai because of a peace treaty with Egypt, which Egypt is in the process of breaking. Yet Israel is the one who is asked to continue to give up more of The Land, which they won in wars, wars they didn't start, but which they won by the grace of God.


To give more land to Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, a people of no historical background, will destroy the last of Israel's buffer zone .  The  creation of a Palestinian state would destroy Israel. Without Israel ,much good for this world will be gone, and the violence of the Muslim world will engulf the region spilling over to the rest of the West.  The Arab state was already created by the UN in 1947-1948. This is historical fact.There is no need to create something that was accomplished 64 yearsago. 

Steven Carol: No To a Second Palestinian State

(adapted from his book: Middle East Rules of Thumb ©2008-2009 and from his forthcoming book: Understanding the Volatile and Dangerous Middle East © 2012.

Must all national and ethnic groups that want their own states and have struggled for them get them, in the name of self-determination? If so, why haven’t the Imazighen (Berbers), who predate their Arab conquerors by millennia and who have had their own language and culture, have their own state? Why is there no independent Euskadi state for Basques? Elsewhere in Europe, why is there no state for the Bretons of Brittany, the Flemings of Flanders, the Catalans of Catalonia in north-eastern Spain, the Frisans in the Netherlands, and the Sami people in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and on the Kola Peninsula of Russia? Why is there no state of Tibet, Jola state of Casamance (southern Senegal), Lunda state of Katanga, Luba state of South Kasai, Ibo state of Biafra, Tuareg state of Azawad, stretching across the Sahara from Mali to Niger, Tamil state in north-eastern Sri Lanka, a state of Cabinda, and a state of Kurdistan?

Of all the peoples on earth who have not yet been granted the sovereignty they have fought for–the Chechens of Russia, the Uighurs of China, the Karens of Myanmar, the Mizos and Nagas of northeast India, the Saharawis of Morocco, and the Acehans of Indonesia, to name but a few–why must the Palestinian Arabs be given a second Palestinian Arab state? They already make up some 80 percent of the population of Jordan, a nation created by the British in 1921 from 77.5 percent of the original British Mandate of Palestine which was to be the Jewish National homeland.

There never was a separate Palestinian Arab people, distinct from other Arabs during the 1,192 years of Muslim hegemony in Palestine under Arab, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Seljuk, Ayyubid, Mameluke, and Ottoman rule.
Should the Palestinian Arabs alone be acknowledged by many, of deserving not one, but two states? Thus far the historic record has shown a lack of Palestinian Arab ability to govern and police themselves. Recall that the PLO/PA governed Gaza since 1994, save for the twenty-one Jewish communities located there and subsequently evicted by the Israeli government in 2005. In a military putsch and battle, that lasted from June 7 to 15, 2007, Hamas ousted PLO/PA Fateh officials and has exercised control of the Gaza Strip ever since, turning the territory into a rocket-launching platform from which to bombard Israel.

One important benchmark of nationhood must be the degree of difference from its neighbors, and the need for a state to protect that uniqueness. The Tibetans, for example, have their own special culture, language, and religion, which they will lose if they continue to be ruled by the Chinese; the Kurds have a culture and language unlike that of the Arabs; the Karens, a language and religion different from that of the Burmese.

There never was a separate Palestinian Arab people, distinct from other Arabs during the 1,192 years of Muslim hegemony in Palestine under Arab, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Seljuk, Ayyubid, Mameluke, and Ottoman rule. All through the period of the British military occupation and the subsequent British Mandate of Palestine, countless official British Mandate documents speak of the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine—not Jews and Palestinians.

Steven Carol has a Ph.D. in history, with specialties in the Modern Middle East, US History, the World Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Cold War. He is the official historian, associate producer and most frequent guest of Middle East Radio Forum www.middleeastradioforum.org. He is the author of Middle East Rules of Thumb, Encyclopedia of Days: Start the Day with History and his latest book: From Jerusalem to the Lion of Judah and Beyond.