My mother is a Palestinian – evidence of the fiction as to who the Palestinians really are.
She does not belong to the Palestinian people featured prominently in the newspapers and certainly not to the group whose mandate is to destroy the State of Israel as their Charter promulgates. My mother is a Jew as our whole family are and have always been, not part of a group that wear the fictitious label “Palestinians” – a name hijacked and applied to a conglomeration of those who formerly identified themselves as Arabs.
Palestine was an old Roman name for the area used by the conquering imperial powers who decided to split up the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves after the First World War. Egypt went to the British. The Land of Israel had lines drawn through it creating a new country “The Hashemite Kingdom of TransJordan” in recognition of support of the British by the Hashemites, a local Bedouin tribe. Another part of the map of the Land of Israel was bolted on to Lebanon as it was put under French control with Syria. This was despite agreement in the San Remo Peace Conference in 1920 that defined the borders of the Land of Israel as being in accordance with their ancient limits. Palestine as a whole was designated to be the Jewish National Home and the Jewish State, with the Jewish People the national beneficiary.
The British then re-labelled what remained as Palestine settling in as “Protectors of the Mandate” next door to Egypt. They refused to allow large numbers of Jews to return home to their land both prior to and after the Second World War. During that war the local Arabs sided with the Nazis. Imperialism began falling to pieces as foreign powers were thrown beginning with the British leaving what was to become the Jewish State of Israel in 1948. Egypt nationalized their own country in 1956, seizing British assets including the Suez Canal.
Who were the Arabs residing in what was known as Palestine at the time? In the nineteenth and early twentieth century there was an influx of Arab economic migrants from Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Africa and other surrounding countries. They lived in the Jewish ancestral home together with local Arabs, Jews and nomadic Bedouin tribes. Research by Tzvi MiSinai has found that many local Arabs had Jewish roots but were converted to Islam during the Muslim Caliphate era, having remained from the Second Temple Era two thousand years earlier. To this day there are 60 families with the surname Cohen, a decidedly Jewish name, in Jordan. Many other families with Jewish names are scattered throughout Arab villages in parts of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, knowing their roots but unlike in the past unable to publicize that fact due to cases of retribution.
My mother’s papers show her origin as being “Palestine” in 1921, when the British took over the area after the First World War. The Jews were called Palestinians whilst the Arabs remained Arabs.
The hijacking of the word “Palestinians” with the name being given to the local Arab population in Israel was a push for money and personal power. The name “Palestine” is a fiction, the area being won by the Israel Defence Forces against seven Arab armies in 1948 together with further conquests in later wars. It is no accident that Arafat, self-styled “Chairman of the Palestinians” died with over $100 million dollars in his overseas bank accounts, some say $900 million. Greed and corruption have been part of the abuse of the people of the area, leading to death, despair and destruction. Corruption and power also rule Gaza today with the good people of the world funding the ever-growing population, armaments providing fire-power into civilian areas in Israel and more money in the bank accounts of the leaders. A corruption of the name Jerusalem as “Al Kuds” meaning holy in Arabic is a corruption of the words “holy place” which is the name for Beth HaMikdash or the Holy Temple of the Jews. The Arafat era produced the falsehood of ownership of Jerusalem which is only one example of what is now believed to be part of the Palestinian narrative.
Death is the penalty for public dissention in Gaza, as people learn the truth from the internet and television as Hamas rules with an iron fist. A whole generation of children in Gaza read textbooks re-naming the Jewish State of Israel “Occupied Palestine” a pretence that is drilled into them from the cradle, together with hatred and expectations of martyrdom, reinforced with posters of young martyrs throughout the city.
The Holocaust may be far from the minds of the world, but Israelis will not allow themselves to be victims of a second Holocaust. Whilst twenty-two Arab countries purposely allowed the refugees of a lost war to stagnate, the United Nations has designated these people as the only refugees not to be resettled elsewhere, continuing to call whole cities with multi-storey buildings “refugee camps”. Generations after generation of people live in misery falsely believing that they own a very small piece of land that is not theirs and never will be. Apart from their wealthy leaders they exist in difficult circumstances whilst the majority of charity monies meant for them is squandered on rockets aimed at civilians in Israel. An interesting but effective public relations campaign has individuals world-wide believing the fiction, assisted by the loony left in Israel itself. That is the price that democratic Israel has had to pay for free speech.
However, the Arab world has changed over the past few generations. No longer solely made up of tribes of the desert, they are now well-educated, holding forth the promise of sensibility. Regime change is not a future impossibility in Iran. There is an undercurrent of unpublicized trade and commerce between Israel and most Arab countries. Economic peace is more important to Arab heads-of-state than war will ever be.
In fact, war is dangerous to the leaders themselves, unless they have become power-crazy and irrational. Economic disadvantage of the masses is the prime motivator in the fall of leadership, particularly where fundamentalist elements takes charge of social services and education for the poor. Misinterpretation of the Koran itself is a feature of this fundamentalism, fully ignoring the words of the Koran as it acknowledges the sovereign right of the Jews in the Land of Israel, given by Allah as their heritage (Qur’an, “Night Journey” ch. 17:100-104 and Qur’an 5:20-21).
The Palestinians have been sidelined. Arafat himself was called “you dog” – by Arab leaders, the worst insult by a fellow Arab. He was only useful when needed for internal unrest amongst Arab citizens of the State of Israel in the days that they believed that they could annihilate it. Today Israel is too strong for that belief to be realistic. The “Palestinian agenda” will have to be solved in another way, whether through resettlement of these people around the world, by integration within individual Arab countries or in death by war. Lebanon has made a good beginning by finally allowing their refugees to legally obtain work. Saudi Arabia has been flexing its muscles in its economic interests actively seeking a solution.
Middle Eastern powers are showing signs of willingness to change their political stance in order to promote economic growth and prosperity, particularly with the decline of the importance of oil. Israel has a unique part to play as a regional economic hub with its leading technological edge, newly discovered supplies of its own energy, the ability of its people to communicate in Arabic, English and other languages, its unrivalled geographical position with access to both land and sea across continents and also the percentage of tertiary educated citizens which is now higher than that of the United States. Israel would welcome the opportunity to share its expertise and provide work, opportunity, sustainability and an improved lifestyle for hundreds of millions of people in cooperation with neighboring countries around its borders.
The United Nations has a role to play in dismantling the system of education that breeds terrorists, rather than paying for it. Resettlement in Arab and other countries, without resorting to existential threats to the Jewish State must be a top priority rather than wasting money by fueling corruption, death and misery.
The era of war may be behind us, despite the rumblings in Iran. People of the world want to live out their lives in peace, not waiting for hell to rain down on them. Those who now call themselves Palestinians will have to face reality. Their mission was false. Their leaders lied to them. Their only hope is to find somewhere else to live out their lives; places where their children can be free to be children, free to grown up in peace and free to enjoy life.
The only other alternative to the “Palestinian Problem” may very well be self-destruction as they continue to feed their own to their god of fire.