The NEWEST Official Discussion Thread for the creation of Israel, the UN and the British Mandate

[Sixties Fan]

The Crucial Moment


“The support of the British government, when given, will be in conjunction and agreement with the Allied powers.” So announced Weizmann at a Zionist conference in May 1917; as he well
knew, it could not have been otherwise. If the French, the Americans, or perhaps even the Italians had thrown cold water on the Zionist project, that would have broken the momentum in London, leaving the Zionists without a British declaration. And so the triumvirate of Sokolow, Weizmann, and Brandeis left nothing to chance. Thanks to their efforts, when the crucial moment came in the British war cabinet, Balfour could claim the assent of the Allies: “Mr. Balfour then read a very sympathetic declaration by the French Government which had been conveyed to the Zionists, and he stated that he knew that President Wilson was extremely favorable to the Movement.”

The Cambon letter proved indispensable. The historian Isaiah Friedman, who probably weighed more evidence than anyone, believed that without it “there would have been no Balfour Declaration.” (Balfour reportedly said the same to Sokolow.) As for Woodrow Wilson’s assent, the British war cabinet had insisted upon it; without it, as the diplomatic historian Frank Brecher noted, the Balfour Declaration “almost certainly” would not have been issued. Weizmann called it “one of the most important individual factors in breaking the deadlock created by the British Jewish anti-Zionists, and in deciding the British government to issue its declaration.”

Despite appearances, the Balfour Declaration was more than the chess move of a single power. Behind it stood the Allies, each of whom gave it some push forward.

Despite appearances, then, the Balfour Declaration was more than the chess move of a single power. Behind it stood the Allies, each of whom gave it some push forward. And when Balfour finally issued it, no one doubted that that the Allies stood by Britain’s side. Just after publication of the declaration, the Jewish Chronicle of London affirmed that the British government had acted “in accord—it is without doubt to be assumed—with the rest of the Allies.” The Zionist Review described the declaration as “formal public recognition by Great Britain (and, that is, by the Allies) that Israel as a nation lives and persists.”
Stephen Wise, chairman of the Provisional Zionist Committee in New York, knew all of the inside details of how Sykes and the Zionists had canvassed for Allied “votes.” “It may be assumed,” he hinted, “that Britain is not acting alone.”

It is not for us to predicate that England has spoken and acted in concert with her Allies, but we are justified in believing that England, ever working in closest cooperation with her Allies in the war, will in the day of peace find herself not only supported by France and Italy, but above all by the American government and people.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[Sixties Fan]

Collecting Endorsements


The British issued the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917. But the Zionists understood perfectly well that the Allies would have to be consulted once more on the “day of peace,” and that Palestine as a “national home” for the Jews would be contested. The Balfour Declaration thus opened another chapter, in which the Zionists worked to persuade each Allied government to endorse it openly.

Here, too, Sokolow played the lead on the continent, and it was no small task. The French had cooled; America was now well in the war, and Russia (after the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917) was out, so Jewish opinion in both countries no longer mattered much (assuming it ever had). And there had been a change of government in France since the Cambon letter. In January and February 1918, Sokolow returned to Paris, this time with the aim of securing a public French declaration in support of the Balfour Declaration. There he met with the French foreign minister Stephen Pichon, an old friend, who assured him that nothing had changed in France’s position since the Cambon letter.

But Sokolow asked for a formal statement: an explicit French endorsement of the Balfour Declaration. American Jews would appreciate it, Sokolow assured Pichon, and this would help France at the peace conference. So Pichon delivered an endorsement, and it was published on February 10, 1918. Pichon affirmed that “the understanding is complete between the French and British governments concerning the question of a Jewish establishment in Palestine (un établissement juif en Palestine).” Sokolow was not satisfied with this phrase, which fell short of the “national home” ( foyer national) mentioned in the Balfour Declaration. So he pleaded with Pichon to use that phrase; on February 14, Pichon sent Sokolow another letter that did just that.

The Zionists collected other endorsements, some outright, some with emendations. The most important came from Italy and Japan—the two states that, along with Britain and France, would participate in the San Remo conference and become permanent members of the Council of the League of Nations. In May 1918, the Italian government pledged to Sokolow to help “facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national center (centro nazionale ebraico).” In January 1919, Japan informed Weizmann that “the Japanese Government gladly take note of the Zionist aspirations to establish in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people and they look forward with a sympathetic interest to the realization of such desire.” (Similar endorsements came from Siam and China, the other two then-independent states of East Asia.)

Last but not least, in August 1918 Woodrow Wilson sent a letter to Stephen Wise expressing “satisfaction in the progress of the Zionist movement . . . since the declaration of Mr. Balfour,” whose text Wilson repeated in its entirety. Wise announced that “the conjecture of some,” that the Balfour Declaration “commanded the President’s approval,” had now been “established as a certainty for all.”
Between his secret endorsement in October 1917 and his public one in 1918, Woodrow Wilson introduced a new principle in international relations: self-determination.
Between Wilson’s secret endorsement of October 1917 and this public one, Wilson had introduced a new principle in international relations: self-determination. “National aspirations must be respected,” said the president in his “self-determination” speech of February 11, 1918. “Peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent.” From that point onward, critics of the Balfour Declaration would insist that it had denied self-determination to the majority-Arab population. But how could facilitating the Jewish “national home” violate Wilson’s principle, if Wilson himself (as Lloyd George put it) was “fully committed to the Balfour Declaration and was, in fact, an enthusiastic supporter of the project it involved”? Wilson’s endorsement eased any Allied doubt as to whether the Balfour Declaration conformed to the new rule of the international order.
The Zionists brought of all these endorsements to the peace conference in Paris in February 1919. Sokolow opened the Zionist presentation at the conference before the foreign ministers of Britain (Balfour), France (Pichon), the United States (Robert Lansing), Italy (Sidney Sonnino), and Japan (Makino Nabuaki). In the era before the United Nations and the League of Nations, there existed no higher international forum than this.

In his preface, Sokolow spoke of the Balfour Declaration as though it had been made by all of the Allies:

In the midst of this terrible war, you, as representatives of the Great Powers of Western Europe and America, have issued a declaration which contained the promise to help us, with your goodwill and support, to establish this national center, for whose realization generations have lived and suffered.

In Sokolow’s carefully chosen words, the Balfour Declaration had morphed into the Allied declaration. A monumental effort in many capitals had permitted him to utter that sentence without fear of contradiction.
The San Remo conference in April 1920 was an extension of the peace conference. One of its tasks was to parcel out former Ottoman territories into mandates, which the powers would administer as trusts on behalf of the League of Nations. There the powers agreed that Britain would receive the League of Nations mandate for Palestine.

But what would it be mandated to do? Would it be charged with facilitating the “national home”? The Balfour Declaration, if introduced into the mandate, would become part of international law. Absent that, there would be no legal standing to the “national home.” Britain, at Zionist urging, sought to have the entire Balfour Declaration inserted in the text of the mandate, and it was here that Sokolow’s 1918 efforts in Paris were richly rewarded.

Since Sokolow’s triumph in Paris, there had been another change of government in France, and the French had grown intransigeant. The lead French negotiator, Philippe Berthelot, “knew not Joseph,” and attempted to exclude the Balfour Declaration from the mandate on the grounds that it was an “unofficial declaration made by one power, which had never been formally accepted by the Allies generally.” In particular, it “had never been officially accepted by the French government.”
Lord Curzon, Balfour’s successor as foreign secretary, replied that Berthelot “was possibly not fully acquainted with the history of the question.” He then produced Pichon’s letter to Sokolow and had the interpreter read it aloud. One “could hardly say that M. Pichon was unaware of the significance of the declaration,” Curzon observed, adding that Pichon “had not only endorsed, on behalf of his own government, Mr. Balfour’s declaration, but had added in his letter: ‘besides, I am happy to affirm that the understanding between the French and British government on this question is complete.’”

A flailing Berthelot countered that “it was not in any way evident that M. Pichon had accepted the whole declaration in its entirety.” But it certainly sounded as though he had. In the end, Pichon’s endorsement could not be undone. Berthelot retreated, and the Balfour Declaration entered whole into the preamble of the League of Nations mandate—at which point it acquired full legal standing in international law. The “national home” for the Jews in Palestine had become a legal commitment of the international community. The Allied powers made Britain “responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers.”

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Weakness of Secret Pledges


The Balfour Declaration has often been weighed against an earlier set of promises: in 1915 and early 1916, Britain made various pledges to Sharif (later King) Hussein of Mecca, leader of the Arab Revolt, in a series of Arabic letters known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. In the letters, the British promised Hussein that they would support Arab independence within certain borders—at the very least in Syria and Mesopotamia, and possibly in Palestine. How was it that the Balfour Declaration became international law, while the Hussein-McMahon correspondence ended up a dead letter? Answer: there was no Arab Sokolow.

Once Hussein had his secret pledges from the British, he made little effort to extract comparable commitments from other Allies. In particular, Sykes tried to press Hussein’s son Faisal to act as Sokolow did and come to some understanding with the French over Syria. McMahon had included a key reservation—namely, that the territories promised for Arab independence were only those “in which Great Britain is free to act without detriment to interests of her ally France.” As France’s interests in Syria (and Palestine) were well-known, this should have been a powerful incentive to the Arabs to reach a thorough understanding with the French. But Hussein and Faisal never did, and Faisal came to the peace conference in 1919 without any French chits.
Not only that: his British chits had been given secretly. At the peace conference in Paris, Lloyd George invoked the British commitments to Hussein as though they were binding on France. Pichon objected: “This undertaking had been made by Great Britain alone. France had never seen it until a few weeks before [this conference].” Lloyd George countered that France “had for practical purposes accepted our undertaking to King Hussein.” Pichon: “How could France be bound by an agreement the very existence of which was unknown to her?”
Pichon was exaggerating France’s ignorance, but because the Hussein-McMahon correspondence was secret, knowledge of it could be denied. Faisal had entered a collision course with France, which in 1920 occupied Syria by arms and threw him out of Damascus. Given French determination to rule Syria, a clash would have been difficult to avoid, but the absence of an Arab Sokolow in Paris made it inevitable.

No less significant, McMahon’s secret pledges were meant for Hussein’s eyes only. They weren’t publicized to the Arabs until long after the war. The Balfour Declaration was something entirely different: a pledge to an entire people, given before all the world. This was only partly obscured by the vehicle of the declaration: the letter addressed by Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild for conveyance to the (English) Zionist Federation. But the letter was no more than a convenience, and Sokolow made light of it at a dinner on November 15, 1917 at which Lord Rothschild read the Balfour Declaration. Sokolow quipped that it had been “sent to the Lord and not to the Jewish people because they had no address, whereas the Lord had a very fine one.”

The Balfour Declaration thus anticipated what later came to be called public diplomacy. The Zionist movement had no use for secret pledges of the sort Britain gave to Hussein. As Herzl insisted at the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the movement sought “publicly legalized guarantees” since anything less “could be revoked at any time.” Herzl took a dim view of “secret interventions” and called for “free and open discussion subject to constant and complete monitoring by world public opinion.” The aim was to produce a public assurance by any government with control or a say over Palestine, and have it incorporated in public law.
In this aspect, Sokolow, a journalist like Herzl, was Herzl’s truest disciple. It was Sokolow who coined the Hebrew term hasbarah (“explanation”), a word that perfectly parallels public diplomacy in its modern sense. Sokolow saw hasbarah as the natural form of Zionist advocacy in the chancelleries of Europe, in editorial boardrooms, and in public speeches.
“We are not conducting any secret diplomacy,” he said in a London speech in mid-1917. “Such a thing is obviously impossible for the Jewish people. The Zionist leaders are endeavoring to make clear to the powers the aspirations of the Jewish people.” In 1919, he insisted that “in the whole proceedings there are no secret treaties, no secret diplomacy, in fact neither diplomacy nor conspiracy; but they constitute a series of negotiations, schemes, suggestions, explanations, measures, journeys, conferences, etc.”

While Sokolow may have seemed like a diplomat, even to professional diplomats, he thought like a publicist, eager to get the story out. He took every assurance he received and made it public. Sokolow saw no point in discretion for discretion’s sake. In mid-1917, he told a London audience that he and Weizmann had been “abundantly successful” in winning over the French and British governments, that “our success with the Italian government transcended all of our expectation,”
and that Pope Benedict had given him “the warmest assurances of his sympathy.” (News of Sokolow’s audience with the pope spread so widely that it gave rise to a joke: two Jews find themselves in St. Peter’s Square, where they see two figures standing on the papal balcony. The one Jew asks the other: “Who’s that next to Sokolow?”)

Wilson explicitly asked that his prior approval of the Balfour Declaration not be made public, and it wasn’t. But the Zionists publicized every other assurance. This had the dual purpose of spurring competition among the Allies and raising the morale of rank-and-file Zionists. But above all, an open assurance, communicated to a vast public, could only be retracted at a cost.
Indeed, had the Balfour Declaration been issued as a secret letter to Zionist leaders without having been cleared by the Allies (that is, like the British promises to Hussein), it would have never entered the preamble of the mandate, and Britain probably would have disavowed it in the 1920s. In 1923, in light of growing Arab opposition, a new British government did order a review of Palestine policy. Could the Balfour Declaration be abandoned? The review committee (under Lord Curzon) noted that the declaration had been “accepted, not indeed without some reluctance, by the whole of our Allies, that it met with especial favor in America, that it was officially endorsed at San Remo, that it figured in the original Treaty of Sèvres, and that it was textually reproduced in the mandate for Palestine, which was officially submitted to and approved by the Council of the League of Nations in July 1922.” Under those circumstances, it was “well-nigh impossible for any government to extricate itself without a substantial sacrifice of consistency and self-respect, if not of honor.”

The British would no doubt have had far fewer qualms about violating a secret pledge made only to the Jews. A public pledge that had been cleared and then seconded by the Allies was another matter. Britain wasn’t yet prepared to sacrifice honor on that scale.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[Sixties Fan]

Why Sokolow Has Been Forgotten


How is it that the true nature of the Balfour Declaration has been obscured, so that it is remembered solely as a product of British imperial will? Why does no other government “mark” the centennial? (Apropos, June 4 marked exactly a century to the Cambon letter.) Why has Israel itself failed to remind Washington, Paris, and Rome of their crucial roles, perhaps prompting them to express their own pride in the decisive assurances they gave in 1917?

Selective memory is the answer. It is easy enough to understand why the British would prefer to forget that they needed the prior approval of Allies (the French, no less!). Initially, the British wanted the gratitude of the Jews for themselves. Later, when Zionism became a burden, they wanted the exclusive prerogative to downgrade the “national home” in any way they chose, without being second-guessed (by the Americans, of all people!). Even today, Britons ridden by imperial guilt over the Palestinians want the privilege to wallow in it alone. Britain, in this view, has a unique obligation to “set things right”—a remote echo of past imperial hubris.

But surely it is incumbent on Israel to remember the Balfour Declaration for what it was: the carefully calibrated consensus of the nascent international community circa 1917. Why has Israel forgotten?

There are two reasons. First, when Britain became the mandatory power in Palestine, Zionism fixed its political action almost exclusively upon London. After the peace settlement, sympathy toward Zionism dissipated in France, Italy, and the United States, and the Vatican reverted to its traditional hostility. Britain became almost the sole support of Zionism. Weizmann spent the interwar years tirelessly reminding Britain of its obligation to foster the “national home,” with steadily diminishing results. His desperate strategy was to present the Balfour Declaration as thoroughly British, having emanated entirely from the depths of Britain’s own supposed tradition of “gentile Zionism.”

Sokolow, too, wrote a polemical History of Zionism in two volumes, published in 1919, designed to convince British readers that the Balfour Declaration capped centuries of the English love of Zion. The possibility that France or Italy or the United States, for a moment’s lack of enthusiasm, might have nipped the whole thing in the bud couldn’t be admitted.
But there was a second, pettier reason. Weizmann wanted full credit for the Balfour Declaration. To secure it, he and his associates had to cut out of the story all those parts in which he didn’t star. That included Sokolow’s diplomacy on the continent, which was a solo performance.

The story of Weizmann and Sokolow, and Weizmann versus Sokolow, could fill a much longer essay and has yet to be told. Suffice it to say that every aspect of Sokolow’s role in 1917 brought the tension between them close to the surface. In his autobiography, Weizmann described Sokolow as lacking “practicality.” “He had no idea of time,” claimed Weizmann, “or the meaning of a practical commitment.” Sokolow also allegedly suffered from an “over-diversification of opinions and convictions,” and “was always in favor of compromise”—a dangerous trait, in Weizmann’s book.
These elements of distrust emerged strongly when Sokolow accepted the mission to Paris. Weizmann disliked the very idea of him darting about the Quai d’Orsay, even under the watchful eye of Sykes. In particular, Weizmann suspected, erroneously, that Sokolow might buy success in Paris with concessions to the French in Palestine, encouraging them to press for a standing equal to Britain’s. “Your work in France,” Weizmann warned Sokolow, “may be interpreted as negotiations on behalf of our movement in favor of France. On no account [is] such [an] impression admissible.”

Weizmann ended that missive by demanding that Sokolow return to London. For his part, Sokolow dismissed the notion that his mission might encourage French ambitions as “pure imagination.” “Either you have not received my letters,” he wrote to Weizmann, “or you have not
had time to go through them.” Sokolow remained on the continent for a full six weeks, working alone and in tandem with Sykes.
No one could argue with the results: Sokolow had performed beyond anyone’s expectations. According to Jehuda Reinharz, Weizmann had “underestimated Sokolow’s skills as a diplomat.” But of course Weizmann did not fail to put the assurances made to Sokolow to good use in Britain, and even stretched them when it served the cause. “Our friend, chief, and leader, Mr. Sokolow,” he announced in a speech to the English Zionist Federation on May 20, 1917, “has been both in France and in Italy, and from both these governments he has received assurances of full sympathy and full support.”
Full? Not exactly. And this: “We have assurances from the highest Catholic circles that they will view with favor the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.” This was an elastic interpretation of Pope Benedict’s words to Sokolow.

Then, once the Balfour Declaration was issued, Weizmann reversed gears, and it became his habit to minimize Sokolow’s achievement. Sokolow himself offered an explanation in 1918, after his return from Paris where he had secured Pichon’s endorsement of the Balfour Declaration:

In our offices [in London], I found Weizmann and reported to him the results of my effort in Paris. I can’t resist the impression that he is not sincere, and that ambition eats him whole. It seems to me that he increasingly forgoes calm and objective consideration, and instead operates out of personal motives, which arise from his anxiety. He is very suspicious, fears rivals, and brooks no opposition. I showed him the French document. He said, that’s very fine, but I felt he saw it as some sort of competition.
The American Zionist leader Stephen Wise later wrote that a “deep abyss” opened up between Sokolow’s and Weizmann’s versions of how the Balfour Declaration came to be. Weizmann’s wife Vera alluded to this in her memoirs in recalling a Zionist congress convened in the early 1920s. Some of the delegates, she remembered,

were rather jealous that one man from the little [Russian] village of Motol [Weizmann’s birthplace] should have secured the Balfour Declaration. The Polish Jews in particular felt like this since they would have preferred Nahum Sokolow, the father of the Hebrew press, to have been the initiator of the Declaration. To smooth over their ruffled feelings, Schmarya Levin, who was never at a loss for words, told the story of two Jews who were arguing as to which was more important—the sun or the moon. At length they decided that the moon was more important: the sun gives light in the day-time, when it is light out anyhow, whereas the moon gives light when it is dark!

Partisans of the two men lined up, and it wasn’t necessarily along the Polish-Russian divide. Lewis Namier (originally from Poland), a British historian and an admirer of Weizmann, dismissed Sokolow as a “little Jewish faktor [sales agent] now raised to the level of pseudo- statesmanship.” Reubin Brainin (originally from Russia), a publicist and an admirer of Sokolow,
claimed that “it was Sokolow, perhaps more than Weizmann, who won the sympathy of prominent British Jewish figures theretofore indifferent to Jewish national aspirations in Palestine.”

Into the 1930s, Sokolow’s disciples still claimed the Balfour Declaration as his achievement. But Sokolow did practically nothing to promote his version. Vain he may have been, but he never got around to writing his memoirs, even of the events leading up to the Balfour Declaration. According to his son, Sokolow made notes and even started filing material, but he died in 1936 without having written anything.
Weizmann, by contrast, told his version many times. In his Trial and Error, he devoted this single sentence to Sokolow’s diplomacy: “Sokolow was entrusted with the task of modifying the attitude of the French, and of winning the consent of Italy and the Vatican—a task which he discharged with great skill.” (This, while admitting that “the chief danger always came from the French.”) One of Weizmann’s sharpest critics detected a pattern: “The most conspicuous feature of Dr. Weizmann’s appraisal of Nahum Sokolow are the omissions. In many phases of Zionist history the latter played an important role, to which no reference is made in Trial and Error.”

The historian Mayir Vereté wrote that “it is not easy to decide whether [Weizmann’s] share was greater than that of Sokolow” in securing the Balfour Declaration. That assertion has been contested by Weizmann’s biographers (although one, Norman Rose, has admitted that Sokolow’s contribution was “often overlooked in the wake of Weizmann’s achievements”). But the question is not whether Sokolow has received less than his due. Until a biographer researches Sokolow as thoroughly as others have researched Weizmann, there cannot be an answer. The problem is that the forgetting of their partnership, perhaps the most consequential in the history of Zionism, didn’t only erase Sokolow from memory; it erased awareness of the Allied antecedents of the Balfour Declaration. The earliest Zionist success in mobilizing international legitimacy became a story of collusion between a wily British Jew and a clutch of British imperialists.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[P F Tinmore]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Tell them the whole story. Tell them that those who were actually expelled by Israel had fought against Israel in 1948 and were very willing to continue to kill Jews, just as so many continue to do it. To destroy Israel, and make Jews second citizens again, and not in their own country anymore, but in a Muslim/Arab country.
ONE MORE Muslim Arab country.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Britain’s Retreat from the Declaration
For two decades, Weizmann led the Zionist struggle to hold Britain to its promises, to close what he recognized as “the gap between the promise of the [Balfour] declaration and the performance.” But by the late 1930s, Britain was in full retreat from the declaration; in the British White paper of 1939, Zionists saw its final abrogation. The White Paper, which informed British policy throughout World War II, blocked Jewish immigration to Palestine at precisely the moment when the Jews of Europe faced destruction. Britain attempted to set Palestine on a course to become an Arab state with a Jewish minority.

As the sun set on Britain’s support for Zionism, Weizmann argued that Britain hadn’t the right to discard or or even interpret the Balfour Declaration on its own. Why? Not because its text had appeared in the preamble of the League of Nations mandate. By 1939, the League was in tatters.

Instead, Weizmann cited the World War I commitments made to Zionism by the other Allies. Britain had the “moral right” to rule Palestine only because the “civilized nations of the world” had conferred it “for the explicit and direct purpose of helping to build up the Jewish National Home.” And these nations did so because of Zionist exertions.

Did not the British government of the time—1917-18—encourage us, the late lamented leader Sokolow, myself, and other friends who were working in the cause of Great Britain and Palestine, to go to France, Italy, America, and plead—I do not exaggerate this contribution—that the mandate should be given to Great Britain? We were encouraged to do it. We were encouraged to bring in our people. We were encouraged to pour out all that was best in us because we trusted in the word of Britain; that was for us the rock on which we were to build in Palestine.

The Balfour Declaration did not legitimate Zionism. It was Zionism, through its diplomatic efforts, that legitimated the Balfour Declaration.

Thus did Weizmann, at his lowest ebb, admit the true character of the Balfour Declaration. It had not legitimated Zionism. It was Zionism, through its diplomatic efforts among “civilized nations,” which had legitimated the Balfour Declaration. Not only had its issuance depended on the tacit or explicit agreement of the Allied powers, but that agreement had been secured by the Zionists themselves—by Weizmann, Brandeis, and, above all, by the lamented but forgotten Sokolow.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[P F Tinmore]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Time to Fix the Distortions



The centennial of the Balfour Declaration is the perfect opportunity to chip away at the distorted accretions of a century. The largest of these is the notion that the Balfour Declaration arose outside any legitimate framework, as the initiative of a self-dealing imperial power. This is utterly false. The Balfour Declaration wasn’t the isolated act of one nation. It was approved in advance by the Allied powers whose consensus then constituted the only source of international legitimacy. Before Balfour signed his declaration, leaders and statesmen of other democratic nations signed their names on similar letters and assurances. The Balfour Declaration anticipated a world regulated by a consortium of principal powers—the same world that, 30 years later, would pass a UN resolution legitimating the establishment of a Jewish state.

This centennial is thus the time to remind governments of their shared responsibility for Britain’s pledge to establish a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. In Washington, Paris, Rome, and Vatican City, it is important for Israel’s ambassadors and friends to speak openly of the historic and essential role of each government in the gestation of the declaration. The same should be done in all of the capitals that endorsed the Balfour Declaration after its issuance, but before it was enshrined in the mandate. That would include Beijing and Tokyo.

The American role deserves particular emphasis. Few Americans know that Wilson approved the Balfour Declaration in advance, or that this approval had a decisive effect in the British cabinet. The United States never entered the League of Nations, and so never ratified the mandate. But in June 1922 the United States Congress passed a joint resolution (the so-called Lodge-Fish resolution) that reproduced the exact text of the Balfour Declaration (“the United States of America favors the establishment in Palestine,” etc.). President Warren G. Harding signed the resolution the following September. The centennial is a unique opportunity to remind the American public of these facts, all of which point to America’s shared responsibility for the Balfour Declaration.

The main commemoration will take place in Britain, and here it is imperative that Israel and its friends insist on a full accounting of Britain’s record. The past months’ attempt by the Palestinians to force Britain to “apologize” for the Balfour Declaration has already failed. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas demanded such an apology several times over the past year, most notably in a speech at the United Nations, where he cited “the catastrophes, misery, and injustice this declaration created.” In April, the British government informed the Palestinian Authority that it “does not intend to apologize”:
We are proud of our role in creating the state of Israel. . . . Establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in the land to which they had such strong historical and religious ties was the right and moral thing to do, particularly against the background of centuries of persecution.

Proud Britain may be, but Israel cannot forget that in May 1939 the British unilaterally abrogated the Balfour Declaration, shutting down Jewish immigration to Palestine. This act had no legal foundation. The Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations concluded that the White Paper “was not in accordance with the interpretation which, in agreement with the mandatory power and the Council, the commission had always placed upon the Palestine mandate.” Not only did Britain freely reinterpret the “national home” so as to preclude a state, but Britain even denied that it meant a haven. So Britain barred Europe’s Jews from entry to their legally recognized “national home,” and Jews perished in the millions.

If the 1917 Balfour Declaration is now to be deemed a source of British pride, its 1939 abrogation should be deemed a source of British shame.

The subject of Britain and Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust has been researched thoroughly. “Within the [Holocaust’s] greater circle of tragedy,” wrote one historian, “there was a smaller one”: namely, Britain’s determination to keep desperate Jewish refugees out of Palestine by every possible means. This must not be forgotten when Israel’s prime minister arrives in London to “mark” the centenary of the Balfour Declaration. Yes, this will be a chance to strengthen bilateral relations. No, an apology is not demanded. But if the Balfour Declaration is now to be deemed a source of British pride, its revocation should be deemed a source of British shame.

And what of the other claim, that the Balfour Declaration disregarded the Palestinian Arabs? Balfour was not ignorant of objections to Zionism. Its critics, he said in a 1920 speech, invoked the principle of self-determination, claiming that if applied “logically and honestly, it is to the majority of the existing population of Palestine that the future destinies of Palestine should be committed.” Balfour thought there was a “technical ingenuity” to this claim.

But, looking back upon the history of the world, upon the history more particularly of all the most civilized portions of the world, I say that the case of Jewry in all countries is absolutely exceptional, falls outside all the ordinary rules and maxims, cannot be contained in a formula or explained in a sentence. The deep, underlying principle of self-determination points to a Zionist policy, however little in its strict technical interpretation it may seem to favor it.

This should be read as the codicil to the Balfour Declaration. The Cambon letter spoke of “justice” and “reparation,” Pope Benedict cited “providence,” the mandate preamble mentioned “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine.” These were all attempts to contain, in a formula, that which Balfour said no formula could contain. The poetic simplicity of the Balfour Declaration resides in its presumption that a home for the Jews in their land needs no justification. “How goodly are thy tents,” the declaration proclaims. A century later, it still does.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

 

[Sixties Fan]

Whoever chose, six years ago, to invest nine dollars in Assaf Voll's book A History of the Palestinian People: From Ancient Times to the Modern Era, would have easily been able to devour all the pages in this epic in no time at all. The book begins with the memorable quote of Seinfeld's George Louis Costanza: "Just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it", and follows this with 120 empty pages "depicting" Palestinian history. Amazon removed this work from its shelves following the cries of "gewalt" issued by the Palestinians, but only after the book reached first place in Amazon's category of "Israel and Palestine History".

Israel's minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, who only a few days ago shoved a similar historical truth in the face of the Palestinians – "There's no such thing as the Palestinian People" – is in good company. Voll might have opted for a gimmick, but Israel's late prime minister, Goldar Meir, used the exact same words fifty years ago, as did Newt Gingrich, a former Republican politician and speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Gingrich referred to the Palestinians as "an invented people who want to destroy Israel", "Arabs who migrated to Israel during the Ottoman Empire period...". When US President Obama disagreed with him, Gingrich scoffed at him, describing the administration as: "so out of touch with reality that it would be like taking your child to the zoo and explaining that a lion was a bunny rabbit".

Even Arab and Palestinian leaders have been known to admit the truth in a slip of the tongue. Perhaps the most outstanding example of this is that of Zuheir Mohsen, one of the leaders of the as-Sa'iqa faction of the PLO, who was targeted by the Mossad, but left us with an unparalleled heritage: "The Palestinian people do not exist," Mohsen explained to the Dutch newspaper Trouw back in 1977. "The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity.... 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."

https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/03/28/palestinian-nationhood-what-does-that-mean/

 

[P F Tinmore]

Time to Fix the Distortions



The centennial of the Balfour Declaration is the perfect opportunity to chip away at the distorted accretions of a century. The largest of these is the notion that the Balfour Declaration arose outside any legitimate framework, as the initiative of a self-dealing imperial power. This is utterly false. The Balfour Declaration wasn’t the isolated act of one nation. It was approved in advance by the Allied powers whose consensus then constituted the only source of international legitimacy. Before Balfour signed his declaration, leaders and statesmen of other democratic nations signed their names on similar letters and assurances. The Balfour Declaration anticipated a world regulated by a consortium of principal powers—the same world that, 30 years later, would pass a UN resolution legitimating the establishment of a Jewish state.

This centennial is thus the time to remind governments of their shared responsibility for Britain’s pledge to establish a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. In Washington, Paris, Rome, and Vatican City, it is important for Israel’s ambassadors and friends to speak openly of the historic and essential role of each government in the gestation of the declaration. The same should be done in all of the capitals that endorsed the Balfour Declaration after its issuance, but before it was enshrined in the mandate. That would include Beijing and Tokyo.

The American role deserves particular emphasis. Few Americans know that Wilson approved the Balfour Declaration in advance, or that this approval had a decisive effect in the British cabinet. The United States never entered the League of Nations, and so never ratified the mandate. But in June 1922 the United States Congress passed a joint resolution (the so-called Lodge-Fish resolution) that reproduced the exact text of the Balfour Declaration (“the United States of America favors the establishment in Palestine,” etc.). President Warren G. Harding signed the resolution the following September. The centennial is a unique opportunity to remind the American public of these facts, all of which point to America’s shared responsibility for the Balfour Declaration.

The main commemoration will take place in Britain, and here it is imperative that Israel and its friends insist on a full accounting of Britain’s record. The past months’ attempt by the Palestinians to force Britain to “apologize” for the Balfour Declaration has already failed. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas demanded such an apology several times over the past year, most notably in a speech at the United Nations, where he cited “the catastrophes, misery, and injustice this declaration created.” In April, the British government informed the Palestinian Authority that it “does not intend to apologize”:
We are proud of our role in creating the state of Israel. . . . Establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in the land to which they had such strong historical and religious ties was the right and moral thing to do, particularly against the background of centuries of persecution.

Proud Britain may be, but Israel cannot forget that in May 1939 the British unilaterally abrogated the Balfour Declaration, shutting down Jewish immigration to Palestine. This act had no legal foundation. The Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations concluded that the White Paper “was not in accordance with the interpretation which, in agreement with the mandatory power and the Council, the commission had always placed upon the Palestine mandate.” Not only did Britain freely reinterpret the “national home” so as to preclude a state, but Britain even denied that it meant a haven. So Britain barred Europe’s Jews from entry to their legally recognized “national home,” and Jews perished in the millions.

If the 1917 Balfour Declaration is now to be deemed a source of British pride, its 1939 abrogation should be deemed a source of British shame.

The subject of Britain and Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust has been researched thoroughly. “Within the [Holocaust’s] greater circle of tragedy,” wrote one historian, “there was a smaller one”: namely, Britain’s determination to keep desperate Jewish refugees out of Palestine by every possible means. This must not be forgotten when Israel’s prime minister arrives in London to “mark” the centenary of the Balfour Declaration. Yes, this will be a chance to strengthen bilateral relations. No, an apology is not demanded. But if the Balfour Declaration is now to be deemed a source of British pride, its revocation should be deemed a source of British shame.

And what of the other claim, that the Balfour Declaration disregarded the Palestinian Arabs? Balfour was not ignorant of objections to Zionism. Its critics, he said in a 1920 speech, invoked the principle of self-determination, claiming that if applied “logically and honestly, it is to the majority of the existing population of Palestine that the future destinies of Palestine should be committed.” Balfour thought there was a “technical ingenuity” to this claim.

But, looking back upon the history of the world, upon the history more particularly of all the most civilized portions of the world, I say that the case of Jewry in all countries is absolutely exceptional, falls outside all the ordinary rules and maxims, cannot be contained in a formula or explained in a sentence. The deep, underlying principle of self-determination points to a Zionist policy, however little in its strict technical interpretation it may seem to favor it.

This should be read as the codicil to the Balfour Declaration. The Cambon letter spoke of “justice” and “reparation,” Pope Benedict cited “providence,” the mandate preamble mentioned “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine.” These were all attempts to contain, in a formula, that which Balfour said no formula could contain. The poetic simplicity of the Balfour Declaration resides in its presumption that a home for the Jews in their land needs no justification. “How goodly are thy tents,” the declaration proclaims. A century later, it still does.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/forgotten_truth_balfour_declaration.pdf

And nobody bothered to consult the Palestinians.

The Palestinians received Palestinian nationality by international law in 1924. The Palestinians received Palestinian citizenship by domestic law in 1925.

With this was the right to self determination without external interference; the right to independence and sovereignty; and the right to territorial integrity.

This has been affirmed by subsequent UN resolutions.

 

[Sixties Fan]

And so Smotrich, even though his name is Smotrich, is absolutely right. "The Palestinian People", as he put it, "is an invention less than one hundred years old", and if anybody is genuinely entitled to the title of being Palestinian, then that would be his grandfather, a 13th-generation resident of Jerusalem, along with a number of other grandfathers and grandmothers with whom I am personally acquainted. The imaginary, or more correctly the late, or extremely late "Palestinians", migrated here en masse in the late 19th century and throughout the years of the British Mandate, and they had no idea at the time that they were "Palestinians" or that they were a "People".

From Egypt to MasterChef

At the time, not a single one of them claimed, as did former Palestinian politician Saeb Erekat (who passed away two years ago) who lived in Jericho together with his family 3,000 years before the People of Israel came to the city under the leadership of Joshua. None of them regarded themselves as the descendants of the Jebusites or the Philistines. Many of the "Palestinian" migrants recognized the Jewish history surrounding the Land of Israel and the Jewish birthright to the land. At that time, they did not turn Jesus into a Palestinian preaching Islam rather than Christianity, as their current counterparts' nonsensical claims would have us believe, and they never even contemplated making claims to be the original natives of this land.

How do we know this to be the case? It's simple. They themselves talk about this on a thousand and one random and sometimes less random occasions. Take for example Ms. Salma Fiomi, a resident of the Israeli Arab town of Kafr Qassem, who demonstrated her culinary skills on the popular TV competitive cooking show MasterChef. On the show, Fiomi proudly presented her version of Koshari – a popular Egyptian dish of rice and lentils. "My family", explained Fiomi, "came from Egypt, from Al-Fayoum, and I, Salma Fiomi, come from Al-Fayoum."

https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/03/28/palestinian-nationhood-what-does-that-mean/

 

[P F Tinmore]

And so Smotrich, even though his name is Smotrich, is absolutely right. "The Palestinian People", as he put it, "is an invention less than one hundred years old", and if anybody is genuinely entitled to the title of being Palestinian, then that would be his grandfather, a 13th-generation resident of Jerusalem, along with a number of other grandfathers and grandmothers with whom I am personally acquainted. The imaginary, or more correctly the late, or extremely late "Palestinians", migrated here en masse in the late 19th century and throughout the years of the British Mandate, and they had no idea at the time that they were "Palestinians" or that they were a "People".

From Egypt to MasterChef

At the time, not a single one of them claimed, as did former Palestinian politician Saeb Erekat (who passed away two years ago) who lived in Jericho together with his family 3,000 years before the People of Israel came to the city under the leadership of Joshua. None of them regarded themselves as the descendants of the Jebusites or the Philistines. Many of the "Palestinian" migrants recognized the Jewish history surrounding the Land of Israel and the Jewish birthright to the land. At that time, they did not turn Jesus into a Palestinian preaching Islam rather than Christianity, as their current counterparts' nonsensical claims would have us believe, and they never even contemplated making claims to be the original natives of this land.

How do we know this to be the case? It's simple. They themselves talk about this on a thousand and one random and sometimes less random occasions. Take for example Ms. Salma Fiomi, a resident of the Israeli Arab town of Kafr Qassem, who demonstrated her culinary skills on the popular TV competitive cooking show MasterChef. On the show, Fiomi proudly presented her version of Koshari – a popular Egyptian dish of rice and lentils. "My family", explained Fiomi, "came from Egypt, from Al-Fayoum, and I, Salma Fiomi, come from Al-Fayoum."

https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/03/28/palestinian-nationhood-what-does-that-mean/

Who are A People? This is a territorial designation. People who normally live in a defined territory are defined by that territory. They are the people of the place. The name of the territory may change but the people do not. The Palestinians have been the people of the place forever.

People move all of the time. Palestine has been invaded, conquered, and occupied many times. People have come and gone. Some because they want to. Others because they have to. However, there is a core group of people who have stayed and put down roots. These are the Palestinians.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Anti-Zionists like to claim that Jews have no right to Israel because they were absent from the land for so long, and therefore the rights have been extinguished over time.

The proof they are wrong, of course, is that Jews have always maintained our emotional attachment to the Land of Israel. Our absence from the land was forced upon us and not a choice. The most famous example is the phrase at the end of the Passover seder and at the end of Yom Kippur services, "Next Year in Jerusalem!"

And, of course, every day, Jews in their prayers ask God to restore us to the Land and rebuild the Temple.

However, that argument has a flaw. Those examples may prove only that Jews want the Messiah to arrive and then return to the land of our forefathers. But what abut the ongoing attachment to the land in the two thousand years of diaspora? How can the ties that each Jew has in each generation, not a theoretical future, be proven?

This attachment can be proven by a single Hebrew word, and that word is אַרְצֵֽנו.

"Artzeinu" means "our land. " It is used about a half dozen times in the Hebrew scriptures, but the use of the word multiplied after our exile began.

Almost invariably, the term "our land" in Jewish literature refers to the Land of Israel - and no other.
The Sefaria database of Jewish texts finds אַרְצֵֽנו is used scores of times in the Talmud, 145 times in the Medrash, dozens of times in Jewish liturgy and hundreds of times in Jewish legal texts. And the passage of time does not lessen the use of the word - on the contrary, it can be found in texts written in the 19th and 20th centuries as well, by scholars who were not Zionist at the time.

From Psalms: "The LORD also bestows His bounty; our landyields its produce."

To the Mishna: "One who sees a place from which idolatry was eradicated recites: Blessed…Who eradicated idolatry from our land."

To the Talmud:"Rav Ḥisda said to Rav Yitzḥak: This balsam oil, what blessing does one recite over it? Rav Yitzḥak said to him, this is what Rav Yehuda said: One recites: Who creates the oil of our land, as balsam only grew in Eretz Yisrael, in the Jordan valley."

To the Grace After Meals: "May the All-merciful break the yoke from off our neck, and lead us upright to our land."

To Maimonides: "It is forbidden to sell [non-Jews] homes and fields in Eretz Yisrael....It is permitted to sell them houses and fields in the Diaspora, because it is not our land."

To the Chofetz Chaim (early 20th century) saying that the sin of loshon hora, speaking negatively about others, is "so severe as to have caused us to be exiled from our land!"

And on and on, through commentaries, works of philosophy, and responsa literature.

There is no need to qualify the term to say "our land of Israel" or to give it any other name. The phrase "our land" needs no explanation to the Jewish people that read these texts. Everyone knows what "artzeinu" refers to. No one would think for a second that "our land" refers to Babylonia or Egypt or Poland or Lithuania or anywhere else the authors and writers lived.

No matter how far we moved away, how much we were dispersed, how bleak the future looked, Jews always knew that there was a land - and only one land - that is ours.

And this one word, used in so many ways by Jews throughout history but always with the same meaning, proves it.

The eternal Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel can be proven by a single word

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Another prime example that doesn't really leave much room for interpretation can be seen in the words of Fathi Hamad, the former minister of the interior in the Hamas government, who urged Egypt to provide help during IDF Operation Returning Echo in the Gaza Strip in March 2012. "When we call for your help," he explained, "It is with the aim of continuing the jihad. Praise Allah – All our us have Arab roots, and every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip and throughout Palestine is able to prove his Arab roots, whether from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or anywhere else. We have blood ties... Personally, half of my family is from Egypt. Where is your mercy? More than 30 families in the Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri. Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians, and the other half are Saudis."

Dozens of books and records left behind by visitors to the Land of Israel clearly illustrate that at the turn of the last century, the land was desolate and empty, and the alleged "Palestinian People" migrated here only following the renewal of Jewish settlement in Israel as part of the modern Return to Zion in the 19th century. This is the case in the famous research of Israel's former President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi on the Ottoman period. This is also true of American journalist, Joan Peters, author of the book From Time Immemorial, who estimated that at the beginning of the First Aliyah in 1882, there were some 141 thousand non-Jews only living in the Land of Israel. The works of the Hebrew University's Professor Moshe Ma'oz also support this view, underscoring the fact that for centuries the number of Arabs living here in Israel never exceeded 100 thousand.

Ze'ev Galili's research further develops this approach, as he arrived at the following, logical conclusion: if towards the end of the 19th century, there were about 100 thousand Arabs living in Israel, this means that in the seventy years that elapsed from that point to 1948, the Arab population increased twelvefold, and the only way to explain such an increase is that it was the result of mass immigration from neighboring states.

Ze'ev Galili's research further develops this approach, as he arrived at the following, logical conclusion: if towards the end of the 19th century, there were about 100 thousand Arabs living in Israel, this means that in the seventy years that elapsed from that point to 1948, the Arab population increased twelvefold, and the only way to explain such an increase is that it was the result of mass immigration from neighboring states.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/03/28/palestinian-nationhood-what-does-that-mean/

 

[Sixties Fan]

Nations that must invent

Anthony Smith, the renowned sociologist and Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics, once distinguished between two types of national identity. The first type includes nations with a core identity based on culture and history, and the second –nations without any such nucleus that are required to invent everything from nothing.

We belong to the first type while the Palestinians belong to the second type. It is as simple as that. This is essentially what Smotrich said, and Smotrich, even though his name is Smotrich, was right on this occasion. The Al-Masri clan migrated here from Egypt, the Al-Mughrabi clan from Algeria, Al-Turki from Turkey, Al-Iraqi from Iraq who settled in Taibeh, and the Al-Ajami clan from Iran. The Kna'an family in Nablus does not hail from the historical Land of Canaan but rather from Aleppo in Syria. As the renowned researcher, Pinhas Inbari, has suggested, the Erekat family from Jericho originates from the large Al-Huwaytat tribe that moved from Medina and then settled in Jordan, as well as in Abu-Dis and in Jericho. Thus, it is clear that they all came from the immediate "neighborhood".

The term "Palestinian People", in relation to the Arabs living in Israel, appeared for the first time in 1964, in the PLO Charter. The outrageous UNRWA definition, according to which the minimum seniority required in Israel in order to define an individual as a Palestinian refugee (both him and his descendants) amounts to two years, still does not qualify to turn the Palestinians into a people.

The Palestinians have almost no unique defining trait. Neither religion nor language, and no common ethnic background or history and shared homeland. If you take the trouble to examine the long-winded, multi-clause definition that UNESCO contributed to the term "people", you will also discover that the Palestinians do not meet the majority of them.

"The Palestinian People" was created especially for us, only following the Shivat Zion ("Return to Zion") movement and the subsequent renewed Jewish settlement in Israel, in an attempt to wipe us off the map along with our unbroken, thousands-of-years-old bond with this land. There is really no need to waste any words on our roots to the Land of Israel, in stark contrast with the fake roots that the Palestinians have tried to put down. Our history is manifestly documented in the chronicles of history, in the Bible, undeniably etched in archeology and research. We have no need for inventions and historical forgeries. As the 19th-century British statesman and social reformer, Lord Shaftesbury, so aptly put it 180 years ago, we returned as a "people without a land to a land without a people".

https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/03/28/palestinian-nationhood-what-does-that-mean/

 

[Sixties Fan]

The word “Palestine” is not Arab or Middle Eastern in origin. It dates back some 1,900 years and is derived from a people who were not native to the region: The Philistines, a people from the Aegean Sea who were closely related to the ancient Greeks. They lived on the coast of what is now the Gaza Strip and Israel, but had disappeared by the 6th century BCE.

The name associated with them, however, did not die out. The Romans, in a fit of spite, reapplied the term “Palestine” to the Land of Israel centuries later, after they defeated a Judean uprising in 135 CE.

In effect, the Romans sought to erase the association between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people.

The “Palestine” moniker continued to be used long after the Roman Empire fell. When Muslim armies conquered the region in 629 CE, they Arabized the name to “Filastin.” This term cannot be found in the Quran, while the name “Israel” is mentioned several times.

The regional name “Palestine” endured. During the Middle Ages, it became common in early modern English and was employed by the Crusaders. But for nearly 2,000 years, it never referred to a country or a group of people.

In short, for most of recorded history, there were never any “Palestinians.”

After World War I, the modern contours of “Palestine” were established. The British Mandate for Palestine originally consisted of present-day Israel, Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and Jordan.

During the British Mandate period, the term “Palestinian” usually referred to Jews living in the Mandate, as well as their institutions.

Before Israel was founded, several prominent Jewish and Zionist organizations used the name “Palestine.” These included The Palestine Post newspaper and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, which are now The Jerusalem Post and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

At the time, many Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine considered themselves part of Greater Syria rather than “Palestinians.” In 1937, a local Arab leader told the Palestine Royal Commission, “There is no such country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented! Our country for centuries was part of Syria.”

Arab historian Philip Hitti echoed this sentiment shortly before Israel declared independence, saying, “There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.”

The watershed moment for the “Palestinian” national movement came after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel won control of Judea and Samaria from Jordan. The words of author Walid Shoebat of Bethlehem sum up the profound shift in local Arabs’ identity: “On June 4, 1967, I was a Jordanian, and overnight I became a Palestinian.”

Since 1967, a whole national mythology has been created around the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian.” For example, the Palestinian Arabs have claimed to be descendants of the Canaanites who preceded the ancient Israelites and Philistines in the Holy Land.

In 2018, Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas told the United Nations’ Security Council, “We are the descendants of the Canaanites that lived in the land 5,000 years ago and continued to live there to this day.”

But most Palestinians trace their origins to prominent tribes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Egypt. Yasser Arafat was born in Egypt. Even the Kanaan family in Nablus (Shechem) traces its ancestry to Syria. In any case, the Canaanites had disappeared more than 1,600 years before the Arabs first arrived in the Holy Land.

Preposterously, Palestinians have even asserted that Jesus was a Palestinian. In a 2013 Christmas message, Abbas called Jesus a “Palestinian messenger.” In 2019, Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour posted on Twitter, “Jesus was a Palestinian of Nazareth.”

We beg the pardon of Mr. Abbas and his fellow fantasists, but Jesus was a Jew from Judea, which was named Judea because it was and still is the homeland of the Jewish people.

While the Arabs of the region are free to call themselves whatever they want, they are not free to hijack the 3,000-year history of the Holy Land for themselves. In the end, the name “Palestine” represents the Jews’ original dispossession of their homeland 1,900 years ago.

How the Palestinians got their name

The Palestinians can call themselves whatever they want, but they cannot hijack 3,000 years of history.

www.jns.org