Israel and Indigenous Palestinians

My latest article on Israel, Israel Is Not Quite What the Propaganda Machine Says It Is,was one of my first ventures into a territory about which I've read a lot but written little.

What has stopped me from writing about the subject of the controversial legitimacy of Israel is that I know that many of my friends and readers support Israel and would likely be offended.

But I decided that, since my purpose in writing is to tell the truth as I see it and hopefully help others in seeing it too, and, in addition, since I believe that everything is interconnected and there are no important parts of the whole picture we can ignore without distorting our vision of other parts, I had to take this step, although not very easy or pleasant.

The comments and reactions have been a mixed bag of favourable and unfavourable, but many more of the former than I expected.

I suspect that many people have begun to realise that Israel is not the saint and victim in the Middle East conflict - and that Jews are not the saints and victims in the history of Europe either -, but are afraid to say so explicitly, because the "anti-Semitic" slander is much more powerful these days than the "Islamophobic" one.

This post is the first part of my answers.

Giuseppe Gigliotti wrote a very long comment on my Facebook profile page in which he seems to fuse his opinions on this and a previous article of mine, Israel Not Such a Haven for Christians. I doun't doubt his good faith, only some of his claims, which I'll examine quoting them as they are, mistakes and all. He says:

"Maybe, if among conservatives (included people that you love quoting, like Oriana Fallaci), there is support for the Jewish State, it is not because of a supposed lobbist pressure, but because of other reason."

I love Oriana Fallaci and I like quoting her because she's among the first who opened my eyes on Islam. This doesn't mean that she can make no mistake.

In one of her books, though, Oriana Fallaci says that Lebanon was the most beautiful and European country in the Middle East until it was invaded by the Palestinians, who did to it what the Jews had done to their lands. She spent many years in the Middle East as correspondent for the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. So she had seen many things first hand, including the displacement of Palestinians by Israel.

Why she supported Israel can be explained by her focus on opposing Islam, the same reason that applies to most of the counterjihad movement. If we have a common enemy, the general way of thinking goes, we must be friends or at least allies.

This is not a safe judgement, especially considering that the West would not even have the problem of the enemy, Islam, inside the gates if Jewish organisations, Leftist and politically correct in the diaspora as much as they are ethnonationalist when it comes to Israel, hadn't promoted mass immigration, multiculturalism and "tolerance" to Islam in Europe and America, where, supported by a Jewish-dominated media industry, academia, education system and Hollywood, they had a great influence in pushing - along with Cultural Marxism, one of their creations -  policies that are greatly damaging the white, gentile, indigenous populations.

And they are still at it.

"Have you ever bothered to visit the country or to read about Zionism? It seems no."

I've read a lot about Zionism. I haven't visited Israel. I dispute the fact that you can understand a country's politics better if you've been there. In many cases it could even be counterproductive, for example if you go on one of those escorted tours to Israel for MPs and journalists organised by the Israel lobby during which you are presented only with the reality that they want you to see.

The following part, in which Giuseppe describes Israel as full of energy and mentions that he helps the local Christians there, is interesting but irrelevant to what I'm saying. Good for him to do that!

His next sentences puzzle me:

"So which is your point? You declare to be concerned about the fate of christians. Well, sorry but your concernes sound hollow to me. If you were moved by real angst, you wouldn't have quoted Younab. You know, a man on payroll of Abbas, that has nver condemned the muslim persecutions in Gaza or PA areas is not a source i will quote. But, it iz your own problem."

There is no quotation from "Younab" (or Younan, which is probably what Giuseppe meant) anywhere in those two articles under examination.

"Now let's pass to your scandalous theory about a supposed palestinian indigenousness. Even here, have you a vague idea of the jewish state law? It is meant to restate the obvious. Israel has always been the jewish people national home, without denying aocial or political rights to its minorities. That you, a woman who condemns multiculturalism , have objections only to the jewish selfdetermination sounds hilarious."

I am not objecting to Jewish self-determination, only to the method of stealing other peoples' lands used to achieve it. Palestinian indigenousness is not "scandalous", "a theory" or "supposed".

Even one of the heroes of Zionism (therefore yours), David Ben-Gurion, candidly admitted:

Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews. But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution! There is a gulf, and nothing can bridge it… We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.

And in his 7 June 1938 Address at the Mapai Political Committee, quoted in Simha Flapan's Zionism and the Palestinians (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , he said:

In our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us. But let us not ignore the truth among ourselves... But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. Militarily, it is we who are on the defensive who have the upper hand but in the political sphere they are superior. The land, the villages, the mountains, the roads are in their hands. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside.

The United Nations recognised Israel on December 11 1948 with Resolution 194, but Article 11 of the latter declares:

(The General Assembly) Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible. [Emphases added]

So, Israel's recognition by the UN included that Israel let dispossessed Palestinians return (the “Right of Return”), which Israel hasn't done and for which the UN has issued various resolutions against Israel. I suppose the UN suffers from the universal disease of anti-Semitism.

"But, let's move to the next step. Where is the proof of the indigenousness of palestinians? You haven't quoted a single source, except that idiotic map. And, for your perusal, that images disprove your thesis. If you knew israeli history, something that you don't know, you would know that the borders of Palestinian Mandate were designated by britons. An indigenous people doesn't use a colonial map for defining its own homeland. And infact the Lehi was against this demarcation, since it was arbitrary. Yet, this indigenous people that you love so much uses an invented map... The truth is that until 30s there was no palestiniannation."

Giuseppe is contradicting himself, as by his own admission there was a Palestinian nation from the '30s, therefore before the birth of Israel.

Elsewhere, Giuseppe is confusing "nation" with "state".

To be a nation, a people doesn't have to be represented by a state. A good example is the Jewish people: before Israel, they didn't have a state, but Jewish nationalism existed, and that's what led to the establishment of the Jewish state.

From this initial confusion stem his misunderstandings about the maps: they don't portray country borders, they depict where Palestinians lived before dispossession and where they live now.

I doubt that Giuseppe has read my article under discussion, or that he has read it carefully, otherwise he wouldn't write that I don't "know that the borders of Palestinian Mandate were designated by britons", because I describe that situation there.

Proof of the indigenousness of Palestinians? There's plenty. I did cite a respected source, historian J.M. Roberts. I also quoted a Zionist source, Moshe Dayan, who said:

We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here... Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages... There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.

Where's Giuseppe's proof that Palestinians were not indigenous to those lands?

Here's some more that they were, in the World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples about the current Gaza Strip and West Bank, in co-operation with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), saying:

Main indigenous and minority groups: indigenous Palestinians...

Giuseppe' reference to the Lehi's opposition to my map's demarcation as arbitrary is a bit self-defeating.

The Lehi (aka Stern Gang) was a violent and terrorist Zionist group whose objective was to evict the British authorities from Palestine by force, to allow unrestricted immigration of Jews and the constitution of a Jewish state, a "new totalitarian Hebrew republic". Hardly a reputable source.

As is well known, they were not the only Jewish terrorist group:

In the aftermath of World War II, Britain still played host to a number of groups sympathetic to Fascism and racial nationalism. These groups, together with the growing prominence of vocal politicians like Enoch Powell, alarmed the Jewish population. Of course, this was the same Jewish population which had repaid British war-time assistance by supporting, in every conceivable way, the Irgun terrorist campaign against the British in Palestine. One Jewish historian has remarked that Jews in Britain lavishly funded “the purchase of arms for Jewish underground armies fighting against British troops.”[1] Jewish terrorism against the British had culminated in 1947 with the kidnapping of two British army Intelligence Corps NCOs, Sergeant Clifford Martin and Sergeant Mervyn Paice. Martin and Paice were beaten and bloodied by their Jewish captors, before being hanged in a eucalyptus grove near Netanya. Their bodies were booby-trapped with mines, causing them to be torn to pieces when efforts were made to retrieve them. The brutal and sadistic slayings comprising the ‘Sergeant’s Affair’ had followed the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel (British headquarters in Palestine) a year earlier. The new atrocity sparked a wave of revulsion throughout Britain. More specifically, the actions caused the British people to re-think Jewish loyalty.

My answers to comments continue in another article.