Contentions commenter Maines Michael points us to Bat Ye’or’s incisive article in the November New English Review, entitled “The Palestinization of UNESCO” (which follows Robert Wolfe’s equally incisive article in the August NER, entitled “Settlements Are the Issue”). Taken together, the two articles cut to the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Bat Ye’or’s article focuses on the claim “that Jewish existence in its ancestral homeland, Judea and Samaria, is an ‘occupation’ – a colonization:”
In this way, Israel has become a state that is occupying its own historical homeland. In Orwellian language propagandists speak of “the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land” that is called Judea, and not of the ethnic and religious cleansing of Jews from their homeland through wars, expulsions, dispossession and the dehumanizing apartheid rule of dhimmitude.
Wolfe’s article focuses on the fact that the “settlers” in Hebron are the descendants of Jews who lived there for a very long time:
[P]rior to 1949 there were numerous Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. In particular there was a large Jewish community in Hebron which dated back to the 16th century. But in 1929, this entire community was destroyed by the Arabs and its inhabitants massacred. … So when the Palestinians now argue that Jews have no right to live anywhere beyond the 1949 armistice lines, what they are actually saying is that Jews have no right to return to areas where they were previously murdered or driven out by the Arabs.
Wolfe also observes it is “neither just nor reasonable to expect Israel to maintain Judea and Samaria in the same Judenrein condition in which the Arabs left it in 1967”:
Judea and Samaria formed the heartland of the ancient Jewish kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and Jews have every right to settle there while waiting for the time, perhaps many years from now, when the democratization of Arab society has proceeded to the point where the Palestinians are ready to make peace with Israel. If the Palestinians are concerned that the progress of Jewish settlement will gradually shrink the area available for a future Palestinian state, they have only to make peace now in order to stabilize the situation.
The area Israel has tried to give the Palestinians three times is properly described as “disputed” rather than “occupied.” In 1922, the League of Nations designated it as the national home of the Jewish people. In 1937, in response to Arab pogroms, the Peel Commission proposed two states, which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected. In 1947, the UN proposed another two-state solution; the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected it. When the Arabs started a war, Jordan illegally occupied a portion of Palestine — an occupation never recognized by the UN, U.S., Soviet Union, or any Arab country. In 1967, when it joined still another war against Israel, Jordan lost the land it unlawfully held. It is currently held by the only entity with even a shadow of a legal claim to it: the Jewish state.
With the demise of the peace process – the victim of too many Palestinian rejections of a state, too many wars after withdrawals from disputed land, too many years of Palestinian refusals to negotiate without pre-negotiation concessions designed to pre-determine the issues to be negotiated – it is time to return to first principles.
One is that the U.S. has no conceivable interest in supporting an apartheid Palestinian state, much less one in which terrorist groups remain not only undismantled but part of the Palestinian polity, currently run by unelected leaders unable even to organize Potemkin elections, whose declared goal is not an end-of-claims agreement but an entity to pursue further claims against the state Arabs tried to destroy in 1948 and 1967 and still refuse to recognize as a Jewish state.
The so called Radical Left has little interest in facts, and even less in the Palestinians, who serve primarily as a dubious reason for being anti-Israeli. n nBefore the famous occupation following the 67 war, when West Bank was a part of Jordan nobody spoke about Palestinians and certainly not about occupation. In fact, 67 war was a huge achievement for the Palestinians, because they were allowed political expression by the, as the Left puts it, "apartheid loving Israel." They completely lacked in the brotherhood loving kingdom of Jordan. n nThe occupation or rather the preoccupation with the settlements never mentions the fact that they constitute only 2 percent of the area in dispute. n nThe articles, protests, flotillas and the like of the Left promote violence, which usually is bad PR for Israel. Violence harms more Palestinians than Jews, but Palestinians have never been the issue.
” but Palestinians have never been the issue. ”
But they are the weapon.
As Romirowsky and Joffe show in research into UNWRA and UNRWA Representative in Jordan Lt. General Sir Alexander Galloway the Arabs had no intent on treating the refugees humanely but using them against the UN and Israel.
You write: "The US has no conceivable interest in supporting an apartheid Palestinian State…" The US may have no conceivable interest, but nonetheless it does support an apartheid Palestinian state. Here is how: 1. The US comes out vocally against the Jewish people living in Judea and Samaria (see for example President Obama's statements concerning no more settlement building.) 2. The PLO representative to the US stated point blank to the US media that Jews would not be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state. (The US government said absolutely nothing about the statement.) 3. The PLO/PA continuously and repeatedly renames Jewish historical and religious sites as Moslem Mosques. (Other than a silly clicking noise with its tongue, the US does not forcibly come out and condemn such action and demand it be stopped. Indeed, from the accounts in the press, it was with deep regret that the Obama Administration had to obey US law and withdraw funding from UNESCO.) 4. The Zivotofsky v Clinton case .
Basically the US doesn't want any problems with the oil producing nations because the right to use the family automobile is sacrosanct with American voters. The US will do all sorts of somersaults to avoid problems in this area. If you understand that you understand US policy and it's pretty well bipartisan.