Posted by Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist anti-Jewish organization, has attacked Israel and committed numerous incredible atrocities, like decapitating babies and raping and killing women in public. They proclaim to be and fight for the “Palestinian People”. Anti-Jewish hate demonstrations have popped up everywhere in the so-called “civilized” world celebrating this new height of bloody barbarism and blaming Israel for it. These deranged minds have wrapped themselves in the “Palestinian flag” in solidarity with the “Palestinian People” and their alleged fight for freedom.
But is there really a “Palestinian People”? Palestine is not a nation or a nation state or a country. The term refers to a geographic region located in the so-called Middle East that includes parts of modern-day Israel, Jordan, territories of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The term is equivalent to terms like “Rhineland”, “Appalachia”, or the “Western Desert”. The region has a long and complex history.
Palestine is named after the Philistines, who are believed to have been one of the groups that comprised the “Sea Peoples”. The Sea Peoples were a confederacy of naval raiders who moved around in the eastern Mediterranean Sea during the Bronze Age, i.e approximately 3000 years before today. It has been theorized that the Sea Peoples were originally Etruscan, Italian, Mycenaean, or Minoan. They mainly attacked Egypt during 1200-900 BCE. The Philistines are first documented in reliefs at the Temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu. The Egyptians called them Peleset. The Assyrians called them Palastu, Pilišti, or Pilistu.
The region of Palestine has been inhabited since prehistoric times. The Philistines settled in the area known as Canaan, which was subsequently ruled by many kingdoms and powers, including Ancient Egypt, the kingdom of Israel, the kingdom of Judah, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great and his successors, the Hasmoneans, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the crusaders, several Muslim caliphates, the Mongols, and the Ottoman Empire. The Hasmonean kingdom became a de-facto Roman province and was initially called “Roman Judea”.
The Israelites invaded Palestine under Joshua probably between 1400 and 1200 BCE. The first Jewish king, Saul, the predecessor of King David, probably lived around 1079 to 1007 BCE. The Kingdom of Israel was established around 930 BCE and lasted until 722 BCE when it was conquered by the Assyrian Empire. The Kingdom of Judah was also established around 930 BCE and lasted until 586 BCE when it was conquered by the Babylonian Empire.
The Roman Emperor Titus destroyed Jerusalem and forced the Jews into the diaspora. To stick it to the Jews, the Romans changed the name of the province from “Roman Judea” to “Palaestinae” – land of the Philistines.
In modern times, the region was ruled by the Ottoman Empire until the end of World War I. After the war, Palestine was placed under British administration by the League of Nations. In 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, which sought to establish one Jewish and one Arab state in Palestine.
These 33 countries voted in favor:
Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Byelorussian S.S.R., Canada, Costa Rica, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, Liberia, Luxemburg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Sweden, Ukrainian S.S.R. (!), Union of South Africa, U.S.A., U.S.S.R., Uruguay, Venezuela.
These 13 countries voted against:
Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen.
These 10 countries abstained:
Argentina, Chile, China, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Mexico, United Kingdom, former Yugoslavia.
Note that the Soviet Union voted in favor and that 10 countries out of the 13 voting against were Islamic countries.
When on May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence and became a nation state, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq launched a surprise attack against Israel in an attempt to snuff it out. But Israel, as weak and unorganized as it was at the time, won the first Arab/Israeli war and much of the territory that had originally been destined by the UN for the Arab state fell under Israeli control.
The propaganda of the Arabic aggressor states, which referred to the defeat of the Arabic armies as “nakhba” (the catastrophe), convinced the Arabic population of these areas, which included Jaffa, Lydda, Ramle, the upper Galilee, and parts of the Negev, that they would need to run away from Jewish occupation. This created 700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees. It was the starting point of the fight that is still going on in front of our eyes today.
Israel is surrounded by large Arabic states with moderate population densities. One wonders, why the Palestinian refugees could not have been absorbed by these large Muslim countries. In fact, one of them tried: Jordan. But Yasser Arafat’s PLO instigated the Palestinian Arabs in the Jordanian refugee camps to revolt against the Jordanian government and King Hussein, threatening to overthrow the Hashemite Monarchy. This led to the so-called Black September or Jordanian Civil War. In September 1970, the PLO seized three civilian airplanes and forced them to land in the Jordanian city of Zarqa. They took foreign nationals as hostages and blew the planes up in front of journalists from all over the world. King Hussein ordered the Jordanian Army to take action. He had to retake his own capital from the PLO. Since then, no other Arab or Muslim country has shown any appetite to accommodate any Palestinian Arabs.
However, the conflict dates back to the end of the nineteenth century when Jewish immigrants began arriving in Palestine in large numbers returning back from the diaspora to the land of their ancestors. I have heard some reasonably educated people say that the root cause of the conflict is Zionism. This is a serious error, because Zionism itself was the effect of centuries of persecution of Jews all over Europe. It strikes me as reasonable that the Jews who suffered from pogrom to pogrom (a Russian word meaning as much as “round up”) should attempt to find a place on this earth where they could live safely and in peace and it seems plausible to me that this place should be the place where they had lived for hundreds of years. The majority of the members of the UN apparently shared this view in 1947.
The root cause of the conflict between Israel and surrounding Arab terror organizations is the deep-rooted hate of Jews among many Muslims. Christianity is not quite innocent either. Even today, I have heard Christians say “Yeah, but the Jews killed Jesus Christ”. For Christ’s sake: Jesus himself was a Jew! And it was the Romans who killed him, not the Jews.
During the European middle ages, the Jews were hated because some of them were rich. They financed the wars of the Christian rulers. Jews were also blamed for the black death. “The Jews have poisoned the wells” was the mantra. Ignorance turned into hate. But there was method to this madness. Many a debtor, kings and citizens alike, was able to get rid of his debt by killing his Jewish creditors.
Not only were Jews seriously restricted in what gainful activities they were allowed to engage in, they were also outright expelled from several countries. A few examples:
In 1290, King Edward I of England issued the Edict of Expulsion, which ordered the expulsion of all Jews from England.
In 1394, King Charles VI of France ordered the expulsion of all Jews from France.
In 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Isabella I and Ferdinand II, issued the Alhambra Decree, which ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Spain.
In 1881, a wave of violent anti-Jewish riots swept across Russia, leading to the emigration of many Jews.
While the notion of a “Palestinian People” is a pure propaganda invention, the Jews are indeed a real people in the sense of the German term “Volk”, which is defined as follows:
“A living community of people characterized by a common cultural heritage and historic fate… with a strong sense of togetherness. ”
Meyer’s Enzyklopaedisches Lexikon Bd. 24
In the case of the Jews, you can add a common religion and language, which they have preserved over thousands of years.
Read the Quran and you will find many passages where the Prophet preaches hatred of Jews. Find me a single passage in the Thora where Jehovah recommends hating Arabs.
The Arab/Israeli conflict is not about Hamas or Palestinian freedom, independence, or statehood. It is about one-sided irrational pathological hate of Jews and the loss of all human decency. You doubt that?
The following hadith, which forms a part of the Sahih Muslim hadiths is a part of the charter of Hamas:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
The hadith are “even more scathing than the Quran in attacking the Jews”:
“They (the Jews) are debased, cursed, anathematized forever by God and so can never repent and be forgiven; they are cheats and traitors; defiant and stubborn; they killed the prophets; they are liars who falsify scripture and take bribes; as infidels they are ritually unclean, a foul odor emanating from them – such is the image of the Jew in classical Islam, degraded and malevolent.”
Schweitzer, Frederick M. and Perry, Marvin Anti-Semitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, ISBN 0-312-16561-7
I am on the side of those who build and construct. I am against those who destroy and attack. Despite all the malice and evil that Israelis have experienced from the Palestinian Muslim Arabs they do not brainwash their children at school to hate Arabs, Palestinians, or Muslims. The Jews have turned the barren Holy Land into an efficient and advanced nation-state with many peaceful and productive Muslim Arab citizens. The Palestinian Arabs have squandered the billions they were given to buy rockets, wage wars of aggression, and commit horrendous atrocities.
If Israel ever wants to exist in peace, those hateful deranged Palestinian war mongers and baby killers must be extirpated from mankind. I hope that Israel will accomplish this. Better an end with horror than horror without an end.