[They] speak treachery, with tongues of deceit in their mouths.
Micah 6:12
They conceive mischief and bring forth evil and their heart prepares deceit.
-- Job 15:35
There is a Hebrew term
lashon ha-ra
"the bad tongue". Since the Children of Israel came back to the land of
their fathers, the bad tongue has been one of the sharpest weapons used against
them. This tongue has three forks, that:
-- invent deceits to forward an ambition or a spite.
-- spread deceits because they are preferred to the truth.
-- spread deceits that in ignorance are mistaken for the truth.
For example: According to Pope John Paul II:
"A sad condition was created for the Palestinian people who were excluded
from their homeland. These were facts everyone can see." When this
sentence is parsed by standards of evidence and logic, not one single "fact"
can be seen in it.
Among the relentlessly repeated deceits:
1] There was a flourishing Arab nation in Arab-Palestine, subjugated and
ruined by the intrusion of alien Jews who have no history or roots there
.
The nation known at stages of its history as "Israel" "Judah" or "Judea"
is the only sovereign nation-state that ever existed in the land now known
by the Greco-Roman geographical designation of "Palestine". The Israelite-Jewish
presence goes back some 3,500 years and has never been broken. The Jews were
deprived of their ancient political independence by the Roman conquest in
the year 70, but never lost their attachment to the Land of Israel or their
conviction that they would one day redeem it.
Both Jews and Christians dwelt in the land when it was seized by military
forces from Arabia in the Seventh Century. (Among the Jews survivors of the
once flourishing Jewish communities of Arabia that Muhammad had recently
annihilated.) There was no Arabic name for this region, so the conquerors
adopted the Greco-Roman "Palastina", that they pronounced "Falastin". This
region became the neglected province of one foreign empire after another.
[See further: A Time to peak Issue I:2, No. 2]
* * * * * * *
2] The Arabs of Palestine had been a nation in the land since ancient
times.
The Arab military invaders themselves left few descendants in the land, but
some of the local population converted to Islam and adopted the Arabic language.
For 1200 years thereafter, peoples of many origins came into the land at
some times, and left it at other times, while nomads wandered in and out.
These peoples came from throughout the Middle East, Egypt, North Africa,
Turkey, the Balkans, Armenia and Central Asia.
In a census of 1931, the non-Jewish population of Mandate Palestine named
24 different countries as their places of birth. They were never an indigenous
or homogeneous population, and they never formed a distinct national identity,
society or polity. The claim that there is a "Palestinian people" or "Palestinian
nation" has a history of decades, not millennia. It was concocted only after
the Six-Day-War of 1967, avowedly as a device to forward the goal of the
destruction of Israel.
In 1997, the head of the PLO Military Department stated:
"Yes, the existence
of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding
of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel."
* * * * * * *
3] There was a flourishing Arab society in Palestine before the intrusion
of the Jews.
At the start of the Jewish resettlement, in the 1870s-1880s, Palestine was
a province of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, ruled by the Sultan in far-off
Istanbul. The entire non-Jewish population west of the Jordan River was about
140,000, including nomads who moved in and out and even roving bandits.
That population had been stagnant or in decline for centuries.
The land was depopulated, deserted, impoverished and barren. Western travellers,
who knew from the Bible of the beauty, fertility and vitality of ancient
Israel, came to visit and found not the Land of Milk and Honey but an empty
wilderness of ruin and desolation.
A British consul reported in 1857 that the land was not cultivated, villages
had disappeared, and that "The country
is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore the greatest
need is that of a body of population".
Mark Twain rode through just a few years before the start of Jewish resettlement
and saw only ". . . the kind of solitude
to make one dreary." The Galilee was "unpeopled deserts . . .
rusty mounds of barrenness" where he "never saw a human being on
the whole route". He concluded that
"Palestine sits in sackcloth
and ashes . . . desolate and unlovely".
(The
Innocents Abroad
, 1867).
At about the same time, Samuel Manning, a British Christian clergyman came
to the Holy Land and wrote
:
"But where are the inhabitants? This fertile [coastal] plain which might
support an immense population is almost a solitude. . . . The denunciations
of ancient prophecy have been fulfilled to the very letter 'The land is
left void and desolate and without inhabitants."
(
These Holy Fields
,
1894)
By the early Nineteenth Century, it was perceived, especially in the United
States and Great Britain, that the only hope for the restoration of Palestine
was in the return of the only people who loved it and would care for it.
Those who seriously espoused the idea of the Return of the Jews included
U.S. President John Adams, British Prime Minister Disraeli, British Foreign
Minister Lord Palmerston, and writer George Eliot.
This had indeed been the sustaining hope of the Jews themselves for two millennia,
and it became an active movement by the 1870s-1880s, even before Theodor
Herzl organized Zionism as a worldwide movement.
* * * * * * *
"Around 1910, my family was staying at a hotel in Switzerland, where we met
a very rich Arab. One of the other guests said to him, 'You Arabs are making
a mistake in letting Jews come into Palestine. You should throw them out
while you can'.
"The Arab laughed and said, 'Oh, no. Palestine is one of the poorest and
most backward places in the world. There's nothing there. The Jews will come
and fill it with farms and orchards and towns. They'll build factories and
schools and hospitals and railways. Then we Arabs will throw them out and
keep it all for ourselves.
-- Carrie Nora Isaac, New York
4] The Jews displaced and dispossessed the Arabs.
Jews had always "come up to the Land". Now pioneers began to come, perhaps
a dozen or a score at a time, calling themselves
Hovevei Tzion
[Lovers of Zion}, or
BILU
an acronym for the Hebrew
Beth Ya'akov Lecha Venelecha
[House of Jacob Let Us Rise Up and Go], that echoes The Lord's first command
to Abraham: "
Lech lecha . . .
[Rise up and go . . . to a land that I will show you]".
They did not take any land away from Arabs, or displace any Arabs
. They went into areas long uninhabited and abandoned. The Ottoman Turkish
government sternly restricted purchase of land by Jews. An
effendi
who could claim or contrive ownership of a bit of wasteland would be paid
an exorbitantly inflated price for it. On the wasteland, the pioneers drained
swamps and irrigated deserts, tilled soil untilled for centuries and built
where nothing had been built for centuries. Many died of malaria and other
diseases, and many more were murdered by bandits.
They did not create the "sad condition" of the papal lament, Rather, they
created conditions that attracted and drew Arabs from other countries and
regions, who came to seek the work, wages and a better conditions
found only in the vicinity of the new Jewish settlements. Within
decades of the start of Jewish resettlement, the Arab population in those
areas grew far beyond the limits of natural increase.
If the Jews had not come, the Arabs would not have come either
.
* * * * * * *
"So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and
multiplied until their population has increased more than even all world
Jewry could lift up the Jewish population."
Winston Churchill, 1939
Malcolm MacDonald, a British Secretary of State hostile to the Jews, admitted
in 1938:
"The Arabs cannot say
that the Jews are driving them out of their country. If not a single Jew
had come to Palestine after 1918, I believe that the Arab population of [Western]
Palestine today would still have been around the figure at which it had been
stable under Turkish rule."
5] The British Mandate to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine was
a crime against the Arabs
.
According to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the League of Nations Mandate
of 1921, "Palestine" included all of the land east as well as west of the
Jordan River in the Jewish National Home to be open for "close Jewish settlement".
In 1922, the British detached the entire region east of the river, depriving
the Jewish National Home of a full 75 percent of Mandate Palestine. This
they did in order to provide a puppet kingdom for their protégé Emir Abdullah,
after he was driven out of Arabia. Since there was no historic name for such
a kingdom, it was called after a biblical river. From that day to this, the
Kingdom of Jordan has permitted no Jew within its borders, and when it seized
control of Judea and Samaria (1948-1967) it killed or drove out all the Jews
who had dwelt there.
The British progressively limited the areas open to Jews west of the Jordan
River. They slammed and bolted the gates of the Jewish National Home at the
very time when Jews most desperately needed a haven. The British obsessively
counted and recounted the number of Jews, with a view to barring their entry
or deporting them. At the same time they permitted a massive influx of Arabs
from other countries and regions, technically illegal but never hindered.
These newly arriving Arabs took the places meant for the Jews, and so charmed
or intimidated the British that the Jews they displaced were consigned to
the death camps of Europe, or left to drown on their way to the Promised
Land. Shortly before the start of World War II, the British Foreign Office
actually requested the government of Nazi Germany to prevent the escape of
Jews, and a few years later admonished the U.S. State Department not to encourage
the escape of Jews, because nobody wants them.
* * * * * * *
"If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs."
British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 1937
"If we must have preferences, let me murmur in your ear that
I prefer Arabs to Jews."
British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, 1943
The Jews who succeeded in reaching the Jewish National Home were confined
to only 17 percent of Mandate Palestine, which became the State of Israel
in 1948. That the Arabs were not granted 100 percent they proclaim to be
the Crime of the Century, to be undone by any means.
* * * * * * *
6]
Jerusalem is a holy city of Islam, where Jews have no history, rights or
claims.
Jerusalem has been the heart of Israel and of world Jewry for 3,000 years,
and there has been a virtually unbroken Jewish community there during all
that time. When modern statistics are on record, they show Jews as the majority
in the city:
1860: 11,000 Jews
6,500 Muslims
4,500 Christians
1906: 40,000 Jews
13,000 Christians
7,000 Muslims
1999: 633,000 Jews
200,000 Muslims and Christians
Jews around the world turn toward Jerusalem when they pray. Muslims turn
toward Mecca. Jews and Christians make religious pilgrimages to Jerusalem.
Muslims make religious pilgrimages to Mecca.
Jerusalem is not mentioned at all in the Koran. It does not appear on lists
of Muslim holy cities. Caliphs and sultans ruling from afar paid little or
no heed to Jerusalem, that dwindled to a dirty, dilapidated and poverty-stricken
village scarcely to be expected in any city that is loved or revered.
Arabs built little in Jerusalem, except for the Dome of the Rock, that a
caliph built in the Seventh Century on the site of the First and Second
biblical Temples. It is now being alleged that those Temples never existed.
(Why, then, why did the caliph choose just that site?) One might suppose
this too preposterous to require rebuttal, the historically illiterate minions
of the news media may repeat it with quite serious mien.
During the Jordanian occupation of the Old City of Jerusalem, the Jewish
residents were killed or driven out. For 19 years, Jews of all nationalities
were banned from their holy places and historical sites, while ancient synagogues
and cemeteries were wrecked or crudely desecrated. Now, the Muslim religious
authorities still permitted to administer Temple Mount are relentlessly unearthing
and destroying every relic of the Temples they say never existed a program
dubbed "archaeological terrorism".
7] Judea, Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza are Palestinian territory, unlawfully
occupied by Israel. Israeli settlements there are illegal under international
law.
Israel is not occupying Palestinian territory, because there is not and never has been any such thing. "Occupied Palestine", like "Arab East Jerusalem", are diplomatic and journalistic stock epithets that melt away under analysis.
The status of Judea, Samaria and Gaza is still according to the Mandate for the Jewish National Home. The remaining parts of the Mandate have become the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan. In 1948, Jordan (then still Trans-Jordan) joined the Arab coalition that launched a war of total destruction against Israel. With the support of Great Britain, and under the command of British officers, Jordan managed to take land west of the Jordan River and also parts of Jerusalem. No nation or international body called upon it to withdraw.
In 1967, Jordan again joined an Arab coalition in a war of total destruction
against Israel, and thereby lost what it had taken in 1948. That land thus
came under Israel's administration, which is quite lawful. The Jewish communities
since built there, either on empty land or on land grabbed from Jewish owners
in 1948, are also quite lawful -- regardless of the juridical rulings of
foreign office functionaries and news broadcasters. [See further Issue 6]
With the Oslo Accords, Israel permitted PLO administration of parts of these
areas. That was not a grant of sovereignty, nor wass it either unconditional
or irrevocable. It depended on PLO fulfillment of its undertakings in those
accords; fulfillment it never even began much less carried out. Israel retains
responsibility for security in those areas, and the right to take action
against terrorism or any other threat to its security that emanates therefrom.
This cannot constitute an attack against or incursion into the "Palestininan
territory" that does not exist.
* * * * * * *
8] The Palestinians seek only to free themselves of occupation and
regain the lands taken from them
.
As noted above, lands were given to them by Israel, not taken from them.
Since Israel's voluntary withdrawals after the Oslo Accords, some 98 percent
of the Arabs resident in Judea, Samaria and Gaza now live under the rule
of the PLO.
When the PLO was founded in 1964. it adopted a charter defining its purpose
as the total destruction of Israel, to be achieved by terrorism and war.
This was before the Six-Day War of 1967, when the lands the PLO now purports
to liberate were still held by Jordan and not by Israel. It therefore
cannot rationally be argued that the terrorism is caused by or excused by
the "occupation".
The Oslo Accords required the cancellation of this Charter, but that has
never been done. Despite public relations flimflam to the contrary, the goal
of the destruction of Israel is still in effect. The pretense that the Palestinians
yearn only for a state in these areas, side-by-side with Israel and at peace
with it, is belied by PLO-officials themselves:
In 1974, the PLO adopted its Plan of Stages: First take control of any territory
that it can trick Israel into yielding. Then use that territory as the springboard
for the war to destroy Israel. That Plan of Stages is also still in effect.
After signing of the Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat announced:
"This agreement, I am not considering
it more than the agreement which had been signed between our Prophet Muhammad
and Koraish." [Two years after Muhammad signed the treaty with the
tribe of Koraish, he attacked and annihilated it.]
In a speech in Sweden, he promised to:
". . . eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state.
We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population
explosion. Jews won't want to live among us Arabs."
Faisel al-Husseini, scion of one of the most powerful Arab families, and
PLO "Minister for Jerusalem" defined the PLO program, in April and June 2001:
"We will] continue to aspire to the strategic goal: namely, Palestine from
the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea. Whatever we get now, cannot
make us forget this supreme truth."
"If we agree to declare our state over . . . the West Bank and Gaza, our
ultimate goal is the liberation of
all historic Palestine from the River [Jordan] to the Sea [Mediterranean].
We distinguish the strategic, long-term goals frm the political phased goals,
which we are compelled to temporarily accept due to international pressure."
PLO Minister of Communications, 1999:
"Our people have hope for the future, that the occupation state [Israel]
ceases to exist."
* * * * * * *
9] Israel drove out the Arab population in 1947-48 and is responsible
for the wretched conditions of the Arab refugees.
This is the planned subject of the forthcoming "Tongues of Deceit Part
II".
END