Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: British Mandate

Showing posts with label British Mandate. Show all posts

Thursday, August 31, 2023

The UN's latest anti-Israel legal argument is predicated on lies

On Thursday, the UN published a document titled, "Study on the Legality of the Israeli Occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem."

It is 107 pages of tendentious and one-sided arguments all intended to declare Israeli actions since 1967 to be illegal. There are counterarguments to each of their arguments - but they don't let the readers know that.

However, the entire basis of the paper is bogus. Turn to page 18, which declares its "methodology.":

The study takes it as a starting point that the Palestinian territory – i.e., the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip – was occupied by Israel in 1967, in the course of an international armed conflict.

Setting aside Gaza for now, the question is - when did that territory become "Palestinian?"

Looking at newspaper articles in the years after the Six Day War, the West Bank was usually described as "occupied Jordan."

Here are two articles from 1972, the first about how militant Arabs threatened fellow Arabs running for office in the first elections in the West Bank after the war:

When, exactly, did the territory turn from "occupied Jordan" into "occupied Palestinian territory"?

It never happened. The world just went along with Palestinian propaganda and eventually believed it.

The question gets starker when we realize that Jordan's annexation of the West Bank in 1949 was illegal, and almost no nations recognized it. It was never legally Jordanian territory.

So the West Bank was never "occupied Jordan." It was part of the British Mandate of Palestine, the same mandate that promised the land to be the Jewish state. Not a Palestinian homeland - only a Jewish homeland.

This is international law, that has never been abrogated. Israel has a superior legal right to Judea and Samaria than anyone else. Israel's characterization of the territory as "disputed" was probably a mistake - it should have always claimed it all. But "disputed" is accurate, "occupied" is not.

Which is why the Mandate is never mentioned, and the "methodology" deliberately omits it, pretending that the territory is "occupied Palestinian territory" without ever saying when, legally, it became "Palestinian."

The paper spends a lot of time on the argument that the Mandate system provided a "sacred trust" for the rights of self-determination of the peoples in the territories. But as the Palestine Mandate document above shows, only the Jewish people were given that right under the Palestine Mandate. And the reason is as simple as it is unpalatable to the UN's legal "experts" - in 1920, no one considered that there existed an Arab "Palestinian people." The Arabs of Palestine who were speaking of nationalism wanted to become part of Syria, their interest in an independent state only arose (with very few exceptions) after the West drew the borders of British Mandate Palestine and unity with Syria was no longer an option.

To apply the League of Nations Mandate language to apply to the self determination of a people who didn't exist as a people at the time - who didn't even consider themselves a people - is the height of deception.

The next part of the "methodology" is even more absurd:n"The study also takes it as a starting point that Israel continues to occupy the Gaza Strip."

Before Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, no legal expert had ever said that an occupation is possible without soldiers physically on the ground controlling the territory.

For example, see the definition in the 1972 Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms:

Military occupiers are obligated, under international law, to set up a court system, to ensure that cities are governed and continue to run, to set up an entire bureaucracy to run the territory. That is impossible without "boots on the ground," the informal definition of occupation for over a hundred years.

Israel does not control Gaza. It cannot stop rockets or mortars, weapons manufacturing or military exercises. Israel cannot create a military court system - which is required under the rules of occupation. It cannot arrest anyone.

The second sentence makes it quite clear that Area A in the West Bank is not "occupied" even if one accepts that somehow the West Bank is "Palestinian territory."

As with all other legal analyses when it comes to Israel, this paper was intended from the outset to determine that Israel's actions and "occupation" are illegal. It set the ground rules to ensure that pesky arguments like the League of Nations Mandate or the accepted definitions of occupation pre-2005 not even be brought up. (When JFK blockaded Cuba, did the US "occupy" Cuba?)

This isn't international law. It is twisting international law against only one state - coincidentally, the only Jewish state.

And that is only the beginning of the problems with this document. But since the methodology itself is based on lies, that ensures that the rest of the document built on this foundation of lies is invalid as well.

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The UN's history of the "Question of Palestine" omits every single Palestinian attack on Jews

The UN has a webpage where it shows a timeline on the "Question of Palestine."

It is biased as hell.

It starts with "1885 – The term 'Zionism' first coined by the Viennese writer, Nathan Birnbaum."

There is no mention of Jewish history in the region for thousands of years. No mention of Jewish kingdoms. No mention of the centrality of Eretz Israel and Jerusalem to Judaism. No mention of the Bible.

But after that, it simply ignores or whitewashes every single act of terrorism by Palestine's Arabs.

It doesn't mention the murderous Palestinian pogrom against Jews in 1929.

It says, "1936/1939 – Palestinian rebellion against the British Mandate and Jewish immigration." But not that Arabs murdered Jews, just that it was a "rebellion."

It doesn't say anything about the Arab League boycott of Jews.

It doesn't mention any Arab attacks on Jews in 1947-48. No outbreak of hostilities hours after the UN Partition resolution, no mention of the constant attacks on Jewish civilians, no mention of the Hadassah Hospital convoy massacre or the many other attacks on Jewish civilians - but it does mention Deir Yassin, and exaggerates the number of dead as "hundreds." .

The UN gets the date of Israel's independence wrong, saying it happened on May 15, 1948.

There were scores of fedayeen attacks by Palestinian Arabs against Israel in the 1950s and 60s, and hundreds of Israelis were killed. Not one incident is mentioned.

But the UN describes the 1966 As-Samu incident, where Israeli and Jordanian troops battled after a land mine killed 3 IDF soldiers, as a "massacre" of Palestinians. 15 Jordanian soldiers and three civilians were killed. It was not a massacre by any definition.

There is not one mention of Palestinian airplane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s.

It says, "1987 – First 'Intifada' begins in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip." It doesn't mention that the intifada killed hundreds of Israelis. The many terror attacks that occurred during the Oslo process are nowhere to be found.

Similarly, it says, "Ariel Sharon’s al-Haram al-Sharif visit in September 2000 triggers the Second Palestinian Intifada."

Not a word about Palestinian suicide bombings, or bus bombings, or attacks on pizza shops and Passover seders and bar mitzvahs.

And of course no mention later about rockets from Gaza, massacring rabbis or kidnapping and murdering kids. Hamas is not mentioned as a terror group - or even militant group. In fact, the word "terror" is nowhere to be seen. Neither is "Islam," "Muslim" or "Jihad," although Jews are mentioned.

The Holocaust is not mentioned either. There is simply no information on why Jews might want to have their own homeland in the region.

There is plenty of other anti-Israel bias in wording and choice of incidents.

According to this official UN history, Palestinians have not attacked, let alone killed, a single Jew. The only aggression mentioned is from Jewish and Zionist groups.

The UN's anti-Israel bias is unmistakable even in this public document that is pretending to be objective.

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Palestinians never run out of ways to blame Jews for their abject failures

The official Palestinian Authority Wafa news agency reports:

Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh today received in his Ramallah office the new head of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) mission to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Kerstin Gerling, in the presence of its former head, Alexander Tieman, and IMF Resident Representative Thomas Laursen, during which they discussed the impact of the Israeli occupation on the Palestinian economy.

"The Israeli occupation is the main obstacle to the development process in Palestine. Israel has employed many tools to control us, whether through direct military occupation of our lands, and control of the borders, crossings, the labor market, and infrastructure," said the Prime Minister.

Let's look at the list of how Shtayyeh claims Israel is controlling the Palestinian economy and development - and compare it to how Jews existed in British Mandate Palestine:

The British military occupied the entire land.

The British controlled the borders.

The British controlled the crossings.

The British controlled the labor market.

The British controlled the infrastructure.

Yet , somehow, the Zionist Jews managed to build an economy, develop industry, create an entire export industry, innovate in farming techniques, drain the swamps to rid the country of malaria, and at the same time build universities, newspapers, cultural institutions, sports teams and everything else to be ready for independence.

And the Jews did it all in 26 years, from 1922 to 1948.

The Palestinians have essentially complete control of all of Area A and administrative control of Area B for 28 years now, since Oslo II in 1995. They have control over their own labor market. They have control over their own infrastructure. By nearly every metric, they have more autonomy than Jews did under British rule.

But what do they have to show for it? Whining about how the Jews are stopping them from building an economy!

Unlike Jews in the 1920s, Palestinians can build an economy providing services worldwide via networking. Residents can program, translate, do legal service work, artwork - anything that can be done remotely. Unlike the Jews in the British Mandate, the Palestinians are surrounded by fellow Arabs who would happily buy goods from them if they were competitive on price and quality.

Where are the initiatives to build such an economy?

As far as I can tell, every major plan to improve the Palestinian economy comes from non-Palestinians - from the UN, or the Quartet. The Palestinians outsource their own future to others - and then blame Israel when they don't accomplish anything.

The Jews in the mandate period didn't have international organizations falling over themselves to build a Jewish state - but almost every nation in the world claims to support building an independent Palestinian state.

Even with the billions of aid, the automatic majority in the UN, countless NGOs willing to fully support the Palestinian cause, and a history of hundreds of millions of petrodollars invested in Palestinian governance, the Palestinians still have next to nothing to show for it.

But they do have someone to blame - Israel.

And the world believes the obvious lie.

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Comparing 1921 Zionists with 1994 Palestinians

On Sunday, I saw a tweeter quoting a 2019 Hanan Ashrawi tweet:

This is a ridiculous theory, so I responded:

Somehow, between 1921 and 1948, under full British control, Zionists managed to build a prosperous economy and effective governance.

Palestinians have had since 1994 with more autonomy than Jews had. And yet they blame Israel for their failures.

As usual when I strike a nerve, I got a lot of angry responses , nearly all of which are the usual mindless anti-Israel drivel. But a few people made one reasonable point.

So I answered that point and elaborated on my initial tweet.

The only reasonable response to this has been that the Zionists had large amounts of capital from the Jewish diaspora.

This is true - and it proves my point. Jews didn't depend on anyone else to build their nation. They funded it themselves, they drained the swamps themselves, they built their government themselves, they built cities from scratch themselves, they built an economy themselves. They had no foreign aid, no NGOs giving advice, and the British didn't allow them to do a great deal.

Now let's look at Palestinians since 1994.

They've received tens of billions of dollars - from the EU, from the Arab world, from the US. They have more NGOs advising them than anyone else on Earth does. They have an automatic UN majority for political support. They got the world to recognize their "state" before it exists.

And yet they haven't built squat. Three decades later they are dysfunctional, corrupt, divided, and immature. All those billions were wasted instead of invested. Instead of working to build, they are spending all their political capital to fight Israel in international fora.

The most honest Palestinian government comes from the Hamas terrorists. At least they don't pretend - they want Palestine to be a stage towards a pan-Islamic ummah. The PA tells the world it wants peace but it admires and financially supports terrorism.

Neither Hamas nor the PA have shown the slightest interest in building a real independent nation - only the trappings of one. Neither have shown any interest in making the lives of their people better. Their goals are the same: blame everything on Israel and work to destroy it.

Everyone knows all of this. But it is a convenient fiction for the West to pretend that the PA actually cares about its people and actually wants an independent state. The PA focus on "return" shows that its goals lie elsewhere.

So, no, Israel isn't the reason the Palestinians have a dysfunctional and corrupt statelet.

The Jews built Israel despite the difficulties, the Palestinians avoid building a state despite the financial and political support of nearly the entire world.

Adults take responsibility for their actions. Palestinians do not. Instead they blame all their problems on others.

Any objective observer can see that they are the ones who have architected their own problems by making poor decisions for decades and never abandoning Arafat's "stages" program to destroy Israel.

If the Palestinians were serious about peace and building a nation, they'd have no better partner than Israel.

But leaders that responded to a peace plan in 2001 with a terror spree that they remain proud of today are not leaders.

They are antisemites.

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The British didn't leave Palestine on May 15, 1948 - but on June 30

The last British soldiers did not leave Palestine until six weeks after Israel declared independence.

The British continues to control Haifa's port until June 30, when they finally left and Israel took over.

And within hours of the withdrawal, Israel introduced its new navy. (London Daily Herald, July 1 1948)

It was so small that United Press put the word "navy" in scare quotes.

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Interesting analysis of the evolution of Palestinian identity by an anti-Zionist

Zachary Foster has become a popular anti-Zionist tweeter in recent months, to the point of becoming essentially a troll more interested in scoring points than in facts. (Before he blocked the terrific Adin Haykin, they had a number of entertaining exchanges.)

Yet in the past, I have found his scholarly papers to be very interesting and illuminating, and they tell a story that does not at all support the current Palestinian lies about their history. Sadly, he seems now to be more addicted to "Likes" than to the truth.

A 2011 unpublished master's thesis by Foster also upends current Palestinian lies, especially from Rashid Khalidi.

The period 1914-1923 is what, the most influential of these writers, Rashid Khalidi, has called the “critical years,” in his widely-praised award-winning work on the subject, Palestinian Identity. He argues that as a result of the “rapid, momentous, and unsettling changes” from the outset of World War I in 1914 to roughly 1922 or 1923, “the sense of political and national identification of most politically conscious, literate and urban Palestinians underwent a sequence of major transformations. The end result was a strong and growing national identification with Palestine.” Importantly, Khalidi writes, this full-fledged national loyalty was felt by a “significant proportion of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine”and by 1922, “important elements of the country’s Arab population had already come to identify primarily with Palestine” (my emphasis). He adds that the “most common self-description of political groupings during the mandate was as Palestinian Arab.”....Although Khalidi might like to think that “no one” could possibly dispute the widespread existence of a Palestinian identity during this thirty year period, with careful attention to evidence rather than hyperbole and polemic, I believe we can gain a much more accurate understanding of precisely when, how and why a unique Palestinian identity became widespread.

Foster then demolishes Khalidi, showing that he primary identification of Palestinian Arabs before the 1936 revolt were with their cities, or with Syrians/Egyptians or Arabs in general.

Foster uses interesting analysis methods to come to this conclusion. For example, "not a single book was written on the history of Palestine out of sheer passion and love for Palestine until the 1930s. As we stated previously, this is in complete contrast to the city histories – all of which seem to have been written out of the authors devotion and love for the hometown." And then, "In 1936 and 1937, alone, eight books were published on the Palestine issue, more books than had been published in the preceding sixteen years combined. If the historical works are a guide to identity in Palestine, then, it seems that the major shift from city to Palestine did not obtain until the mid-late 1930s."

This is also fascinating (I put footnote text in parentheses):

The other major work on Palestine in the pre-1936 period is al-Barghouthi and Totah’s Tarikh Filastin, but, as previously mentioned, this was written at the behest of the British authorities to be used in the Mandatory education system. To be sure, this does not make the book irrelevant for the study of Palestinian identity. It does, however, suggest that it was not necessarily a natural idea for an Arab intellectual to pen a book on “the History of Palestine” in 1923.(Indeed, Totah wrote his Ph.D dissertation on the history of Arab education. Palestine is a totally irrelevant analytical category in his dissertation, as discussed above.) And, indeed, this point is reinforced throughout the text, such as in their etymological discussion of this place we now call Palestine. Four names are offered which have historically been used to describe the region, Filastin being merely one of them. (The other three are ‘ard kana’an, ‘ard al-mi‘ad, and al-‘ard al-muqqadisa.)

Those translate to the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land and the Holy Land. Foster doesn't mention that Khalil Totah was a Christian Quaker; while he was born in Ramallah his view of Palestine was through the lens of the Bible rather than as an Arab. It is curious that Foster doesn't spend more time talking about how religion was a more important marker of identity than being a citizen of "Palestine" as well.

As far as identifying as Palestinian, Foster notes,

While Filastin emerged as a geographical, social and political space by the 1920s, it seems that “al-‘Arab” (the Arabs) or “al-Muslimin” and “al-Masihiyyin” (the Christians) were still preferred over “al-filastiniyyin” (the Palestinians) throughout the Mandate period to describe the region’s inhabitants. Very rarely is the word Palestinian used to describe the people of the region, who instead preferred to describe themselves, their culture, their land and their people as Arab.

One reason that Foster doesn't mention is that Jews at the time enthusiastically identified as Palestinian, and Palestinian Arabs - especially the literate ones who were espousing nationalism - didn't want to be identified with the Jews.

Foster, quite reasonably, uses "loyalty" as a metric to see whether nationalism was more important to Palestinians than their hometowns or Arabness (he also seems to ignore clans, which were much more important in how Palestinian Arabs self-identified.) I'm still not convinced that most Palestinian Arabs identified as being loyal to Arab Palestine even into the 1940s. Here's why.

Foster is only looking at written texts of the time for evidence of loyalty. While literacy soared in Palestine between 1900-1948, a significant number of Palestinians, especially in rural areas and villages, were still illiterate in 1948, and there is no evidence that they identified with "Palestine." Moreover, Arab actions during the 1948 war speak louder than the printed word that Foster relies on. While many defended their own towns, practically none defended anyone else's town - they fled along with their own community members. There was no loyalty to, or sacrificing for, an Arab Palestine. The loyalty Foster sees is the written loyalty of intellectuals, a theoretical loyalty that they were trying to instill in their readers, not a reflection of actual loyalty that would make one fight for and die for one's country.

Indeed, it was the Arab intellectuals who fled the fastest in 1947-48. While the Jewish Palestine Post took heroic measures to ensure that it would put out a paper every day even during the worst fighting and when its own building was bombed, the Arab newspapers in Jaffa and elsewhere simply stopped publishing when the war reached them.

Last issue of "Falastin", blaming the British for Arabs fleeing Jaffa

So while Foster proves that loyalty to Arab Palestine was close to nonexistent before 1936, he doesn't go far enough because of his reliance on written materials as evidence of "loyalty" without keeping in mind that the loyalty espoused was more theoretical and prescriptive than real. It ignores the larger context that includes the people whose mindset hadn't changed for centuries. These were Arabs who easily moved from one part to another of the Arab world for economic reasons or because of wars, who did not accept the Western division of the region with arbitrary borders as relevant to their lives, and who thought that they could migrate to other Arab areas in 1948 as many of their ancestors migrated to Palestine - never dreaming that their fellow Arabs would refuse to accept them and treat them as brothers upon their arrival.

Their identity as Palestinians was forged largely because of their mistreatment by the rest of the Arab world and its refusal to integrate them in their own societies in the 1950s, not from the Arab intellectuals of the 1910s or 1930s who created a new nationalism as a response to Zionism. The shame of their being so badly mistreated by their own people is what fuels the desire to create theories after the fact of a pre-1948 Palestinian identity, an identity that was extraordinarily weak.

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Another own goal at the "Museum of the Palestinian People"

There aren't too many things to see in the virtual tour of the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington DC. But several of the objects on display that show the paperwork behind lifecycle events of Palestinians are interesting - unintentionally.

There are two marriage certificates and one birth certificate.

Outside of the handwritten description of the father of the baby having a nationality of "Palestinian," none of these documents, issued by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, say anything about Palestine.

There is also a pair of passports issued in 1946. They don't say "Passport of Palestine." They say "British Passport - Palestine" and there is Hebrew inside along with Arabic.

This same museum proudly shows a 1938 National Geographic map of the Middle East called "Bible Lands" that uses "Palestine" as a clear English translation of Eretz Yisrael, but the museum considers this "proof" that there was a nation called Palestine. But that is a map that had no official function. Every document in the museum from a government proves that there was no such nation.

Why would a museum of the Palestinian people show paperwork that contradicts the idea of a Palestinian nation? And what happened to the parts of Palestine under Jordanian control in 1949?

Palestinians accuse Israel of erasing their Palestinian nationality from before 1948, but....what about Jordan? We see that Jordan did not call keep any vestige of "Palestine" in the areas it illegally annexed. Jordan literally erased Palestine. Why did no Palestinian Arab protest about this?

Yet it appears that Jordan did maintain records of which citizens came from Palestine and who did not - with the aim of potentially disenfranchising the Palestinians by forcibly "returning" them to a Palestine that never existed. Moreover, the family that donated these documents were never refugees - the father was born in Nablus in the 1930s.

The museum documentation doesn't mention any of this, of course. Because it isn't interested in the real history of the Palestinian people, a people created in the 1960s purely to paint Israel as a Goliath. The museum's entire purpose is to delegitimize Israel by not only placing all the blame of the Palestinian "diaspora" on Israel, but also in erasing the entire Jewish history in the Levant as it carefully curates pottery and artwork to avoid any mention of any Jewish presence on the Land.

A careful look at the "Museum of the Palestinian People" shows that there was never a Palestine.

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Jews acting like adults while Arabs act like babies - in 1948

The time between May 1 and May 15, 1948, was a strange time in British Mandate Palestine.

Many British bureaucrats had already packed up and left ahead of their official departure on May 15. But the Jewish state couldn't be declared yet.

Normal governmental functions still needed to be done. And who did them?

The Jews, of course.

Palestine Post, May 3, 1948:

May 4:

Someone has to keep the lights on, collect the garbage, deliver the mail, approve permits. It takes mature people to step in and do the work needed for the good of all.

This is leadership.

And what about in the Arab sector? They were busy doing a run on their banks (May 2):

The wealthy Arabs ran away in December, but their political leaders in Jaffa and Haifa were the first to leave, not the last, when those cities were taken over by the Haganah. (May 4)

This is the difference between leadership and the abdication of leadership.

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Recent "Nakba" memes

The Israel haters are making a big deal over Nakba Day, which will be officially marked at the UN. So I've been making some memes to describe the truth about the Nakba.

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For Once, the EU is Correct - Zionists Did Make the Desert Bloom (Tomer Ilan)

Guest post by Tomer Ilan:

___________________________________________________

How Zionists made the land bloom by eradicating malaria

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has come under attack from Israel-haters for saying the truth that Israel “literally made the desert bloom.” The Palestinian foreign ministry condemned her, calling her statement a “racist trope”.

One of the ways the Zionists made the land bloom is by draining swamps and eradicating malaria.

A 1920 British map shows the entire central and northern parts of the land infected with malaria, with the most severely affected areas being valleys and coastal regions with a high concentration of swamps.

In 1921 British authorities reported that widespread malaria “has decimated the population” and is “an effective bar to the development and settlement of large tracts of fertile lands” and that “much well-watered and fertile land is at present lying waste on account of malaria”.

Just 20 years later, the Zionist anti-malaria campaign changed everything.

In 1941 the British Mandate reported that ‘In a number of areas where intense endemic malaria had resulted in no population for generations, recent antimalarial schemes have created large tracts of cultivatable land’ and that ‘very large areas of what is recognised by all as some of the most fertile land in the country have been reclaimed, after centuries of waste’.

Early attempts to drain the swamps relied on the Eucalyptus, a very ‘thirsty’ tree brought from Australia which uses up to 200 litres of water a day.

A 1911 report entitled ‘Zionist Work in Palestine’ reported that 400,000 eucalyptus trees had been planted to drain the soil.

EUCALYPTUS FOREST NEAR EIN HAROD

Despite the early efforts, pre-WW1 efforts to eradicate malaria generally failed. Many died of malaria and many others left.

In 1922, Dr. Israel Kligler, a Zionist Jew, started the first successful national malaria-elimination campaign in the world. Kligler introduced a methodical and systematic approach which relied on Arab and Jewish cooperation of entire communities to assist in the anti-malaria work.

Kligler focused on education. He pointed out that it was possible to obtain the population’s active cooperation only after the population understood fully the significance and value of the work.

The anti-mosquito campaign was concerned with limiting the breeding in wells, cisterns and other man receptacles by regular inspections and spraying of repellents.

One of the new methods that Kligler initiated was the introduction of Gambusia fish to water sources in the country in 1923. The fish eat mosquito larvae as soon as they hatch from the eggs. The fish turned out to be an effective biological means against mosquito's larvae. The result was the almost total eradication of malaria in the upper Jordan by using where appropriate combinations of anti-larval fish and drainage techniques.

Mosquito larvae

Male mosquito larvae eating Gambusia affinis

Swamps were dried by building drainage channels and the swamps were sprayed with pesticide.

The draining work in malaria-infected areas was very dangerous and many lost their lives.

Swamp draining at Yagur, 1924

A Jewish girl throwing larvicide in Emek Hefer.

After the State of Israel declared its independence, anti-malaria efforts continued, and in 1967 the World Health Organization declared malaria eliminated in Israel.

Yes, Ursula von der Leyen is correct. Zionists did make the land bloom.

____________________________________

Postscript by Elder:

My response to seeing the "racist trope" accusation on Twitter was to post this snippet of an article in Scientific American, April 1960: