Posted on 11/17/2007 9:31:32 PM PST by Psychic Dice
Who is the rightful owner of the land now occupied by Israel? Anyone interested in a fair solution to the Palestian/Israeli question has to ask this question.
Back in the 1970s Joan Peters was a liberal who set out to prove that American policies were the cause of conflicts going on there. Two years into her research she realize that she had it wrong. Her book From Time Immemorial (The Origins Of The Arab Jewish Conflict Over Palestine) details what she discovered.
It is a tome (600 pages) and isn’t a recent release. Although I remember its 1984 publication, I didn’t read it until two year ago.
To be honest, most Jews don’t know this history – especially the young who have recently gone through American universities. Many of them believe that underneath it all the Israelis ripped off the Arabs. Peters documents a very different history.
Peters discovered that the Arab propaganda machine had - for some time - been convincing the West of three lies: • 1) The Jews and Arabs got along famously for the last 1,200 years before the Zionists came along. • 2) Millions of Arabs had owned and worked the land of Palestine from time immemorial. • 3) The Jews drove those millions off their land in 1948.
Having researched thousand of sources: British libraries, Ottoman and other Muslim records, many living Jews and Muslims (including Yasser Arafat), Winston Churchill, even Mark Twain, Peters shows that: • 1) Every Muslim country perpetuated third or fourth class citizenship on its Jewish populations for 12 centuries through habitual mass murders, rapes, extortion, theft, beatings, lies, and many other special rules that would make the Third Reich proud. • 2) Islam reduced the thriving population of the Holy Land (including what is now Jordan) from millions in the 8th Century to mere hundreds of thousands as it over and over and over and over again and again and again and again looted it - until most of the land was owned by three families of Syrians in Damascus. In 1887, 60,000 Jews and a couple thousand less Muslims (only 28,000 of which were Bedouin Arabs who were nomadic, not land owners) lived within the boundaries of what would become the modern day Israel. • 3) In 1948, the only Muslims who were not allowed to return to their land after seven Islamic countries declared war on Israel were the ones who had left Israel to fight against the Jews.
From Time Immemorial documents precisely why the Israelis are right and why we are right to back them.
I agree with your assessment of the book. But I will say that she did great work on two subjects. The UNRWA and the documentation she provides for the onrush of “illegal” migrants from surrounding Arab countries into Palestine.
Great minds and all that. You and I must have been typing our posts at the same time.
Bureaucrats are people who say that if they don’t record a tree falling in the forest, that it didn’t happen. Scholars are people who believe in what bureaucrats record. Anecdote: My mother was born in Mississippi around the year 1910. The state did not then issue birth certificates. She grew up, married and then divorced a husband whose name she took. No official record exists of either event. She married my Dad and took his name, By that time she had long since shed her name given her by my grandmother, who was divorced from her father and had remarried. A record exists of the latter but not the former. When my mother became 62 and wanted to get social security benefits, she had to PROVE her age, first of all by proving through the census records that she ever existed. Nope. She had to go to her high school records to establish her claim. Luckily, she HAD gone to high school, because none of her elementary school records existed any more.
NOW, if it was there was so little documentation of an American life, what about the millions of Arabs who have lived in what is now Palestine?
True enough for that we all are guilty and for that we can all be saved as well. As for who actually {by force} put him on the cross it was the Romans. Jews were not permitted to put someone to death except by stoning someone to death. Death on the cross was a Roman punishment.
It wasn't by accident that Israel recognized before the nations of the world was reborn in a day on May 14, 1948. Nor is it an accident or unintentional act that current world leaders are trying to bring on her demise through so called peace treaties with her enemies.
Israel was and still is the birthright home of the blood sons Jacob {Israel} both there and scattered from Abraham to whom the promise was made to the last son/daughter of Israel to be born.
As Gentile {Christians} we are grafted branches into that tree or tribe as well but not their replacement. Not any better or lesser. But the defense of Israel is guaranteed by The Word Of GOD. She'll suffer horribly for a time as will many of the age but Israel will not be defeated in the coming battle on her very soil. Wake up United States our leaders are on the wrong side in this matter.
What Peters did was go into the bureaucrats’s archives and find their memos that recorded the fact that they knew the in-migrants were in fact pouring over the border. Especially from the north.
Sounds like our Homeland Security boys! But what do lines on a map mean to the people in the Middle East?
Well, the lines on a map are an artificial construct that contribute to the political unreset within the region even today. The British and French ignored a long history to divide up the region to suit their interests.
We all “killed” Him (but He is risen now! Matt 28:5). I’ve said it before, my sins and yours put him on the cross (as well as those of the whole world John 3:16). John 4:22 “You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for SALVATION is from the Jews.”
P.S.BTW if you really want to get technical about it, it was the Roman soldiers who did our dirty work.
Ditto and copy post 124!!! and Isaiah 62
The only meaningful boundaries are military frontiers, like those between Iran and Iraq. What I would like to know is why the victors chopped up the Kurdish nation and gave their territory to the Arabs and to the Turks and to the Persians. But then these were really supposed to be colonies or protectorates not national states.
Oil, of course. It is the same reason the British lopped off Kuwait from Iraq and kept the United Arab Emirates out of the hands of the Saudis and the Iranians. Jordan was created to keep Abdullah from marching on Syria to reverse Feisal’s eviction and keep the French happy. The panhandle of Jordan was carved from Iraq to give Abdullah more land. Feisal was given the Iraqi throne to keep the Hashemites happy. The list goes on and on. Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the UAR, Qatar, Bahrain... it is the gift the keeps giving.
>>That is one of the most controversial and disputed history books of the last generation.
>>If you want to find out more, go here and here.
Many thanks.
Did Peters or anyone else answer Porath or Blair?
Peters did revise the book, and has spoken about it on various occasions, so it stands to reason she made some sort of defense of her findings. I don't know how successful she was. A lot of people who come across her book now don't know about the earlier controversy.
>>Did Peters or anyone else answer Porath or Blair?
>Peters did revise the book, and has spoken about it on various occasions, so it stands to reason she made some sort of defense of her findings. I don’t know how successful she was. A lot of people who come across her book now don’t know about the earlier controversy.
I’m working from the original 1984 printing that is currently available from Amazon. It would be interesting to see her revisions.
I haven’t had time to go through all the info on the sites you named, to reread Peters and to search for criticism of both. From Time Immemorial is long and dense, as are the criticisms. I intend to repost when finished. It will probably take a couple months.
For now, I have a few thoughts.
I suspect Yehoshua Porath of being either an Israeli Leftist Jew or an Israeli Arab, whose criticism might very well have been aimed at the 1986 right wing Israeli Jews. I have no evidence of this yet, but it seems quite possible that he is as tendentious as he accuses Peters of being.
Porath says:
“Mrs. Peters puts great emphasis on the claim that during and after the 1948 war an “exchange of populations” took place. Against the Arabs who left Palestine one had to put, in her view, about the same number of Jews, most of them driven by the Arab rulers from their traditional homes in the Arab world. And indeed there is a superficial similarity between the two movements of population. But their ideological and historical significance is entirely different. From a Jewish-Zionist point of view the immigration of the Jews of the Arab countries to Israel, expelled or not, was the fulfillment of a national dream—the “ingathering of the exiles.” Since the 1930s the Jewish Agency had sent agents, teachers, and instructors to the various Arab countries in order to propagate Zionism. They organized Zionist youth movements there and illegal immigration to Palestine. Israel then made great efforts to absorb these immigrants into its national, political, social, and economic life.”
Porath implies that the reason that the Jews were thrown out of the Arab countries in 1948 is that Zionists in Israel were forming a Fifth Columns in each of the Arab countries. What he leaves out are all the citations of persecution under dhimmitude that those Jews lived under for 1,200 years that Peters documents. In other words, it is quite likely that those Jews wanted out and to live in a land run by Jews. So what if the. “… ideological and historical significance” of the movement of Jews is entirely different from that of the Muslims? Lastly, which country could the back to Israel movement be organized in? Iran? Iraq? Syria? Yemen? Of course it was centered in Israel by folks who were passionate.
There is also possibly a problem with Peters who admitted to being a liberal when she started the book. I think that she still is. With a quick search, I found out that she works for CBS and was involved in the Jimmy Carter administration. Since her book undercuts the ideologies of the people who now pay her, I am not at all sure that would defend what she wrote 20 years ago.
My overall problem is somewhat exacerbated because I am not an historian. Hence I will never know when I am making a mistake of correctly historically contextualizing my conclusions like the one that Blair points out.
Peters says that much of the land was barren. Porath counters that Jewish writers themselves clearly asserted that there were plenty of Arabs who owned land but would not sell to Jews. Blair contextualizes that with this:
“In Palestine under Ottoman rule, land left uncultivated reverted to the state.5 But Ottoman restrictions prevented Jews from purchasing state lands, which made up a significant proportion of the available land.6 Thus Jews would have been allowed to purchase only land already under cultivation, even if large areas of the country were deserted.”
In another context Blair quotes Pipes:
“Most early reviewers, including myself, focused on the substance of Miss Peters’s central thesis; the later reviewers, in contrast, emphasized the faults—technical, historical, and literary—in Miss Peters’s book. “
“I would not dispute the existence of those faults. From Time Immemorial quotes carelessly, uses statistics sloppily, and ignores inconvenient facts. Much of the book is irrelevant to Miss Peters’s central thesis. The author’s linguistic and scholarly abilities are open to question. Excessive use of quotation marks, eccentric footnotes, and a polemical, somewhat hysterical undertone mar the book. In short, From Time Immemorial stands out as an appallingly crafted book. “
However, later in his piece, Pipe’s says (http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1110):
“Granting all this, the fact remains that the book presents a thesis that neither Professor Porath nor any other reviewer has so far succeeded in refuting. Miss Peters’s central thesis is that a substantial immigration of Arabs to Palestine took place during the first half of the twentieth century. She supports this argument with an array of demographic statistics and contemporary accounts, the bulk of which have not been questioned by any reviewer, including Professor Porath.”
“Nonetheless, Professor Porath dismisses her argument as “fanciful.” He says that “the main reason” for Arab population growth is that Arab births remained steady while infant mortality decreased. He concludes that the movement of population was not significant in comparison with natural increase.”
“Now, there can be no question that improvements in medical conditions contributed to the increase in Arab population. But it is not immediately clear that declining infant mortality was more important than immigration. Professor Porath asserts this but he does not provide the evidence necessary to convince a reader.”
“The disproof of Miss Peters’s thesis requires a detailed inquiry into birth and death records, immigration and emigration registers, employment rolls, nomadic settlement patterns, and so forth. She may be wrong; but this will be proven only when another researcher goes through the evidence and shows that immigration was unimportant. The existence or absence of large-scale Arab immigration to Palestine has nothing to do, of course, with Miss Peters’s motives or the obvious short-comings of her book. The facts about population change will not be established by heaping scorn on Miss Peters, only by going back to the archives.”
“Faulty presentation notwithstanding, Miss Peters’s hypothesis is on the table; it is incumbent on her critics to cease the name-calling and make a serious effort to show her wrong by demonstrating that many thousands of Arabs did not emigrate to Palestine in the period under question.”
“Until such happens, what is one to think? Is there reason to accept Miss Peters’s version of events? I believe so: even though From Time Immemorial does not place Arab immigration to Palestine in a historical context, it is not hard to find a rationale for their movement. The Arabs who went to Palestine sought economic opportunity created by the Zionists. As Europeans, the Zionists brought with them to Palestine resources and skills far in advance of anything possessed by the local population. Jews initiated advanced economic activities that created jobs and wealth and drew Arabs. Zionists resembled the British, Germans, and other Europeans of modern times who settled in sparsely populated areas—Australia, southern Africa, or the American West—and then attracted the indigenous people to themselves.”
“There is really nothing surprising in all this; and because it makes such good sense, I put credence in the argument that substantial numbers of Arabs moved to Palestine. I will adjust my views, of course, should compelling evidence be found to show otherwise. But this will require that Miss Peters’s critics go beyond polemics and actually prove her thesis wrong.”
My simple question, “Who owns Israel? The Arabs or Jews?” is really asking were the Arabs significantly cheated? Although it is possible that I might change my mind, I don’t expect to. From Time Immemorial details and suggests so many inquiries from which to argue, ultimately it is going to be hard to make the case for the Muslims.
However, all this reading is taking so much of my time that I am probably going to have to elevate it to the status of a hobby.
Now then, to really push a few buttons. How about this argument? In WWI, the Ottoman Muslims tried to kill England. Since the Brits were on the winning side of that war and the Ottomans were on the losing side, why wasn’t the answer to the question of ownership of Isreal the Brits call? If they thought that the best thing to do for both the Arabs and Jews was to create Israel, is it possibly they are wrong only because they weren’t powerful enough to make it happen?
I don't think Porath was saying that Arab Jews were exiled because of an Israeli fifth column. Apparently he does believe that such efforts were made by Israel, but I take his point as simply that the kind of symmetry that some people see between the Arab flight from Israel and the expulsions of Jews from Arab countries is a distortion.
Israelis could argue that there was an element of flight from actual war in the Palestinian case that wasn't true of the expulsions from Arab countries. But it's certainly true that from the point of view of Israel an ingathering of Middle Eastern Jews in Israel was something to be desired, while Palestinians and Arabs in no way desired exile. So in that regard, at least, he's right in arguing that from the point of view of the states concerned -- rather than of the refugees themeselves -- there wasn't a symmetry. It wasn't as though the effects of the two expulsions balanced out for both sides.
It would be interesting to know what Pipes thinks about the book now. In the article you cite he's trying to cover himself for having reviewed the book positively, so he calls for further investigation. Okay, has that further investigation occured and has it been convincing?
As for the British, Germany tried to destroy them, so they took German colonies as trusteeships and gave some to South Africa and New Zealand. But the trusteeships were understood as temporary. They couldn't simply give the land to South Africa or New Zealand permanently to do as they wished.
I'm not interested in hashing this out or making a career out of arguing about it either. I posted the links so that people could make up their own minds.
>>I don’t think Porath was saying that Arab Jews were exiled because of an Israeli fifth column. Apparently he does believe that such efforts were made by Israel,
Porath didn’t call the Jewish recruiting efforts a “Fifth Column.” I did because given the 1,200 years of dhimmitude imposed by Arabs, come-to-Israel recruiting efforts could not have been viewed any other way – especially since those countries were devoted to destroying Israel before it ever got started. Peters details rampant confiscation of Jewish property, incarceration of Jews, refusal in many instances of Arab countries to let Jews out, and many barely escaping with their lives.
>> but I take his point as simply that the kind of symmetry that some people see between the Arab flight from Israel and the expulsions of Jews from Arab countries is a distortion.
>>Israelis could argue that there was an element of flight from actual war in the Palestinian case that wasn’t true of the expulsions from Arab countries. But it’s certainly true that from the point of view of Israel an ingathering of Middle Eastern Jews in Israel was something to be desired, while Palestinians and Arabs in no way desired exile. So in that regard, at least, he’s right in arguing that from the point of view of the states concerned — rather than of the refugees themeselves — there wasn’t a symmetry. It wasn’t as though the effects of the two expulsions balanced out for both sides.
Peters argues that symmetry existed in the numbers of Jews and Arabs that each expelled, but not the reasons. She says just the opposite. Jews wanted out from under 1,200 years or Arab dhimmitude that the 1948 war brought to a head. Israeli Arabs who fought against Jews in the 1948 war were not allowed back into Israel.
She also points out that many of the expelled Arabs had not lived there for hundreds and hundreds of years as Arab propaganda would have the world believe. A huge proportion of Arabs had been there for decades at best and only because Jews created an economy that required workers. Arabs terrorized Jews and Brits over a number of years to keep Jews out. Hence impoverished Muslims from all countries in the Middle East made their way there to take the jobs.
Porath strikes me as disingenuous because he cloaks his argument as a refutation of Peters assertions of symmetry, when he is in fact introducing separate arguments.
>>It would be interesting to know what Pipes thinks about the book now. In the article you cite he’s trying to cover himself for having reviewed the book positively, so he calls for further investigation. Okay, has that further investigation occured and has it been convincing?
Good questions.
>>As for the British, Germany tried to destroy them, so they took German colonies as trusteeships and gave some to South Africa and New Zealand. But the trusteeships were understood as temporary. They couldn’t simply give the land to South Africa or New Zealand permanently to do as they wished.
My understanding is that England wanted the Ottoman Empire to fight on their side in WWI. When they didn’t, after the war, the Brits disbanded the Caliphate and changed their government to a democracy. As part of the arrangement, Palestine which had been ruled by the Ottomans became England’s responsibility.
>>I’m not interested in hashing this out or making a career out of arguing about it either. I posted the links so that people could make up their own minds.
I would like to, but I don’t have the time. I intend to make this question of whether Muslims were made to grab their ankles when it comes to Israel a research project that I will work on when I can.
btt
btt
btt
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.