A fine new review of The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process.
“The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process,” review by Francis P. Sempa, New York Journal of Books, December 16, 2019:
“Spencer shows that the so-called Middle East ‘peace process,’ often championed by the United States, has been a sham from the beginning because most of the Arab-Muslim world has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a nation.”
Robert Spencer’s The Palestinian Delusion is a very pessimistic book, but in this case pessimism is realism. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as part of the larger Arab-Israeli conflict, has existed since Israel was founded in 1948.
Israel’s Arab and Muslim neighbors in the greater Middle East sought Israel’s destruction shortly after it established statehood. They have periodically waged war against Israel ever since. The roots of the conflict are both religious and geopolitical. Spencer believes there is no permanent solution to the struggle. He is probably right.
Spencer, whose previous books include Confessions of an Islamophobe and The History of Jihad, briefly reviews the competing historical claims to the territory that after World War I became the Palestine Mandate. The fall of the Ottoman Empire left much of the region to be divided by British and French statesmen and diplomats.
During the First World War, the Balfour Declaration promised a homeland for the Jewish people, but Israel’s claim to the land has much deeper ancient historical roots. Jews who migrated to the land that became the State of Israel were simply going home. Spencer notes that between 1881 and 1947 the Jewish population of Palestine grew from 25,000 to 600,000.
Spencer claims that there are no such people as Palestinians; they are not the indigenous people of the area that they claim to be. “There is no trace of support for such an idea in history,” he writes. “No archeological evidence, or evidence of any other kind has been found to substantiate a link between the ancient Canaanites or Jebusites and the modern-day Palestinians.”
Instead, Spencer continues, “[t]he land that is now the State of Israel corresponds roughly to the lands known in ancient times as Judea, Samaria, Idumea, and Galilee, and was inhabited by Jews.”
The Palestinians, according to Spencer, are an “invented people.” The term “Palestinians,” he writes, was invented by the Soviet KGB and its Arab allies in the 1960s to use as a weapon against Israel. Indeed, prior to Israel’s takeover of the West Bank of the Jordan River in the Six Day War of 1967, few if any Arab leaders championed the “rights” of the Palestinians to statehood.
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed in the early 1960s. Yasser Arafat became the “founding father” of the Palestinian people, even though he was a native of Egypt, Spencer writes. An invented people invented a history and became “victims” of Israeli “occupation” of their land. This fiction has been accepted by most of the “international community” and is a staple of politics at the United Nations.
Spencer shows that the so-called Middle East “peace process,” often championed by the United States, has been a sham from the beginning because most of the Arab-Muslim world has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a nation. Spencer blames tenets of Islam, and he quotes generously from the Koran and Muslim clerics and scholars to buttress his argument…
There is much more. Read the rest here.
Rotem says
Yasser Tusuf Arafat Husseini Al-Qudwa was born in Cairo. His mother Husseini, came from Saudi Arabia and his father – Al-Qudwa, from the Al-Qudwa tribe in “Syria”. In fact, most citizens of Egypt, are mix of several tribes and people from the Arab peninsula, the Levant and the gulf. No, they have nothing to do with the region that the European called “Palestine”, and their flag – that used to belong to the “Hashemite Kingdom of the Hejaz” (1920-1926) which is now a part of Saudi Arabia.
mortimer says
Excellent information. What a deceptive bunch of liars. The Emir of Trans-Jordan was given his very own kingdom in the eastern half of the designated Jewish homeland. The Arab princelings played musical chairs to suit the British Foreign Office.
I am disgusted the cowardly way Great Britain created this mess. They should have plowed ahead quickly to create independent Israel, rather than playing footsie with the corrupt Arab tribal leaders.
The Pallies are obviously a concocted ethnicity composed of Arabs from nearly every region in the former Ottoman empire. The same mélange of Arab migrants of the former Ottoman Empire are found in every part of that former empire. They too must be ‘Pallies’ as well by the same token.
Rotem says
The term “Palestine” is an old Roman lie, but Arabs as “PaIestinians” – that’s the biggest deception in mankind history! Who are these people really, where did they come from, when and under what circumstances – in this article:
https://en.mida.org.il/2018/05/16/origins-arab-settlers-land-israel-2/
mortimer says
Thanks too Rotem for the very useful posts.
It was the Zionists who quickly adopted the term ‘Palestinian’ applying it to themselves, especially to those Jewish babies born in Mandatory Palestine. Many family names used by Pallies reveal their origins outside the region. Such names are the names of countries (Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, North Africa) and some are the names of various tribes living far from present-day Israel.
‘West Banker Arabs’ doesn’t have the same melodrama as ‘Palestinian’. Morever, the Arabs didn’t invent the ‘Pallies’ … it was the KGB that invented the ethnicity with the help of Nicolai Ceausescu.
gravenimage says
The Palestinian Delusion “shows that the Middle East ‘peace process’ has been a sham from the beginning”
……………..
This is so true. I had increasingly wondered how committed the “Palestinians” were to peace–it was Oslo that proved to me that they had no intention of not continuing to attack Israel.