Palestinian Homeland or a Homeland for the Jews? Which is it?
How Israel’s propaganda framed the news and history of Palestine and presented it to viewers/readers for decades, unchecked, has already profoundly shaped most people’s perception of current events, not least the perceptions of Israel’s Jews themselves.
…numerous analysts, across time and region, have established that this media consistently skews the news when it comes to Israel-Palestine. This results in nations and their governments upholding Israeli priorities rather than those of their own people, and perpetuating injustice toward Palestinians.
It’s not simply in the news that the issue of justice for Palestine has been fake-framed. Take, for example, the index of a book (published in 1992) by Anita Shapira called Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948. If you check for “Palestine” in the index, you will read, “Palestine, see Land of Israel”. Under that designation, you see: “Land of Israel (Eretz Israel)”, with many entries.
Such astonishing “scholarship” explains why people ask hasbara questions on Quora wondering if there ever was a country called Palestine. There has been a concerted effort to erase four thousand years of the history of Palestine.
There is no time left to pussyfoot around facts.
Palestinians have a right to self-determination in historic Palestine. It’s been their homeland for millennia; it’s not the homeland of the Jews, the newcomers.
By the time of the Balfour Declaration, Jews constituted about 10% of the population of Palestine, mostly as a result of immigration into Palestine and colonization. Furthermore, it is unconscionable for the Zionist movement and regime in Israel to continue to claim Palestine as belonging to Jews worldwide rather than the indigenous population while implementing that claim with force and violence as shown in the video clip below (and as they did in 1947/48 by ethnic cleansing Palestinians and denying their internationally recognized right of return) :
In the introduction titled “Palestine as a name commonly used throughout ancient history” of his most recent book, Palestinian historian Nur Masalha writes:
Palestine history is often taught in the West as a history of a land, not as Palestinian history or a history of a people. This book challenges colonial approach to Palestine and the pernicious myth of a land without a people … and argues for reading the history of Palestine with the eyes of the indigenous people of Palestine. The Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine; their local roots are deeply embedded in the soil of Palestine and their autochthonous identity and historical heritage long preceded the emergence of a local Palestinian nascent national movement in the late Ottoman period and the advent of Zionist settler-colonialism before the First World War.
[Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, Zed Books, 2018]
In chapter Eight of the same book titled “Palestinian statehood in the 18th century: early modernity and practical sovereignty in Palestine”, Masalha writes:
In the case of Palestine, as in the case of most other Arab political entities, traditionally and throughout the Middle Ages the name Filastin had indicated both an exact geographic location and the identity of the (predominantly, but not exclusively,) Arab Muslim population. Moreover, the history of modern Palestine is often studied from and with European, Ottoman and Zionist-settler perspectives; the autonomous agency and voice of Palestine and the Palestinians themselves are seldom recognized… Yet the dawlah al-qutriyyah, or the country/state — the Arabic term qutr being a ‘country’ — as a parachronism, and whether traditionally in the form of sultanate, emirate, kingdom, khanate, shaykhdom, wilayat, caliphate or any other name, was one of the most common forms of statehood throughout Muslim history and in Muslim majority countries; a statehood which often enjoyed practical sovereignty…
[Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, Zed Books, 2018, (p. 211)]
In 1973, Moshe Dayan lay claim to the West Bank and the right of Israelis to settle everywhere in the West Bank, calling it Judea and Samaria and a Jewish homeland. However, history contradicts such claims:
Hebrew, Israelite, Judean, and the Jewish people (and Judaism) have been used by the mythmakers to suggest an historic continuity. In fact, they were different people at different times in history with varying ways of life. And the earliest of these reputed pre- Christian-era forebears of present-day Jews intermarried with the Amorites, Canaanites, Midianites, Phoenicians, and other Semitic ancestors of the present day [Palestinian] Arabs, whom they found there and with whom they shared their lands… Neither the Jews nor these forebears ever constituted a race or even a distinctive pure ethnic grouping. The very word Hebrew does not indicate a derivation of a land or a region, but comes from the word Ibhri, “one who crosses over.” It was first used in reference to Abraham when he crossed over the Jordan from his home in Ur of the Chaldees into the Holy Land… It was in the face of growing competition from the new Christian faith that the rabbinate and other Jewish leaders ceased proselytization, turned inward, and began to make “a racial hoard of God,” to use the words of H.G. Wells [Outline of History — Doubleday, 1956]…
[“Sixty-seven Words: One Man’s Dream. Another’s Nightmare” in The Zionist Connection, What Price Peace? By Alfred M. Lilienthal, Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, 1978 (p.10)]
No matter Moshe Dayan’s PR in the previous century and the deeply-held conviction of Zionism that Palestine belongs to Jews worldwide rather than its native people of all religions, in all conscience, the injustice Israel continues to mete out to the Palestinian people must end.
Here is the crux of the matter: the religious/cultural minority of Jews in various countries in Europe chose (through the Zionist movement) to resolve the problems they were having by looking for a geographic territory to colonize and form “a homeland for the Jews”. They finally poured into Palestine and grabbed it — through violence that they have sustained to this day. Now, in an ironic reversal, it’s the Palestinian exiles/refugees in Europe (and elsewhere) who are demanding their own homeland back.
That’s the crux of the matter, whether you call them colonizers or whatever — they were immigrants who formed zionist “colonies” by their own description. They abused the hospitality of Palestinian Arabs. There was no empty territory for them to grab for their “Jewish homeland”, and they did look far and wide before landing in Palestine. The following is a list of countries they coveted for their “Jewish State”, and there is no doubt whatsoever that they would have been as creative in their embellishing myths to justify their violent and damaging actions as they were in regard to Palestine.
1: Noah’s Arc on the Niagara: Grand Island, New York (1818–1848).
2: Uasin Gishu, East Africa (1903–1905).
3: Angolan Zion: Benguela Plateau (1907–1914).
4: The lost Jewish continent: Madagascar (1933–1942).
5: New Jerusalem. Down Under, Port Tasmania (1904–1945).
6: Suriname (1938–1948).
7: Uganda
… the list goes up to 13.
For more on the above, see What other countries were considered for the Jewish homeland? Argentina, Uganda…?
When the question of self-determination for Palestinians comes up, we often find hasbara that ignores the historical facts above. Here, for example, is a patronizing conclusion presented in an answer on Quora based on implausible and convoluted definitions of “self-determination”:
I believe that the Palestinians are entitled to some form of self-determination (which, by the way, largely exists under the Palestinian Authority if they chose to use it) but the creation of an independent country of Palestine would require significant concessions which the Palestinians to date have not been willing to make (a demilitarized border, etc.).
The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network has exposed this campaign to deny Palestinians fundamental human rights:
… the entire Israeli project has been based on rejecting our multiple pasts and cultural heritages. The only heritage they assert is the memory of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews. And in using it as a weapon against the Palestinian struggle, they have cheapened that memory, not protected it.
The state of Israel has always been an apartheid state. Its founding was based on denying and destroying Palestinian collective life on the land, while encouraging Jewish immigration and participation in a settler-colony, itself based on a classed racial hierarchy among Jews. The new law, in Adalah’s words, is “primarily anti-Palestinian, since it seeks to entrench the immediate implications of the Nakba: the denial of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people in its homeland [and] the denial of the Palestinian refugees’ Right of Return.” In claiming the land of historic Palestine for Jews, whom Israel claims to unify and represent, it denies that land to Palestinians. This relationship rests on an apartheid system. Palestinians who resist and lay claim to their homeland are turned at best into second-class citizens. At worst, they are dispossessed, subject to violence and imprisonment, and become “terrorists” for claiming their right to have rights.
It’s way past time to reframe the discussion on this seventy-plus-years tragedy.
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Note: Most of the above was first published (23 Jan 2019) as an answer on Quora to the question: Do Palestinians have a right to self-determination as a people in Israel/Palestine?
Rima Najjar is an activist for justice in Palestine.
