DuBois: Where is knowledge

Posted: Sunday, April 14, 2002

Has everyone lost what little knowledge of history they may have possessed?

I am sick of hearing about the poor Palestinians. Just who are they? There is no language know as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian culture. There never has been a country or nation known as Palestine, governed by Palestinians.

Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese and Iraqis.

The first time the name Palestine was used was in 70 A.D., when the Roman Empire crushed Israel and destroyed the second temple. The Romans declared the nation of Israel would be no more, and renamed the land Palestina (from the word Philistine - an ancient enemy of Israel). It was the Romans' way of adding insult to injury.

The ancient area of Palestine comprised a large, ill-defined chunk of what is now the Middle East. After the Romans, it was governed by Islamic conquerors, Christian crusaders, the Ottoman Empire and eventually became a British mandate after World War I. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 obligated Britain to "the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people." At that time, no restrictions either east or west of the Jordan River were imposed.

The original mandate comprised all the area now known as Israel and Jordan. By the time the British formally established the Palestine Mandate, Arab pressures resulted in a separation of the land area. Jews would be restricted to the land west of the Jordan River; Arabs would occupy the area east of the river. Because there was no historic Arab name for this region, it was called Trans-Jordan (meaning "across the Jordan").

This act administratively established a homeland for Arabs who had been living in the entire British mandate of Palestine. To that end, the British installed Hashemite ruler Emir Abdullah, who previously had been expelled from the Arabian peninsula.

By administratively partitioning the mandate, Britain reduced the available homeland for the Jews to only 22 percent of the area that was supposed to have become the Jewish national homeland as called for in the Balfour Declaration. No Jews would be permitted to live east of the Jordan River, but Arabs could (and did) live west of it.

It was not until 1946 that Britain finally granted Trans-Jordan its full independence, formally partitioning the Palestine Mandate and creating an independent Palestine-Arab state. In 1947, under further pressure from the new Arab states, the U.N. General Assembly voted to further partition western Palestine (the Jewish portion from the Jordan River west to the Mediterranean) into further Arab and Jewish states.

Desperate for a homeland that would ensure their security after the Holocaust, the Jews accepted the U.N. decision. The Arab states did not. In 1948, Israel declared statehood, and the Arab states immediately launched an attack to destroy the Jews. Arab armies forced the Arab population to flee, promising they could return after Israel had been crushed. The invading Arabs were eventually repulsed; however, the area now known as the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and East Jerusalem had been annexed by Trans-Jordan, and the Gaza Strip by Egypt.

In 1949, Israel signed an armistice with the Arab states, including Trans-Jordan, which in April of that year changed its name to Jordan. This was simply a cease-fire, not an acknowledgement of changed borders. In fact, of the entire international community, only Pakistan and Britain recognized the new "de facto" borders.

In 1967, the Arab states again attacked Israel, this time losing back to Israel the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Egypt's Gaza Strip. Egypt also lost most of the Sinai Peninsula. Israel eventually returned the Sinai to Egypt as part of their peace accord.

The eventual disposition of the West Bank is still very much up in the air. But to call this area "Palestinian" land is utterly wrong, as is calling the Arabs who moved into the area in the early 20th century "Palestinians."

Dennis DuBois of Amarillo is a frequent contributor to the Other Opinion page.

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