The
War In Israel:
The Israeli -
Palestinian Struggle
By Paul Eyler
[ Myth vs Fact ] [ Brief History ] [ Timeline ]
Peace and safety have been a major concern for those
living in today’s conflict between two groups of people: Israelis and
‘Palestinians.’
Palestinian
Homeland?
The
Palestinians have seen much anguish the past 50 years. First of all, none of
their Arab brethren have wanted them to assimilate within their nations. Many
have been forced to live in “camps” for the past 50 years.
However, prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, there was no serious movement
for a Palestinian homeland.
In the Six-Day War, Israel captured Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem. But
they didn’t capture these territories from Yasser
Arafat. They captured them from Jordan’s King Hussein.
[How and why did all the Palestinians
suddenly discover their national identity after Israel won the war?]
What is “Palestine?” Who are the
“Palestinians?”
Palestinians? There
has never actually been a Palestinian people, nation, language,
culture, or religion. The claim of descent from a Palestinian people who lived
for thousands of years in a land called Palestine is unsubstantiated. That
land was Canaan, inhabited by Canaanites, who died out after the Hebrews
entered into the land. According to the Bible, Canaan became the land of
Israel given by God to His people.
Those who today call themselves Palestinians are Arabs by birth, language,
and culture, and are close relatives to Arabs in surrounding countries from
whence most of them came. They were attracted by Israel’s prosperity. The
name Palestine comes from the Philistines, who were not Semites, but
invaded Canaan from Crete and parts of Asia Minor.
The first time the name was used was in 70 A.D. when the Romans committed
genocide against the Jews, smashed the Temple and declared the land of Israel
would be no more thus fulfilling Christ’s prophecy in Luke 19:41-44. From
then on, the Romans promised, it would be known as Palestine. The name was
derived from the Philistines, a Goliathian people
conquered by the Jews centuries earlier. It was a way for the Romans to add
insult to injury.
Palestine has never existed—before or since—as an autonomous entity. It was
ruled alternately by Rome, by Islamic and Christian crusaders, by the Ottoman
Empire and, briefly, by the British after World War I. The British agreed to
restore at least part of the land to the Jewish people as their homeland.
There is no language known as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian
culture. There has never been a land known as Palestine governed by
Palestinians. Palestinians are Arabs, indistinguishable from Jordanians
(another recent invention), Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, etc. Keep in mind that
the Arabs control 99.9 percent of the Middle East lands. Israel represents
one-tenth of 1 percent of the landmass.
The
Jewish factor:
The
very fact that Jerusalem is mentioned more than 800 times in the Bible makes
it worthy of special attention. This unique city is the only one upon which
God has bestowed His distinctive blessing and protection (Ps 132:13-14), and
the only city for whose peace we are commanded to pray (Ps 122:6). God says He
has chosen Jerusalem as the place where He has put His name forever (2
Chr 6:6; 33:7; Ps 46:4; 48:1-8; 87:3).
After decades of pleading with Israel to repent of its idolatrous
rebellion, God pronounced through Jeremiah His reluctant judgment upon His
city and upon His land (Lv 25:23). The prophesied
70 years of desolations began with the destruction of the temple and the city
in 586 B.C. (Jer 52:7-14) and ended with the
temples completion about 516 B.C.
That the temple was restored and sacrifices resumed at the end of 70 years
is established history. According to the Bible, the angel Gabriel told Daniel
that after the Messiah had come and been “cut off” (i.e., killed, “but not for
himself”) the temple and Jerusalem would be destroyed again (Dn
9:25-26). This post-Messiah destruction would leave the Jews for “many days
without a king...and without a sacrifice...” (Hos
3:4). Obviously, something would prevent the temple from being rebuilt! As
quoted above, Jesus explained that the Gentiles would control Jerusalem.
For 1,930 years since the AD.
70 destruction of the temple, Christ’s words have been fulfilled in history,
and their continued fulfillment today is at the heart of the Middle East
crisis.
Yet in today’s Israel, only a
small minority claim to be religious. The state’s ruling elites are only
nominally Jewish.
We know that territorial nationalism was
the paramount principle of secular Zionism. That being the case, the “peace
process” signifies—as indeed it has—the end of secular Zionism!
What is crucial here, however, is not the noun “Zionism”, but the adjective
“secular”. From the Arab point of view—which, after all, is of decisive
significance—it is Israeli secularism that constitutes the greatest threat to
Arab-Islamic civilization, as may be read in the pages of Muslim scholars such
Harvard-educated Professor Seyyed
Hossein Nasr.
What Jerusalem has is spiritual value. And, make no mistake about it; what
we’re seeing in the Middle East today is an ethnic and spiritual conflict.
It’s not about oil even though any disruption affects global financial
stability. It’s not really about land even though concessions have been made
along the “Land-for-Peace” outline.
History of the Region: 1800 +
Books, such as Battleground by Samuel Katz and From Time Immemorial by Joan
Peters long ago detailed the history of the region. Far from being settled by
Palestinians for hundreds, if not thousands of years, the Land of Israel,
according to dozens of visitors to the land, was, until the beginning of the
last century, practically empty. Alphonse de Lamartine
visited the land in 1835. In his book, Recollections of the East, he writes
"Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw no living object, heard no living
sound…." None other than the famous American author Mark Twain, who visited
the Land of Israel in 1867, confirms this. In his book Innocents Abroad he
writes, “A desolation is here that not even
imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor
safely…. We never saw a human being on the whole journey.” Even the British
Consul in Palestine reported, in 1857, “The country is in a considerable
degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body
of population…”
In
fact, according to official Ottoman Turk census figures of 1882, in the entire
Land of Israel, there were only 141,000 Muslims, both Arab and non-Arab. This
number was to skyrocket to 650,000 Arabs by 1922, a 450% increase in only 40
years. By 1938 that number would become over 1 million or an 800% increase in
only 56 years. Population growth was especially high in areas where Jews
lived.
Where did all these Arabs come from?
[According to the Arabs the huge increase in
their numbers was due to natural childbirth. In 1944, for example, they
alleged that the natural increase (births minus deaths) of Arabs in the Land
of Israel was the astounding figure of 334 per 1000. That would make it
roughly three times the corresponding rate for the same year of Lebanon and
Syria and almost four times that of Egypt, considered amongst the highest in
the world. Unlikely, to say the least. If the
massive increase was not due to natural births, then were did all these Arabs
come from?]
All the evidence points to the neighboring Arab states of
Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. In 1922 the British Governor of the
Sinai noted that “illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai,
but also from Transjordan and Syria.” In 1930, the British Mandate -sponsored
Hope-Simpson Report noted that “unemployment lists are being swollen by
immigrants from Trans-Jordania” and “illicit
immigration through Syria and across the northern frontier of Palestine is
material.” The Arabs themselves bare witness to this trend. For example, the
governor of the Syrian district of Hauran,
Tewfik Bey el
Hurani, admitted in 1934 that in a single period
of only a few months over 30,000 Syrians from Hauran
had moved to the Land of Israel. Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
noted the Arab influx. Churchill, a veteran of the early years of the British
mandate in the Land of Israel, noted in 1939 that “far
from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and
multiplied.”
Far from displacing the Arabs, as they claimed, the Jews were the very reason
the Arabs chose to settle in the Land of Israel. Jobs provided by newly
established Zionist industry and agriculture lured them there, just as Israeli
construction and industry provides most Arabs in the Land of Israel with their
main source of income today. Malcolm MacDonald, one of the principal authors
of the British White Paper of 1939, which restricted Jewish immigration to the
Land of Israel, admitted (conservatively) that were it not for a Jewish
presence the Arab population would have been little more than half of what it
actually was. Today, when due to the latest “intifada”
Arabs from the territories under 35 are no longer allowed into pre-1967 Israel
to work, unemployment has skyrocketed to over 40% and most rely on European
aid packages to survive.
PLO
chief Yasir Arafat himself, self declared “leader
of the Palestinian people”, has always claimed to have been born and raised in
“Palestine”. In fact, according to his official biographer Richard Hart, as
well as the BBC, Arafat was born in Cairo on August 24, 1929 and that’s where
he grew up.
Who
is the PLO?
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), headed by
Yasser Arafat since 1969, claims to represent Palestinians. To this
day, the PLO declares, “The struggle with the Zionist enemy is not a struggle
about Israel’s borders, but about Israel’s existence.”
The
PLO was an Islamic terrorist organization. It trained many terrorists around
the world. Under Arafat the PLO became the most vicious and bloodiest
terrorist organization ever known. It holds records for the biggest hijacking
(4 aircraft at once), the largest number of hostages (300 at one time), the
largest ransom extorted ($5 million from Lufthansa) and the greatest number
and variety of targets (40 civilian aircraft, five passenger ships, 30
embassies or diplomatic missions, and massacres of school children), etc. The
Palestinian Prize for Culture was recently awarded to Abu
Daoud for his book telling how he planned and murdered eleven Israeli
athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics!
However, many Palestinians have been a thorn in the side of the Arab world
as well.
The PLO’s terrorism against Jordanian civilians was so vicious that King
Hussein chased them into Lebanon (see study on Black September). There the
PLO wiped out the towns of Damur,
Beit Mallat, Tall
Abbas and others. Its reign of terror went largely
unreported. About 300,000 Lebanese civilians were murdered in the PLO’s
attrocities against that country before the
Israelis expelled them. Yet Israel was painted the villain!
What about Islam’s holy sites?
Are there really any in Jerusalem?
Don’t the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the
Rock (on the Temple Mount) in Jerusalem represent Islam’s third most holy
sites?
In actuality, the Koran says nothing about Jerusalem. It mentions Mecca
hundreds of times. It mentions Medina countless times. It never mentions
Jerusalem. With good reason. There is no historical
evidence to suggest Mohammed ever visited Jerusalem.
The Temple Mount has only been considered the third holiest site to Islam
since 1967. Before this, only one Muslim leader ever visited the site, and
that was King Abdullah I of Jordan, who was shot and killed outside the Al-Aqsa
mosque by a Palestinian in 1953.
So how did Jerusalem become the third holiest site of Islam? Muslims today
cite a vague passage in the Koran, the seventeenth Sura,
entitled “The Night Journey.” It relates that in a dream or a vision Mohammed
was carried by night “from the sacred temple to the temple that is most
remote, whose precinct we have blessed, that we might show him our signs. ...”
In the seventh century, some Muslims identified the two temples mentioned in
this verse as being in Mecca and Jerusalem. And that’s as close as Islam’s
connection with Jerusalem gets—myth. Meanwhile, Jews can trace their roots in
Jerusalem back to the days of Abraham.
The
Muslims controlled it for a thousand years and they let it crumble into
rubble-until they discovered it was significant to the Jews; then, of course,
it became critical to Islam. Under Jewish authority, the land has blossomed
both agriculturally and economically as foretold in Scripture.
Is it legitimate that the Palestinians desecrate and usurp any holy site
that falls under their authority? The Temple Mount is more sacred to Jews than
Muslims, yet Jews are prevented from worshipping there. Even a visit by a Jew
is resented, as was seen in the case of the visit of Ariel Sharon, even though
it was OK’d by the head of the Palestinian Security Services,
Rajoub Jabril.
The Palestinians took over Joseph Tomb from the Israelis when they withdrew
from the site in Nablus (biblical
Shechem, even though it was given for Jewish
worship in the Oslo Agreements. The Palestinians, having killed guards and
worshippers, proceeded to destroy the Jewish presence and then renovate it
into a Muslim mosque. The Palestinian leaders are now calling to do the same
to Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Jews
are to be evicted as the Palestinian Muslims take over. They have also burned
the Jewish synagogue in Jericho while Palestinian Police looked on.
To whom are these sites more sacred? Israel allows mutual worship at the
sites and guarantees freedom of worship and access. The Muslims do not, and no
one in the international community complains about this practice.
As the Palestinian leadership claims that they are disenfranchised, it
should be noted that the Israeli government (Barak)
offered them 92% of the West Bank, east Jerusalem as part of a joint capital
and sovereignty over the Temple Mount AND THEY REJECTED THE OFFER. This was
more than any Israeli leader had offered or was expected to offer. Yet, Arafat
rejected it and then claims that there is no movement in the Peace Process.
What is left for Israel to offer? And now, how could most Israelis even agree
to such generous terms now that they know that their peace partners do not
want peace at all?
What is their true intent?
Many have warned that the Oslo Peace Process was a sham on the part of the
Palestinians to get armed PLO terrorists into the heart of Israel to initiate
a rebellion and war to destroy Israel according to their published “Phase
Program.” It seems that the Palestinian program is not only a plan on paper,
but a plan that is now being implemented before our eyes today.
The
global media portrays the Palestinians as children and
youths who are only armed with rocks, the reality is that they have a
20,000 plus trained army with automatic weapons in the heart of Israel who are
firing against the Jews. Their children are put on the front lines in front of
the cameras to gain international sympathy, while their snipers fire from the
surrounding buildings. Any national government would meet the intensity of
violence of mobs with police and military strength to stop the lunacy and
bring calm for the larger community. Yes, the government would be better armed
to defend themselves, but this does not necessarily make the defending force
“bad” and the offending group “good.”
*Interesting Note: Many Israeli Jerusalem
Arabs are fearful of being transferred to Palestinian Authority jurisdiction
if a final-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is reached.
Arutz-7 news service reported that many of them have begun catching up on back
taxes and other civil debts as well as bringing their documents up to date so
that they can claim they are Israeli citizens in good standing. It is
speculated that an overwhelming majority of Jerusalem’s Arabs might choose to
remain under Israeli control rather than come under Palestinian jurisdiction.
It is sobering to recall that virtually everything the Palestinians are
demanding today the Israelis were willing to give them in 1948. At that time
the Jews wanted only a small part of Palestine, which did not include
Jerusalem. The Arabs rejected this, threatening to drive the Jews into the
sea. Fifty years later and three subsequent wars have seen the Arabs
consistently attacking Israel and losing those things they are now demanding
back from the peace process, mainly land.
Question: Has there ever been another
nation that ceased to exist for nearly 2,000 years and was and reborn in a
day? (just as foretold by the prophet Isaiah)
Sources: