This article neglects to mention the fact that majority of the "Arab majority" in the British Mandate of Palestine from 1917-47, migrated there themselves after the Jewish migration commenced in the 1880s, and after those Jewish migrants bought up the land from absent wealthy Arab landowners, based predominantly in Syriah, Egypt and further afar (because that's where they hail from), and turned what was essentially swamp and desert into something habitable and profiitable.
Thank you for writing this, but there remains One Big Problem: It is not (anymore) about land; the Gazans have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the radial Islamic ideology which requires all Jews dead or gone and all Muslim land clear of Jews. And other infidels. It is about the Caliphate the terrorists following this ideology wish to expand--first the entire Middle East, then the World. Many times, Israel has tried to give land to the Arabs who now call themselves Palestinians (indeed, the British tried in the very beginning). Every offer of land was--and still will be--rejected, because there is only one acceptable goal: They want all of Israel, and no Jews. And they are willing to be martyrs for this holy cause. There won't be any more land offers coming but there will be peace in the new Middle East, with prosperity and coexistence for all the inhabitants there.
I remember this outstanding and timely article by Mr. Aziz! I read it when it first came out and was absolutely blown away! The Jewish settlers arriving in the land of Palestine were NOT colonizers they were the indigenous people of the land returning home. Zionism if anything was an anti-colonial, indigenous rights movement. It's important to remember that the Jews didn't just fight the Palestinian Arabs to obtain their independence but also the British Empire. The Hagenah, Irgun and Lehi engaged in campaigns of armed resistance and sabotage against the British. The land they owned in Palestine they didn't steal or force poor Arab tenant farmers off, they legally purchased them from their absentee owners. It wasn't the Zionists who exploited, neglected and didn't care about the Arab peasanty and poor. It was the Arab upper class who did all these things. The Zionist settlers were just simply trying to buy land to rebuild their state on. But the poor Arab farmer who got their land taken from them blamed the Jews for this. It was the Arab elite who played the local Arabs off against the Zionist settlers. This inflamed an already difficult situation in which the vast majority of the Arab population hated the Jews, felt they had no right to the land and wanted them gone. Only a small minority had good relations with the Jews. Most of them had to be bribed to do so. The Jewish people are not Europeans! People forget that Europeans never accepted Jews as one of them. Jews were expelled from England, France, the German states, Spain, the Italian states, Austria, and Portugal. Tsarist Russia inflicted bloody pogroms on their Jewish population. This is why Jewish immigration to the holy land while it had started as early as the 1840s, accelerated tremendously in the 1880s. These immigrants were the direct descendants of the majority of the Jews of the holy land who fled due to an economic depression that gripped the entire Roman Empire, a series of failed uprisings and Roman repression. As to the Palestinians, they are of mixed descent. They are descended not only from Arab settlers from across the Middle East but also the Romans, the Byzantines and some of the aforementioned indigenous Jews. As to the allegation that Israel's security measures in the West Bank and Gaza are colonialism, my response would be as follows. If were talking about the West Bank, the Jewish settlers who built homes out there have every right to be there as that area was once the Kingdoms of Judea and Samaria where their ancestors had lived three millennia ago. As for the occupation it is done in a humane a way as possible and is necessary to protect Israel and its people. West Bank Palestinians are protected by the IDF from harm in wartime, can work in Israel for four times the wages they could earn at home, they can get free medical care from the IDF, can obtain Israeli citizenship, can marry Israelis if they so choose, and have a degree of self-government. That doesn't sound like colonialism to me. As to Gaza, Gaza is run by Hamas NOT Israel! Hamas is the reason Gaza has high rates of poverty, unemployment and food insecurity. Israel's blockade of Gaza is once again, a necessary security measure as is the Iron Wall. NONE of that qualifies as colonialism. You know who actually is engaging in settler colonialism? The Palestinians. Palestinians are financing and building settlements on Kurdish land in Northern Syria. You can't make this stuff up! If anyone knows anything about colonialism its Arab Muslims. They came out of Arabia and conquered Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, and all of North Africa. Israel treats minority groups exceptionally well as well as women, LGBT people and people with disabilities. I can't say the same for the Arab countries and Iran. Visit any Arab country and see how they treat Palestinians, Bedouins, Kurds, black people, women, gay people, Trans people, and disabled people. Israel is like a more compressed version of the United States in the middle of the Middle East. If you ever get the chance to visit Gaza here is what you'll see: women treated as chattel, Jews banned from citizenship, Afro-Palestinians live in a mini-1950s/60s Alabama, black Africans are sold on the auction block like its 1850, disabled folks are neglected and abused, and children are trained to be antisemitic terrorists.
The Times was owned and managed in the past by assimilated German Jews. However, the current publisher has one Jewish grandparent and is married to a non-Jew. Even when the NY Times was managed by a Jew in the 1940's, the paper had the reputation of discriminating against Jews in hiring. In addition, the paper buried details of the Holocaust at the time, not wanting to be seen as a Jewish newspaper. Any Jewish ancestry claimed by the current publisher is wholly irrelevant.
It’s rather clear that your statement proves that your historical knowledge is vastly overrated. By you. Have you never heard of the Balfour Declaration? How about the San Remo Agreements or the Treaty of Sevres? And no one on this thread seems to be enthusiastic about anything at all. Just confirming the audacity of one of the most anti-Semitic rags in the American landscape. Shalom.
The article in the New York Times precedes all of these declarations, but that's beside the point that its theme was probably a long way from the present day fixation with settler-colonialism, a lazy trope that gets deployed in knee-jerk fashion. Clearly, in the NYT, you see a line of antisemitism going back way back when; that's your prerogative; my view is more nuanced; that's all.
Happy to share understanding of history any time, preferably without reliance on left/right political prejudices.
This is a very important article to be added to the growing number of Arabs who are expressing the truth that Israel is not a settler-colonial state.
However, equally important is accuracy -- John wrote: "Having to pass through multiple military checkpoints to get home from work or school every day, or to get to the hospital, or to visit your family is an absolute utter nightmare." And I wonder when was the last time he drove through Judea-Samaria. I wrote about this in the past and will update this article because things have changed since Oct 7th, but even the restrictions added after Oct 7th have been eased over the past year. In any case, it is instructive to read the earlier article that was written during the time Israel was constantly being accused of restricting freedom of movement.
While I truly respect so much of the statements in Mr. Aziz’s article, there are a few major elements that were ignored or glossed over: When Arab Muslim lands expelled all their Jews and about 750,000 of those Jews fled to then-Palestine, those surrounding Arab lands were horrified. They then decided to pay about 800,000 Arab Muslims from many countries to move to Palestine to “balance” that sudden increase in the Jewish population of the land. So many of those suddenly “Palestinians” were actually Kuwaiti, etc. And when the surrounding Arab Muslim lands decided they wanted to “push the Jews into the sea” they realized all those new immigrants would literally be in their way. So they asked those they had paid to move there to “just temporarily” move to Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank (then part of Jordan!) so the sheer could be more easily pushed right into the sea. Thus began Israel’s War of Independence. Apparently none of those surrounding Arab Muslim countries expected Israel to win that war! But when Israel did win that war, why would they then allow those Arab Muslims with no ties to the land, who had been perfectly complicit in the plan to push the Jews into the Sea, back into Israel? Those “Paid Palestinians”had no ties to the land! Contrast them with Palestinian Christian and Muslim Arabs who had lived peacefully and undisturbed in Nazareth and other small cities probably since the time of Jesus. Big difference! So I think when the term Palestinian is used, there should be a notation of where that particular Palestinian had actually come from, and whether they had had any ties to the land before they were paid to move there to balance the Jewish population. And there is a brilliant comment above that notes well the anti-Jewish Islamic goal! I took a course in Islamic history to learn why Mohammed hated the Jews, since so knee that he had deeply respected the Jews! I was astonished when I learned the answer. You may be astonished too! It seems that Mohammed had decided he wanted to kill the King of Mecca and Medina so he could take over the rule of both cities. He approached the Jews living there and asked if he could count on their help. The resident Jews discussed the matter and explained to Mohammed that that line of rulers had been very kind and hospitable to the Jews after the Romans had kicked the Jews out of Judea about 500 years before. They told Mohammed that they were very sorry, but they felt they could not betray him because he had been so kind to them. So then Mohammed gathered 10,000 warriers and attacked the cities and murdered the king and his family…and he then also murdered all the Jews! And from then on, he wanted every Jew gone! Imagine harboring such animosity for reasonable and caring human feelings! I’ll continue another day.
I haven't read through all the comments. but I would like to ask: Based on what do you call yourself a Palestinian? From what year? Where were you, your parents, your grandparents born? And before that? Many who live in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, and Aza carry last names like Al-Masri.(of Egypt). Arrafat himself was born in Egypt. Most of the Arabs cannot properly pronounce their so-called nationality, and say it with a B sound as there is no P in Arabic, hence the Banias named after the Greek god Pan in the Golan. and so on...
My uncle was a Palestinian Jew as all the Jews in pre-state British Mandate Palestine were designated. Before then they were living in Lower Syria under the Ottoman Empire. Arabs were called just that: Arabs. "Palestinian" is a moniker that was mostly created in the 60s, with some help from Russia. of those days....
I found this to be a very good, if not an excellent, article, especially since it comes from an interested party in the debate, assumably from the other side. But there are two things he neglects to mention. One is that the religious factor of Islam does not allow this situation to be rectified peacefully. Islam's ideas are absolute with no room for compromise.
The second is that the San Remo Resolution, which came out of the San Remo Conference of 1920, explicitly gave the land to the Jewish people. Given that Palestine had never been a country, this was a fair and reasonable things for the principal allied powers, who had full rights of disposition, under International Law, to do. It is also where the first-ever Arab countries came into being, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. If those countries are legit as per San Remo, then the Jewish home (which was not yet a state but could be seen as one in the future) is just as legit. Arab leaders supported the idea of a Jewish state in 1920, just as Jewish leaders supported Arab states.
But this is still well worth reading and the author should be applauded.
It’s Judea and Samaria, NOT the occupied West Bank. Disputed territory. Checkpoints are there for a reason! Stop funding terrorism and maybe there is a chance for peace!
When the Arabs want peace, there will be peace. The rest of the conversation, albeit necessary and appropriate to establish the bona fides of the Israeli Jews, thus countering the perpetual propaganda machine of the “Palestinians” wouldn’t be taking place were it not for the Arab Muslims making war on the Jews. When will the Arabs want peace? When there is a definitive defeat. When they give up their sick dream of killing Jews and running them out of Israel or when that sick dream becomes reality. A conclusive defeat of the forces threatening Israel today would go a long way toward convincing them that attacking Israel is not the best use of their time.
This article neglects to mention the fact that majority of the "Arab majority" in the British Mandate of Palestine from 1917-47, migrated there themselves after the Jewish migration commenced in the 1880s, and after those Jewish migrants bought up the land from absent wealthy Arab landowners, based predominantly in Syriah, Egypt and further afar (because that's where they hail from), and turned what was essentially swamp and desert into something habitable and profiitable.
Thank you for writing this, but there remains One Big Problem: It is not (anymore) about land; the Gazans have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the radial Islamic ideology which requires all Jews dead or gone and all Muslim land clear of Jews. And other infidels. It is about the Caliphate the terrorists following this ideology wish to expand--first the entire Middle East, then the World. Many times, Israel has tried to give land to the Arabs who now call themselves Palestinians (indeed, the British tried in the very beginning). Every offer of land was--and still will be--rejected, because there is only one acceptable goal: They want all of Israel, and no Jews. And they are willing to be martyrs for this holy cause. There won't be any more land offers coming but there will be peace in the new Middle East, with prosperity and coexistence for all the inhabitants there.
A fine article but I suspect that Mr. Aziz is rarely a featured speaker at his local mosque.
I remember this outstanding and timely article by Mr. Aziz! I read it when it first came out and was absolutely blown away! The Jewish settlers arriving in the land of Palestine were NOT colonizers they were the indigenous people of the land returning home. Zionism if anything was an anti-colonial, indigenous rights movement. It's important to remember that the Jews didn't just fight the Palestinian Arabs to obtain their independence but also the British Empire. The Hagenah, Irgun and Lehi engaged in campaigns of armed resistance and sabotage against the British. The land they owned in Palestine they didn't steal or force poor Arab tenant farmers off, they legally purchased them from their absentee owners. It wasn't the Zionists who exploited, neglected and didn't care about the Arab peasanty and poor. It was the Arab upper class who did all these things. The Zionist settlers were just simply trying to buy land to rebuild their state on. But the poor Arab farmer who got their land taken from them blamed the Jews for this. It was the Arab elite who played the local Arabs off against the Zionist settlers. This inflamed an already difficult situation in which the vast majority of the Arab population hated the Jews, felt they had no right to the land and wanted them gone. Only a small minority had good relations with the Jews. Most of them had to be bribed to do so. The Jewish people are not Europeans! People forget that Europeans never accepted Jews as one of them. Jews were expelled from England, France, the German states, Spain, the Italian states, Austria, and Portugal. Tsarist Russia inflicted bloody pogroms on their Jewish population. This is why Jewish immigration to the holy land while it had started as early as the 1840s, accelerated tremendously in the 1880s. These immigrants were the direct descendants of the majority of the Jews of the holy land who fled due to an economic depression that gripped the entire Roman Empire, a series of failed uprisings and Roman repression. As to the Palestinians, they are of mixed descent. They are descended not only from Arab settlers from across the Middle East but also the Romans, the Byzantines and some of the aforementioned indigenous Jews. As to the allegation that Israel's security measures in the West Bank and Gaza are colonialism, my response would be as follows. If were talking about the West Bank, the Jewish settlers who built homes out there have every right to be there as that area was once the Kingdoms of Judea and Samaria where their ancestors had lived three millennia ago. As for the occupation it is done in a humane a way as possible and is necessary to protect Israel and its people. West Bank Palestinians are protected by the IDF from harm in wartime, can work in Israel for four times the wages they could earn at home, they can get free medical care from the IDF, can obtain Israeli citizenship, can marry Israelis if they so choose, and have a degree of self-government. That doesn't sound like colonialism to me. As to Gaza, Gaza is run by Hamas NOT Israel! Hamas is the reason Gaza has high rates of poverty, unemployment and food insecurity. Israel's blockade of Gaza is once again, a necessary security measure as is the Iron Wall. NONE of that qualifies as colonialism. You know who actually is engaging in settler colonialism? The Palestinians. Palestinians are financing and building settlements on Kurdish land in Northern Syria. You can't make this stuff up! If anyone knows anything about colonialism its Arab Muslims. They came out of Arabia and conquered Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, and all of North Africa. Israel treats minority groups exceptionally well as well as women, LGBT people and people with disabilities. I can't say the same for the Arab countries and Iran. Visit any Arab country and see how they treat Palestinians, Bedouins, Kurds, black people, women, gay people, Trans people, and disabled people. Israel is like a more compressed version of the United States in the middle of the Middle East. If you ever get the chance to visit Gaza here is what you'll see: women treated as chattel, Jews banned from citizenship, Afro-Palestinians live in a mini-1950s/60s Alabama, black Africans are sold on the auction block like its 1850, disabled folks are neglected and abused, and children are trained to be antisemitic terrorists.
Proof positive that the NY Slimes was, is, and will continue to be anti-Semitic despite its history of being owned by Jews!
The Times was owned and managed in the past by assimilated German Jews. However, the current publisher has one Jewish grandparent and is married to a non-Jew. Even when the NY Times was managed by a Jew in the 1940's, the paper had the reputation of discriminating against Jews in hiring. In addition, the paper buried details of the Holocaust at the time, not wanting to be seen as a Jewish newspaper. Any Jewish ancestry claimed by the current publisher is wholly irrelevant.
It's doubtful that the word 'coloniser' was loaded with odium at that time, so perhaps best to curb your enthusiasm.
It’s rather clear that your statement proves that your historical knowledge is vastly overrated. By you. Have you never heard of the Balfour Declaration? How about the San Remo Agreements or the Treaty of Sevres? And no one on this thread seems to be enthusiastic about anything at all. Just confirming the audacity of one of the most anti-Semitic rags in the American landscape. Shalom.
The article in the New York Times precedes all of these declarations, but that's beside the point that its theme was probably a long way from the present day fixation with settler-colonialism, a lazy trope that gets deployed in knee-jerk fashion. Clearly, in the NYT, you see a line of antisemitism going back way back when; that's your prerogative; my view is more nuanced; that's all.
Happy to share understanding of history any time, preferably without reliance on left/right political prejudices.
Good day.
This is a very important article to be added to the growing number of Arabs who are expressing the truth that Israel is not a settler-colonial state.
However, equally important is accuracy -- John wrote: "Having to pass through multiple military checkpoints to get home from work or school every day, or to get to the hospital, or to visit your family is an absolute utter nightmare." And I wonder when was the last time he drove through Judea-Samaria. I wrote about this in the past and will update this article because things have changed since Oct 7th, but even the restrictions added after Oct 7th have been eased over the past year. In any case, it is instructive to read the earlier article that was written during the time Israel was constantly being accused of restricting freedom of movement.
https://www.israeldiaries.com/btselem-confirms-that-checkpoints-in-judea-and-samaria-not-so-bad/
Nor is there any mention of the Palestinian terrorism and continuing violence that gave rise to the checkpoints.
absolutely
While I truly respect so much of the statements in Mr. Aziz’s article, there are a few major elements that were ignored or glossed over: When Arab Muslim lands expelled all their Jews and about 750,000 of those Jews fled to then-Palestine, those surrounding Arab lands were horrified. They then decided to pay about 800,000 Arab Muslims from many countries to move to Palestine to “balance” that sudden increase in the Jewish population of the land. So many of those suddenly “Palestinians” were actually Kuwaiti, etc. And when the surrounding Arab Muslim lands decided they wanted to “push the Jews into the sea” they realized all those new immigrants would literally be in their way. So they asked those they had paid to move there to “just temporarily” move to Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank (then part of Jordan!) so the sheer could be more easily pushed right into the sea. Thus began Israel’s War of Independence. Apparently none of those surrounding Arab Muslim countries expected Israel to win that war! But when Israel did win that war, why would they then allow those Arab Muslims with no ties to the land, who had been perfectly complicit in the plan to push the Jews into the Sea, back into Israel? Those “Paid Palestinians”had no ties to the land! Contrast them with Palestinian Christian and Muslim Arabs who had lived peacefully and undisturbed in Nazareth and other small cities probably since the time of Jesus. Big difference! So I think when the term Palestinian is used, there should be a notation of where that particular Palestinian had actually come from, and whether they had had any ties to the land before they were paid to move there to balance the Jewish population. And there is a brilliant comment above that notes well the anti-Jewish Islamic goal! I took a course in Islamic history to learn why Mohammed hated the Jews, since so knee that he had deeply respected the Jews! I was astonished when I learned the answer. You may be astonished too! It seems that Mohammed had decided he wanted to kill the King of Mecca and Medina so he could take over the rule of both cities. He approached the Jews living there and asked if he could count on their help. The resident Jews discussed the matter and explained to Mohammed that that line of rulers had been very kind and hospitable to the Jews after the Romans had kicked the Jews out of Judea about 500 years before. They told Mohammed that they were very sorry, but they felt they could not betray him because he had been so kind to them. So then Mohammed gathered 10,000 warriers and attacked the cities and murdered the king and his family…and he then also murdered all the Jews! And from then on, he wanted every Jew gone! Imagine harboring such animosity for reasonable and caring human feelings! I’ll continue another day.
I haven't read through all the comments. but I would like to ask: Based on what do you call yourself a Palestinian? From what year? Where were you, your parents, your grandparents born? And before that? Many who live in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, and Aza carry last names like Al-Masri.(of Egypt). Arrafat himself was born in Egypt. Most of the Arabs cannot properly pronounce their so-called nationality, and say it with a B sound as there is no P in Arabic, hence the Banias named after the Greek god Pan in the Golan. and so on...
My uncle was a Palestinian Jew as all the Jews in pre-state British Mandate Palestine were designated. Before then they were living in Lower Syria under the Ottoman Empire. Arabs were called just that: Arabs. "Palestinian" is a moniker that was mostly created in the 60s, with some help from Russia. of those days....
I found this to be a very good, if not an excellent, article, especially since it comes from an interested party in the debate, assumably from the other side. But there are two things he neglects to mention. One is that the religious factor of Islam does not allow this situation to be rectified peacefully. Islam's ideas are absolute with no room for compromise.
The second is that the San Remo Resolution, which came out of the San Remo Conference of 1920, explicitly gave the land to the Jewish people. Given that Palestine had never been a country, this was a fair and reasonable things for the principal allied powers, who had full rights of disposition, under International Law, to do. It is also where the first-ever Arab countries came into being, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. If those countries are legit as per San Remo, then the Jewish home (which was not yet a state but could be seen as one in the future) is just as legit. Arab leaders supported the idea of a Jewish state in 1920, just as Jewish leaders supported Arab states.
But this is still well worth reading and the author should be applauded.
It’s Judea and Samaria, NOT the occupied West Bank. Disputed territory. Checkpoints are there for a reason! Stop funding terrorism and maybe there is a chance for peace!
Excellent article. Very insightful and accurate.
The part that is not accurate is about checkpoints inhibiting movement in the PA. I will write about that.
When the Arabs want peace, there will be peace. The rest of the conversation, albeit necessary and appropriate to establish the bona fides of the Israeli Jews, thus countering the perpetual propaganda machine of the “Palestinians” wouldn’t be taking place were it not for the Arab Muslims making war on the Jews. When will the Arabs want peace? When there is a definitive defeat. When they give up their sick dream of killing Jews and running them out of Israel or when that sick dream becomes reality. A conclusive defeat of the forces threatening Israel today would go a long way toward convincing them that attacking Israel is not the best use of their time.
This article was excellent!