British Mandate of Israel – OOPS! – Palestine
I’m killing myself trying to think how we Israelis can get out of this stupid debacle we are in whereby Arabs are now calling themselves Palestinians in order to get people around the world to march along the streets with fantastic posters on their behalf that say
#29NovPalestina Brighton says: "FREE PALESTINE!" #BDS pic.twitter.com/5qR6512qxE
— Brighton BDS (@BrightonBDS) November 29, 2015
Masses of concerned right-thinking (meaning left-thinking) people parade the streets at intervals screaming for Israel to stop the so-called occupation of so-called Palestine.
And what can we Israelis do aside from try to shout them down with things like: “There never was a sovereign nation called Palestine!” And then we go on and on giving a history lecture nobody wants to hear (who listened to history class in high school? And we think people are going to listen now? Heck, there are some Americans who still don’t know lots of important stuff about Canadian history and Canada’s their next-door neighbour! Sorry, Americans, I’m only using you as an example of how people didn’t pay attention in history class.)
Anyway, we give history lessons to which people have neither the inclination nor the patience to pay attention and with that we certainly cannot compete with gleeful and passionate demonstrations during which everyone chants:
BDS Campaign Set To Escalate In Australia After Pro-Palestinian Groups Offer Support https://t.co/Ckz0kuXytY pic.twitter.com/W9uAx9tboO
— newmatilda (@newmatilda) October 26, 2015
Adalah NY and the US campaign to end the #Israeli occupation of #Palestine https://t.co/kxu8eTmlF7 POWER OF #BDS pic.twitter.com/1WQJzlMk8m
— Free_Palestine (@JeSuis4Peace) October 27, 2015
I mean, who can resist a good demonstration even if you don’t really know what you’re talking about!
Then suddenly my friend Steve Blowers puts up this innocuous comment on my Facebook page as part of a discussion about the fallacy of “Palestine” and suddenly lights went off in my head. Here is what Steve wrote:
And I suddenly got this funny picture in my head of all these Arabs and everyone demonstrating in the streets with placards that read:
No, eh? Doesn’t quite work, does it!”
What would everyone do if the Mandate had been called the British Mandate of Israel?
Of course, we know why the Brits didn’t call it that – they had promised the very same land to both the Jews and the Arabs. Now if they had called the Mandate “Israel”, the Arabs would not likely have believed that the Brits really intended to give it to them, would they have? And then the Arabs would likely not have been so enthusiastic about helping the Brits in their war against the Ottomans, would they have been? And then . . .. But here I go again – giving you the history lesson you never wanted.
Maybe, instead of calling Israel Israel, we could have kept the name, Palestine, and then we Jews would still have been the Palestinians. Yeh right! And the Inuit should have kept letting people call them Eskimos! And the Blacks in the States should have let people keep on calling them Niggers! As if names and labels matter! Right?
I do like the idea of the British Mandate of Israel.
Oh well! Why should things be simple or logical when you can make them complicated and misleading and make sure people argue about your true intentions for generations to come!
First published on Times of Israel blogs.
Another history lesson, sorry.
Why has the name ‘Arab’ become a generic descriptor, after all the ‘Palestinians’ certainly fail to be truthful about their homelands of origin.
The (1831-1840) conquest, by Egypt’s Mohammed Ali (born in Mecedonia) resulted in a flow of Egyptian and Sudanese migrants settling empty spaces between Gaza and Tul-Karem up to the Hula Valley. They followed in the footsteps of thousands of Egyptian draft dodgers, who fled Egypt before 1831 and settled in Acre. The British traveler, H.B. Tristram, identified, in his 1865 The Land of Israel: a journal of travels in Palestine , Egyptian migrants in the Beit-Shean Valley, Acre, Hadera, Netanya and Jaffa.The armies of Mohammed Ali were comprised of Eqyptian Mamluks, Ottoman Georgians, and Albanian mercenaries.
In 1917, the Arabs of Jaffa represented at least 25 nationalities, including Persians, Afghanis, Hindus and Balochis. Hundreds of Egyptian families settled in Ara’ Arara’, Kafer Qassem, Taiyiba and Qalansawa. In 1908, Yemenite migrants settled in Jaffa, and Arabs from Syria’s Huran proliferated in the ports of Haifa and Jaffa.
Ibrahim Pasha, son of Mohhamad Ali, Palestine’s Egyptian conqueror, conducted campaigns into Syria and left behind him permanent colonies of Egyptian immigrants at Beisan, Nablus, Irbid, Acre and Jaffa. Some 500 Egyptian soldiers’ families established a new quarter in Jaffa, and that was only one among countless similar situations. Together with the resettlement of Jews, which dates from 1830, Jaffa began to grow. In another area, the Muslims of Safed are mostly descended from Moorish settlers and from Kurds. Much of the Muslim population that remained in the country was transient, as observed in 1918 by the Arab leader, Sharif Hussein. “In 1878, groups of Circassians (Caucasians), Algerians, Egyptians, Druses, Turks, Kurds, Bosnians and others came into Palestine. At least 25% of the 141,000 Muslims [in the whole of Palestine in 1882] were newcomers or descendants of those who arrived after the 1831 Egyptian conquest. In 1858, James Finn, the British Consul General in Jerusalem, reported that ‘Mohammedans of Jerusalem’ were scarcely exceeding one quarter of the whole population.”
The various peoples who constituted the Mamluks have a suprising variety of nationalities. Their history, especially in the Levant, is worth exploring.
The Arabian Qaisi, and Yamani tribes migrated into Nablus from Jordan in the 17th century, although the Syrian branch claims to have settled in the 12th century.
WOW. Thanks for this history lesson. I can see I have more research to do.