A Durable Peace (9 page)

In recent centuries, as the interest in biblical scholarship and archaeology grew in Europe and America, diplomats, writers,
scholars, soldiers, and surveyors toured the Holy Land in increasing numbers. They produced detailed records of what they
saw, most often in the form of books, travelogues, and articles published in various periodicals. Without exception, they
give an account of the demographic and physical condition of the country that is completely different from the one the Arabs
offer today. As early as 1697, Henry Maundrell wrote that Nazareth was “an inconsiderable village,” that Nablus consisted
of two streets, that Jericho had become a “poor nasty village,” that the fortress city of Acre was “nothing here but a vast
and spacious ruin.”
⁵⁰
In 1738, English archaeologist Thomas Shaw wrote of a land of “barrenness and scarcity… from the want of inhabitants.”
⁵¹
In 1785, Constantine François Volney described the “ruined” and “desolate” state of the country:

[W]e with difficulty recognize Jerusalem….[The population] is supposed to amount to twelve to fourteen thousand…. The second
place deserving notice is Bait-el-labm, or Bethlehem…. [A] s is the case everywhere else, cultivation is wanting. They reckon
about six hundred men in this village capable of bearing arms…. The third and last place of note is Habroun, or Hebron, the
most powerful village in all this quarter, and… able to arm eight or nine hundred men.
⁵²

Yet in 1843, Alexander Keith wrote that “in his [Volney’s] day, the land had not fully reached its last prophetic degree of
desolation and depopulation.”
⁵³

In 1816, J. S. Buckingham had described Jaffa as “a poor village,” and Ramleh as a place “where, as throughout the greater
portion of Palestine, the ruined portion seemed more extensive than that which was inhabited.”
⁵⁴
By 1835, the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine gave this description:

Outside the gates of Jerusalem, we saw indeed no living object, heard no living sound. We found the same void, the same silence
as we should have found before the entombed gates of Pompeii or Herculaneum…. a complete, eternal silence reigns in the town,
in the highways, in the country… The tomb of a whole people.
⁵⁵

And in 1857, the British consul in Palestine, James Finn, reported back to England, “The country is in a considerable degree
empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.”
⁵⁶

Perhaps the most famous traveler to the Holy Land was Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867 and wrote of his experiences
in
The Innocents Abroad:

Stirring senses… occur in this [Jezreel] valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for
thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation.
One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.

For dreary solitude, Twain recommended the Galilee:

These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines
… ; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under six funereal palms…. A desolation
is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action…. We reached [Mount] Tabor safely…. We never saw
a human being on the whole route.

In “the barren mountains of Judea,” as he called them, he found more of the same:

Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago….[Bethlehem,]
the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang, “Peace on earth, good will
to men,” is untenanted by any living creature.

And around Jerusalem:

The further we went… the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became. There could not have been more fragments
of stone… if every ten square feet of the land had been occupied by a separate and distinct stone-cutter’s establishment for
an age. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil,
had almost deserted the country…. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur,
and become a pauper village.

And for the country as a whole, he gave this bereaved lamentation:

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies…. Palestine
is desolate and unlovely…. It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land.
⁵⁷

Twain’s observations were echoed fourteen years later in the report of the eminent English cartographer Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
on Judea: “In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no appearance of life or habitation.”
⁵⁸

Stanley wrote these words in 1881—the very year that Arafat designates as the beginning of the Zionist “invasion” and the
“displacement” of the dynamic local population. That Arafat is caught in another lie is by itself unimportant. What is important
is that this lie, endlessly repeated, refined, and elaborated, has displaced what every civilized and educated person knew
at the close of the nineteenth century: that the land was indeed largely empty and could afford room to the millions of Jews
who were living in intolerable and increasingly dangerous conditions in the ghettos of Europe and who were yearning to return
to the land and bring it back to life.

It is true, of course, that there were Arabs living in Palestine, and that in the middle of the nineteenth century they outnumbered
its Jewish population. But by the third quarter of the century the total population of the entire country, Arabs and Jews,
was still only 400,000—less than four percent of today’s figure.
⁵⁹
By the end of World War I, that number had reached 900,000 on both banks of the Jordan, and roughly 600,000 in western Palestine
(the present state of Israel), although these are still insignificant numbers when compared with the overall potential of
settlement and habitation.
⁶⁰
As the German Kaiser, who visited Palestine in 1898, said to Herzl, whom he met there, “The settlements I have seen, the
German as well as those of your own people, may serve as samples of what may be done with the country. There is room here
for everyone.”
⁶¹

When intelligent and humanitarian men such as Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George considered this wasteland of Palestine, they
understood that its minuscule Arab presence, making use of virtually none of the available land for the people’s own meager
needs, could hardly be considered a serious counter to the claim of millions of Jews the world over to a state of their own—especially
when the vast reaches of Arabdom (which extends over five hundred times the area of today’s Israel and the administered territories
combined)
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would be considered a homeland for the Arabs. As Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky put it a few years later, in his testimony
before the Peel Commission:

I do not deny that [in building the Jewish state]… the Arabs of Palestine will necessarily become a minority in the country
of Palestine. What I do deny is that
that
is a hardship. It is not a hardship on any race, any nation, possessing so many National States now and so many more National
States in the future. One fraction, one branch of that race, and not a big one, will have to live in someone else’s State….
I fully understand that any minority would prefer to be a majority, it is quite understandable that the Arabs of Palestine
would also prefer Palestine to be the Arab State No. 4, No. 5, No. 6. [Today there are twenty-one Arab states]… but when the
Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish claim to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation.
⁶²

In trying to shore up their historical claim to Palestine, the Arabs have not merely distorted the demographic and physical
conditions of the country in the nineteenth century. They have tried to persuade the world that the Arabs of Palestine had
forged a distinct and unique national identity over the centuries; otherwise, they knew, they would not qualify for self-determination.
Thus, they claimed that when the Jews “invaded,” they took over what had been an independent country, “Palestine,” inhabited
by a distinct nation, “the Palestinians.”

But this claim, too, makes a farce out of history. As Bernard Lewis states, after the Arab conquest there was no such thing
as Palestine: “From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning
of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative
boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a larger entity.”
⁶³
The Turks parceled the land out among four distinct administrative districts, or
sanjaks.
The Jerusalem District included the Sinai and stretched into Africa, while Samaria, Galilee, and Transjordanian Palestine
were three additional, separate districts. A succession of rulers had carved up the country’s territory and distributed the
parts among the various districts of their empires, so that there was never an Arab state of Palestine, or even an Arab province
of Palestine. Even the very name Palestine fell into disuse among the Arabs, only to be revived by the British—and appropriated
from them by the Arabs in this century.

Who were the champions of the presumed Palestinian nation under the two centuries of Mamluk dominion or under the four centuries
of Turkish rule? In what political organizations, social institutions, literature, art, religion, or private correspondence
were expressed the ties of this phantom nation to that carved-up land?
None can be cited.
Throughout this long period the Arab inhabitants of Palestine never showed a hint of a desire for independent nationhood,
or what is called today self-determination. There were Arabs who lived in Palestine, as elsewhere, but there was no such people
as Palestinians, with a national consciousness, or a national identity, or a conception of national interests. Just as there
was no Palestinian state, so too there was no Palestinian nation or culture. Such was the conclusion of the 1937 British Royal
Commission, which attempted to determine what should be the disposition of the land:

In the twelve centuries or more that have passed since the Arab conquest, Palestine has virtually dropped out of history…
In economics as in politics, Palestine lay outside the main stream of the world’s life. In the realm of thought, in science
or in letters, it made no contribution to modern civilization.
⁶⁴

Some may argue that by the 1930s the issue had already become politicized and therefore that the historical truth cannot be
ascertained from pronouncements from that decade. But no such objection can possibly apply to eyewitness accounts of visitors
to the Holy Land from a century earlier. Here, for example, is the conclusion of Swiss scholar Felix Bovet, who visited Palestine
in 1858 and reported on the state of civilization he found there:

The Christians who conquered the Holy Land never knew how to keep it, and it was never anything to them other than a battlefield
and a graveyard. The Saracens [i.e., Arabs] who took it from them left it as well and it was captured by the Ottoman Turks.
The latter… turned it into a wasteland in which they seldom dare to tread without fear. The Arabs themselves, who are its
inhabitants, cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places
of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters.
The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their
passage through it.
⁶⁵

When Edward Robinson, Claude Conder, and the other archaeologists first toured the land, they could identify the ancient Jewish
sites with relative ease because the Arabs usually had not bothered to give them new Arabic names, leaving the original Hebrew
names in place (albeit slightly modified to be more easily pronounced in Arabic). The Hebrew names the explorers found virtually
intact included: Jeremiah’s birthplace of Anatoth (Antha), the Maccabee battlefields at Lebonah (Luban) and Beth Horon (Beth
Ur), the site of Bar Kochba’s last battle at Betar (Batir), the site of the tabernacle at Shiloh (Seilun), Arad (Tel Urad),
Ashkelon (Asqalan), Beersheba (Bir es Saba), Benei Brak (Ibn Ibreiq), Beth Shean (Beisan), Beth Shemesh (’Ain Shams), Adoraim
(Dura), Eshtamoa (Es-Samu), and hundreds of others.
⁶⁶
In fact, in the
twelve centuries of the Arab presence in Palestine before the return of the Jews in modern times,
the Arabs built only a single new town
—Ramleh.
⁶⁷
These obvious facts moved Sir George Adam Smith, author of The Historical Geography of the Holy Land,
to write
in 1891, “Nor is there any indigenous civilization in Palestine that could take the place of the Turkish except that of the
Jews who… have given to Palestine anything it ever had of value to the world.”
⁶⁸

Hence, when the world leaders at Versailles weighed the question of competing Jewish and Arab claims, they were justifiably
not concerned with any “Palestinian” national claim. No Arab leader at Versailles (or in Palestine, for that matter) came
forward to present such a claim. Headed by Feisal, son of the Sherif of Mecca and later to become King Feisal of Iraq, the
Arab delegation was preoccupied with securing independence for an Arab state that they envisioned would include present-day
Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula. In fact, they saw the Zionists as potentially useful allies. In January 1919, a month
before the opening of the Versailles Conference, Feisal signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann calling for “the closest possible
collaboration” between the Jewish and Arab peoples “in the development of the Arab State and Palestine,” and stating that
the constitution of Palestine should “afford the fullest guarantees for carrying into effect the British Government’s [Balfour]
Declaration of 2nd November, 1917,” and that “all necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration
of Jews into Palestine on a large scale.” In return, the Zionist Organization agreed to “use its best efforts to assist the
Arab State in providing the means for developing the natural resources and economic possibilities thereof.” The Arab and Jewish
peoples also undertook to “act in complete accord… before the Peace Congress.” In March, Feisal wrote to Felix Frankfurter,
who was then a member of the American delegation: “Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted
yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference, and
we regard them as moderate and proper.… We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome home.” (These documents are reproduced in full
in Appendixes A and B.)