The Myth of Palestinian Indigeneity

A central part of the Palestinians’ national narrative is that they have occupied their homeland for thousands of years—or, in Mahmoud Abbas’s words, “since before Abraham”—and were only recent displaced or expelled by Zionists. While Arabs have indeed lived in the land of Israel since the Islamic conquest, there were successive waves of mass non-Arab immigration from the Middle Ages until World War II. In The Rape of Palestine, first published in 1938, William Ziff recounts some of this history, paying special attention to the role of the British government in encouraging further Arab immigration even while making it increasingly difficult for Jews to enter the land:

It was always the foreign soldier who was the police power in Palestine. The Tulunides [a 9th-century Muslim dynasty] brought in Turks and Africans. The Fatimids [who ruled Egypt and parts of the Levant in medieval times] introduced Berbers, Slavs, Greeks, Kurds, and mercenaries of all kinds. The Mamelukes [who replaced the Fatimids] imported legions of Georgians and Circassians. Each monarch for his personal safety relied on great levies of slave warriors. Saladin, hard-pressed by the Crusaders, received 150,000 Persians who were given lands in Galilee and the Sidon district for their services. . . .

Lured by stark evidence of labor scarcity and big pay, peoples from all surrounding states began to drift into Palestine [after World War I]. Though a huge corps of coast and frontier guards kept vigilant watch to prevent the entry of “illegal” Jews, Arabs from anywhere entered without even the gesture of passport investigation. The report of the [British] Peel Commission admits frankly that the inhabitants of Syria and Transjordan “are free to enter the corresponding districts in Palestine without special formality.” It is, in fact, by disguising themselves as Arabs that most “illegal” Jewish immigration is accomplished.

Though the [British] government solemnly estimates in 1937 a total Muslim increase by immigration of only 22,535 since the time of the British occupation, evidence of a vast influx of desert tribesmen is obvious everywhere. As early as 1926, Colonial Secretary [Leopold] Amery cautiously conceded that despite the growth of the Jewish element “the increase of the Arabs is actually greater than the Jews.” Figures presented before the Peel Commission in 1937 showed the Arab population to have more than doubled in fourteen years. This admitted gain in half a generation must either be attributed to outside immigration or to the most astonishing philo-progenitiveness in medical history. . . .

[T]he government itself acknowledged in 1922 the immigration of whole tribes “from the Hejaz and southern Transjordan into the Beersheba area,” a fact which in itself must make its estimates of [minimal] Arab immigration far-fetched. Other approximate figures are available from scattered but credible sources. One of these is the statement of the French governor of the Hauran in Syria, that from his district alone, in the summer of 1933, 35,000 people had left for Palestine as a consequence of bad crops.

Read more at Middle East Forum

More about: Israel & Zionism, Israeli history, Mandate Palestine, Palestinians

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF