A few months ago, I was invited to a conference by Dr. James Zogby. It was an interesting and concerning experience for me because I heard firsthand the half-truths that the Arab world proclaims against the State of Israel. Many of these proclamations are echoed in the anti-Israel demonstrations that curiously began to spread right after the massacre and kidnapping on October 7th by the terrorist group Hamas.
There are many things that are truly worrisome and striking. It’s understandable that Mr. Zogby holds conferences across the country for those who want to fuel this anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hatred. What is strange is that he is an advisor to the U.S. government on Middle Eastern affairs.
It is somewhat understandable that the media would support groups with histories and current activities tied to terrorism, considering Iran is behind a vast plan of misinformation and agitation. Many people, instead of seeking serious information, simply take at face value what they easily see in videos made and shared on social media.
What is perplexing is that organizations like the Red Cross and the United Nations would partake in this biased ignorance, despite being organizations supposedly dedicated to neutral positions that help resolve conflicts rather than inflame them by taking sides. This is a clear manifestation of anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, and anti-Israelism.
I came across an incredibly insightful interview that sheds some light on all this misinformation regarding the conflict and the war we are currently experiencing. The interviewee is Francisco Gil White, a professor at ITAM, a political anthropologist, and historian. He holds a master’s in social sciences from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Evolutionary and Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of
California, Los Angeles.
This time, I’ll simply transcribe some of his answers to share with you. It may take more than one Temple Times due to its length.
We can’t talk about Palestinians before 1920 because it was in 1920 when the British Mandate for Palestine was created. Before that, no one in that area would say ‘I am Palestinian,’ and there was no traditional or formal territorial demarcation in the Ottoman Empire called Palestine. The inhabitants of that area referred to the place as Bilad al-Sham. They considered themselves to be in Syria, to be part of Syria. That’s how they saw it.
‘Palestine’ is a term that was mainly used in the West because it comes from when the Roman Empire concluded a genocide against the ancient Jewish people. In the 1st and 2nd centuries, in 135 C.E., the genocide ended with the defeat of Bar Kokhba. After the Romans completed this genocide, they could now impose themselves over the Jews as they wanted. Besides banning conversion to Judaism under penalty of death and other measures that completely devastated the city of Jerusalem, they changed its name to Aelia Capitolina and changed the name of the province, which had been called Judea after the Kingdom of Judea, to Syria-Palestina, and prohibited Jews from entering.
In what had been Jerusalem, they built a Greek city. They imported many Greeks to live there. So, what the Romans were doing was an ethnic cleansing process. They were trying to erase the Jews from their own land. That’s where the name Palestine comes from. Politically speaking, Palestine means: ‘This is not Jewish land, and Jews are not allowed.’ That’s what it means politically. Well, that’s the function of Palestine.
Etymologically, it means something else. It means the land of the Philistines. But obviously, it made no geographical, historical, or political sense to call that Syria-Palestina because the Philistines had ceased to exist centuries earlier. Long before the Romans decided to give the place this name, the Philistines were no more. The political purpose of renaming it was to say that it was not Jewish land.
By 1947, there was a vote in the UN to partition what had been the British Mandate for Palestine, and it’s important to emphasize that the proposal was to create two states, one for the Jews and another for the Palestinian Arabs. The Jews accepted, even though much of the land that had been promised to them had already been taken away. They said that as long as they had something, they accepted this partition. The Arabs said no, we do not accept, we do not want a state.
The leader of the Palestinian Arabs, Al-Husseini, said we don’t want a state. And Hassan al-Banna, who was the Secretary General of the Arab League, publicly announced what they did want.
He said: We are going to exterminate the Jews in the Middle East, announcing the 1948 war, which is the Israeli War of Independence. Hassan al-Banna, Secretary General of the Arab League and a disciple of Husseini, said this is going to be a massacre, like those of the Mongols and the Crusades.
This was what they wanted. And this is very important because people believe that what is happening in the Middle East is a territorial dispute. That is a facade. There is no territorial dispute. We can clearly see this in the definition of Palestine adopted by the PLO.
The PLO defined Palestine as the territory invented by the British government in 1920. The British government in 1920 arbitrarily drew the territory they divided in the Middle East with France and said: ‘This is the British Mandate for Palestine.’ Two years later, they redefined it and took away what is now Transjordan. So, there was no reality to this term Palestine; they were inventing it. Palestine was a word used in Europe. It was not used in the Ottoman Empire, which had owned those lands for centuries. Palestine and Palestinians did not exist for anyone. Only starting in 1920, when the British Empire drew this territory and promised the League of Nations that it would be a Jewish homeland so that they would be allowed to control that territory. That was the condition to which they committed when they took possession of what was called the British Mandate for Palestine.
To understand the conflict, we must go back years in history. When we talk about this alleged territorial dispute, it’s also important to understand that this Palestinian Arab movement was never a movement that emerged from grassroots pressure. Instead, it has always been directed from above by its leaders. It seems like a movement, but it is an issue of the Arab elites.
When the Zionist Jews began to arrive in the British Mandate for Palestine, many small Arab landowners wanted to sell their lands to the Zionists who were arriving to cultivate them. Because another important point to clarify is that no one had their land forcibly taken away. People have this idea in their heads that the Zionist Jews arrived there because the model they are presented with is that of colonialism. So, they are constantly told that Israel is a colonialist country that dispossessed the natives of their own land, of their place, etc.
The history is not that. The history is that the Zionist Jews arrived and bought land from the Arab landowners who had titles and wanted to sell, and many wanted to sell. And Amin al-Husseini, who is the founding father of the Palestinian Arab movement, who came from one of the most powerful aristocratic landowning families in the entire region of the Arabs, would threaten the small Arab landowners with his gang of terrorists, saying: ‘Woe to you if you dare sell your property to these Jews who are buying it and paying exorbitantly. Woe to you! Because if you sell, we’ll come and kill you and your entire family,’ and they would follow through on those threats.
People ended up terrified; the small landowners no longer dared to sell their properties to the Jewish Agency, which was the organization responsible for managing the lands before the creation of the State of Israel. Then Husseini would come with the same thugs and say that he would buy them, and he would buy them at rock-bottom prices, consolidate them, and sell them to the Jewish Agency in larger estates to become kibbutzim and other communities.
With that money, because he sold them for exorbitant prices, he financed terrorism against the Jews themselves.
This is the founding father of the Palestinian Arab movement. But what is very important here is that he was an aristocrat. This was the most powerful family among the Arabs living there. They were the ones organizing terrorism. The common Arab people did not want to kill Jews. The lower-class Palestinian Arabs were benefiting from the Zionist immigration to the Mandate because it was creating an economic boom.
The social structure that existed in the British Mandate for Palestine, in what was the Arab society, consisted of highly unproductive estates owned by aristocrats. And below them were peasants who were semi-slaves of these Arab feudal lords. They had unpayable debts and therefore couldn’t leave. They were socially and economically trapped.
In contrast, the Zionists arrived, bought the land, and the former peasants were freed and could now freely find employment in the industries that the Zionist Jews were creating, in the kibbutzim, and new cities, and their lives improved because they went from being slaves to being employees earning decent wages and able to pay off their debts.
To be continued in the next Temple Times…
For now, I just want to add that I wish all of us to be inscribed and sealed for a good year. May we see peace in Israel and in the whole world and may those who sow blind hatred encounter people who think, research, and do not remain in unfounded and blind hatred.
Le Shana Tova Tikatevu VeTechatemu
Rabbi Gustavo Geier
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