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Over the past few years,
the term nakba (also spelled naqba) has become the favorite nonsense
word of the Anti-Israel Lobby. Meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, it has
been embraced by anti-Semites all over the planet to refer to Israel’s
creation, which supposedly imposed a “catastrophe” upon the
“disenfranchised Palestinian Arabs.”
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Of course, the real
catastrophe that befell the Arabs in 1948-49 was that they failed in
their attempt to annihilate Israel and exterminate its population, and
for that they paid a price.
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Meanwhile, Nakba Nonsense
has been spreading. Google finds over 85,000 web pages referring to
Israel’s creation as a “nakba,” and a Yahoo search finds even more than
that. The anti-Israel web magazine Counterpunch cannot mention Israel
without using the term. Even Israel’s leftist minister of education,
Yuli Tamir, has orderedthat the nakba be taught as partof the
curriculum in Israeli schools, where Israel’s schoolchildren can be
taught to mourn their own country’s existence.
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(Tamir, who was previously
a professor of education at Tel Aviv University, is so bizarre that in
the summer of 1996 she published an article in the Boston Review
defending female circumcision in the Third World and denouncing those
who expressed disgust at the practice – see http://bostonreview.net/BR21.3/Tamir.html.)
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Nakba ceremonies are now
held each year by leftist professors at Israeli universities who mourn
the very creation and existence of their country.
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The nakba of the late
1940’s and 1950’s that befell large numbers of Jews living in Arab
countries who were suddenly expelled, persecuted, and stripped of their
property does not interest such people. Those Jewish refugees made new
homes in Israel and actually outnumbered the Palestinians who fled.
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Meanwhile, an urban legend
has been fabricated about the origin of the term “nakba” – a fairy tale
that claims the word was a banner waved by Palestinians starting in
1948, and that its very use shows how deep the roots of “Palestinian
nationality” go.
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So here is a little
current events quiz: What is the real origin of the term “nakba” and
what is its original meaning?
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If you get the answer to
the quiz wrong – in other words, if you say it refers to the events of
1948 – you are in very good company. I myself would have flunked the
quiz up until a few days ago, when I stumbled on the correct answer.
Not only does the bandying about of the “nakba” nonsense word not point
to any “depths of roots of Palestinian nationality,” it proves the very
opposite: namely, that there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation
or nationality at all.
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The authoritative source
on the origin of “nakba” is none other than George Antonius, supposedly
the first “official historian of Palestinian nationalism.” Like so many
“Palestinians,” he actually wasn’t – Palestinian, that is. He was a
Christian Lebanese-Egyptian who lived for a while in Jerusalem, where
he composed his official advocacy/history of Arab nationalism. The Arab
Awakening, a highly biased book, was published in 1938 and for years
afterward was the official text used at British universities.
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Antonius was an “official
Palestinian representative” to Britain, trying to argue the cause for
creating an Arab state in place of any prospective homeland promised
the Jews under the Balfour Declaration of 1917. By the 1930’s Antonius
was an active anti-Zionist propagandist, and as such was offered a job
at Columbia University (where some things don’t seem to change much).
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He served as an academic
fig leaf for xenophobic Arab nationalists seeking to deny Jews any
right to self-determination in or migration to the Land of Israel. And
he was closely associated with the Grand Mufti, Hitler’s main Islamic
ally, and also with the pro-German regime in Iraq in the early 1940’s.
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Antonius was so
passionately anti-Zionist that he continues to serve as the hero and
mentor of Jewish leftist anti-Zionists everywhere. For example, the
late Hebrew University sociology professor Baruch Kimmerling relied on
Antonius at length in his own pseudo-history, Palestinians: The Making
of a People (Free Press, 1993).
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So how does Antonius
provide us with the answer to the current-events quiz concerning the
origin of “nakba”? The term was not invented in 1948 but rather in
1920. And it was coined not because of Palestinians suddenly getting
nationalistic but because Arabs living in Palestine regarded themselves
as Syrian and were enraged at being cut off from their Syrian homeland.
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Before World War I, the
entire Levant – including what is now Israel, the “occupied
territories,” Jordan, Lebanon and Syria – was comprised of Ottoman
Turkish colonies. When Allied forces drove the Turks out of the Levant,
the two main powers, Britain and France, divided the spoils between
them. Britain got Palestine, including what is now Jordan, while France
got Lebanon and Syria.
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The problem was that the
Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians and were seen as such by
other Syrians. The Palestinian Arabs were enraged that an artificial
barrier was being erected within their Syrian homeland by the infidel
colonial powers – one that would divide northern Syrian Arabs from
southern Syrian Arabs, the latter being those who were later misnamed
“Palestinians.”
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The bulk of the
Palestinian Arabs had in fact migrated to Palestine from Syria and
Lebanon during the previous two generations, largely to benefit from
the improving conditions and job opportunities afforded by Zionist
immigration and capital flowing into the area. In 1920, both sets of
Syrian Arabs, those in Syria and those in Palestine, rioted violently
and murderously.
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On page 312 of The Arab
Awakening, Antonius writes, “The year 1920 has an evil name in Arab
annals: it is referred to as the Year of the Catastrophe (Am al-Nakba).
It saw the first armed risings that occurred in protest against the
post-War settlement imposed by the Allies on the Arab countries. In
that year, serious outbreaks took place in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq.”
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Yes, the answer to our
little quiz is 1920, not 1948. That’s 1920 – when there was no Zionist
state, no Jewish sovereignty, no “settlements” in “occupied
territories,” no Israel Defense Forces, no Israeli missiles and
choppers targeting terror leaders, and no Jewish control over Jerusalem
(which had a Jewish demographic majority going back at least to 1850).
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The original “nakba” had
nothing to do with Jews, and nothing to do with demands by Palestinian
Arabs for self-determination, independence and statehood. To the
contrary, it had everything to do with the fact that the Palestinian
Arabs saw themselves as Syrians. They rioted at this nakba – at this
catastrophe– because they found deeply offensive the very idea that
they should be independent from Syria and Syrians.
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In the 1920’s, the very
suggestion that Palestinian Arabs constituted a separate ethnic
nationality was enough to send those same Arabs out into the streets to
murder and plunder violently in outrage. If they themselves insisted
they were simply Syrians who had migrated to the Land of Israel, by
what logic are the Palestinian Arabs deemed entitled to their own state
today?
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Palestinian Arabs are no
more a nation and no more entitled to their own state than are the
Arabs of Detroit or of Paris. They certainly are not entitled to four
different states: Jordan, Hamastan in Gaza, a PLO state in the West
Bank, and Israel converted into yet another Arab state via the granting
of a “right of return” to Arab refugees.
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Speaking of Palestinians
as Syrians, it is worth noting what one of the early Syrian
nationalists had to say. The following quote comes from the
great-grandfather of the current Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad:
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“Those good Jews brought
civilization and peace to the Arab Muslims, and they dispersed gold and
prosperity over Palestine without damage to anyone or taking anything
by force. Despite this, the Muslims declared holy war against them and
did not hesitate to massacre their children and women…. Thus a black
fate awaits the Jews and other minorities in case the Mandates are
cancelled and Muslim Syria is united with Muslim Palestine.”
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That statement is from a
letter sent to the French prime minister in June 1936 by six Syrian
Alawi notables (the Alawis are the ruling class in Syria today) in
support of Zionism. Bashar’s great- grandfather was one of them.
(Copyright©2008 FrontPageMagazine.com 05/06/08)
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MATERIAL REPRODUCED FOR
EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY
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Amen to the
above!! There has never
been a political state called Palestine! That area was merely called
Palestine. On May 14, 1948 Israel, for the first time since 70
A.D., became an independent political state. The settlement,
however, was quite unacceptable to the Arab/Muslim world. Israel
was immediately attacked on all sides by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. Israel's defense was heroic, and a
truce was arranged on Jan. 7, 1949. Notice please, Israel was not
attacked by Palestine. Satan, also called the devil, has
fabricated a political state of Palestine and Palestinians in his
effort to thwart God's plan for Israel. Jesus said to the false
religionists of His day, which also has application to the Muslims of
today: "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of
your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode
not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When
he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar,
and the father of it"
(John 8:44).
In the six-day war in
1967, Israel captured Jerusalem from Jordan. The Sinai
Peninsula was captured from Egypt. Nothing was captured from the
mythical state of Palestine.
BLESS ISRAEL AND THE JEWS
"Now the LORD
had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred,
and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee:
And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make
thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing" (Genesis 12:1 & 2).
"And I
will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and
in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed" (Genesis 12:3).
Retired pastor/teacher James
McCutchan
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