The title, I will admit, is deliberately provocative. I have been involved in enough Israeli/Palestinian threads to realize they generate a lot of heat without ever getting anywhere. My point in presenting this diary is to point out how long this debate has been going on. Not just since 1948, when the state of Israel was born, but far, far longer. And yet nothing ever gets settled. (I expect to called anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli, in the comments. I vehemently deny the former; I admit to a little of the latter. I am not anti-Israeli, per se, but I believe that the state of Israel has been overly brutal in asserting its territorial claims.)
What follows are excerpts from an article published in Atlantic Monthly in 1920 by Anstruther Mackay, who was a military governor of part of Palestine during World War I.
He was also a prophet: The Zionist project, he wrote, would "arouse fierce Moslem hostility and fanaticism against the Western powers that permitted it. The effect of this hostility would be felt through the Middle East, and would cause trouble in Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India. To this might be ascribed by future historians the outbreak of a great war between the white and the brown races, a war into which America would without doubt be drawn." To our great misfortune today in Iraq and Afghanistan, where many Americans have died due to enmities aroused, in part, through our support of the state of Israel.
That the Jews, once a powerful tribe and perhaps almost a nation, should, after the lapse of so many centuries, cherish aspirations to become a modern nation with a country of their own, is both commendable and romantic. But today, and indeed in all ages, aspirations must be made to fit in with hard facts...
Today it is the Zionist portion of this remnant of Judah, which, on the statement that for three or four centuries its ancestors owned the land from which nearly two thousand years ago they were driven, claims the whole of Southern Syria, the province of Palestine. These people even go so far, on what grounds is not clear, as to claim that their boundaries run from the town of Tyre on the north to the Egyptian village of El Arish in the Desert of Sinai on the south, and also east of the Jordan, from the plain of Ammon to the Syrian desert, formerly the country of the Moabites.
Now if this interesting remnant was claiming an uninhabited country, or one in which the law of property did not exist, it might be an interesting though hazardous experiment to let them have it, and watch the result. Any practical experiment toward the attainment of a contented Jewish people would be welcome...
But the Syrian province of Palestine, about one hundred and fifty miles long and fifty miles broad, largely mountainous and sterile, contains at present a population of more than 650,000 (in 1920), divided as follows: Mohammedan Arabs, 515,000; Jews, 63,000; Christian Arabs, 62,000; nomadic Bedouins, 50,000, unclassified, 5000. Of these the Mohammedans and Christians are to a man bitterly opposed to any Zionist claims, whether made by would-be rulers or by settlers...
It will be seen that, to fulfill their aspirations, the Zionists must obtain the armed assistance of one of the European powers, presumably Great Britain, or of the United States of America. To keep the peace in such a scattered and mountainous country would be a large one. Is the League of Nations, or any of the Western powers willing to undertake such a task? But without such armed protection, the scheme of a Jewish state, or settlement, is bound to end in failure and disaster.
Now as the Zionist claims a historical right to the land, so also does the Arab, not content with the mere right of possession The bulk of the Arab Moslems came into Syria with the Caliph Omar in the seventh century A.D. The Christians are still older, and are mainly descended from the converts of Contantine and Helena in the fourth century. A few may be the descendants of Crusaders...
Certain Zionist writers in the London press have recently been making a most unfair use of the words 'Arab' and 'Bedouin.' In an article published recently it was stated that 'the Bedouin question will in course of time settle itself, either by equitable purchase of by the Bedouin's desire for the nomadic life which he will find over the border in the Arab state. If by these words, the writer means the 50,000 nomadic Bedouins, no harm would be done and all parties would be pleased... But he does not mean this . He hopes to buy out 'equitably' the half-million Mohammedan and sixty thousand Christian Arabs, who own and cultivate the soil--a stable population living, not in Bedouin tents, but in permanent villages.
Should these landlords and farmers refuse this 'equitable' bargain, it is to be presumed that our Zionist writer, by forceful arguments to be applied by the protecting power, will arouse in them a desire for the nomadic life across the border. If the Zionists honestly believed that the land is occupied and worked by nomadic Bedouins without right of ownership, they should be informed that the Arab land-owners possess title-deeds as good as, and much older than, those by which the American or English millionaire owns his palace in Fifth Avenue or Park Lane...
The present nationalist anti-European movements in Egypt, Syria, Persia, and, in fact, all through the East are founded on the Oriental fear that the Western peoples, with their more virile natures and greater energy , are pushing themselves more and more into the East and westernizing those countries--a process most distasteful to the Oriental, albeit, he himself often, to keep his head above water and to compete with the foreign settler in his country, is forced, with curses in his heart, to try to westernize himself...
I offer the antiquarian article above without comment. Perhaps the fact that I offer it will be seen as comment enough. I am, by trade, a scientist and a teacher, not a historian, and I welcome anyone who can place Mackay's point of view in historical context. Oh Unitary Moonbat, where are you?
I also pray for civility in the comments. Thank you.
This is the second in a series of diaries I hope to deliver pointing out that the past is not just prologue, it is not even the past, but the extended version of the present.
The first diary was yesterday, titled Deja Vu All Over Again--A Message to the Middle Class.