22 thoughts on “Why is there no State of Palestine?”

1. Your statement “There is no State of Palestine because between 1949 and 1967, when every inch of the West Bank and Gaza strip were in Arab hands, the Arabs chose not to create one. Choosing instead to focus on destroying Israel” is not quite accurate. It is because the part of the British Mandate that was not retained by Israel in 1948 was grabbed by Jordan and Egypt. This is exactly what would happen if a State of Palestine were to be created (heaven forbid!) in the Arabs’ One-State Solution scenario, i.e. if they conquered Israel and drove the Jews into the sea. It would take Palestine’s Arab neighbours (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon (in the form of Hezbollah) no more than a couple of years, if not sooner, to grab the land for themselves.

2. The time-line of the events listed in this article is gold-dust.. Thank you.
   First and foremost, I am a humanitarian and I do care for the people that call themselves Palestinians. However, may I remind the readers that post the 1967 Six-Day War, the tactic of creating the Palestine identity came about through the PLO.. Prior to that, the ‘Palestinians’ called themselves Arabs which explains why these people rejected so many opportunities to have borders of their own..

   If there is a national character, the Arabs are romantics and ‘dream’ about their right to return. This is why what started out as 700,000 Palestinian Arabs living in Jordan as ‘refugees; now number 2,000,000

   1. Spot on, Mike, I lived in Israel before 1967 and remember how they called themselves Arabs NEVER Palestinians, an epithet reserved for the Jews. I have been told that there is a record of a court case brought by an Arab against the British Mandate authorities for insulting him by calling him a Palestinian!

      1. But surely, Josephine, ‘Arab’ refers to an ethnic group which may be spread over different national boundaries…? As Jews are. Thus we might be British or American Jews, Egyptian Jews, Australian Jews…and so on. I don’t see your point as a sound argument against Arabs being allowed to call themselves Palestinian Arabs.

         1. Arabs don’t call themselves Palestinian Arabs, though. They call themselves Palestinians.

         2. Josephine Bacon is correct. The Arabs in what was Palestine called themselves “Arabs”. I read many also called themselves South Syrians, though I suspect that was earlier. As for the term “Arabs”, it is definitely not an ethnic group. Indeed there is no definition. I recently asked a Mullah to define “Arab” and all he could say it is anyone who speaks Arabic. Like, I learn the language and become magically an Arab? Ethnically the MidEast population can trace roots to all the tribes and peoples that populate the Bible and other literature of the Levant and North Africa in early CE and all BCE, Archaeology needs to be studied to make sense of all this. In brief there is no “Arabs”. Indeed there are Arabians, from the peninsula. Others adopted their language and religion, and some ethnic mix occurred, as it always had done over the millennia. The Palestinian Arab has roots in a population of about 100,000 (c. 1830) , many of whom proudly claimed descendency from Jews who had converted to Islam. Others were Christians, some immigrants, some descendents from local Christians from 2000 years ago. Others were Jews with roots just as ancient (few!), and more recent immigrants. Over the centuries since 170 CE, Jews came and went, but always kept a presence in the Holy Land. To the 100,000 more Muslims joined from all corners of the Muslim world, from Morocco to Persia, Bosnia & Tcherkessia to Egypt and Yemen and Africa (importation of slaves), up to 1917. From then to 1948 Muslims immigrated from adjacent countries simply because the Brits and Jews had opened economic opportunities. Then in 1948 the newbees fled. In a nutshell that is the history.

3. Professor Eugene Kontorovich International law is on Israel’s side. Watch the video to understand why! This must be one of the best video presentations that very clearly explains international law and the legal case for Israel and for Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria. Definitely watch this to have a better understanding of international law so you can talk about Israel’s situation intelligently with others.

   http://www.torahcafe.com/jewishvideo.php?vid=33fb484b5

   1. I have seen him before. He is very informative.

   2. Illuminating, thanks for posting.

   3. I want to thank you, Rondo, for pointing me to this fine presentation by Eugene Kontorovich. Now that we’ve lost Howard Grief and Salomon Benzimra, I’m doubly glad that we have Professor Kontorovich, who has written tellingly of Jewish rights in Palestine under international law. It is well worth looking for his articles and videos on the legality of the Israeli settlements, Israel’s legal borders, and the ways in which Israel is treated differently from other nations.

4. What is the meaning of ‘not relevant’ in the above table?

   1. It simply means ‘not applicable’. Between 1949 and 1967 all of the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab hands, therefore the concept of needing someone to ‘offer’ a Palestinian state becomes irrelevant to the question. The same of the current situation in Gaza.

      1. Thank you.

5. Because, Jane, it is how they perceived themselves. The Arabs living in Syria-Palestine, a province of the Ottoman Empire until 1918, and subsequently living in the British Mandate of Palestine, never called themselves Palestinians, the only people who called themselves Palestinians were the Jews. Jews who volunteered to serve in the British army even wore a shoulder flash bearing the word “Palestine”. There was no other way therefore to describe the non-Jews living there, and indeed they themselves never described themselves as anything else. Even during the years 1948 to 1967, those living in what is now the West Bank and the Gaza Strip never referred to themselves as Jordanians or Egyptians although those were their nationalities. Yet even during that period they had no aspirations for an independent state, or if they had they would soon have been outlawed by the Egyptian and Jordanian monarchies and subsequent Egyptian dictatorship.

6. There is a Palestinian state. Jordan. The u.n. created 2 states Israel and Trans-Jordan. The Jews accepted theirs, while the Arabs rejected theirs and start a war.

7. It’s an interesting point but I’m still not convinced you have a strong enough argument to bar Palestinian Arabs from calling themselves Palestinian. Whatever they did or didn’t call themselves historically is beside the point because critics could argue, well there were no Jewish Israelis before 1948 – in fact no Israelis at all; and in antiquity the inhabitants of the Roman province of Palestine didn’t call themselves Israelis at all; as I understand it, they called themselves Hebrews; and under the Ottomans, as you say they were known as Palestinians. Do you see what I’m trying to get at? In historical terms, both sides have an equal claim to the name, which is why I say that as an argument for there not being a state of Palestine today, it just doesn’t work. There are better arguments for that.

8. There is an Arab state from the Bristish Mandate. It is Jordan.

9. Names not withstanding, to me, the crux of the matter is that the UN offered both sides land. The Israelis gladly took their offer, and the Arabs rejected it. It is at this point that the argument really begins. The Arabs not only rejected the offer, but they attacked with 5 fully mechanized modern armies. The Israelis won. All those Arabs that lost their homes, made the choice to turn and fight. They are NOT refugees, they are losers. Those who were effectively displaced, should have been absorbed by the attacking Arabs. Instead, what we have had for 70 years now is a generational claim to refugee status, based on a war they started. Over funded, with their corrupt leaders stealing billions, they have dragged this false issue along way too long. In stark comparison, look at how quickly the legitimate refugees of Syria have been absorbed. Weeks, maybe months, but certainly not decades. There never ha been a country of Palestine. When Israel was again attacked in 1967, they took the West Bank from JORDAN. Nobody had ever heard of a Palestinian until then. They didn’t claim nationalist right under Jordan, or the others in Gaza, which was Egypt. Now, suddenly, when the Jews win the spoils of war, they show up. If the rules people expect Israel to adhere to were applied globally, Texas, California, New Mexico and Arizona would go back to Mexico, and many European and Asian borders would have to be undone. Face it, this whole charade of :Palestinians: is propagated because people don’t like Jews. Let’s not let the facts get in the way, right?

10. Hooray! Spot on as usual Dave! It has also been largely forgotten that the whole area of Eretz Israel consisted of swamp and desert with a few scattered towns such as Jaffa and Jerusalem when it was under Ottoman rule. Contemporary sketches show how deserted it was. Arabs started to come to Eretz-Israel from the surrounding countries towards the end of the 19th century, when the Jews had begun to resettle and were reviving the land and especially the port of Jaffa. This also applies to Gaza. Very few Israeli Arabs can trace their ancestry back in Eretz-Israel to before the 19th century and it has been proven that in the cities holy to the Jews (Hebron, Safed, Jerusalem and Tiberias) the Jewish population in the 19th century exceeded that of the Arabs. The Arabs have spread the lie that Jewish immigration to Palestine began after, and as a result of, the Holocaust.

11. Actually the so called Falasteenians are a tragic lot. No area to call home, other than one belonging to someone else and another that refuses the label and that they themselves don’t want. Indeed they totally refuse the very idea that Transjordania=Jordan is actually the country that was allocated to them way back in 1922.
    Today the situation is muddied by the Hashemite rulers refusing them entry, out of simple and justified fear of being dethroned, probably slaughtered.

    1. In fact the people living in Jordan who call themselves Palestinians and lived on the other side of the Jordan river prior to 1948 or who moved there subsequently outnumber the native Jordanians. That, and the Black September uprising against Jordan make the Jordanians wary of becoming host to an even greater majority of people who, even in their own native Arab countries, continue to call themselves refugees.

12. Let’s call it black and white ok folks ! Muslims and Jews!! Who gives what a rats ass if they are this faction or another. It’s all the same . It’s the conquer of the Jewish nation. They also want to destroy the American nation to turn it to a Islamic world to worship their Demon Allah. Which is a demonic demon of reference to to the moon . There is no simpler truth to it. You all want to discuss the history of their history. It boils down to the same. Evil versus the Godly. By the the way I’m a Christian.

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