There has been so much discussion and debate within Australian Federal Politics lately, particularly within sections of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) about the inevitability, legitimacy, and recognitionof “a Palestinian State within pre-1967 borders” that I felt compelled to set the record straight in relation to what I consider to be some critical historical falsehoods and myths being regularly espoused and circulated to support such claims. Enough is enough.
According to the Oxford definition, a fait accompli is “a thing that has already happened or been decided before those affected hear about it, leaving them with no option but to accept it.” This term came to mind when listening to a recent speech to Australian Parliament in Canberra by Aboriginal Australian Senator, Lidia Thorpe. In her speech, Senator Thorpe urged the Australian government to acknowledge the sovereignty of Palestine and the Palestinian people, blurring her extremist Indigenous views to make her case. “We know how it feels to be on the end of a slow, pervasive violence which claims more and more lives as time goes on with no one blinking an eye. We know about apartheid. And we know about being occupied by a power incapable of recognising the truth.”1
The way in which Senator Thorpe condemned “the violent occupation of Palestine, the brutality of the colonial power that is Israel and their state-sanctioned murder of the Palestinians” encouraged me to provide some truth, legitimacy, and balance to an otherwise biased, one-sided, and distorted version of reality when it comes to the aggressive anti-Israel sentiment that has become only too common for me to stand idly and allow to occur.
Palestinian nationalism has “become accepted as fact by most Americans and shaped their views and the policy of most U.S administrations toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.” However, this has not always been the case on the global political stage. According to then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in a 1969 interview in the Sunday Times of London, “there is no such thing as Palestinians. It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people”. 2
When considering the long-held claim of historical religious rights and connection to Jerusalem as the eternal ‘Palestinian’ capital, one must consider the existence of any tangible evidence of specific passages or wording within the Islamic sacred text (Quran) which support such a claim. The confronting reality for many readers given global sympathies towards their ongoing struggle, is the misguided notion that the Quran articulates any passages or wording to support this in any way. According to Saied Shoaaib (a Muslim writer and researcher of Egyptian origin, specializing in Islamic movements), “Quranic passages clearly illustrate the Jews’ imperative to enter the land of Israel…The Quran specifically states that God promised the land of Israel, including Jerusalem, to the Jews.” Shoaaib pulls no punches by arguing that “although ordinary Muslims who might not actually have read their holy book could be excused for their ignorance about the Jewish roots of and rights to Israel and Jerusalem, the same cannot be said for the leaders of Muslim countries, imams, and the heads of illustrious Islamic institutions.”
Shoaaib asserts that this “exposes the hypocrisy of those radical Muslims who claim to believe in and adhere to the letter of the Quran yet use the claim that Palestine and Jerusalem are Islamic for political purposes and propaganda. Dignitaries and scholars of that calibre should know better. Yet many of them repeat false assertions that contradict the Quran and scholarly interpretations of its verses. The fact is that the Quran does not mention Jerusalem or Palestine.”
An essay by Salo Aizenberg published on the Algemeiner website in May this year articulates the numerous occasions in which Israel were ready and willing to provide Palestinian leadership with a definitive peace agreement. “The truth is that three consecutive Israeli leaders – Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert – sought to hand over permanent control of territory to the Palestinians, which is frequently ignored by the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as they perpetuate the notion that Israel wishes to control and dominate the Palestinian people.”4
Aizenberg places accountability squarely with the Palestinians when it comes to generally accepted claims of Israel being the colonial aggressor, by saying that “If they would actually acknowledge that Israel offered full statehood on territory equal to 100% of the West Bank and Gaza, then the image of a perpetually intransigent Israel that refuses to end its occupation would be proven false. What is beyond doubt is that a sitting Israeli prime minister was ready to agree to a definitive peace agreement that would establish a Palestinian state on territory equal to 100% of the West Bank and Gaza, but Abbas said no by refusing to show up to a follow-up meeting and never offering another response or counteroffer.”
What about the globally accepted stance by sympathetic ‘charitable’ organisations such as Amnesty International, of Palestinian historical claims over the land of Israel? An article by Professor Shmuel Trigano from the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs states that “before the British Mandate this territory had been part of the Ottoman Empire, and ‘Palestine’ was neither a geographical nor a political entity” and that “the population that was there was not completely ‘indigenous’ either at the end of the 19th century.”
Trigano claims that before the Ottoman Empire, there were no ‘Palestinians’. He supports this by saying that “Arabs from all the countries within the Ottoman Empire migrated to the territory, attracted by the economic hub created by the Jews. Throughout their long history of dispersion, the Jews have returned to their ancestral land in waves. Similarly, Yasser Arafat and Edward Said, for example, were not Palestinians but rather Egyptians, though they were Arabs and Muslims (in fact, the objective definition of Palestinians).” 5
As the Embassy of Israel in Dublin state, “attempts to present Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria (“the West Bank”) as illegal and colonial in nature ignore the complexity of this issue, the history of the land, and the unique legal circumstances of this case.” The Embassy clarifies that “Jewish presence in this territory has existed for thousands of years and was recognized as legitimate in the Mandate for Palestine adopted by the League of Nations in 1922, which provided for the establishment of a Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancient homeland. At no point in history were Jerusalem and the West Bank subject to Palestinian Arab sovereignty.”6
I have learned over the years that there are always two sides to every story. The predatory illusion of a Palestinian State within pre-1967 borders is thankfully, far from being a fait accompli. May truth win out over marketing spin, as right-minded folk continue to highlight the historical facts, evidence, and data to counteract the mounting avalanche of anti-Israel falsehoods that consume our screens on an all-too-often basis.
German Philosopher and Poet, Friedrich Nietzsche, once said that “sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
1. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230811-australia-senator-aboriginals-palestinians-share-a-reality-ofattempted-genocide/
2. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1148667
3 https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11680/quran-jerusalem-jews
4 https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/05/10/examining-the-crime-that-was-mahmoud-abbas-rejection-ofpeace/
5 https://jcpa.org/article/deconstructing-the-three-stages-of-the-nakba-myth/
6 https://embassies.gov.il/dublin/AboutIsrael/history/Pages/Judea-Samaria
