The Mamluks, already mentioned, who in 1250 took Palestine over from:
The Ayyubi dynasty, the descendants of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader
who in 1187 took Jerusalem and most of Palestine from:
The European Christian Crusaders, who in 1099 conquered Palestine from:
The Seljuk Turks, who ruled Palestine in the name of:
The Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, which in 750 took over the sovereignty of
the entire Near East from:
The Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, which in 661 inherited control of the
Islamic lands from
The Arabs of Arabia, who in the first flush of Islamic expansion conquered
Palestine in 638 from:
The Byzantines, who (nice people—perhaps it should go to them?) didn't
conquer the Levant, but, upon the division of the Roman Empire in 395, inherited
Palestine from:
The Romans, who in 63 B.C. took it over from:
The last Jewish kingdom, which during the Maccabean rebellion from 168 to
140 B.C. won control of the land from:
The Hellenistic Greeks, who under Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. conquered
the Near East from:
The Persian Empire, which under Cyrus the Great in 639 B.C. freed Jerusalem
and Judah from:
The Babylonian empire, which under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. took
Jerusalem and Judah from:
The Jews, meaning the people of the Kingdom of Judah, who, in their earlier
incarnation as the Israelites, seized the land in the 12th and 13th centuries
B.C. from:
The Canaanites, who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before
they were dispossessed by the Israelites.
As the foregoing suggests, any Arab claim to sovereignty
based on inherited historical control will not stand up. Arabs are not native to
Palestine, but are native to Arabia, which is called Arab-ia for the
breathtakingly simple reason that it is the historic home of the Arabs. The
territories comprising all other "Arab" states outside the Arabian peninsula,
including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as
the entity now formally under the Palestinian Authority, were originally
non-Arab nations that were conquered by the Muslim Arabs when they spread out
from the Arabian peninsula in the first great wave of jihad in the 7th century,
defeating, mass-murdering, enslaving, dispossessing, converting, or reducing to
the lowly status of dhimmitude millions of Christians and Jews and destroying
their ancient and flourishing civilizations. Prior to being Christian, of
course, these lands had even more ancient histories. Pharaonic Egypt, for
example, was not an Arab country through its 3,000 year history.
The recent assertion by the Palestinian Arabs that they are
descended from the ancient Canaanites whom the ancient Hebrews displaced is
absurd in light of the archeological evidence. There is no record of the
Canaanites surviving their destruction in ancient times. History records
literally hundreds of ancient peoples that no longer exist. The Arab claim to be
descended from Canaanites is an invention that came after the 1964 founding of
the Palestine Liberation Organization, the same crew who today deny that there
was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Prior to 1964 there was no "Palestinian"
people and no "Palestinian" claim to Palestine; the Arab nations who sought to
overrun and destroy Israel in 1948 planned to divide up the territory amongst
themselves. Let us also remember that prior to the founding of the state of
Israel in 1948, the name "Palestinian" referred to the Jews of Palestine.
In any case, today's "Palestine," meaning the West Bank and
Gaza, is, like most of the world, inhabited by people who are not descendants of
the first human society to inhabit that territory. This is true not only of
recently settled countries like the United States and Argentina, where European
settlers took the land from the indigenous inhabitants several hundred years
ago, but also of ancient nations like Japan, whose current Mongoloid inhabitants
displaced a primitive people, the Ainu, aeons ago. Major "native" tribes of
South Africa, like the Zulu, are actually invaders from the north who arrived in
the 17th century. India's caste system reflects waves of fair-skinned Aryan
invaders who arrived in that country in the second millennium BC. One could go
on and on.
The only nations that have perfect continuity between their
earliest known human inhabitants and their populations of the present day are
Iceland, parts of China, and a few Pacific islands. The Chinese case is
complicated by the fact that the great antiquity of Chinese civilization has
largely erased the traces of whatever societies preceded it, making it difficult
to reconstruct to what extent the expanding proto-Chinese displaced (or
absorbed) the prehistoric peoples of that region. History is very sketchy in
regard to the genealogies of ancient peoples. The upshot is that "aboriginalism,"
the proposition that the closest descendants of the original inhabitants of a
territory are the rightful owners, is not tenable in the real world. It is not
clear that it would be a desirable idea even if it were tenable. Would human
civilization really be better off if there had been no China, no Japan, no
Greece, no Rome, no France, no England, no Ireland, no United States?
Back to the Arabs
I have no problem recognizing the legitimacy of the Arabs'
tenure in Palestine when they had it, from 638 to 1099, a period of 461 years
out of a history lasting 5,000 years. They took Palestine by military conquest,
and they lost it by conquest, to the Christian Crusaders in 1099. Of course,
military occupation by itself does not determine which party rightly has
sovereignty in a given territory. Can it not be said that the Arabs have
sovereign rights, if not to all of Israel, then at least to the West Bank, by
virtue of their majority residency in that region from the early Middle Ages to
the present?
To answer that question, let's look again at the historical
record. Prior to 1947, as we've discussed, Palestine was administered by the
British under the Palestine Mandate, the ultimate purpose of which, according to
the Balfour Declaration, was the establishment of a Jewish national home in
Palestine. In 1924 the British divided the Palestine Mandate into an Arabs-only
territory east of the Jordan, which became the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and a
greatly reduced Palestine Mandate territory west of the Jordan, which was
inhabited by both Arabs and Jews.
Given the fact that the Jews and Arabs were unable to coexist
in one state, the British decided that there had to be two states. At the same
time, there were no natural borders separating the two peoples, in the way that,
for example, the Brenner Pass has historically marked the division between Latin
and Germanic Europe. Since the Jewish population was concentrated near the
coast, the Jewish State had to start at the coast and go some distance inland.
Exactly where it should have stopped, and where the Arab state should have
begun, was a practical question that could have been settled in any number of
peaceful ways, almost all of which the Jews would have accepted. The Jews'
willingness to compromise on territory was demonstrated not only by their
acquiescence in the UN's 1947 partition plan, which gave them a state with
squiggly, indefensible borders, but even by their earlier acceptance of the 1937
Peel Commission partition plan, which gave them nothing more than a part of the
Galilee and a tiny strip along the coast.
Yet the Arab nations, refusing to accept any Jewish
sovereignty in Palestine even if it was the size of a postage stamp, unanimously
rejected the 1937 Peel plan, and nine years later they violently rejected the
UN's partition plan as well. When the Arabs resorted to arms in order to wipe
out the Jews and destroy the Jewish State, they accepted the verdict of arms.
They lost that verdict in 1948, and they lost it again in 1967, when Jordan,
which had annexed the West Bank in 1948 (without any objections from Palestinian
Arabs that their sovereign nationhood was being violated), attacked Israel from
the West Bank during the Six Day War despite Israel's urgent pleas that it stay
out of the conflict, and Israel in self-defense then captured the West Bank. The
Arabs thus have no grounds to complain either about Israel's existence (achieved
in '48) or about its expanded sovereignty from the river to the sea (achieved in
'67).
The Arabs have roiled the world for decades with their
furious protest that their land has been "stolen" from them. One might take
seriously such a statement if it came from a pacifist people such as the
Tibetans, who had quietly inhabited their land for ages before it was seized by
the Communist Chinese in 1950. The claim is laughable coming from the Arabs, who
in the early Middle Ages conquered and reduced to slavery and penury ancient
peoples and civilizations stretching from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic;
who in 1947 rejected an Arab state in Palestine alongside a Jewish state and
sought to obliterate the nascent Jewish state; who never called for a distinct
Palestinian Arab state until the creation of the terrorist PLO in 1964, sixteen
years after the founding of the State of Israel; and who to this moment continue
to seek Israel's destruction, an object that would be enormously advanced by the
creation of the Arab state they demand. The Arab claim to sovereign rights west
of the Jordan is only humored today because of a fatal combination of world need
for Arab oil, leftist Political Correctness that has cast the Israelis as
"oppressors," and, of course, good old Jew-hatred.