Putting Palestine and the Palestinian Nakba Into Perspective

24 min readMar 25, 2024

The Accusation That Jewish Immigration Was A Moral and Physical “Catastrophe” For the Arabs of Palestine

Anti-Zionists claim that no people on earth would ever peacefully allow immigration into their land to the point where they became a minority, and certainly would not allow those immigrants to set up a state. Is that true? And is it the whole story?

Truthfully, in its early stages the only consensus was that Israel should be a Jewish homeland and Jews experiencing pogroms and other forms of anti-Semitism should be supported in immigrating there for safety. The important thing is early Zionism was a movement for refugees, after centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe, believed in by people who felt Jews in Europe would never be safe without a homeland where they could be a majority. This need for a refuge to save Jews was the primary motivation of Theodore Herzl, an early Zionist who was influential in Europe. Many Zionists like Herzl thought it should eventually be a state but also many did not.

Early Zionists actually formed into two camps. “National Zionism” was a movement to establish a state. “Spiritual Zionism” was a movement to repopulate the land of Israel with Jews to make it a spiritual center of Judaism. Aside from that, it could be a territory or a province of another power, as long as it was designated as open to Jewish immigration and welcoming of Jews into their spiritual home. What these two views had in common was it had to be a refuge for Jewish people, open to them and a safe place for them. Which view would come out on top as history unfolded really was going to depend on the welcome they received from the inhabitants of Palestine.

The idea that Israel needed to be an actual nation state didn’t achieve consensus even among Jewish people until the 1930’s. The consensus became strong not only because of what happened in Europe but because of how the Jewish immigrants were received in Palestine, after the Arabs of Palestine staged a long series of pogroms against the Jewish refugees, and the consensus came for obvious reasons. They were not treated as refugees and welcomed. They were greeted by people who eagerly adopted Nazi ideology and tried to import it into the Middle East. At that point, it became clear that Herzl was right. There could be no safety for the Jewish people without a Jewish state and a Jewish majority in it. To this day, most Jewish people are national Zionists for this reason, including me. The horrific outbreak of antisemitism and violence against Jews in the West and in Russia since October 7th only adds more evidence that Herzl was right.

Go deeper: The importation of Nazi ideology into early Palestine

Perspective on Palestine and the Palestinian Nakba

Israel must exist because Jewish people need it as a refuge, and of course it must exist as our homeland, the only place we are not outsiders. The Jews are indigenous to that land.

Among the many opportunities for peace the Arabs of Palestine missed, which people cite, the most realistic is not the peace talks with Yasser Arafat or any peace talks at all. It was the opportunity the Arabs had to greet the immigrant Zionists from 1880 –1930 as lost brothers seeking refuge, not as invaders. There was a chance to live and work together. Instead, they focused on things like the blasphemy of Jewish feet on the Al Aqsa Mosque and the insult of living with Jews who were not dhimmi and the humiliation of seeing others rehabilitate the land when they could not.

Other areas have seen similar migration without similar violence. Right now, even as I speak, here in North America, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, has seen a huge influx of Chinese immigrants over the last couple of decades which has driven up property values to unaffordable levels for the previous population, and flipped the demographics. The white Canadians in the area have lost a great deal of economic and political power, including the mayorship of Vancouver.

Go deeper: Meet the Chinese mayor of Vancouver, British Columbia

While there are tensions and problems, they are working them out peacefully and are not resorting to massacres or guerilla warfare to “exterminate the Chinese.” Unlike Arabs, Canadian people are kind of nice in their attitudes towards outsiders. That could have happened in Palestine as well but the Arabs there chose a different attitude, following the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Al-Hussayni.

What makes this most deeply tragic is the concept of “Palestine” is an imperial European concept, and for the Arabs to hold onto it romantically and persistently seems to have created so much violence. Palestine was just lines on maps which existed mainly in Europe at that time, created by Rome at first, and consisted of governance structures set up by the British but not particularly embraced by the Arabs previously except when communicating with Europeans, and not featuring much in Arab identity.

Go deeper: The forgotten history of “Palestine”

And even to Europeans “Palestine” was much bigger than how it is portrayed today, including a huge amount of land east of the river Jordan, which today is the country of Jordan,

Since biblical times, Palestine was understood to span the Jordan River. It was common to call the one bank Western Palestine and the other Eastern Palestine, as evidenced by such works as Edward Robinson, et al., Biblical Researches in Palestine and the Adjacent Regions (1856); Charles Warren, Underground Jerusalem (1876); Frederick Jones Bliss, The Development of Palestine Exploration (1906); and Ellsworth Huntington, Palestine and Its Transformation (1911). The Israelite tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Menasseh, the Bible said, all held land east of the Jordan River. Before World War I, no books described that river as Palestine’s eastern boundary.
Eastern Palestine was also known as Transjordan, meaning “across the Jordan.” In other words, the Jordan River did not bound Palestine; it bisected it. Referring to the Jordan Valley in his book Sinai and Palestine (1863), the Oxford University scholar Arthur Penrhyn Stanley said, “It is around and along this deep fissure that the hills of western and eastern Palestine spring up.”
The terminology of Western and Eastern Palestine appeared universally in 19th- and early 20th-century literature. In George Adam Smith’s influential study, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, Book II is entitled “Western Palestine” and Book III “Eastern Palestine.” The famous works of Britain’s Palestine Exploration Fund — the first coauthored by H.H. Kitchener, later Field-Marshal Earl Kitchener, when he was but a lieutenant — were titled The Survey of Western Palestine and The Survey of Eastern Palestine.
No one in the pre-World War I period ever needed to specify how far eastward Eastern Palestine extended. As the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica stated, “The River Jordan, it is true, marks a line of delimitation between Western and Eastern Palestine; but it is practically impossible to say where the latter ends and the Arabian desert begins.”

Contrary to common belief today, and contrary to even more common rhetoric among anti-Zionists, Arabs were never “dispossessed of Palestine”. 75% of Palestine is still Arab, and Israel is a small reservation on the Jew’s historical national lands. The Palestinian cause as it is understood today is not about having a Palestinian state in Palestine. It is about having a second Palestinian state in Palestine and, mostly, about having no Jewish state.

The 25% of Palestine west of the river Jordan, which became Israel, by and large was not great land treasured by the Arabs when the original Zionists found it. Western Palestine was mostly barren and Jerusalem was an impoverished shambles. Why? Aside from having a large desert area, it was one of the most densely malarial areas in the world and sparsely populated. Here is a description of its condition when the original Zionists found it, from a recent historical malaria survey,

Before World War I, for several centuries, Palestine had been a part of the Ottoman Empire. Palestine was so severely saturated in malaria, it was either uninhabitable in many areas or otherwise very thinly populated. Palestine was described by an officer with Allenby’s army as “one of the most highly malarious countries in the world” (Austen 1919). The disease had decimated the population to the point that Mark Twain in 1867 wrote on his visit to Palestine, “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action…We never saw a human being on the whole route” (Twain 1869).
In its 1876 Handbook for Palestine and Syria, the travel agent Thomas Cook and Son said of Palestine that “Above all other countries in the world, it is now a land of ruins. In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that…for miles and miles there is no appearance of present life or habitation, except the occasional goatherd on the hillside, or gathering of women at the wells, there is hardly a hill-top of the many within sight which is not covered with the vestiges of some fortress or city of former ages” (Cook and Son 1876).
In 1902, in his report entitled “The Geographical Distribution of Anopheles and Malarial Fever in Upper Palestine,” J. Cropper wrote of Rosh Hanikra (which marked the border between the provinces of Syria and Palestine), “It was guarded by a small company of Turkish soldiers, and the platoon had to be changed every month because malaria sickened and debilitated everyone after 10 days” (Cropper 1902). Between 1882–1914, approximately 75,000 Eastern European Jewish idealists arrived to settle in Palestine (not to be confused with the religious Jews who for centuries came to try to live [and die] in the Holy Land). However, by 1914, about half this number of idealist Jews had died or had left, unable to cope with the severe pestilential conditions.

The above is not Zionist propaganda. It is just entomology. You can read the whole study at the Go deeper link below.

Go deeper: The malarial land which became Israel

For many of the Arabs, that area was just southern Syria. Political consciousness for Arabs in Palestine as distinct from Syria didn’t even begin to form until the 1920’s, when the French ruled Syria and the British ruled the newly created “Palestine” and the Arabs in the two places realized they had to deal with distinct powers to manage their political destiny. For most of the pre-war period, a substantial portion of the Arabs of Palestine who resisted British control wanted the area to be instead part of a pan-Arab state and, when that became unrealistic, many of them shifted to openly demanding it become part of Syria. Pre-1948, Arabs suggested that the British Mandate territory should be called “Southern Syria” to emphasize the fact that Palestinian Arabs viewed themselves not as a separate people as they claim today, but as Syrians or as part of a larger Arabian nation.

As an example, in 1937 Awni Al Habdi told the British Peel Commission,

There is no such country as Palestine! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.

Al Habdi was one of the organizers of the Palestine Revolt of 1936–1939 in which the Arabs of Palestine tried to violently drive out the Jews and British. It was not for the cause of an independent “Palestine”. It was for the cause of re-uniting with Syria and getting rid of outsiders.

Even relatively far into modern times this was widely recognized among the Arabs. For example, Hafez Assad of Syria is known to have told Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization in its early days,

You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people.

The core reason for this is that Palestine as conceived by anti-Zionists today was largely an imperial invention of the British Empire and other European powers in 1917. It did not exist under the Ottoman empire, as you can see from the map below, and it ceased to exist in its entirety after the British abandoned it in 1948. Israel came into existence at that time, of course, while Egypt got Gaza and Jordan came into existence, taking the West Bank. Syria took the Golan Heights.

“Palestine” as an entity ( as opposed to a name for a vaguely defined region, referred to by that name mainly by Europeans and occasionally by Arabs ) existed only as a European colonial construct, and only for a mere 27 years, to divide previously Ottoman Syria between French and British governments after they defeated the Ottomans in WW I.

This is hardly long enough to birth a “people” distinct from the Arabs in the surrounding lands. Prior to that, the name “Palestine” was given to a vaguely bounded territory, including what is today Israel, by the Roman Empire after it conquered the Jews, as an insult to them ( it was named after the Philistines, who were Greeks from Crete, not Arabs ). But at that time it was a Jewish territory under Roman rule. It soon faded after Roman rule faded.

The British Mandate of “Palestine’’ actually included Jordan, which no one today is claiming needs to be “returned” to the “Palestinians” because no such people as “Palestinians” existed to take it from at the time. A lot of people seem to be content to treat the Hashemite dynasty of Jordan as ruling a legitimate country which did not “steal” land from Palestinians, while pretending Jewish people “stole” from Palestinians, while hiding the fact they are trying to “liberate” the territory of Israel from the indigenous Jews to re-establish a European colonial construct. This just seems to be a recipe for continued revolutionary violence over manipulated identities.

Here is the history, as given by Honest Journalism,

In 1516, the Mamelukes [ who also maintained no territory of “Palestine” ] were displaced by another Muslim empire, that of the Ottoman Turks originating from Asia Minor. The Turks implemented new geographical designations for their conquests, dividing the territory into administrative provinces known as Eyalets. Initially, most of the territory which today comprises Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (which can be designated as the “Modern Nations”) became incorporated into the single Eyalet of Sam, which generally conformed with the prior region known as “Esh Sham.” Once again, the Ottomans did not identify any territory as Palestine/Filastin, although Ottoman historians and scholars were certainly familiar with the history of the region and the old place name. Palestine had also become an irrelevant name to Jews, who preferred “Eretz Israel” (Land of Israel), and to the Arabs and Muslims, who continued to refer to Esh-Sham. Even among Christians, Palestine was a lost name for much of the Ottoman era, as they preferred calling the region the “Holy Land” or “Judea.”
The administrative boundaries and names of the Eyalets changed several times over the centuries, and in the early nineteenth century, the Eyalet of Sam was divided into three new Eyalets: Aleppo, Sidon and Damascus. The area usually associated with the Holy Land was mostly comprised of the Eyalets of Sidon and Damascus, so administration was handled out of today’s Lebanon and Syria. In 1864 the Ottomans enacted another administrative reorganization, which eliminated the old Eyalets in favor of new provinces called Vilayets, in turn divided into sub-districts called Sanjaks. Each Vilayet was governed by a Vali, or governor-general, and each Sanjak was governed by a Mutesarrif. The reorganization created a new Vilayet of Suriya, the Arabic form of Syria, which was essentially a union of the former Eyalets of Sidon and Damascus, with a Vali based in Damascus, which comprised most of the territory of the Modern Nations. The establishment of this province was the first time that the name “Syria” was officially used by the Ottomans to designate a territory.

So, the idea that immigration was going to make Jews a majority in “Palestine” wasn’t the real issue. Palestine per se barely existed in the Arab imagination ( except mainly as a way of talking about the region to Europeans ), and Jews wouldn’t have been a majority in the greater area of Syria, which was the dominant Arab way of thinking about the land.

Viewed through the more prevalent lens of clan and tribal mixing and migration, which was common, national boundaries were not particularly serious. Even Syria was just thought of as part of the larger Ottoman controlled area in the Levant, which encompasses modern day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and Cyprus, without very significant political or cultural distinctions between them. The issue for the Arabs wasn’t about the national consciousness of a Palestinian people. It was that no Muslim controlled land at all should ever revert to the control of Jewish people ( or to outsiders ): Once Muslim, always Muslim.

If you speak to someone who disputes this, please ask them to address the reason why the Arab population of that region barely increased in the century prior to 1917 and then exploded afterwards. In fact, going deeper into history, a census of the Palestine area in the 7th century found about 600,000 non-Jews and 100,000 Jews living in the area. A census towards the end of the 19th century found almost the same total population.

Yet, after the British mandate the Arab population in that area exploded, possibly for the first time in a millennium. The main reasons were, first, the Ottomans conscripted huge numbers of Arabs from the region which became the British Mandate and sent them off to war, from which most never returned. It wasn’t because they were dying. It was mostly because they had little attachment to that land and found things were better elsewhere.

The second reason is the Zionist immigrants killed the local mosquito population and eradicated malaria, drastically decreasing mortality rates for the Arabs who remained in Palestine. How drastic?

Helpfully for this paper, Major Austen gave a lecture in November 1919 to the Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene entitled “Anti-Mosquito Measures in Palestine During the Campaigns of 1917–1918.” This was reported in The Lancet (Anonymous 1919) and published unabridged by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (Austen 1919).
Austen noted the prevalence of malaria in all three forms, but particularly malignant tertian fever, among the inhabitants. Sixty percent of the population was infected (Anonymous 1919).

When the British arrived in 1917, they found 60% of the Arab population had malaria. Malaria is a very serious disease untreated. Not only does it have a high mortality rate, but those who survive are prone to serious chronic illnesses and possible cognitive issues which could last their lifetimes. That level of disease burden is normally pretty debilitating in every way: economically, culturally, politically.

That was the status of Palestine and the Arabs of Palestine before Zionism. The explosion of the Arab population after 1917 was largely because the British did not conscript them and send them away, and also they were no longer dying of malaria. Instead, the British were letting them live on the land where they were born, which the Arabs of that period reacted to as an imperial imposition, complaining of rising unemployment as their population exploded.

Make no mistake, it was the Jewish Zionists who saved Palestine. They were led by a man named Israel Kligler,

After the defeat of the Ottoman army in 1918, the Palestine Mandate on behalf of the League of Nations was operated from 1920 to 1948 by a British civil administration. Dr. Israel Kligler, an idealistic Jew, arrived in Palestine in December 1920. He was a public health scientist, and he had developed an impressive reputation while working in the U.S. and South America with the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York. Kligler commented that he came to Palestine “with a view to coming to grips with the malaria situation…unless something was done to check the ravages of malaria, the reconstruction of Palestine would be a costly if not altogether an impossible effort”

He mobilized the entire Jewish and Arab communities around the efforts, which lasted nearly a decade. It was by no means easy,

Kligler was also blessed with the assistance of a British administration in Palestine that was aware of the severity of malaria there, and that also appreciated trying to protect against the disease. However, with a hint of negativity, the Palestine Department of Health wrote, quoting an older unknown source: “the experts of 1918…[prophesied] that the future of this country might be considered to be almost hopeless from the malaria standpoint”

This is the true history of Zionism and Palestine. The Jews did not invade it. They saved it.

The modern equivalent to Jewish immigration from 1900–1930 would be a mass migration of immigrants to a certain city or region, within a much larger polity, with that demographic eventually taking over the politics of the smaller region and revitalizing it. In America, that has happened repeatedly without it causing a century long guerilla war. It’s happening currently with Hispanic immigrants coming to increasingly dominate America’s southwest and, while it is causing political tensions, they have nothing like the character of Palestinian violence.

Go deeper: Meet the Cuban mayor of Miami

It also happened in the recent past when Cuban refugees in the 1980’s more or less politically took over South Florida. This massive Cuban refugee influx into South Florida included the purposeful dumping by a foreign government of undesirables and prison populations by the tens of thousands, along with hundreds of thousands of other refugees fleeing a bad political and economic situation. The US federal government tacitly cooperated with this for its own political reasons despite the passionate anger and disapproval of Miami’s local population. Geographically, Israel is to the greater Levant area of Jordan, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria as Miami-Dade County is to Florida and the Southeastern United States.

The Arab response to Jewish refugee immigration was as if the residents of Miami-Dade county in the 1980’s had risen up in a great, violent century long conflict, declaring that no Cubans should ever govern South Florida. Can you imagine if all the current residents of South Florida had organized a siege of Little Havana in Miami, to starve out all the Cubans to kill them? That’s what the Arabs of Palestine did to the Jewish people in the Siege of Jerusalem. Ironically, Cuban migration to south Florida flipped demographic and political control of the region away from Jewish people and eventually revitalized the entire region. Peacefully.

There was even a peaceful Nakba of sorts. Many people who previously lived in Miami were uncomfortable with the changes brought by the new refugees, which included a foreign language, increased crime, drug smuggling, organized drug cartels, and the domination of an unfamiliar ethnicity which had previously been a minority. Many of these existing residents moved to places like Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale, thirty or forty miles away, to get some distance from what was happening in Miami.

For those not familiar with how tiny Israel is, this is about the same distance most Arabs who packed up their houses during the Nakba had to move to get to the beach in Gaza or the river in the West Bank. Even though these Arabs were still in “Palestine” and were adopted by new nations ( Jordan and Egypt ), they named themselves “Palestinian Refugees” and made the title an inheritance for their children, to memorialize eternal grievance. The reason you do not hear about the “Florida refugees” who fled Miami and are living in Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale today has less to do with a difference in the situation and more to do with a difference in the people.

Go deeper: How the people of Miami perceived Cuban refugees at the time

The truth is, the Palestinian Nakba wasn’t a catastrophe. It was a bunch of people packing up their things and moving thirty miles down the road to the beach or the river, to still live in Palestine with their cousins. It’s not immensely different from the many thousands of people who lived in Miami in the 1980’s, when hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees arrived, about which they were not consulted and had no say, and so who responded by moving thirty or forty miles down the road to Ft. Lauderdale and Boca Raton.

Each Palestinian has received more compensation in foreign aid in the 75 years since than any Miami resident ever received for the house they sold, many times over. What turned this displacement from a temporary material setback into a metaphysical and eternal “catastrophe” is that Palestinians chose war, both at the time and ever since. It was the war which caused the Palestinian catastrophe, not the immigration or the Jewish nation. Palestinians lie in a bed of their own making, and also lie about who made the bed.

There are many, many examples. This claim that “no one” would peacefully accept immigration-driven loss of political and demographic control over a small region of a bigger polity or geography is nonsense. No Muslim would accept it, perhaps, but that’s a problem with Muslims, not with immigrants or immigration.

Immigration happens all over the world for all kinds of reasons. As I have said elsewhere in this book, one thing which creates misunderstandings about this issue is that the word “colony” in the 19th and early 20th centuries was used in a broad and ambiguous way. Jewish documents and groups at the time refer to colonies and colonization. That language in its time was not just used to refer to imperial expansion but also to regular immigration projects, which were not about conquest but just about people looking to find a better life.

The reason Israel became an actual nation when those other immigrant tides simply control local and provincial governments, is not because Jews or Israel are “special”, but because the tide of Zionist immigration happened during a special period of history when the old empires were falling away and new nations were forming.

The ancestral land the Jews were immigrating to had no nations on it, and the last history of a nation it had was a Jewish nation. Jewish immigrants and refugees were there and were continuing to come, and if the old imperial powers were leaving, the Jews had just as much right as Arabs did to insist on a piece where they could exercise self-determination, given the land hadn’t hosted a nation since the last Jewish nation was there.

The Arabs have simply never accepted that specific way the world changed in the 20th century; borders and populations shifted, new nations were born and old empires faded away. The fact that the 20th century happened has been accepted almost everywhere except on that little bit of land, and the world is energetically supporting the Palestinians in their denialism. Jewish people keep asking themselves, “Why?” The answer we arrive at does not make us feel secure.

A full-blown Palestinian political identity with localized Palestinian nationalism wasn’t really a thing until the 1960’s, where it emerged at the urging of the Soviets, who wanted to make trouble for America by helping the Arabs of the former Palestine refashion the conflict from a pan-Arabic religious struggle, as Al-Hussayni framed it, turning it instead into a national liberation movement for “Palestinians”.

Nazism + Stalinism + Radical Islam = Hamas

Indeed, as I alluded to much earlier, there’s a very substantial historical and political sense in which all the rhetoric of Palestinian nationalism/anti-Zionism/post-Zionism/pro-Palestine is just a dirty, false combination of Nazi and Soviet rhetoric designed to divide western democracies from each other and from Israel.

I am not offering this description flippantly. It is important it be said out loud and named for what it is. I have read many assertions in the last few months that “From the river to the sea” is not a call to genocide of the Jews in Israel but a call for “freedom and human rights” for all, supposedly, in a land which would be some kind of liberal, western paradise for Jewish people, if they would only allow the Palestinians of Gaza to pursue their national dreams.

If you are even slightly tempted by this bald-faced lie, fashioned specifically for western liberal ears, please read below articles 11–13 of the Hamas charter. This is the charter they had in 2006, when the Gazans freely and enthusiastically elected Hamas as their government after the Israelis forcibly removed the Jewish settlements from the land and gave Gazans freedom to form their own government and live life how they wished. This charter is still in force today, and is the closest thing Gaza has to a constitution. Once you read it, you will not think Israel was irresponsible or cruel in setting up a blockade of Gaza after the 2006 election.

If you doubt this is still Hamas’s guiding vision today, you can read the Go deeper link below, which will take you to the output from their 2021 conference The Promise of the Hereafter, in which they lay out their vision for Israel ( tldr version; killing, driving out and enslaving the Jewish people and murdering all “collaborators” abroad ).

Recall, Hamas is today the most popular political entity among Palestinians, despite its corruption and harsh treatment of the people of Gaza, specifically because of its designs on Israel.

Go deeper: What Hamas plans for Israel, in its own words, from its 2021 Promise of the Hereafter conference

Hamas 1986 Founding Charter:
Article Eleven:
The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgement Day?
This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.
It happened like this: When the leaders of the Islamic armies conquered Syria and Iraq, they sent to the Caliph of the Moslems, Umar bin-el-Khatab, asking for his advice concerning the conquered land — whether they should divide it among the soldiers, or leave it for its owners, or what? After consultations and discussions between the Caliph of the Moslems, Omar bin-el-Khatab and companions of the Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, it was decided that the land should be left with its owners who could benefit by its fruit. As for the real ownership of the land and the land itself, it should be consecrated for Moslem generations till Judgement Day. Those who are on the land, are there only to benefit from its fruit. This Waqf remains as long as earth and heaven remain. Any procedure in contradiction to Islamic Sharia, where Palestine is concerned, is null and void.
“Verily, this is a certain truth. Wherefore praise the name of thy Lord, the great Allah.” (The Inevitable — verse 95).”
Homeland and Nationalism from the Point of View of the Islamic Resistance Movement in Palestine:
Article Twelve:
Nationalism, from the point of view of the Islamic Resistance Movement, is part of the religious creed. Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land. Resisting and quelling the enemy become the individual duty of every Moslem, male or female. A woman can go out to fight the enemy without her husband’s permission, and so does the slave: without his master’s permission.
Nothing of the sort is to be found in any other regime. This is an undisputed fact. If other nationalist movements are connected with materialistic, human or regional causes, nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement has all these elements as well as the more important elements that give it soul and life. It is connected to the source of spirit and the granter of life, hoisting in the sky of the homeland the heavenly banner that joins earth and heaven with a strong bond.
If Moses comes and throws his staff, both witch and magic are annulled.
“Now is the right direction manifestly distinguished from deceit: whoever therefore shall deny Tagut, and believe in Allah, he shall surely take hold with a strong handle, which shall not be broken; Allah is he who heareth and seeth.” (The Cow — Verse 256).
Peaceful Solutions, Initiatives and International Conferences:
Article Thirteen:
Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion. Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight. “Allah will be prominent, but most people do not know.”
Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?
“But the Jews will not be pleased with thee, neither the Christians, until thou follow their religion; say, The direction of Allah is the true direction. And verily if thou follow their desires, after the knowledge which hath been given thee, thou shalt find no patron or protector against Allah.” (The Cow — verse 120).
There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with. As in said in the honourable Hadith:
“The people of Syria are Allah’s lash in His land. He wreaks His vengeance through them against whomsoever He wishes among His slaves It is unthinkable that those who are double-faced among them should prosper over the faithful. They will certainly die out of grief and desperation.”

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

All Chapters:

0. Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

1. The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

2. Genocide or Just War?

3. For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point

4. What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

5. The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

6. Chosen For Their Insignificance, Not Their Superiority

7. The Incoherence of, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am just against Zionism.”

8. Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism

9. How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine

10. The 1920’s And The Spread of Hate