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The Methodist Federation for Social Action Newsletter

Grossly Distorts The History of The Arab/Israeli Conflict: Part 1

The Methodist Federation for Social Action (“MFSA”) grossly distorts the history of the Arab/Israeli conflict in its January-February 2008 edition of “Social Questions Bulletin.” In an article entitled “A Synopsis of the Israel/Palestine Conflict,” the MFSA presents the history in a manner so replete with factual errors, misrepresentations, material omissions and distortions -- all aimed at portraying Israel as the sole aggressor in the region -- that it cannot be called an actual history. Rather, it is little more than propaganda and an all out attack on the state of Israel.

1. According to the Synopsis, for 2,000 years there was no “Israel/Palestine Conflict.” During this time the “land of Palestine was inhabited by Palestinian Arabs” and Muslims, Christians and Jews “lived in harmony.” (p. 4)

WHAT ARE THE REAL FACTS?

• 2,000 years ago, during the time of Christ, the region was called Israel, not Palestine. It was the homeland of the Jews, who were under occupation by the Romans. There were no Arabs in the region. It was during the Byzantine era that many Arabs (at that time people from Arabia) came in from the desert and took up residence in what is now Israel and Lebanon.

• There is a long history of conflict in the Holy Land. In 135 AD Emperor Hadrian violently sacked Jerusalem, killing many Jews and selling many more into slavery. He renamed the region “Palestine” after the Philistines, who were not Arabs. By the end of the 4th century, following Emperor Constantine’s adoption of Christianity, the Land of Israel had become a predominantly Christian country.

• There were no Muslims in Palestine or anywhere else until the time of the Prophet Mohammed in the 7th century. The Islamic military expansion began after the Prophet Mohammed’s death in 632 AD. The Islamic era in Palestine/Israel began when Jerusalem was captured by Caliph Umar in 638 AD. This was a violent, military conquest, as were the Christian Crusades which began in in 1099 AD. Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians were slaughtered by the Crusaders. This was followed by the violent invasion of the Mongols under Genghis Khan, and in 1291 the Muslim Mamelukes of Egypt. Finally, in 1517 the Mameluke armies were defeated by the forces of the Ottoman Sultan. During World War I the Ottomans were driven from much of the region by the United Kingdom during the violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

• To characterize this region as peaceful until “more and more Zionists immigrated to

Palestine” (p. 4) amounts to little more than fantasy in the service of the MFSA’s agendum of attacking the Jewish state.

2. The “Synopsis” identifies the late 1880s as the time when the peacefulness in the region was disrupted as a result of the European “Zionists” who “decided to colonize this land . . . . with the express wish of taking over the land for an exclusively Jewish state.” (p. 4)

WHAT ARE THE REAL FACTS?

• A serious Jewish resettlement of Palestine/Israel began during the Ottoman Era in the early1880s, first with Arab Jews from Yemen and then followed by Russian Jews. The total population in Palestine at the time was about 550,000, as compared to over ten million now. There was also a significant Arab immigration into Palestine during that time. The non-Jewish population in Israel/Palestine grew from about 469,000 in 1893 to about 1,270,000 in 1946.

• There was non-Arabic non-Jewish immigration as well. In the 1931 British census, the non-Jewish population of Israel/Palestine listed 24 different countries as their birthplace.

• Jews were about 33 percent of the population prior to the 1947 U.N. partition plan. They were not “colonialists” any more than the newly arrived Arabs were. They were immigrants seeking to build a new life in their ancestral homeland. There were also indigenous Jews whose families had lived in Palestine for millennia. They did not displace the Arab population in Palestine, which had also been growing during that same period.

• Today, some 50 percent of Jewish Israelis are the descendants not of European Jews, but of Jews from North Africa and Middle Eastern countries.

3. The “Synopsis” states that in 1947 “[u]nder considerable pressure from high-placed American Zionists, the UN decided to give away 55 percent of Palestine to a Jewish state.

WHAT ARE THE REAL FACTS?

• The Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I. Under the mandate system established by the League of Nations, Britain and France redrew the map of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. Initially there were twelve Arab states (ultimately to become self-governing) formed on about 3,500,000 square miles from previous Ottoman territory and former European colonies in the Middle East and North Africa.

• The area that includes modern day Israel, modern day Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza -- 45,000 sq. miles -- was given to the British to hold in trust for a Jewish homeland.

• But in 1922, the British subtracted the area east of the Jordan River (4/5 of the Palestine Mandate) from the Jewish state to create another Arab state -- Jordan -- out of that area. That left 11,000 sq. miles, for the Jewish homeland.

• When the U.N. formally recommended partition in November , 1947, it allotted 2,000 sq. miles for what was to be another Arab state (this would have been the Palestinian state). That left 9,000 sq miles or 20 percent of the original Palestine Mandate for the Jewish state.