Secretary of State Marco Rubio does not think much of plans by France, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia to recognize a state of Palestine this coming week at the United Nations. Rubio says recognition would not change reality but would reward Hamas terrorism.
The UN General Assembly greased the way for France and the others earlier in September by finally condemning Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of 1,200 people in Israel and seizure of 251 others. It insisted that the US-designated terrorist organization free the remaining hostages in the Gaza Strip, hand its weapons to the Palestinian Authority (a.k.a. the Palestine Liberation Organization) and have no part in governing a West Bank and Gaza Palestine.
The Europeans claim recognition would help end the war sparked by Hamas that has devastated the Strip. They also imagine recognition would sustain hopes of a “two-state solution.”
Whose hopes? Arab spokesmen have asserted for a century that they reject the vision—updated by President George W. Bush in 2002—of two states, Israel and “Palestine,” side-by-side and at peace.
Start in 1919. The General Syrian Congress, addressing victorious World War I allies as they divided the defeated Ottoman Turks’ Middle Eastern empire, urged “there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine, nor of the littoral zone which includes Lebanon, from the Syrian country. We desire that the unity of the country should be guaranteed …”
Also in 1919, the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations in Jerusalem wanted diplomats at the Paris Peace Conference to get something straight: “We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria. It has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographic bonds.”
Nevertheless, by 1921, France took the League of Nations mandate for Syria and Lebanon while Great Britain, having severed Transjordan (today’s Jordan) from lands intended for Palestine, took the remaining mandate for what eventually would become Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The same year, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who eventually emerged as Nazi Germany’s chief Arab collaborator as well as the “Palestinian George Washington,” wrote to Winston Churchill. Al-Husseini asked the British colonial secretary to reunite Palestine with Syria and Transjordan.
‘Palestine integral part of Syria’
In 1937, the influential Arab historian George Antonius appeared before the Peel Commission. To appease anti-British, anti-Jewish violence the commission eventually would recommend curtailing Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine. Antonius insisted that “Palestine has always been an integral part of Syria …”
After World War II, when the Allies considered dividing British Mandatory Palestine between Jews and Arabs, the Anglo-American Committee in 1946 heard from noted Arab-American historian Philip Hitti. Hitti informed committee members that “there is no such thing in history as ‘Palestine,’ absolutely not…”
Palestine, he said, was but “a very small, tiny spot there on the southern part of the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, surrounded by a vast territory of Arab Muslim lands.” Hitti ignored the Middle East’s Christians, Kurds, Berbers (Imazighen), Jews, Druze and other indigenous minorities.
The first leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ahmed Shukeiry, appeared before the UN General Assembly in 1956. He informed the body that “it is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria.”
Shukeiry’s successor, Yasser Arafat, first waged a terrorist war to “liberate” Israel but not the Jordanian-occupied West Bank or Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. The PLO’s appetite expanded after the Jewish state gained those suddenly “Palestinian” territories in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Nevertheless, in 1977 PLO executive committee member, Zahir Muhsein, told the Dutch newspaper Trouw that “the Palestinian people does not exist. … The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity.” Muhsein added that “Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”
In 2007, Azmi Bishara, an Israeli Arab Knesset (parliament) member fled the country after being questioned about passing information to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon. Two years later he told Israel Channel 2 Television that “I don’t think there is a Palestinian nation at all. I think there is an Arab nation. … I never turned to be a Palestinian nationalist, despite my decisive struggle against the occupation [against Israel]. I think that until the end of the 19th century, Palestine was the south of Great Syria.”
It can be argued that a distinct Palestinian Arab nationalism has emerged out of the 100-year-plus Arab rejectionism—often violent—epitomized recently by rebuffing U.S. and Israeli two-state offers in at Camp David in 2000, Taba in 2001 and after the Annapolis conference in 2008. If so, it is not a 23 Arab country that nationalism seeks but elimination of Jewish nationalism embodied by Israel. Western countries’ unfounded endorsement of “Palestine” now rewards that murderous irredentism.
Eric Rozenman is author of Jews Make the Best Demons: “Palestine” and the Jewish Question, on which this column draws, and most recently, The David Discovery.
