Historical fact, however, belies this enticingly simplistic narrative.

The disputed territories, together with the territories that are now Israel and Jordan, were originally (in Biblical and post-Biblical times) Jewish kingdoms, and for most of the last seven centuries part of the Ottoman Empire. After the defeat and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the First World War, the League of Nations divided most of its former possessions in the 1922 peace conference. The Arabs were granted rights to most of the formerly Turkish-controlled lands, to an area that was 500 times larger in size than the small area reserved for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The British received an international mandate over Palestine because they undertook to establish a Jewish national home there, which the League considered as an act of "restoration" of ancient Jewish rights to the land, rights that outweighed any Arab claims based on later conquest and residence.

At first, the Arab representatives to the Versailles conference gladly accepted this division. It gave them control over vast areas lost centuries ago, without requiring them to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of soldiers, as the Allies had, to liberate these lands from Turkish dominion. They did not then consider the tiny sliver of South Syrian wasteland, known to Jews as Judea and Samaria and to the Europeans as the Holy Land, of any significance, politically or religiously, and were happy to give it up in exchange for what they so surprisingly gained. The Emir Faisal, who represented the Arabs, signed a draft agreement with the Zionist movement, welcoming the Jews back to their homeland and pledging cooperation.

So the disputed territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were never "Palestinian lands," neither as national patrimony nor as private property. In fact, until the institution of the British mandate, the Holy Land never had a separate political identity or a distinct people inhabiting it. It was a neglected province of South Syria, whose few and destitute Arab inhabitants considered themselves South Syrians. As Bernard Lewis notes, "From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries within a larger entity [of Syria]."

Indeed, to date, 93 percent of the land in what was the British Mandate, including the lands of the West Bank, are still government-owned. They were so despoiled, malaria-infected, and sparsely populated that no private owners evinced any interest in owning them, so they were kept by the sultan and then inherited by the British mandate in safekeeping for the Jews.

On a visit to the Ottoman-controlled Holy Land in 1860, Mark Twain described it as "the prince of desolation." "The hills are barren, the valleys unsightly deserts peopled by swarms of beggars struck with ghastly sores and malformations. Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes; only the music of angels could charm its shrubs and flowers again into life."

Other writers and artists visiting the Holy Land (chiefly from Britain and Germany) as well as geographers, archeologists, and cartographers, were equally stunned by its utter desolation.

It was only toward the end of the 19th century, when a growing stream of Jewish immigrants rehabilitated the land, draining swamps, reclaiming deserts, and controlling the diseases (chiefly malaria), that a decimated Arab population began increasing. The resuscitation of the land by the Jews and the economic opportunity they created brought an influx of Arab immigrants from dirt-poor neighboring Arab states to swell the number of Arabs in Palestine, so that by the turn of the century there were about 250,000 Arab Muslims and 150,000 Jews living there, along with 100,000 Christians and others.

It was, in fact, British colonial machinations that turned initial Arab acceptance of a Jewish homeland in British-protected Palestine into unmitigated and disastrous hostility. British behavior in the Middle East in general, and in Palestine in particular, was common colonial practice: divide and rule. In India, it enabled the British to subdue the subcontinent with few troops by pitting hostile segments of the indigenous population against each other. They employed this strategy in Palestine, too.

From the very first days of the mandate, a group of very influential British officials in the Colonial and the War Offices, who wanted to maintain control over the land and to prevent the establishment of an independent Jewish national home, started undermining their government's efforts to fulfill its obligation toward the Jews. These British officials, many of them avowed anti-Semites, fanned Arab resentment over broken British promises to make the Arabian chieftain, Faisal, king of Damascus and Syria, and redirected it against Jewish aspirations in Palestine.

Indeed, their naming the mandate over the Holy Land "Palestine," rather than the Land of Israel, was a deliberate effort to obliterate the Jewish connection to the land by calling it by its Roman name. They also, in 1923, unilaterally removed from the original mandatory

Outpost               - 4 -               September 2002