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What’s frustrating about Israel’s war against Hamas is that many people think this is an ancient fight with some Palestinian justification because Israel wrongly got the land from England. The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, one of my favorite podcasters because of his wisdom and humanity, fell into that trap, so I’d like to set the record straight. After all, if one of the best of good guys can get the record wrong, that’s dangerous for the truth.
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Here’s what Michael Knowles said:
I’ve transcribed the relevant portion:
The Israel Palestine conflict…actually is a complex conflict that has gone on in its present form for 100 years and has gone on in other forms for millennia.
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[snip]
The pro-Palestine movement says that Israel’s establishment in 1948 constituted an unjust act of imperialism that the British gave the Jews this land that they had no right to give them. And as a result of this, the Palestinian Arabs were kicked out of their land into other places, and so they will just simply not accept the existence of the State of Israel.
Israel’s argument is that God gave us this land millennia ago…
[snip]
And then the more recent legal argument from the State of Israel is that the Balfour Declaration grants the premise that the Jews can establish a state in Israel, and in 1948 the UN says it can happen, and then an even more recent argument, from a military and political perspective, is that Israel will say we fought a war and it’s ours. Law of conquest.
Almost everything he said there about Israel’s and the Arabs’ relationship to the land and each other is wrong. Let me break it down:
Jews took possession of the land around 4,000 years ago, eventually forming two kingdoms: Israel and Judah. The Kingdom of Israel vanished when the Assyrian empire conquered it around 720 BC. The King of Judah continued for several hundred more years, although it was often a vassal state of Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans. In 70 A.D., the Romans erased the Jewish state, later renaming the conquered territory “Palestine” after the Jews’ historic enemy, the Philistines.
When Rome became Christian, so did the Roman colony of Palestine. When Islam rose out of the desert and began its period of conquest, it conquered Jerusalem. (Although he’d never been there, Mohamed had already claimed it as his own.) Because the remaining Jews were poor and passive, first, the Umayyads and, then, the Abassids weren’t interested in the Jewish remnant in a far outpost of their lands.
The real war for the Muslim colonizers was against Christendom, for the Crusades—begun to recover Jerusalem from the Muslim conquest—began in 1066 and ran for several hundred years. The Muslims (by this time, the Ayyubid Muslims) won. In the 16th century, the rising Muslim power was the Ottoman Empire, which captured Jerusalem in 1517 and held it for the next four hundred years.
What’s important to understand is that there was no “millennia” of war between Muslims and/or Arabs and Jews. Jews were a conquered people and had ceased battling anyone after the Roman conquest. Instead, Muslims battled Christians and each other until the Turks took over and promptly ignored the region.
When Theodore Herzl came up with the idea of Zionism—a Jewish return to the land that God had granted them and that they had occupied continuously since around 1800 B.C.—it was land that no one wanted, including Arabs. As Hadriani Relandi documented in 1714, there were practically no Arabs in the land. The population was primarily Jewish, along with a smaller cohort of Christians. Arabs were almost nonexistent, and there was no conflict.
By the late 1800s, when Zionism began, here’s what you need to know: First, the Jews bought the land from Ottoman Turks. They weren’t “conquerors,” but legal owners. Second, the small number of Arabs lived in incredible squalor and were incredibly grateful to the Jews for their labors, which made the land fertile, wiped out diseases, and educated their children. Third, the Muslims and Arabs in the land were, compared to the Jews, who’d been there continuously for almost 4,000 years, very recent arrivals. Except for the Bedouins (who like the Israelis), they’d drifted into the land beginning in about 1830 from Algeria and, later, from the Caucasus region of Russia and Tripoli.
And here’s a really important one: Yes, the Balfour Declaration did say that, when the Ottoman Turks lost the war along with the Germans, the Jews could have some of that land as their homeland. But it also gave land to the Arabs. Lots and lots of land. Absolutely massive amounts of land, including all of what is today Jordan. Yes, Jordan is the legal land of those Arabs who, beginning in the 1960s, called themselves “Palestinians.” (Before then, the “Palestinians” were the land’s Jewish residents.)
It’s important to get the history right because the “Palestinians” have grounded their claims in history: According to them, European and American Jewish colonizers used their toxic, white, Jewish force to kick pathetic Arabs off land they’d held for millennia. That’s simply untrue. Even if you don’t support Hamas directly, you support them indirectly if you accept their propaganda.
Image: YouTube screen grab.
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