Anonymous author
Arabs continuously protest that the land of Israel was “stolen from them”. Despite the mass territory that they currently occupy (such as Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt), they still covet the tiny land of Israel. They do so even as Israel comprises only 0.1% of the Middle East’s land mass and is surrounded by 22 Arab/Muslim nations.
All Arab claims to jurisdiction based on inherited historical control are illegitimate. As a strictly legal matter, the Jews obtained the land of Israel from the British, not the Arabs. There were legal mandates and conditions involved which the Jews followed; indeed, the British transferred the land recognizing the Jews as its rightful historical hiers. In July of 1922, the League of Nations recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine,” and thus entrusted Great Britain with the Mandate for Palestine. To take a step furtherback, the land still would not be Arab territory, as the British seized it from Turkey, –who also do not want the land back–during the Great War in 1917.
The Arabs took Palestine by military conquest, and also lost it by conquest, to the Christian Crusaders in 1099. The Arabs have no grounds to complain about the expansion of Israeli territory to the West Bank in 1967, which was an act of self defense, as it was Jordan who attacked Israel despite their desperate pleas to avoid this conflict.
Arabs are native to Arabia, not Palestine. One of the many differences between Israelis and Arabs include the the letter P. Anat Berko, a conservative lawmaker from the governing Likud Party, stated in parliament that Palestine could not possibly exist because there is no sound of a ‘P’ in the Arabic language. After the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, it was the Romans, the ruling power at the time, who renamed Judea ‘Aelia Palestina’, after the Philistines who were enemies of the Jews. This change was made in an attempt to erase Jewish connection to and minimize Jewish identification with the land.
‘Free Palestine’ is a term we often hear nowadays. The Free Palestine Movement opposes the existence of the land of Israel and believes there is no grounds for coexistence between Jews and Arabs. They claim that they have owned the land for hundreds of years. However, there was never an independent Palestinian state in the first place. Despite the Arab’s supposed connection to the land, the word ‘Jerusalem’ is not mentioned once in the Quran. Furthermore, as mentioned, Arabs defensively claim that the letter P is not represented in their alphabet because Israel is the land of ‘Filastin’ and not ‘Palestine’. Even so, the word ‘Filastin’ does not appear in the Quran either.
The land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people and Arabs have no right to protest that they are the rightful inhabitants. Their claims to the land are both false and illogical. Although they continue to fight to take over our minimal territory, we must stand up to defend our country.
