Bruce Bawer

Bruce Bawer on Robert Spencer’s latest book: The Truth about “Palestine”


 

The more you cut through the dross that surrounds the Muslim Arabs’ conflict/dirty war against Israel, the more you come to understand the reality which Israel faces. The Muslim Arabs are wrapped in an endless dervish of death and mayhem due to Islamic commands that compel them to fight the Jews…

 

The Truth about “Palestine”

Robert Spencer delivers a new vital corrective.

Over the years, Robert Spencer has written enough books on Islam to fill a good-sized bookshelf and to provide, along with the Koran and a few other key documents, an ideal syllabus for an intensive course in the Religious of Peace. The topics of his books include the Koran, sharia law, the life of Muhammed, the history of jihad, the nature of stealth jihad, Iran, ISIS, the differences between Christianity and Islam, and the “war on terror.” While holding to a consistently high level of scholarship, Spencer invariably writes in a lucid, straightforward manner that makes his works ideally suited for the intelligent common reader.

 

The newest addition to the Spencer shelf is The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace ProcessIt covers a lot of material, but does so as cogently as ever. First, he refutes definitively the myth that today’s so-called Palestinian Arabs descend from indigenous inhabitants of what is now Israel. “No archeological evidence, or evidence of any other kind, has ever been found to substantiate a link between the ancient Canaanites or Jebusites and the modern-day Palestinians,” Spencer writes. “Palestine was the name of a region but never of a people or of a political entity.”

 

Yes, the region was under Arab rule for a while a very long time ago – after the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed and before the Ottoman Empire moved in – but there were always Jews there, and, usually, few if any Arabs. In fact, as the accounts of travelers quoted by Spencer testify, the region was thinly populated for centuries. It was in the nineteenth century that British visitors and officials began to seriously envision this desolate area as a future population center for Jews.

 

Yet not all Brits were big on the idea. Though the Balfour Declaration, issued in 1917 by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, expressed support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland (but not necessarily a Jewish state) in Palestine, pro-Arab Brits, notably T.E. Lawrence of Lawrence of Arabia fame, promoted the myth that the Arabs had been strong British allies in World War I, and thus deserved at least some of the former Ottoman territory that the League of Nations had placed under British administration in 1922 with the explicit intention of transforming it, eventually, into an independent Jewish state.

 

In any event, it was during these years that Jews from the diaspora started relocating to their ancient homeland in considerable numbers. At the same time, Arabic-speaking Muslims from North Africa and elsewhere migrated there, too. In reaction to these developments, the British banned Jewish settlement east of the Jordan. Hence it wasn’t the case, as many would now have you believe, that the Jews stole land from Arab Muslims; on the contrary, the British took much of the ancient Jewish homeland, territory that Jews had expected to be able to settle and govern, and gave it to Arab Muslims who had no historic connection to it whatsoever.

 

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