Lebanese Journalist: Israel Excels and Arabs Failed a Century After Balfour

Feb 22, 2018

A Lebanese journalist has conceded that looking back at a century of history in the Middle East, the Arab world has failed where Israel has shined.

In a November 25, 2017 article marking the 100^th  anniversary of the Balfour Declaration published in the London-based daily Al-Hayat, Lebanese journalist Karam Al-Hilu compared the meager accomplishments of the Arab world in the past century with those of the rest of the countries of the world, and particularly Israel.

The Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917 was a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Baron Rothschild stating that “His Majesty’s government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Al-Hilu noted that Israel’s supremacy in the areas of science, economy, society, and politics is the source of its strength, as well as the source of the Arabs’ failure in confronting it.

“A century after the Balfour Declaration the Arabs have not managed to build a [a single] state that possesses knowledge, justice, and the economic, social, and human capability for confronting Zionism,” al-Hilu wrote, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) recently published,

Arab Lack of Achievements

“One hundred years have been squandered [by the Arabs], in all aspects; during them, the Arabs have been confronting Israel while their cultural infrastructure was in crisis – in the areas of knowledge, politics, economy, society and thought,” he charged.

According to a 2014 Arab Knowledge Report published by the United Nations (UN), despite the existence of 500 Arab universities, with an enrollment of nine million students and faculties of 220,000 lecturers, scientific achievements are meager in the Arab world, which has failed to adapt to digital culture and other basic aspects of human progress.

Expenditure on scientific research for its part is negligible.

Scientists and research output are a rarity in the Arab world, and the research that is published there constitutes only 0.8 percent of the global average. The number of patents registered to the Arabs in the past 50 years does not exceed the number of those registered by Malaysia alone.

“Not a single Arab university ranks among the 500 best in the world, while Israel supersedes the Arabs at an astronomical rate, in inventions and in hi-tech export. Israel has completely wiped out illiteracy  [among its citizens], while among the Arabs, 23 percent remain illiterate,” he further noted.

Arab Law and Justice

The Arabs have also not succeeded in building a single state of law and justice, he pointed out.

Transparency.org’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2016, published January 2017, shows that six of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world are Arab. Countries such as Egypt and Tunisia are ranked 108^th in corruption, and Lebanon is 136^th, while Israel takes 33^rd place, which places it with the developed countries.

“[The Arabs] have not managed to establish a country [in which there is] economic justice; the class gaps [among the Arabs] are very great and unemployment, particularly among young people, tops out at 35.7 percent in Egypt, 32.1 percent in Iraq, and 45.3 percent in Mauritania,” he added.

For the Arabs to change the course of history and rectify this situation, as part of the “resistance to Israel,” they must start by “reading these numbers and these facts,” claimed al-Hilu.

While the Arab world has “spared no blood, martyrdom, or [self-]sacrifice” in its fight against Israel, “it has been negligent in the areas of science, economy, society, and politics that are the source of Israel’s strength – just as they are the source of our failure in confronting it,” he concluded.

Arab and Muslim journalists and commentators have previously expressed envy over Israel’s success in various realms, especially compared to the stagnation of the Arab and Muslim world.

Palestinian Historian: ‘There Was Nothing Called a Palestinian People’

(with thanks to www.unitedwithisrael.org )

Rather than accepting history and living with it, Palestinian leader Abbas chooses to invent facts, thus perpetuating the Palestinian war against Israel’s existence.   

Palestinian Authority (PA) head Mahmoud Abbas published an op-ed in the UK’s Guardian on Thursday to mark the 100^th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, in which he disregarded the historical facts and presented a revisionist version of the events.

The Ottoman Empire’s rule of the Land of Israel, as well as most of the Middle East, began in 1512 and lasted for over 400 years. There was never any “Palestinian” entity in the area.

However, Abbas, after castigating Lord Arthur Balfour for promising “a land that was not his to promise” went on to describe the Palestinian people as “a proud nation with a rich heritage of ancient civilisations, and the cradle of the Abrahamic faiths.”

Contradicting Abbas’ historical revision, just a day before, PA official TV broadcast an interview with the historian Abd Al-Ghani Salameh, who explained that in 1917, the time of the Balfour Declaration, there was no Palestinian people.

“There always was a historical struggle over the Mandated Palestine territory, and many wanted to rule it. How did the aspirations to rule affect the Palestinian existence, the Palestinians’ options, and the Palestinians’ possibilities of development?” the host of the program asked Salameh during a special broadcast for the centenary anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.

“Before the Balfour Promise (i.e., Declaration) when the Ottoman rule ended (in 1917), Mandated Palestine’s political borders as we know them today did not exist, and there was nothing called a Palestinian people with a political identity as we know today,” Salameh said on Palestinian TV, according to the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a watchdog which monitors Palestinian incitement.

Salameh explained that “Palestine’s lines of administrative division stretched from east to west and included Jordan and southern Lebanon, and like all peoples of the region [the Palestinians] were liberated from the Turkish rule and immediately moved to colonial rule, without forming a Palestinian people’s political identity.”

Please Get Your Historical Facts Straight

In his article in The Guardian, Abbas continued to revise history by claiming that he was 13 years old “at the time of our expulsion from Safed.”

This contradicts Abbas’ own words in 2013, when he admitted on PA TV that the residents of Safed were not expelled but rather left Israel in 1948 on their own.

“The [Arab] Liberation Army retreated from the city [Safed in 1948], causing the [Arab] people to begin emigrating. In Safed, just like Hebron, people were afraid that the Jews would take revenge for the [Arab] massacre [of Jews] in 1929. The 1929 massacre was most severe in Safed and Hebron. The people (of Safed in 1948) were overcome with fear, and it caused the people to leave the city in a disorderly way.”

The IDF did not take revenge for the heinous 1929 massacre, in which 67 Jews were killed in Hebron and 18 in Safed.

100 Years of Arab Rejection

Throughout the 20th century, Arab leaders have rejected Jewish rights, promoted an exclusivist worldview that the land belongs only to them and encouraged violent attacks on the Jewish population.

This rejection of the legitimate and internationally-mandated and recognized claim of the Jewish people to a national homeland in the Holy Land is the cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Even now, the Palestinians, instead of educating and building towards a future of peace, are still looking backwards, trying to turn back the hands of time, re-litigate and deny, and reject the world’s acceptance of the justice of the Jewish people’s claim, the foreign ministry exclaimed.

Abbas announced at the July 2016 Arab League Summit his intention to sue Britain for issuing the Balfour Declaration.

His and other Palestinian leaders’ rejection of the Balfour Declaration reflects their consistent denial of any rights of the Jewish people in their homeland, and thus, drives peace further away.

The vehement opposition to the Balfour Declaration was and has remained rooted in the anti-historical view that Jews are aliens in the land, and in the false assumption that they have no connection to the land and no right of any kind to live there as a people. This attitude of Arab exclusivism continues to drive the Arab-Israeli conflict to this day.

Historical Significance of the Balfour Declaration

The following points regarding the significance of ther Balfour declation were compiled by Dore Gold, the President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs since 2000. In June 2015, he was appointed Director-General of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he served until October 2016.

On July 24, 1922, the British pledge to help build the Jewish National Home was explicitly incorporated into the text of the League of Nations Mandate, which called for "putting into effect” its terms. The Balfour Declaration thus was transformed into a binding obligation under international law. Moreover, it was approved unanimously by the Council of the League of Nations, made up of 51 member states. The Balfour Declaration is important because it recognizes the historical bond of the Jewish People to the Holy Land, a bond which existed long before the declaration. What was significant was its public and formal recognition and its incorporation into international law. In his testimony before the Peel Commission on Jan. 7, 1937, David Ben-Gurion noted: "I say on behalf of the Jews that the Bible is our Mandate, the Bible which was written by us, in our own language, in Hebrew in this very country. That is our Mandate. It is only recognition of this right which was expressed in the Balfour Declaration.” Thus, the British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration, upon which it was based, did not create Jewish historical rights, but rather recognized a pre-existing right. The historic Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel is the real claim to statehood. The tendency to justify Zionism on the basis of the Holocaust is totally misconceived. Not only was Zionism a thriving and successful movement prior to this tragedy, but the Holocaust destroyed its largest human reservoir and severely set it back. The Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine contributed large numbers of volunteers and committed its manpower, agriculture, manufacturing and expertise to the Allied cause. Unfortunately, this contribution was soon forgotten. When the State of Israel was born in 1948, it was invaded by a coalition of Arab armies which received their training and weapons from the main colonial powers: Britain and France. Ironically, the rise of Israel was an anti-colonial development accelerating the demise of European colonial empires. Israel's enemies seek to misrepresent and falsify the historical facts. They try to portray modern Israel as a product of European colonialism, with no roots in the land and no historical rights. Modern Israel is the heir and successor to ancient Israel. The Balfour Declaration recognized this bond.

The True Palestinian ‘Nakba’

 Philip Carl Salzman  Sept 3, 2017 

 

 https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/09/03/the-true-palestinian-nakba/

Seventy years ago today, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) introduced a detailed proposal to the UN General Assembly for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, approved less than three months later by a vote of 33 to 13. Not for the last time, however, a concerted international effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict foundered on the shoals of Arab rejectionism.

Arab Muslims roundly condemned UN partition — and more broadly the very principle of a Jewish state anywhere in Palestine — striving instead for complete victory. 

The Arabs acted according to their tradition, refusing compromise with inferiors. For over a millennium, Islamic empires had spread by the sword from Arabia across the Middle East and North Africa to much of Europe and as far east as India. God bestowed upon Muslims a right — no, a duty — to dominate Dar al-Islam (the house of Islam) forevermore. Not only did Jews, long a subservient and despised minority in Dar al-Islam, lack the right to have an independent state in Palestine, but the Arab residents of Palestine had no right to concede it to them.

The Arabs in Palestine thought that the Jews could not and would not stand up to them, and they acted on that well-established cultural principle. However, the thousand-year-old conditions were  not achieved this time around. The Jews they faced were not a dhimma, and they did not cower. Against the odds, and with little outside help, they fought and won. Again and again.

While maintaining their uncompromising rejection of any Jewish state in the Holy Land, the Arabs eventually abandoned their triumphalist rhetoric in favor of a more useful narrative. In this retelling, Israel is responsible for seven decades of mayhem, not the victim of unremitting hostility. That role would now be played by the Arab residents of Palestine, now called “Palestinians” — indeed, they would be forced to play it by the refusal of Arab states to naturalize, or even provide humane accommodations, to the so-called “refugees.”

Arab states marshalled their collective influence to sell this narrative to the rest of the world, with much success. Most Europeans and their governments, including the European Union, and many Americans risk apoplexy in their violent denunciations of Israel, while tripping over themselves offering sympathy and money to the Palestinians. The United Nations has established a complex bureaucracy devoted solely to their needs.

This narrative has received a particularly warm reception in the academic world, where Western imperialism, rationalized by disparaging “Orientalist” stereotypes of Middle Easterners, is seen as the single greatest cause of the region’s ills.

Of course, blaming all Palestinian problems on Israel makes even less sense than attributing the Arab-Islamic world’s economic, political, and cultural decline in recent centuries to relatively brief and limited Western interventions.

Though the narrative has grown more and more fantastical over the years, its acceptance remains disturbingly widespread. In the end, of course, the Palestinian victimization narrative hurts Palestinians by obscuring the actual sources of their misery — their failed supremacist ideology, despotic and corrupt leaders, and irrational hate of Jews — preventing the emergence of genuine solutions to a tragic, festering problem.

Responses to Allegations re Balfour Declaration

1. The essence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from 1917 until today has been the systematic and total rejection by the Palestinian leadership of the Jewish people's legitimate national rights in the Land of Israel.

2. The Balfour Declaration, issued almost 100 years ago on 2 November 1917 by the then-Foreign Secretary of Britain Lord Arthur James Balfour, marked one of the first times in the modern era that a significant world power officially recognized the Jewish people’s right to their ancient homeland. This document was then incorporated into the 1922 decision by the League of Nations [the precursor of the United Nations] to create a mandate aimed at establishing a national home for the Jewish people in the land of Israel. The League of Nations decision of 1922 transformed the Balfour Declaration and its call for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people from a policy position into an international legal obligation accepted by the international community as a whole.

3. Current Palestinian attempts to undermine the Balfour Declaration are part and parcel of their campaign to undermine the basic rights of Jewish peoplehood and the legitimacy of the State of Israel. Rejecting the Balfour Declaration is tantamount to rejecting the internationally-recognized natural rights of the Jewish people to a national home in the Land of Israel.

4. While Israel has repeatedly stressed its adherence to the principle of two states for two people, these Palestinian attempts prove yet again that their leaders are less interested in establishing their own state alongside Israel than they are in forging it instead of Israel.

5. The Palestinian Authority’s incongruous threat, first announced this past July, to sue the British government over the Balfour Declaration demonstrates that Palestinian leaders remain fixated on unfounded allegations from the past instead of moving forward to a better future for both peoples.

6. This historical denial of internationally-recognized Jewish rights by the Palestinian leadership is also reflected in the recent attempts in UNESCO to erase the Jewish and Christian heritage of Jerusalem.

7. Both the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations decision included specific provisions to ensure respect for the civil and religious rights of all inhabitants in the land of Israel, irrespective of their ethnic orientation or religion.

Israel itself has always fervently strived to protect the rights of all its citizens – Jews and Arabs alike. Even before Israel became a state in 1948, the Jewish national movement deemed respect for the basic rights of all the inhabitants of the land as one of its most important values. Indeed, Israel enshrined these rights in its Declaration of Independence:

“THE STATE OF ISRAEL […] will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

8. In the hope of fulfilling its dream of peaceful coexistence, Israel – and the Jewish national movement that preceded it - continually demonstrated their readiness to make painful compromises with their Arab neighbors.

In contrast, the rejectionist policies of the Palestinian leaders have not changed.

9. Tragically, these Palestinian policies have not been limited to the political sphere. In 1947, the UN Partition Plan - which was accepted by the Jews - was rejected by the Arabs, who chose to wage a war of annihilation instead of accepting the compromise that would have averted all the wars that followed.

10. Current activities by the Palestinian Authority, including its campaign against the Balfour Declaration, indicate that the Palestinian leadership continues to claim exclusive rights to the entire land, refusing to recognize the legitimate historical right of the Jews to their national homeland. These actions cast serious doubts about Palestinian intentions.

11. These actions, together with the systematic distortion of Jewish history, are morally unacceptable and factually unfounded. They are inimical to the international community’s – and Israel’s – desire for peace. It is long past time for the international community to step up and demand that the Palestinians stop perpetuating the conflict against Israel and finally answer Israel’s repeated calls to return to direct negotiations for a genuine peace.