Whose Land Is It? Palestine Or Israel?

A Documentary Looks At This Issue With Old Footage

In the arid lands where the whispers of ancient prophets still echo through the windswept deserts and time-worn stones, a tumultuous tapestry of conflict has been woven, thread by bloody thread. Welcome to the embattled realms of Israel, a land revered as hallowed ground by billions, yet also a tumultuous theater of ceaseless strife and heart-wrenching warfare. From the gritty struggles of the 1947 to 1949 Palestine war, ensnaring figures like David Ben-Gurion and King Abdullah I, to the formidable shadows cast by the titans of conflict such as Gamal Abdel Nasser during the fraught days of the Six-Day War in 1967.

Can you hear the cannons roar across the Sinai Peninsula? Can you feel the shifting sands under the weight of armored divisions clashing in the sweltering heat? “In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles,” said David Ben-Gurion. A saying that ripples through the tumultuous tides of Israel’s conflicted history, mirroring the incessant quest for peace amid a symphony of swords and sorrows.

Absorbing the powerful words of Mahatma Gandhi: “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” How do these echoes of non-violence ripple through the tumultuous oceans of historical clashes and contentions?

Join us, as we traverse the chronicles of Israel’s battle-scarred past, navigating through the haze of warfare and the echoes of tumultuous conflicts, to unveil the human stories shrouded beneath the shadows of swords and the tempests of history. Welcome to the diary of Julius Caesar.

The Echoes of Balfour. The Legacy of a Century-Old Promise in Modern Conflicts

In the crucible of World War I, a potent proclamation emerged that would resonate through the corridors of history, leaving an indelible imprint on the tapestry of Middle Eastern geopolitics – the Balfour Declaration. Crafted on November 2, 1917, by Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, this cryptic yet momentous document articulated the British government’s support for establishing a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The historical theatre was set against the backdrop of the Ottoman Empire’s declining prowess, and the strategic calculus of British imperial interests, intertwining the threads of diplomacy, war, and Zionist aspirations.

Navigating through the complexities of the declaration reveals a convergence of motivations. Britain, engaged in the labyrinth of global conflict, sought to secure wartime alliances and post-war spheres of influence, leveraging the declaration as a strategic chess piece. In this geopolitical chessboard, prominent personalities were instrumental. Chaim Weizmann, a notable Zionist leader and chemist, cultivated significant influence within British political echelons, contributing a nuanced dynamism to the evolution of the declaration.

Numbers and statistics unveil the demographical transformation that Palestine underwent. In the embryonic stages of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Jewish inhabitants constituted about 10% of Palestine’s population. Fast-forwarding through the corridors of time, by the onset of World War II, Jewish inhabitants had burgeoned to approximately 30%, reflecting the tangible impacts of the migration currents facilitated by the declaration.

An intricate mosaic of international agreements and promises characterized this epoch. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, a secret arrangement between Britain and France, carved spheres of influence in the Middle East, sowing the seeds of conflicting promises with the Arab custodians of the lands. These interwoven pledges cultivated an environment ripe for future contentions and contestations.

6 thoughts on “Whose Land Is It? Palestine Or Israel?

  1. Mark

    Jeff in March/April 2002 did two all encompassing shows on this topic, Touch of Evil and Cast a Giant Shadow. You need to get the transcript from him. It would help you immensely on this conundrum.

  2. Justin O Smith

    The Jews’ Valid Claim/ or Beneath Islamic Propaganda

    By Justin O. Smith
    August 1st 2013 at 10:01am

    The following text is anti-Jewish more than it is anti-Semitic, but it is still anti-Semitic from both a historical and a moral viewpoint concerning the controversial issues surrounding Israel and the “Palestinian state”. Professor James M. Rubenstein, author of ‘The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography” is either knowingly advancing the islamofascists’ propaganda and agenda, or, possibly, his own education indoctrinated him to such a point that he received a Ph.D. despite his ignorance in the field; whatever the case, Mrs. Laurie Cardoza-Moore and the Jewish community are rightfully concerned and should be quite angry with the Williamson County School Board, especially when one understands the false premise and assumptions associated with the text.

    From the text: Distinguishing terrorism from other acts of political violence can be difficult. For example, if a Palestinian suicide bomber kills several dozen Israeli teenagers in a Jerusalem restaurant, is it an act of terrorism or wartime retaliation against Israeli government policies and army actions? Competing arguments are made: Israel’s sympathizers denounce the act as a terrorist threat to the country’s existence, whereas advocates to the Palestinian cause argue that longstanding injustices and Israeli army attacks on ordinary Palestinian civilians provoked the act.

    The word “Palestine” does not occur in the Old or New Testament at all; after the Jewish revolt of Bar-Kokhba in 135 AD, the Romans renamed Judea to be “Palestine” or “Syria Palestina”, with the intention of obliterating its Jewish identity. The earlier name never disappeared, and as late as the 4th century, Christian author Epiphanus referred to “Palestine, that is Judea”.

    The “Arab Palestinian” was never a serious age-old or even century-old national identity. The term was introduced as a tool after the 1967 Six Day War, and, according to the British Palestine Royal Commission Report, “In the twelve centuries or more that have passed since the Arab conquest… In the realm of thought, in science or in letters, it (Palestine) made no contribution to modern civilization”.

    As Rosemary Sayigh wrote in the ‘Journal of Palestine Studies’, “a strongly defined Palestinian identity did not emerge until 1968, two decades after expulsion”. It had taken twenty years to establish the “myth” prescribed by Muslim activist Musa Alami.

    Upon the emergence of the Sovereign Jewish State of Israel in 1948, there were no more than 430,000 genuine Arab refugees, although the UN asserted 500,000 officially. 750,000 Jews were dispossessed and forcibly expelled during this same period.

    President Truman’s International Development Advisory Board, March 7, 1951, and the Arab sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut agreed that 68% of the Arab refugees left in 1948 at the urging of Arab leaders and Islamic imams, rather than any expulsion by the Israeli military. As some Arab leaders demanded the “return” of the “expelled” refugees, Emile Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Command, told the ‘Beirut Telegraph’ on August 6, 1948: “It is inconceivable that the refugees should be sent back to their homes while they are occupied by Jews… It would serve as a first step toward Arab recognition of the state of Israel and Partition”.

    From Khaled Al-Azym’s 1972 memoirs (Syrian Prime Minister 1948): “Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees…while it is we who made them leave… We brought disaster upon…Arab refugees by…bringing pressure upon them to leave…We have rendered them dispossessed…Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson and throwing bombs upon…men, women and children – all this in the service of political purposes”.

    In 1958, former director of the UN Relief and Work Agency, Ralph Galloway declared emphatically that “the Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore… a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die!”

    During the 1950s, a population exchange occurred between India and Pakistan, as 8.5 million Sikhs and Hindus from Pakistan fled to India, and approximately 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to Pakistan; a precedent for such population transfers was set by Turkey and Bulgaria in 1913, and in 1923, Turkey and Greece exchanged 1.25 million Greeks and 3.55 million Turks.

    Why wouldn’t such a population exchange have worked with the Jews and the Muslims?

    A mutual repatriation obviously could not be demanded if one side of an exchange had fled from intolerable conditions and could not return. Hence, the Arab lie emerged that the “alien” Jews had lived harmoniously among the “native” Arab Muslims before Israel became a state and the mythical “Palestinian” was created.

    In Egypt after the Sinai Campaign of 1956, thousands of Jews were interned without trial, while still others were served with deportation papers and ordered to leave within days; their property was confiscated, their assets frozen.

    In Iraq, Zionism became a capital crime, and Jews were hanged in the center of Baghdad, in front of cheering crowds of Muslims. Although no laws authorized the confiscation of Jewish property in Iraq before 1950, the Jews were stripped of millions of dollars through economic discrimination and government extortion.

    Anti-Jewish broadcasts from Egypt in response to the partition of Palestine resulted in the December 2, 1947 pogrom in Aden. Eighty-two Jews were murdered, scores more were wounded, while 111 Jewish stores were robbed bare and over 200 Jewish homes and four synagogues were burned to the ground; Aden’s 1958 riots directed violence and murder at the Jewish community once again; after the 1967 Six Day War, it became apparent that the islamofascists were preparing to massacre what remained of the Jewish community, and the British evacuated them. And this scene was repeated time and again across the entire Arab Muslim world!

    Reverend James Parkes observed in 1949: It was only politically that the Jews lost their land. They never abandoned it physically, nor did they renounce their claim to their nation… the only continuous claim that exists. The Jews never submitted to assimilation into various victorious populations even after successive conquerors had devastated the Jewish organizational structure.

    Buried beneath the propaganda of the Arab nations, the Organization for Islamic Cooperation and the islamofascists, one finds that more than 40 Jewish communities survived and could be traced in the 6th century, despite physical violence against the Jews by the post-Roman Christians and Muslims. Twelve of these towns are on the coast, in the Negev, and east of Jordan (Transjordan and the “Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan”), and thirty-one villages are in Galilee and the Jordan Valley.

    After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Albert Memmi, a Tunisian-born writer, responded to a Libyan official’s invitation to Libyan Jews to return to Libya:

    “Is it true that you have said that the Jews have always lived at peace in the Arab countries? And that you have nothing against Jews, only Zionists?…The error which may have been made at Deir Yassine (Palestinian Jewish Irgun and Stern troops inadvertently killed 250 Arab civilians in 1948) is constantly thrown in our faces. Ah, but we have undergone a hundred Deir Yassines, a thousand Deir Yassines! And not only in Russia, Germany or Poland, but also at the hand of the Arab people; yet the world has never been upset over it!… if you really wanted to avoid having us come together on this particular bit of land,… Israel…, then why did you hound us and expel us from the regions over which your power extends?”

    Today and despite John Kerry’s new “peace-talk” initiative between Israel and the “Palestinians”/Arab Muslims, the islamofascists in Gaza and the West Bank, especially Hamas, perpetuate this false national identity, and in so doing, they sacrifice the wellbeing and lives of the “Arab refugees”; they hope only to accomplish, politically and through continued, if sporadic, terrorism, the destruction of an unacceptable sovereign Jewish state… dhimmi Jews from Islamic lands now acting as their equals… as it represents an affront to all Islamic nations.

    Muslim propaganda has effectively hidden the fact that Arab/Islamic nations have virtually purged their Jews, as the European Union, the United States and the rest of the world ignores the plight Arab-born Jews have faced historically – the camps, squalor, displacement, theft of property and a loss of security and murdered kinsmen; raise the question of “Middle East refugees” with any number of academics, such as Professor Rubenstein, professionals or just regular workers, and they refer to the Arab “Palestinians”. It is as though the painful and horrifically sad story of the Arab-born Jewish refugees had been erased: the revisionist history of the anti-Jewish Leftists and islamofascists must be rejected and corrected!

    Justin O. Smith

  3. Justin O Smith

    A Recognition of Reality
    A Historical Injustice Corrected

    By Justin O. Smith
    Sent: 12/9/2017 2:15 PM

    Jerusalem is the undivided capital of Israel, according to President Donald Trump, who declared it so on December 6th 2017, rewarding our close ally Israel and correcting a historical injustice, although any sane person already understood this fact and the historical record removes all doubt. President Trump’s declaration sounded the death knell on the seven decades long world delusion that Muslims and the ideology of Islam somehow have any claim to any part of Jerusalem, which is a critical component of the mythical “palestinians’” simple ploy to undermine and ultimately destroy Israel, a sovereign Jewish state in the middle of the Islamic world, which is viewed in their eyes as an insult to Islam.

    Along with this declaration, President Trump announced the plan to move the U.S. Embassy, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem over the next few years, to ultimately fulfill the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act, signed by President Bill Clinton, which originally called for this to be completed by 1999. A waiver signed by President Trump has delayed the move for six months, until a review can present an efficient and viable plan for the move.

    President Trump was cautioned against this move, by Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who feared it would enrage the Islamic world. While it did result in an immediate blowback, President Trump is convinced that this will aid the peace process in the long term; and even if this is not the case, God will bless him and America for his courageous and righteous decision.

    Representative John Culberson (R-TX) told ‘The Hill’: “America should never change our foreign policy based on an assumption that we’re going to offend a group of Islamic radicals. America should always do the right thing and stand by our allies, and America has no stronger ally on earth than the people of Israel.”

    Justifying his decision, President Trump mentioned the Parliament, Supreme Court and the prime minister’s home in West Jerusalem, as locations within the Old City, including Al Aqsa mosque. A bright, glaring focal point, he made no mention of any Palestinian rights to East Jerusalem.

    Today, the Jewish Temple Mount is the third holiest site in Islam, behind Saudi Arabia’s Mecca and Medina. Muslims believe once they claim a piece of land, it belongs to Islam forever.

    However, there has never been a “Palestinian” state with Jerusalem as its capital, or a palestinian language or culture. There was not any such thing as a “palestinian” people, prior to 1948. They were ethnic Arabs and Muslims, who created the myth as a political tool to use against an unwanted Jewish state in their midst.

    For the past three thousand years, since 1000 B.C., there has been an uninterrupted Jewish presence in the city of Jerusalem, which is the religious and cultural home for the Jewish people and their historic capital. Jews, wherever they are in the world, face Jerusalem when they pray, and each year at Passover, their hopeful prayer is recited, “Next year in Jerusalem”.

    The Bible mentions the City of David, Jerusalem, more than 600 times, and Jerusalem is mentioned hundreds of times in the Prophets (Nevi’im) and Writings (Ketuvim). The Psalms 137:5 state, “If I forget thee Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill”. Out of all the cities in the world, the Bible only calls on us to pray for the welfare of Jerusalem, but not once is Jerusalem mentioned in the Koran.

    In Mohammed’s lifetime, Jerusalem was an unimportant city in the Byzantine Empire and a Christian city without a single mosque. The Al Aqsa mosque is a conquest mosque [Tov Rose & CBN] built atop the ruins of the Church of Saint Mary of Justinian. And, although Islamic tradition says Mohammed ascended into Heaven from Al Aqsa mosque, there is no record of Mohammed having ever been to Jerusalem.

    President Trump rightfully noted: “This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality. It is also the right thing to do. It’s something that has to be done.”

    Many professional “peace experts” contend that President Trump’s capital idea will kill any chance for a negotiated settlement between the Palestinians and Israel. Palestinian Authority president-for-life Mahmoud Abbas, an old terrorist himself, characterized the move as America’s “declaration of withdrawal” from the “peace process”.

    What peace process?

    For nearly a decade, Abbas has refused to engage in direct talks, despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s open invitation, but no negotiation is better than the bad faith negotiations of the Palestinians. In 1993, under Yasser Arafat, they accepted extremely generous deals in the Oslo Accords and right away committed wave after wave of terrorist attacks, in an effort to force more concessions from Israel and the West.

    And now, President Trump has sent the unmistakable message that murder will not be rewarded. No longer will violence over Jerusalem be tolerated.

    Calls for Muslims to engage in “three days of rage” immediately sounded over mosque loudspeakers in Gaza, and hundreds moved on the Israeli border, after Trump’s speech, throwing stones and chanting, “We don’t need empty words, we need stones and Kalasnikovs”, while other clashes broke out in Hebron and Bethlehem. Thirty-one Palestinians were wounded on Thursday, and Friday after prayers was like all other Fridays, with the usual protests and anger.

    The Palestinians don’t want to peacefully coexist beside Israel, in a two-state solution. They seek a one state solution and an Islamic State that exists in the place of Israel, and they cling to their fantasy of eradicating the Jewish state. To achieve this, they have created a campaign to revise history, and they attempt to erase the undeniable Jewish connection and birthright to Jerusalem.

    Reprehensibly, on May 2nd of this year, near Israel’s Independence Day, the U.N.’s cultural body, UNESCO, passed a series of resolutions that stated Israel hasn’t any legal or historical rights anywhere in Jerusalem. Largely comprised of an anti-Israel majority, the votes against the resolution came from the U.S., U.K., Italy, Germany, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Greece, Paraguay and Togo.

    In the moments after the vote passed, Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO, Carmel Shama-Hacohen, draped in a large Israeli flag, addressed the meeting: “Even now, after this miserable vote, this blue and white flag is flying high above the Temple Mount and throughout Israel’s eternal capital city, Jerusalem, waving in the wind, saying to all ‘here we are, and we are here to stay'”.

    Denying reality is how this game has long been played. For seventy years the world has pretended that Jerusalem wasn’t the capital of Israel. We even witnessed the U.N. become the poster child for the absurd, when it declared East Jerusalem “occupied territory”, on December 23rd 2016, because of President Obama’s anti-Israel sentiment. This advanced the insane and ignoble fantasy that, as a matter of international law, the Western Wall, and the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem too, really belongs to the Palestinians. President Donald Trump just put an end to their game, with his acknowledgement of fact and his brave act and moral courage.

    By Justin O. Smith

  4. Justin O Smith

    A Righteous War Against Hamas Terrorism

    Palestinian Protests in America Breeding Grounds for Future Terrorists

    By Justin O. Smith

    Sent 5/19/2021 11:09 PM

    “They are flooding all over the city now buried into torpor and sleep and wine, the invaders. And meanwhile, through its open gates, others irrupt to join their henchmen’s platoons.” ~ Virgil, ‘The Aeneid’ (The burning of Troy) [Blog Editor: I could not find this specific quote by either Virgil or in the Aeneid. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. My guess: there are variations of English translations of Virgil’s Latin.]

    My blood has ran hot with anger over the past several days, at the sight of Palestinians waving their flag in the streets of America, from I-278 near Los Angeles, in front of the Federal Building on May 15, 2021; to downtown Memphis and Nashville on May 18, 2021; as well as in numerous other cities, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Dearborn and Atlanta. They have the freedom of expression right to fly that disgusting flag, representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Hamas terrorists, who have committed murder and mayhem, across the globe for the past six decades, but it is a fight they should have kept in the Middle East, if it’s one they believed must be waged against Israel, even though an accurate accounting of history exhibits multiple fallacies and a myth surrounding the “palestinian people”.

    Jew-Hating Faux-Palestinians Displaying Hate for Israel (photo collage sent from Justin)

    It should be a revolting sight for any true American, who loves the idea of America and its Freedom and Liberties of days past, because whether these “palestinians” are recent legal or illegal immigrants or second and third generation “American citizens”, nothing can be clearer than the fact that they consider themselves Palestinian and Muslim first and a U.S. citizen or “an American” second, and they are here as part of a larger agenda, that has very little to do with desiring a better life and everything to do with subverting America and its alliance with Israel, in order to eventually eradicate the sovereign Jewish nation of Israel.

    This is reminiscent of a “peaceful” protest by the Muslim community in my hometown of Murfreesboro, TN on January 9, 2009 and again in 2012 en masse in support of Hamas murderers and terrorists in Gaza, along with the discovery that one of the board members of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro was a radical jihadist.

    It also brings up memories of my youth and witnessing a majority Christian nation, Lebanon, being slowly devastated and destroyed, building by building, community by community, with one bombing to the next and many thousands murdered by armed marauding bands of PLO “freedom fighters” and their Iranian Hezbollah allies, during the 1970s. Through this the early benevolent legal immigration and the massive subsequent illegal invasion of Muslims, from Jordan, Syria and Iran, all with their own particular Islamic identifiers and nomenclature, Lebanon soon became a nation largely held hostage by Muslims who loved her not.

    I recall the second civil war in India that resulted in the new Muslim nation of Bangladesh, and Dacca and the Muslim massacre of eight hundred Hindus, including many women. Their corpses laid out for days feeding the vultures. A great cloud of vultures descended on the area, unrolling the bowels of the dead Hindus, like so many paper streamers, and taking them in their beaks up into the sky.

    On May 18th, it was [JOS] reported by my good friend, Dave Urbanski (Blaze Media) that a caravan of Palestinians drove through LA and stopped to assault diners at one restaurant, after asking for any Jews to identify themselves. Two Jewish men spoke up and were immediately attacked, just for unabashedly declaring themselves to be of the Jewish faith, in a country where everybody is supposed to be tolerant of one another’s faith. …….

    https://slantedright2.blogspot.com/2021/05/a-righteous-war-against-hamas-terrorism.html

  5. Mark Lambert

    I do not fit into your neo-con agenda/propaganda/talking points. I want both sides wiped out. I believe in Freedom for Americans.
    Your foaming at the mouth and gnashing of the teeth is not productive to yourself or anyone else.

  6. The Publisher Post author

    Stand by Mark… within a number of hours I will have a post on the Federal Observer that will be enough to awaken many people – but will also piss some folks off – those who just don’t get it. I have worked on this project for between 50 and 60 hours this past few days and in my “column” introduction – there will be an explanation.

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