When anyone studies the history of the Palestinian issue, the neutral observers cannot help to be amazed at the blatant arrogance, the trampling of human rights, and the insensitivity of the global superpowers. A recent lecture by Dr. Yasir Qadhi, Imam of the East Plano Islamic Center in Texas, counters the Zionist narrative on the Palestine conflict around five essential questions:
- What right did Great Britain have to promise Palestine to fellow Europeans involved in the Zionist movement at the beginning of the 20th century?
As Muslims, we know that Palestine was predominantly under Muslim rule since Umar bin Khattab (RA) except for around 90 years when the Christian Crusaders conquered it. During the Muslim era, Palestine was open to everybody regardless of religious affiliation to live, worship, and pray. Moreover, during this period, there was no civil war or conflict among the inhabitants of Palestine, as Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived peacefully together until the Crusades occurred.
History shows that the British made three contradictory promises to three different groups regarding Palestine. First, the British promised independence to the Arabs if they rebelled against their fellow Muslims, the Ottoman Caliphate. Also, they assured the Sharif of Makkah, the great-great-great-grandfather of the current King of Jordan that he would be the new Caliph if he fought against the Ottoman Empire and would rule the Arab lands stretching from Tunisia to Iraq.
On June 5, 1916, the Sharif of Makkah began the attack on the Ottomans in Madina. The ultimate tragedy is that the fault lies with the outside superpowers of the time but they couldn’t succeed without the help of Muslim traitors such as the Sharif of Makkah. In the end, the Sharif of Makkah wasn’t the Caliph and got nothing for his treachery.
While the British were promising a caliphate to the Sharif of Makkah, they negotiated an understanding with the French, Kingdom of Italy, and Tsarist Russia on the division of the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves. This secret agreement was the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement, which is the second contradictory agreement. Those hand-drawn boundaries by Sykes and Picot are still in existence today.
The third contradictory promise or agreement made by the British was the notorious Balfour Declaration of 1917. The Balfour Declaration was a statement of British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary made this commitment in a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild (of Tring), a leader of British Jewry.
The British dared to promise land that wasn’t theirs to a people, Zionist European Jews that had nothing to do with Palestine. We must remember that around 1900, the Jewish population of Palestine was barely three percent, which was the norm for thousands of years. The Jewish people in Palestine were Jewish Arabs who spoke Arabic and lived harmoniously amongst the Muslims and Christians until the Zionist movement picked up steam in the 1930s and 40s.
- What gave United Nations the right to legislate majority of the Land of Palestine to Europeans of Jewish background?
In 1947, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly passed Resolution 181 that called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with the city of Jerusalem as a corpus separatum (Latin: “separate entity”) to be governed by a special international regime. Without consultation with the local Palestinian population and its leadership, the UN divides Palestine into three parts. European Zionists got 55% of the land, whereas the local Arabs got 45% and Jerusalem was a separate entity.
The Jewish population becomes 30% of the total population of Palestine in 1947 due to the migration of European Zionists but they only own 7% of the land. The remainder of the population was 70% Arab that owned 93% of Palestine. But the UN resolution unjustly allocates the majority of Palestine to the Jews who the bulk of them are recent migrants. This resolution de facto ratified the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
- What gave the newly-found State of Israel the moral right to immediately launch a full-out military offensive in 1948?
On the eve of the declaration of the establishment of Israel by David Ben-Gurion on May 14, 1948, this newly created state goes to war on the Arab inhabitants of Palestine who are mainly farmers and peasants. The Arabs have been living for centuries working the land of Palestine and don’t possess weapons to fight. The Israeli forces attack over 450 Arab villages forcing the people to flee and for decades the Israeli government and historians denied that any massacres occurred and that the Jews found empty land to inhabit.
However, the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe debunked this narrative using pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s showing that the expulsions of Arabs didn’t occur on an ad hoc basis, as other historians have argued, but constituted the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, under Plan Dalet, drawn up in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders. According to UN estimates, the Israeli forces expelled more than 700,000 Palestinians during the conflict—what would become known in Arabic as the Nakba (“catastrophe”). The same Zionist mindset we see today in Israel and the Occupied Territories where new Jewish migrants to Israel are grabbing Palestinian homes and land with the attitude, “if I don’t take it, someone else will.”
- What gave Zionists the right to launch the Six-day War in 1967?
After grabbing over 80% of the land of Palestine in the 1948 offensive, the greed of the Zionists remained unsatisfied. On June 5, 1967, Israel launches a multi-front attack on its Arab neighbors resulting in the capture of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Shebaa farms, and the Golan Heights after six days and thus, the name ‘Six-day War.’ Furthermore, the Palestinians consider the Six-day War as the second Nakba (catastrophe) with another 600,000 Palestinians expelled from their lands. Today, we have a Palestinian diaspora of nearly 7 million around the world that cannot return to their ancestral lands.
- What moral right does the Government of Israel have to treat the Palestinians with the subhuman restrictions it does now?
There is a stark contrast in the living conditions between the Jewish settlers and the Palestinian people under occupation. The Jewish areas look modern like neighborhoods you would find in Western countries but when you cross the other side of the Apartheid Wall, the Palestinian areas are ghettos and slums. The Gaza Strip has become the largest open-air prison in the world with over 2 million trapped there and cannot enter or leave without Israeli permission.
Many non-Muslims have described Israel as an apartheid state. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” published in 2006 was critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and Gaza. Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu has commented on the parallels between South Africa and Palestine and the importance of international pressure in ending apartheid in South Africa. In 2008, a delegation of African National Congress (ANC) veterans visited Israel and the Occupied Territories and said that in some respects it was worse than apartheid. In 2014, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned that if Israel did not make peace soon, under a two-state solution, it could become an apartheid state.
The time has come for the friends of Israel from the West such as the US and its media to wake up and confront the oppression occurring in Palestine under Israeli rule.
Instead of asking Prime Minister Imran Khan about being less vocal regarding the alleged persecution of Muslims in China, Western journalists should have the guts to ask similar questions of their own governments regarding the plight of Kashmiri Muslims under Indian occupation and Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Or do countries like Israel and India have carte-blanche to oppress occupied people because they are “democracies”?
The irony is that the US government gives billions of dollars each year to Israel but doesn’t dare to speak the truth to them. At least Kashmir and Palestine issues remain on the UN agenda while the West hasn’t taken the issue of Chinese Muslims to the UN. How can Western governments justify the recent Israeli offensive against Palestinians killing women and children as self-defense? Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau refuses to accuse Israel of apartheid. The West is just as hypocritical on the issue of Palestine and Kashmir as Muslim leaders on the alleged oppression of Chinese Muslims.
