In last month's edition of the Temple Times, I shared with you an interview with Francisco Gil White, a professor at ITAM, political anthropologist, and historian. He holds a Master’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Evolutionary and Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. In the interview, Gil White analyzed and recounted the origins of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
We had reached the point where he explained the stark difference between the Jews who came to buy land from Arab landlords and provided work to the Arab residents of those lands, which were part of the Ottoman Empire, and the landlords themselves. I must add, with Jewish immigration, these workers—who had previously been almost feudal slaves of the occasional "owners" of the land— became free laborers and were able to pay off their old debts. However, they were not really included in the burgeoning Jewish communities or in the economic and technological progress these communities were acquiring. Some Arab populations did grow in these areas, but not at the pace of the Jewish ones.
We must recognize that this unequal growth and social separation only fueled the resentment of some toward these people who were slowly settling in what they considered their land, even though others owned it.
Let’s continue with the interview:
A very important and undoubtedly majority proportion of the Jews arriving at that time were Marxists, primarily organized by Labor Zionism. These Jews came with an ideology of solidarity with the Arab workers. As a result, they were employed by people who wanted to have a good relationship with them and had an ideology of joining forces with the workers, and they ended up living much better.
This situation meant that the lower, workingclass Palestinian Arabs had no interest in going out to kill Jews, as Amin Al-Husseini wanted them to do. I remind you that AlHusseini is the founding father of the Palestinian Arab movement. He belonged to one of the most powerful aristocratic, landowning families in the region, and was selling land to the new Jewish immigrants and using that money to finance the development of an Arab militia. I should add that he was also the Mufti of Jerusalem at the time, which made him not only the religious leader but, I would say, the political leader of the Arab people in this territory as well.
So, what Al-Husseini did was organize antiJewish terrorism under the guise of Arab nationalism. He directed terrorism not only against Jews but also against Palestinian Arabs themselves to force them to participate in terrorist attacks against the Jews. The proof of this is that statistics show that during the Arab revolt, which was the fourth wave of terrorism he organized under the British Mandate from 1936 to 1939, he had 400 Jews killed and 2,000 Arabs.
Why was he killing more Arabs than Jews? Wasn’t his movement supposed to be anti-Jewish?
The answer is that the Arab working class didn’t see what the problem was with these Zionists coming to free them and develop society with new, more modern communities. The violence was also aimed at forcing Arabs to join the movement against the Zionist Jews.
This is the true origin of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has nothing to do with a territorial claim, as it is often presented today.
This is demonstrated by the PLO. The organization that Husseini created, which later became Fatah in 1970, swallowed the PLO. I’m referring to the PLO that had been created by Nasser in 1964—the Palestine Liberation Organization, which we now call the Palestinian Authority.
Are they the same? Yes, they are.
When the PLO was created in 1964, its constitution stated that the definition of Palestine was the one drawn by the British government in its project to allocate land to the Arab people settled in the British Mandate. These borders had changed several times in negotiations with both sides.
So, the “ancestral” and “millennia-old” land of the native Palestinian people, which is supposedly where they have been for centuries, according to the Palestine Liberation Organization—the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people—said in its 1964 constitution that Palestine had the borders drawn by the British government.
In other words, the people who define what Palestine is, according to the Palestine Liberation Organization, are the foreign, colonialist European infidels. There couldn’t be a greater absurdity.
Also, in that same constitution, the PLO specifically stated that the territories of Judea and Samaria— what they call the West Bank— and Gaza were not part of Palestine.
They explicitly defined these territories in Article 24 of the original constitution and did not claim them as part of Palestine. Why? Because there were no Jews there. At that time, in 1964, Jordan was illegally occupying Judea and Samaria. The Six-Day War, where they would lose that land, had not yet occurred. So, there was no reason to claim it.
In the 1948 War of Independence of the State of Israel, they tried to exterminate the Jews instead of accepting a Palestinian Arab state that had just been offered to them with the partition plan presented by the UN the previous year, 1947. If the disagreement had been about territory, they would have accepted the offer. They didn’t. So, it wasn’t about territory.
They wanted to exterminate the Jews, as they had publicly announced before the war.
What that war did achieve was the prevention of the creation of a Palestinian Arab state, and they failed to exterminate the Jews as they had hoped. The State of Israel was established, but Judea and Samaria were taken by Jordan, and Gaza by Egypt.
That’s precisely why, when the PLO drafted its constitution in 1964, it wrote that Judea, Samaria, and Gaza were not part of Palestine. They didn’t claim them. This proves that the PLO was drawing the borders of Palestine specifically to exclude the territory where Jews were. Because it wasn’t about obtaining land; it was about killing Jews.
Then, as I mentioned earlier, in the Six-Day War in 1967, Jordan lost Judea and Samaria, and Egypt lost Gaza. Once Israel had control of them, by 1968, the PLO rewrote its constitution and redefined Palestine to include the territories of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.
Again, this shows that it had nothing to do with land. They drew the borders of Palestine to surround precisely the areas where the Jews were, with the aim of exterminating them. In fact, Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, announced before the 1967 war that they were going to exterminate the Israeli Jews.
That is why, years later, when Anwar Sadat signed the peace treaty with Israel, it was seen as abandoning the sacred Muslim cause of exterminating the Israeli Jews. Many were deeply offended by Anwar Sadat for signing a peace treaty with Israel, and that’s why he was assassinated.”
It seems we’ll need another edition of the Temple Times to continue unraveling this complex web of lies, revenge, and supposed territorial claims.
It’s important to know the history. It would be beneficial for those who oppose Israel's right to defend itself and allow its people to live in their land to educate themselves on the true origins of the Middle East conflict.
In the meantime, and until we meet again in November, I once again wish you Shana Tova Umetuka uGmar Chatima Tova. May we have a good year, and may we be inscribed for a good and sweet life—a life of peace for us, for all the People of Israel, and for all humanity.
Rabbi Gustavo Geier
View part 1 of this article here.