THE Gaza Strip man blurted out “Where is the Arab world?” as he surveyed the carnage, rubble and destruction caused by Israeli bombings of the Palestinian Jabalya-area refugee camp at the start of the Israeli-Hamas war — yes, refugee camp (among several camps) for Palestine Arabs in Palestine Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, in the most unlikely of all places, New York City, London and Paris, thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters marched in the city centers carrying and chanting slogans of “From the River to the Sea shall Palestine be Free” in support of Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians in the various kibutzs in southern Israel near Gaza Strip which provoked the current war. None, however, signed up to fight for the Palestinians in that war. Instead, Arab-state Egypt doubled down by erecting another twice-as-high wall (six meters of it into the ground) along its border with the strip’s southern border to prevent Palestinians from seeking refuge in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Soon after Jabalya bombings, the Arab League convened (the non-Arab Iranian Islamic regime invited to participate), condemned Israel’s aggression and called, not for holy jihad against the Jewish infidels, but for a ceasefire, and nothing more — so much for the so-called Arab brotherhood and solidarity.
The conflict between the Palestine Arabs and Palestine Jews (Israelis) goes back to more than a century. Like the October 7, 2023 unprovoked attack and massacre of Israelis, the Palestine Arabs drew first-blood significantly back in 1920 against Palestine Jews, and then more terribly worse in 1921. Ever since sporadic killings of Jews followed. In 1929, in their adamant refusal for Palestine Jews to adorn with anything while praying on the Wailing (Western) Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a big riot broke out between Arabs and Jews after Arabs beaten and ousted a Jew from the Wailing Wall after stuffing a note on the wall as he began to pray — both Arabs and Jews claim the Wailing Wall as their holy site. As a result, hundreds were killed on both sides and both were radicalized in their hatred against the other.
Beginning in 1936 on through to Israeli independence war in 1948-49, twisted chain of events happened like a swinging pendulum between the Arabs and Jews in regards to the British Mandatory government. It began with the Arab revolt calling for Palestine-wide strike against the government in protest of the Mandatory lenient policy of en masse Zionists settlement of Palestine from Europe. Arabs attacked indiscriminately against Jews wherever found, but this time also against the British, and bombings of the Mandatory government institutions and infrastructure. Hundreds of Jews and lots of British were killed and a lot of bombings occurred. The British Mandatory government retaliated with a vengeance killing Arabs in the thousands between 1936 through 1939, some for a mere offense as finding a single bullet in an Arab home resulting in the house blown up and execution of the offender. How this went, Jews and British were killed by the Arabs and Arabs killed by the British army.
In September, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and thereby began World War II, with Great Britain and France, among allied powers, fought the war against the Axis powers — Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. That year, the British Mandatory government, fearing the newly independent Arab states and other surrounding Arab states-in-waiting, siding with the axis powers in the prosecution of the war for their opposition to the lax Zionists settlement policy of Palestine, swung to the other end of the pendulum and began to tightened Jew immigration to intolerable limits for the Palestine Jews. So, the radical Jews, such as the Irgun (offshoot of the Jews militia, the Haganah) and the breakaway Stern Gang, revolted against such changed policy to the elation of the Arabs. The difference here was that the moderate Jews (Haganah) joined the British army in their fight against the axis powers while the exiled Grant Mufti of Jerusalem, the Arab titular head, was in Germany asking Hitler for some assistance in ridding the Jews from Palestine.
It was the mischievous marginal group, the Irgun and Stern Gang (the British Mandatory labeled them as terrorists), that did damage to the Mandatory government and killings of Arabs. None was more grievous of the Irgun group than their slaughter of Arabs at Deir Yassin in February, 1948, where they indiscriminately and brutally killed men, women and children of about two-hundred of them that sparked the Palestine Arab catastrophe (al-Nakba) of about three-hundred fifty-thousand of them fleeing Palestine to never to return. It was, however, the Palestine Arabs’ propaganda, in the hopes of surrounding Arab states to come to their aid, by their portrayal of all Palestine Jews as horrendous monsters instilling tremendous fear in the local Palestine Arabs that, upon hearing the slaughter at Deir Yassin, they just dropped everything down and hastily fled — the Mandatory government by this time did not care about all the killings in Palestine because in three months’ time they would pack up and leave it thereby ending its mandate over the area.
On the eve of May 15, 1948 — the Sabbath day the British were scheduled to leave Palestine, the Palestine Jews declared into existence their state. Almost immediately after that proclamation, U.S. President Harry S. Truman officially recognized the “State of Israel”— thereafter, the Palestine Jews came to be known as “Israelis” and (Christian) Arabs became “Arab Israelis” (Moslem) Palestine Arabs did not come to be known as “Palestinians,” and it was only then in 1964 when the “Palestinian Liberation Organization” or PLO was formed that were called Palestinians). The U.S.S.R. (Soviet Union) officially recognized the State of Israel on May 15, 1948, after the British left and it was only sometime after that day that the State of Israel was officially recognized by Great Britain.
On that very day, May 15, 1948, the surrounding and nearby states, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq, self-interested and for land-grab reasons, attacked underdog Israel — the Palestine Arabs were sidelined during the 1948-1949 Israel’s war of independence. Puny Israel came out victorious and gained sixty percent, in addition to the territory allotted to them by the United Nations’ decision of November 29, 1947, of the territory allotted to but rejected by the Palestine Arabs, the rest went to Egypt (Gaza Strip) and Jordan (the so-called West Bank and East Jerusalem) — West Bank was yielded by Israel to Jordan, at Jordan’s request who actually provided the boundary description, and “surrendered” East Jerusalem, who put up a token fight, up to Zion Gate which divided East and West Jerusalem (Jordan described its war with Israel as a “phony war”). The gains by Egypt and Jordan were lost to Israel in the Six-Day 1967 war, and Israel gained the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt (later returned to it when it signed a peace treaty with Israel). As a result, the second wave al-Nakba of more than four-hundred thousand Palestine Arabs fled to neighboring Arab states (other than Egypt) — interestingly, those who sojourned in Nazareth (a Christian site where Jesus grew up) were spared from being driven out of Israel by the Canadian commanding officer of the Israeli Defense Force or IDF, formerly of the Haganah militia.
Before forwarding to today, on June 19, 1967, Israel offered the return of, respectively, the Sinai Peninsula and the strategic Golan Heights it captured earlier from Egypt and Syria during the 1967 Six Day War with the invading forces which Israel defeated, in exchange for peace agreement with them. Egypt and Syria thumbed down Israel offer immediately with their “No” response. Soon thereafter, on September 1, 1967, the Arab League (formed in 1945 with the goal in mind of a pan-Arab caliphate) met in Khartoum, Sudan at a conference and adopted what came to be known as the Khartoum Resolution with its notorious “Three No’s” provisions: No to peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, and No negotiation with Israel. In 1970, the king of Jordan expelled the terror-PLO leadership and a significant number of Palestinians from the kingdom who migrated to southern Lebanon and joined with existing Palestinian refugees residing there — their migration caused to upset the delicate demographic balance of Christian Arabs and Moslem Arabs (Shia Moslems) and in the composition of the Lebanese government, sparking a fifteen-year civil war in 1975.
Prior to 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon in aid of the Christian Arabs to rid the country of the PLO under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, who were, as a condition of IDF’s withdrawal, forced out of the country and exiled to the faraway Sunni Moslem country of Tunisia — Jordanians and Palestinians are Sunni Moslems. Filling in the void came the Hezbollah (“Party of God”) composed of Lebanese Shia Moslems and bankrolled by the newly established, non-Arab, Shia majority Islamic Republic of Iran — Iran was bent on exporting its theocratic form of government, run by Shia Moslems, to its neighboring secular, Sunni-majority Moslem countries much to their consternation. Beginning in 2007, the Sunni Hamas were voted into power (much to their surprise) by the Gazan Palestinians, who were also bankrolled by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and embarked on a jihad against the state of Israel styling its military operation as “Al-Aqsa Mosque Storm” with their perverted objective that one day they (Palestinians) will be praying in the mosque located on the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem controlled by the Palestinian Authority or PA headed by President Mahmoud Abbas— it is not clear here whether Hamas also intended to drive out the PA people (these guys fought and killed each other in the Gaza Strip after Hamas came to power)
In 1964 the terror organization, PLO, was formed at the urgings of neighboring Arab states to compensate for their failure to destroy the state of Israel and drive the Israelis out to the Mediterranean Sea — this became the mantra of the PLO that, through terror, they will drive out the Israelis from the Jordan river to the sea and liberate the Palestinians and take full control of Palestine in its entirety. In early 1967, the pan-Arabists Egypt and Syria colluded to invade Israel. People in Cairo mobbed the streets showing support to their leader Gamal Nasser and hanged Israel in effigy. In Israel mass graves were dug in anticipation of the Arab attack, but despite this the Israelis rallied to the defense of their country. Israel preemptively delivered the first blow and obtained air superiority in a matter of hours by bombing eighteen separate Egyptian airfield runways and destroying eighty-five percent of Egyptian fighter jets. Fearing a rout from Israeli ground forces for their lack of air cover, the Egyptian high command ordered ground forces and tanks, already poised to invade Israel at the Egyptian-Israeli border, to withdraw to the west of the Suez Canal — what followed was a turkey shoot by Israeli Air Force with impunity on the Egyptians. Incredibly, the Egyptian government lied to the people of what really happened and that that all was well according to plan. Syria (and Iraq), upon hearing this news, attacked, pressured Jordan to join the fray, which it did, and were met with superior air and ground power that in six days the guns were silenced and the war was over with Israel again coming out victorious — all the while, the PLO and the Palestinians were sidelined again. The same again happened with the 1973 Yom Kippur War, it was a humiliating defeat for Egypt and Syria. The Yum Kippur War was the last of four Arab-Israeli wars.
In the 1990s, the already subdued PLO’s Yasser Arafat was recalled from Tunisia, agreed to the Oslo Accords, and returned to Palestine together with the other exiled Palestinians. The Oslo Accords gave more than sixty percent of the West Bank contiguous, gerrymandered area (Zone C) to the complete administrative and security control of Israel. Less than twenty percent went to the PA the administrative and security control over a non-contiguous, isolated areas referred as the Palestinian archipelago (Zone A and Zone B — PA’s administrative and Israel’s security control), similarly like the islands (Zone A and Zone B) in Chuuk atoll where the lagoon waters around the islands constituting Israel’s Zone C. Israel has been expanding the city boundaries of East Jerusalem into its Zone C and have already been settled by some three-hundred thousand Jewish settlers where by deliberate design the Palestinians have become a minority in Jerusalem as a whole. On parts of Zone C, more than five-hundred thousand Jewish settlers have called those settled parts of Judea and Samaria their home. In short, Palestinians occupy areas that is a single digit percentage of the territory of Palestine that was first proposed to but was rejected by them by the Peele Commission in January of 1937 during the mandatory period.
To date, some one-million three-hundred thousand Palestinians (and more, by the tens of thousands, are pouring in by the day) have fled from seventy-five percent of the Gaza Strip area to the southern part of the strip as the IDF razed and levelled many areas rendering them unsuitable for habitation — a few pockets of central and northern parts of the strip are occupied by Palestinians numbering only in several hundred thousand. Rafah city, which borders Egypt, is targeted for IDF military operation in a matter of weeks before the Moslem holy month of the Ramadan, expects to pack in more than two-million fleeing Palestinians in the coming days. The prospect for “normalcy” for the Palestinians is utterly dismal and despairing as U.S. and western powers have withheld their funding contribution to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency or UNRWA, the relief organization that provides supposedly humanitarian assistance since, yes, 1949. Meanwhile, as all this was happening, their Moslem Arab brethren Hamas and their Moslem Iranian clergy brethren with their proxy terrorists, Lebanon Hezbollah and Yemen Houthis, have continued to fire rockets at Israel without any regard to the plight and suffering of the Gaza Palestinians — as for the rest of the Arab world, most are mum and the rest pay lip service only, and nothing more.
Will Israel allow the Gaza Palestinians who fled, to return to their homes they fled from, after, and only after, Hamas is driven “from the river to the sea” remains to be seen. The political climate temperature in Israel is rising, and so are the waters around the West Bank Palestinian archipelago surging inland evermore. Israel is Europe in Asia and Palestinians probably need to assimilate, Israel willing, as the pro-Palestinian protesters in the Christian cities of New York City, London and Paris had done, in order to find peace and live in peace fully alongside all peoples of Israel — no Arab state wants to take them in, especially Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait.
JOHN S. PANGELINAN
Kagman, Saipan
