Students For Victory--er, Justice--In Palestine

Open Letter: Dear Students For Victory--er, Justice--In Palestine

by Gerald A. Honigman

What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy G_d ? ... Micah 6:8

Justice, Justice, shalt thou pursue... Deuteronomy 16:20

But the stranger that dwells with you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God... Leviticus 19:34

Dear SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine:

For openers, I have a request...

Please be honest. That begins with the very name of your organization.

It's not "justice" you seek in Palestine, but victory.

Students For Victory In Palestine better characterizes your real goal--along with others aligned with your mindset. But, I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's backtrack a bit...

The opening quotes are from the Hebrew Bible (aka, "Old Testament"), written twenty-five to twenty-seven centuries ago in the very land you claim Jews have no ties to. That land was called Israel and later, by Greeks and Romans, Iudaea--Judaea. Not until the emperor, Hadrian, ended the costly second major revolt of the Jews for freedom in 135 C.E. was the land renamed Syria Palaestina--Palestine. This was done with hopes to end the Jews' struggle for independence once and for all.

Judaea was thus renamed for the Hebrews' historic enemies, the "Sea People" from Crete--the non-Semitic, let alone non-Arab, Philistines. Open http://q4j-middle-east.com and look at the top of the cover to see a Judaea Capta coin Rome issued after the first major revolt some seven decades earlier. Judaea Capta--not Palaestina Capta. Tacitus, Pliny, Dio Cassius, and Josephus were just some of the ancient Roman or Roman-sponsored historians who recorded these events. Corroboration...

Those quotes are just a few of many examples of the subject of justice you'll find in the sacred writings of the Jews. And they go far in explaining the difference between the Arab (as in, for example, "Palestinian") and the Jewish approach to this concept...especially as it applies to others.

The reality is that there can be no justice in any human conflict unless the needs and aspirations of all parties are taken into consideration. But, again, let's be honest. That's not what folks like you in SJP seek. The "justice" you demand is for Arabs and Arabs only. Forget about "the other" in this vision...

When Muhammad's successor Arab caliphal armies (note: you seem to worry about imperialism and colonialism only when non-Arabs/non-Muslims are the alleged bad guys) burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E. and conquered, displaced, massacred, imposed dhimmitude, and/or forcibly Arabized scores of millions of native, non-Arab peoples and acquired millions of square miles of territory from them--the Amazigh-Kabyle ("Berbers") and Jews of North Africa; Copts in Egypt; Kurds; Assyrians; Semitic but pre-Arab Lebanese; black Africans; Hindus and Sikhs on the Indian subcontinent; Zoroastrians in Iran; and others as well, the newly arriving Arab settlers, with no prior connections to those lands, cared nothing about "justice" for the native conquered peoples. There were no attempts to address the latter's own needs and aspirations, and this persists to this very day. The conquered and colonized either accepted Arab terms of conquest or were dispatched from Planet Earth.

Victory, not justice.

When Jews were promised, after World War I, that the long-awaited resurrection of their sole, minuscule state (from which the terrain frequently gives up evidence of their millennial connections, along with volumes of non-Jewish sources for historical corroboration) would come in the wake of the breakup of the four-century old Muslim, but non-Arab, Ottoman Turkish Empire, which controlled much of the region, this was part of the same vision that foresaw "Arabia for the Arabians, Armenia for the Armenians, Judea for the Judeans, Kurdistan for the Kurds," and so forth and was incorporated into President Woodrow Wilson's famous "Fourteen Points."

Unlike the typical Arab treatment of non-Arab owners of lands that they conquered, from Muhammad's day up to the present, it is useful to consider what was offered to Arabs--many, if not most, of whom ample, valid documentation shows entered the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine from elsewhere in the region--to address their own aspirations. Primary sources such as the Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations are filled with such information.

Since the SJP has not likely read such sources, I'm forced to repeat myself since the same arguments keep surfacing. The choice is either to respond or to grant victory by default. And each year, increasingly on too many campuses, a new crop of starry-eyed, naí¯ve students arrives for indoctrination rather than education....especially if the subject has anything to do with the Middle East.

Regarding the Palestine issue, in 1922 London chopped off almost 80% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine, in which Jews were promised a reborn national home, after the dissolution of the Turks' empire and handed it over to its allies in WWI, the Hashemite Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula. The Brits soon shafted the Kurds the same way in the Mandate of Mesopotamia--all in the name of Arab nationalism, one species or another, and for London's own imperial petro-political schemes. See my own extensive doctoral research on this subject referenced in any one of these links...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22british+petroleum+politics,+arab+nationalism,+and+the+kurds...%22+by+gerald+a.+honigman&filter=0&biw=1344&bih=705

In 1947, the Brits offered to cut in half the 20 % of what was left of the original 1920 Mandate after the creation of what would become today's Jordan on all the land east of the Jordan River. In other words, Arabs would have wound up with some 90% of the original land of the Mandate of Palestine, but 10% for the Jews was still too much in their eyes.

Arabs refused the '47 partition plan for the same reason they refuse any meaningful compromises today. The only peace they will accept with the Jews is the peace of the grave.

Again, it's not justice that they want...although this chant leads the naí¯ve, misinformed, and/or innocently ignorant to cheer on groups like SJP.

As always, since Muhammad's day, the real goal is complete victory over both the Infidel and any other national competitors--even Muslim ones, like Berbers, Kurds, and black Africans of Darfur province in the Sudan.

Putting this into a broader context--beyond the conflict between Arab and Jew in the region--as just one example, consider how this has affected some 35-40 million pre-Arab, native North African Kabyle/Imazighen/"Berbers":

In Algeria, Berbers were forbidden to use their own language, Tamazight...riots erupted, reported in France but ignored elsewhere in the West...America, of course, had been sufficiently subject to ARAMCO (the Arabian American Oil Company) propaganda, a payoff to the Saudis by Big Oil, to allow the latter to produce and market Arab oil. So, ARAMCO's message to America was that there is just an Arab world in this region in which there are no Copts, Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Turkmen...and, of course, no Berbers and no Jews–they all came to Israel, you see, from Europe for everyone in this region is just Arab (New English Review, January 17, 2008; https://kabylia.wordpress.com/2017/09/19/berber-autumn/)

Regarding that last tongue-in-cheek sentence above, over half of Israel's Jews were refugees from Arab/Muslim lands--the other side of the refugee coin that usually no one, besides Jews, ever talks about.

Please follow Belkacem Lounes of the World Amazigh Congress as he responded to Libya's Mu'ammar Qaddafi's denial of the very existence of the Amazigh/Berber people...

The people of whom you speak...speak their own Amazigh language daily...every day live their Amazigh identity...What worse offense to elementary rights is there than denying the existence of a people...30 million in North Africa? You menace the Amazigh, warning that whosoever asserts his identity will be a traitor... There is no worse colonialism than internal colonialism–that of the Pan-Arabist claim that seeks to dominate our people. It is surely Arabism–an imperialist ideology that refuses diversity–that constitutes an offense to history and truth...

https://www.memri.org/reports/berber-leader-belkacem-lounesthere-no-worse-colonialism-pan-arabist-clan-wants-dominate-our

Victory, not justice...Not in Palestine, not in Kurdistan, not in North Africa, not regarding pre-Arab Copt descendants of Pharaoh's Egypt, not towards native Jews, not towards anyone not Arab... And not exactly how Jews--despite some rare lapses--are nevertheless expected to, and actually do, treat "the other."

It's not a coincidence that while Arabs have periodically outlawed the language and culture of those whom they conquered, Israel has made Arabic the second national language of the nation. Furthermore, Israel was reborn on soil Jews have called home for well over three thousand years and as a result, in modern times, of legally-recognized partitions and such. Rather than "conquering," a nascent Israel had to avoid being conquered when it repulsed an invasion of some half dozen Arab armies immediately upon its rebirth in 1948...with repeated attempts on its existence ever since.

As discussed previously, another 35-40 million ancient, non-Arab people, the Kurds, had already lost their one best chance at independence after World War I in imperial petro-political games being played by London in collusion with Arab nationalism.

After the League of Nations' Mosul Decision of 1925, the oil of the Kurdish north in Mesopotamia was tied solely to a unified Arab Iraq instead of at least being shared in an independent Kurdistan in at least part of the country. The hopes of millions of Kurds who lived there for millennia prior to the Arab Islamic conquest were simply abandoned.

While repeated compromises and partitions occurred and/or were offered to both national competitors in the Mandate of Palestine--with Arabs winding up with the lion's share of the land, despite claims of folks like SJP to the contrary--there was to be no partition in the much larger Mandate of Mesopotamia to address the hopes and dreams of millions of Kurds and others who predated the Arabs there by millennia. We are living with the tragic consequences of this travesty to this day--just follow the news in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iranian Kurdistan. Indeed, Arabs refer to the potential birth of such an independent Kurdish state as "another Israel'...i.e., once again, how dare any other people (i.e., not just those Arabs call kilab yahud--Jew dogs) but Arabs claim a sliver of justice in the region they refer to solely as "purely Arab patrimony."

Unlike Arabs, with almost two dozen states on over six million square miles of territory to date, the above peoples (and others as well) still don't have one state and still suffer because of this.

So, tell me, please, what campus has a chapter of Students For Justice In Kurdistan...or For Kabylia... or For The Amazigh People on it? Or, for that matter, even has a professor who will dare to bring up the plights of such peoples?

Finally, for my last example revealing the duplicitous deception practiced by organizations like SDJ, let's turn to black Africa. Please consider the following. Here's how Arabs have viewed their ongoing conquest, the tragedy of which continues in places like the Sudan to this very day, with literally millions having been slaughtered, displaced, enslaved, raped, maimed, and so forth over the years...

Ex-president, Gaafar Muhammad al-Nimeiry proclaimed, "The Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into... black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission ("Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics," Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 11, no. 2, 1973, pp. 177-7 Cool

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While many folks--especially "Progressive" profs and such--are quick to identify things like Rudyard Kipling's late 19th-century poem, "The White Man's Burden," as typifying Western colonialist and imperialist attitudes towards the Third World, why have such blatant Arab racist attitudes in the Sudan and elsewhere been routinely given a free pass? A common designation for a black African in Arabic is "˜abd ...slave.

Is it that for folks like the SJP the Arab Man's Burden is acceptable but the White Man's is not? Are the SJP's useful Hebrew idiots in J Street, Jewish Voice For Peace, New Israel Fund, and elsewhere concerned about such things--let alone Gentiles?

Such is the duplicity and hypocrisy which typify an admittedly imperfect Israel's critics--both on campus, in courses of one-sided, deceptive professors, or in groups like Students for Justice in Palestine--and off...where one set of lenses and standards, more often than not, is used to judge Israel and (among other things that it represents) the national liberation movement of the Jews (the world's longest oppressed people), Zionism, and a completely different set for the countries that surround them.

Why is Arabism laudable but Zionism a nasty word?

The plain truth is that, like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and yes, even the so-called "moderates" of Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority and Fatah, groups like SJP reject a resurrected State of Israel, regardless of size.

And yet again, it's not "justice" that they seek, but victory...a victory for purely Arab patrimony and the Dar ul-Islam.

Had Arabs granted Jews a tiny sliver of the same justice they demand for themselves, they could have had their 22nd state--and second, not first, in the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine--numerous times over during much of the past century.

www.geraldahonigman.com