The Rights of the Hebrew Nation in Israel/Palestine

The modern roots of the Israeli (Jewish)-Arab (Muslim) conflict begin in 1882, with the first wave of return of the Jews to their ancient biblical homeland. The Holy Land, the Land of Israel, Judea (the Royal Israeli Tribe), the Hebrew (meaning "those who crossed over" the Jordan River, thirteenth century BCE) Land, and Palestine (a Roman term) were synonyms used to describe a primitive region in the Turkish Ottoman Empire (1517-1917), which was sparsely inhabited, consisting mostly of desert and marshes. The phenomenon of Jewish settlers purchasing land and making a living through agricultural cultivation was called “Conquest” (of the emptiness) by the Zionist (after Zion, the lyric biblical name of Israel) Movement. Through these means, national values were taught to a nation that had lost its land and then returned to it. Between the years 1882 and 1948, the number of Jews in the region increased from 20,000 to 650,000, which was perceived by the Arabs to be a threat to future, post-colonial sovereignty of Palestine due to the fact that they denied the historical connection between the Jews and Israel. In 1949, at the end of the War of Independence against four Arab countries – Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon – that had invaded the area that had been declared a territory of the Jewish State by the United Nations, Israel signed a ceasefire treaty. Rather than a border, an armistice demarcation line was drawn, which lasted until the next war. Israel did not have borders since its neighbors, all considered to be enemies, did not acknowledge its existence or right to possess any part of the land.

In April 1950 the British government officially recognized the State of Israel – 20,770 square kilometers (8,019 square miles), the size of the state of New Jersey in the United States, or half the size of Switzerland – not including Jerusalem, and the Jordanian occupation of central Palestine, which the British had evacuated two years earlier with the end of the British Mandate. The Jordanian invasion reached 22 kilometers (13.6 miles) inland from the Tel Aviv coast. The occupied territory, corresponding to the biblical regions of Judea and Samaria, was called the West Bank (of the Jordan River). At the same time Egypt invaded and occupied the Gaza Strip. In the Jordanian and Egyptian occupied territories no Arab-Palestinian state was established. Mandatory Arab-Palestinians received Jordanian (but not Egyptian) citizenship. Between the years 1948 and 1967, Arab-Palestinian terrorist groups attacked the State of Israel as part of the fight for “the liberation of Palestine,” namely, to annihilate the State of Israel before the Six-Day War of June 1967 and before Israel controlled the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The most prominent figure at the head of the organization whose target was to annihilate the State of Israel was Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). His successor today is Chairman of the Palestinian Authority Mahmud Abbas, known to the Israelis as Abu Mazen. The religious Muslim organization, Hamas, which represents at least one-third of the Arab-Palestinian population and rules the Gaza Strip, was established at a much later stage, in 1987. On May 16, 1967, the Egyptians ordered United Nations military peacekeeping forces to leave the Gaza Strip. Six days later, Egypt blocked Israeli ships from entering the Straights of Tiran, effectively preventing Israeli vessels from navigating the international waters of the Red Sea to Eilat, the southernmost Israeli port. The naval blockade was equivalent to a declaration of war. On June 5, 1967, the first day of the war, Jordanian forces occupied the United Nations headquarters in Jerusalem. Western Jerusalem (Israel) was bombed from the eastern side of the city (Jordan).

Simultaneously, the Syrian army began bombing the settlements in the Jordan Valley. By the end of the Six-Day War Israel had conquered land from Jordan and Egypt – not from the Arab-Palestinians – which Israel transferred to the rule of the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s. Establishing an Arab-Palestinian authority was the first event of autonomy in their history since the Arab conquests of 635 CE. To emphasize: never, in all of human history, did there exist an independent Arab-Palestinian state. The majority of Israeli-Arabs within the 1967 borders – that is to say, those who have Israeli identity cards – consider themselves to be under occupational rule since they do not recognize the right of the State of Israel to exist in any territory whatsoever.

Authenticity Tested

During one of the worst periods of terrorism to occur in the last twenty years, known by its Arab term intifada (revolt), the weekly magazine Time published a timetable of the Israeli-Arab conflict in order to explain the causes of the bloodshed in the Middle East to confused international readers (“A Land Divided,” March 25, 2002). According to Time, the history of the conflict started with the decision of the United Nations in 1947 to divide Palestine between Jews and Arabs. With one strike on the journalist’s keyboard, the entire history of the region was amputated at the year 1946, when Palestine was first divided, with the establishment of the Transjordanian Emirate, now known as Jordan. As a consequence of the misleading chronological presentation of events, a thirty-year history of bloodshed – the period of the 1918-1948 British Mandate – was wiped clean as if it had never happened. By its absence from the timeline, this period was implied to have been peaceful because the State of Israel had not yet come into existence. Therefore, the date of the beginning of the conflict as reported by Time is not based on historical evidence.

The shallowness of the dispute about the rights of the Israeli and Arab nations in the Land of Israel, which is Palestine, pervades many other aspects of the media. Most of the senior (elected, appointed or independent) representatives of Israel find one single, superficially presented argument to be enough. The purpose of this article is to present a series of arguments based on evidence, solid information that precedes opinion, and proven data followed by a preliminary conclusion. The main argument is: It is my right as a Hebrew-Israeli (Jewish resident of Israel) to be a sovereign, sole leader in the Land of Israel west of the Jordan River. The other nation, the Arab nation, has civil rights, but not rights of sovereignty. Obviously, loyalty to the state is demanded of every person of every nation in order to keep his rights. My purpose is to prove that I, as a Hebrew-Israeli, have the right to rule the territory west of the Jordan River according to international law – in accordance with the moral and legal standards that those nations themselves have established.