Mick Hartley

The Arab Case for Israel, by Hussain Abdul-Hussain:

Before the State of Israel emerged, Arab nationalism and Islamism rejected the European-crafted state boundaries in the Middle East, including the concept of Palestine. Instead, these nations aspired to forge a unified Arab or Muslim nation. This grand vision, however, never materialized. The notion of Palestine as a distinct entity emerged in 1964, largely driven by inter-Arab rivalries rather than a historical reality. Since then, Palestinians have cultivated a narrative of a lost state that, in truth, never existed as a sovereign entity. Their collective aspiration for a “return” is less about reclaiming a physical homeland and more about yearning for a time when Israel did not exist. This imagined past fuels a vision that, if realized, risks creating yet another unstable state, given the challenges faced by many Arab nations today, including neighboring Syria and further away Iraq, where peace is always tenuous and civil war haunting these countries and their failing states.

From a review in the Jerusalem Post:

The author makes two compelling overall observations: that the Jewish state is good for the Arabs; and that the Arabs have never articulated a cogent alternative, dwelling on an imagined past rather than an imagined future.

“Palestinians have always wanted to rewind the clock, but to what time, exactly?… The problem for Palestinians has been that no matter which period in history they chose, they would never find a time when the Arabs of Palestine were sovereign over the land,” he writes.

“Throughout history, the only locals to have ever been sovereign over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea were… the Jews.”

And, “Palestinians have never admitted their inability to imagine a future modern Palestine, or their failure to build a single modern institution in their history, let alone to build and manage a functioning state that is not the kind of medieval Islamist emirate that Hamas constructed in Gaza after 2007.”….

Abdul-Hussain observes, “Since the time Muslims gained power over Jews and others in the region, they had treated them the same way they treated one another: coercion by violence. Originally, this was typical for empires subjugating those they colonized. But since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it took on nationalistic characteristics, and this was when the story of Palestine was honed, evolving into the imagined nationality that we see today: the one that claims to have unfairly lost its sovereignty to the Jewish state, despite never having existed as a sovereign state.”

Concerning the explosive topic of Jerusalem, he discovered that “In over two millennia, since the Arabic language first started taking shape, there was never an Arab or Muslim dynasty that considered Jerusalem to be its capital.”

These and many other revelations led him to believe that “Perhaps if the Arabs, including Palestinians, realize that their national identity is not as ancient and fixed as they think, they will find it easier to trade it for more useful advantages, such as a higher standard of living.”

Abdul-Hussain calls for Arab introspection and a substantial adjustment of their viewpoint “not only to let Jews live in peace, but for the sake of a better future for the Palestinians and all the Arabs.”

If they ever choose to “prioritize measurable higher living standards over unquantifiable, manufactured, and manipulative concepts of pride, dignity, and national sovereignty, they will realize that peace with Israel, rather than defeating it, is their actual victory.”…

“It is Palestinians that need to be liberated, not Palestine,” he declares.

“Arab society is perhaps one of the most violent on the planet today … whether in the form of militias, bandits, secret police, thugs, honor crimes, and domestic abuse. Yet now, since the theory of ‘decolonization’ has become all the rage in Western academia, inadequate Islamic traditions that should be replaced with modern ideals are being praised as indigenous.”

See here for more on settler colonialism, and the absurity of applying it to the case of Israel.