After a year as a professor at Columbia University, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton probably knows what she's talking about when she says young people “don't know much at all about the history of the Middle East.”
As an example, she pointed to the often overlooked rejection by the Palestinian Authority of a peace deal with Israel in 2000. Under its terms, a Palestinian Arab state would have been established in 96% of the West Bank and Gaza plus some ceded territory from Israel. In a recent interview, Clinton said Yassir Arafat, then the head of the PA, said he intended to agree with the proposal but in the end declined for fear of his life. “It's one of the great tragedies of history that he was unable to say yes,” she lamented.
Clinton warned that to fully understand the situation in the Middle East, one had to go back “thousands of years.” There's not room to do that in this column. Still, here are eight more historical elements, beginning in ancient days, that protesters on today's college campuses should know.
No. 1: Jews are Indigenous to the Holy Land. A 1993 archaeological discovery confirmed the existence of a King David and successors who lived in what's now Israel 3,000 years ago. And 2,000 years ago, Jesus was preaching there to his fellow Jews.
No. 2: After World War I, the British were awarded a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations, the forerunner of today's United Nations. The mandate called for “conditions as will secure the establishment of a Jewish national home.” Jews and Arabs alike carried Palestinian passports. In the early 1920s, 77% of the mandate's original territory was broken off from Palestine to become Transjordan ruled by an Arab emir.
No. 3: In 1947, the United Nations voted that the remaining 23% of the original mandate's territory should be divided again into two states, one majority Arab and one majority Jewish. The Jewish settlers accepted the plan, but the Arabs did not. According to the U.S. State Department, “Fighting began with attacks by irregular bands of Palestinian Arabs … against Jewish cities, settlements, and armed forces.” As soon as British troops left Palestine, the new state of Israel was invaded by Arab armies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt.
No. 4: No Palestinian state was established after the Israeli War of Independence concluded in 1949. The West Bank and East Jerusalem were occupied by Transjordan, which was renamed Jordan, and the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt. Even with the existence of the state of Israel, over 85% of the original Palestine mandate's territory was Arab-ruled.
No. 5: During and after the war, all Jews who'd lived in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were expelled by Jordan. In contrast, about one-sixth of the population of Israel remained Arab. During the 1947-49 war, between half and three-quarters of a million Arabs left Israel or were expelled from it. Over 800,000 Jews left or were expelled from Muslim lands in the years following Israel's independence. Since most of these refugees settled in Israel, Jews tracing their ancestry to non-European countries came to form a majority of Jews in the country.
No. 6: Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty between their two countries in 1979. Fifteen years later, the Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty was signed by King Hussein of Jordan, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and President Bill Clinton.
No. 7: In 1993 and 1995, the Oslo Agreements were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO recognized the state of Israel, and Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian Arab people.
No. 8: In 2005, Israel shut down its civilian settlements and withdrew its military forces in the Gaza Strip. In 2007, Hamas overthrew the Palestinian Authority in Gaza after a civil war. According to Human Rights Watch, it established control with killings, abductions and beatings of opponents. There have been no elections in Gaza since 2006. Hamas is currently on the U.S. Department of State and the European Union's list of terrorist organizations.
Recently, pro-Palestinian Arab protesters in Harvard Yard displayed a poster of the acting university President Alan Garber with horns and a tail sitting on a toilet, with a caption stating, “Alan Garbage funds genocide.” Do the protesters even know the meaning of genocide as defined by the U.N. in 1948?
Like so many, I'm deeply saddened by the loss of life on both sides in the current war, but sloganeering is not understanding. If protesters want to advocate for Palestinian Arabs, they need to do so on the basis of facts, not catchphrases. How can the state of Israel be illegitimate when it was established by a vote of the U.N.? How can it be a nation of white settler colonials when a majority of its citizens are Arabs, Druze and Jews indistinguishable in appearance from Egyptians, Jordanians, Yemenis, Iraqis, Moroccans, Syrians and Iranians?
I blame American universities in part for what's happening. They should be teaching their students critical thinking, not unquestioning acceptance. I find it commendable that students care enough about what's happening in the world that they are willing to demonstrate, but embracing trendy slogans isn't the same as learning the complexities of the past.
Protesters, whether pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian Arab, should go and study. They should be able to support their positions with history, not just gut feelings.
As Secretary Clinton said, “Propaganda is not history.”
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