London – Palestinian historians examining the administration of the Holy Land during the British and Ottoman periods have discovered that the rulers of that land remained completely oblivious to the fact that they were not really the ones in charge. In reality, say the researchers, the Palestinian people were in control of their homeland, which is why the emergence of Israeli control over the same parcel of land was such a disaster.
While the Ottomans took control of the Holy Land in the first half of the sixteenth century, say the historians, they in fact never truly reigned, despite their monopoly on tax collection, land ownership registration, road construction, military recruitment, and the management of commerce, for example. Throughout the four hundred years of Ottoman rule in the Holy Land, an indigenous people called Palestinians were in fact sovereign, despite there being no record of any indigenous sovereignty since the Second Jewish Commonwealth two thousand years ago.
The same phenomenon continued when the British pushed out the Ottomans toward the end of the First World War and assumed a League of Nations mandate to rule the territory. Although they had the last word in immigration, military disposition, infrastructure, trade, and many other realms typically representing bona fide political control, Palestine was actually a prosperous, vibrant, idyllic country of its own, unbeknownst to the British. By extension, this phenomenon extended through 1967 in the West Bank, since no one seemed to be bothered by Jordanian occupation of the territory until then.
Palestinian scholars have developed three general approaches to this historical anomaly. The first simply ignores the non-Palestinian nature of the Ottoman empire and pretends that since the Ottomans were, to varying degrees, Muslim, though not Arab, the area could be said to fall under the control of an entity with a sort-of Palestinian pedigree, in the sense that many Palestinians of the Ottoman period were also Muslims, as were the vast majority of the people from West Africa to Southeast Asia. Thus it was not specifically with the establishment of Israel in 1948 that Palestine lost its sovereignty, but in 1918, with Israeli control simply a more severe form of foreign occupation.
The second simply denies the need for demonstrating any historical sovereignty in order to claim that the Palestinians had it taken away. This approach offers the advantage of not having to find historical research that backs up its assertions.
The third approach, and by far the most popular, blends the first two, as it simultaneously tries to actively erase documented history – for example, by excavating parts of the Temple Mount to get rid of evidence of ancient Jewish structures – while maintaining that whatever the historical record says is irrelevant, as the Palestinian people have greater rights to all the land in dispute no matter what anybody says.
The various approaches can already be seen in laughably counterfactual statements by Palestinian leaders, such as claiming that Jesus, a Jew, was Palestinian; that the Arab Palestinians are descended from pre-Israelite non-Arab Canaanite peoples, despite what their own individual family lore says; or that today’s Jews have no genetic relationship to the land’s ancient inhabitants, despite what actual genetic studies demonstrate.
But international players have also adopted the approach, pretending that the territories Israel captured in 1967 are considered “occupied” under international law, which could only be the case if they were previously part of a sovereign nation. Jordan captured the West Bank in 1948, and Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip the same year. Neither country gained international recognition for any annexation of those territories; thus the only way of deeming Israeli control “occupation” is by asserting that in fact Palestinians were in control the whole time and nobody noticed.
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