Mahmoud Abbas Tells European Union that He Wants All of Israel, including west of the Green Line

“We are keen on continuing the way of negotiations,” Abbas said. “We are determined to reunite our people and our land.” [here & here emph. added]

The above is what Mahmoud Abbas told Federica Mogherini, High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs of the European Union and the foreign ministers of the EU states on Monday this week [1-22-2018 & here] in Brussels.

This phrase "to reunite our people and our land" seems to be a euphemism for the Arabs' taking all of the State of Israel including the land that Israel held between 1948 and 1967. In other words, it is a masked refusal to accept Israel in any borders. Now, Abbas and the PLO as a whole and Hamas and the other Palestinian Arab terrorist and political groups believe that all of the Land of Israel belongs to them as well as to Islam. To confirm that consider the word "reunite." If something has to be reunited, that means it was once united but is no longer. They know that they already control part of "palestine" [= the Land of Israel roughly speaking]. And what they don't control must be reunited with what they already control, Abbas implies.
And reuniting "our people" means bringing the dispersed Palestinian Arabs living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere with the status of refugees, back together in one state comprising the whole land of Israel, probably to be ruled by the Fatah and other factions that run the zones of Judea-Samaria now under PA/PLO rule.

The PLO Charter by the way speaks of the whole land that they call "palestine" needing to be "liberated"  from Israel. Likewise the PLO's Declaration of a State of Palestine of November 1988. These were obviously  rejections of peace. But maybe Mogherini and her staff are too ignorant or too stupid or too insensitive to the subtle Arab use of rhetoric to understand Abbas' real meaning. If they did understand Abbas' meaning would they have encouraged him and said they support him on the Jerusalem issue? She said:

“I want to reassure President Abbas of the firm commitment of the European Union to the two-state solution with Jerusalem as the shared capital of the two states,” Mogherini said during the meeting. [here & here]                                        

Let's leave aside the stupidity and impracticality of the notion of one city as the shared capital of two states. Did Mogherini understand that Abbas had just told her that he does NOT support the two-state solution, that he and those he represents are claiming the whole country?

Speaking of refugees, it is curious that the so-called "international community" --no doubt Mogherini is part of it-- seems to forget what happened in other situations where there were refugees on an ethnic basis. How is it that precisely the Europeans forgot that many Greeks were driven out of Anatolia, Turkey of today, and almost nobody in Europe but the Greeks themselves care about Greek rights and claims to the Smyrna [now Izmir] region from which most or nearly all Greeks were driven out? The total number of Greeks driven out is estimated at more than 1,100,000 while another 600,000 to one million were slaughtered in the period of 1914 to 1922 [some researchers put the numbers higher or lower]. Greece accepted more than one million refugees in the 1922-23 period and the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen negotiated an agreement between both Greece and Turkey to accept the principle of population exchange rather than go to war. As part of this agreement, Turkey agreed to let Greece expel some 400,000 Muslims living in northeastern Greece, Thrace, and take them in on Turkish territory. This was in exchange for the 1,200,000 or 1,500,000 Greeks that Ataturk and his army had already driven out of Anatolia, what is now Turkey.

For his services in the cause of mutual ethnic cleansing, Nansen received the Nobel Peace Prize. But that was not the end of Turkish-perpetrated ethnic cleansing. In 1955, while both Turkey and Greece were members of NATO, the Turkish government incited a pogrom in Istanbul, previously Constantinople (a Greek-speaking city before the Turkish conquest of 1453), that ended with the expulsion by the mob of tens of thousands of ethnically Greek Turkish citizens. The Turks got away with it. Somehow NATO let them get away with it.

How is it that the Europeans, including the wonderful folk at EU headquarters in Brussels, Mogherini and her staff, have forgotten that once upon  a time, a man got a Nobel Peace Prize for promoting the principle of population exchange?
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For more info on the expulsions of 1922-23, see:
Ernest Hemingway, "On the Quai at Smyrna" and the epigraph to Chapter II, both in the collection In Our Time
George Horton, The Blight of Asia
Marjorie Housepian, The Smyrna Affair
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What does Fatah, Abbas' faction, mean by "our land"?
It seems that they mean the whole country from the river to the sea, from the Jordan to the Med.
See here.
More EU hypocrisy related to covering up for Abbas [here], for his claims on the reasons for the Shoah.
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Other relevant articles:
Fiamma Nirenstein on Abbas' speech in Ramallah on 1-14-2018 [Italiano qui -English  here]

The Arab Invaders Practiced Population Transfer

Tripoli in Lebanon has been in the news lately as the nearest city to the battles going on at the Nahr al-Barad refugee settlement between the Lebanese army and jihadist fanatics, calling themselves Fatah al-Islam [Islamic Conquest]. When the Arab-Muslims originally captured Tripoli --which they now call Trablus-- around the year 640 CE, its previous population abandoned it or may have been forced to leave by the commander of the conquering army, Mu`awiya. Some may have fled before the actual conquest, apparently fearing the terror meted out to other cities that had been captured by or had surrendered to the Arab conquerors. This previous population was predominantly Greek Orthodox in religion, probably spoke both Greek and Aramaic [Greek for the upper classes and Aramaic for the poorer, most probably bilingual to some extent], and were loyal to the Byzantine Empire. Since this empire actually called itself Roman and was a continuation of the Roman Empire in the East, the Arabs called these people Rumis, that is, Romans.

Milka Levy-Rubin points out that the people of Tripoli fled or abandoned or were driven out of the city and went to territory that was securely Byzantine at that time. Then, she points out, Jews were brought in to take the place of the previous population. Her article [Cathedra (September 2006), see here] is largely based on a book by the early Arab historian, Al-Baladhdhuri. He wrote:

Mu`awiyah made it [Tripoli] a dwelling place for a large body of Jews
[Al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (New York 1924), p 195]

Note that whereas the original Byzantine Christian population of Tripoli had fled before the conquerors, the Jews were transferred into the city from their previous homes. We are not told how the Jews felt about being forced to move in this manner. However, it is likely that the Arab conquerors preferred Jews in a coastal city like Tripoli since the Jews were unlikely to make common cause with the Byzantine Empire for which Jews felt a great antagonism in those times. And the feeling was mutual. Hence, the Arab conquerors seem to have viewed Jews as suitable for repopulating abandoned localities. Note that the Arabic title of al-Baladhdhuri's book is: Kitab Futuh al-Buldan, which means The Book of the Conquests of Cities [or "countries"]. The Arabs in those days were frank about having conquered many cities and frankly took pride in these invasions, conquests, and occupations.

Levy-Rubin argues that the conquerors were concerned to rid the Levantine coast from Gaza north to Antioch of population that might be loyal and/or sympathetic to the Byzantine Emperor. Whereas the people of some coastal towns fled, the people of others were driven out. In the case of Tripoli and other places, a new population was brought in. In some places that surrendered, much of the earlier population remained, but houses and real estate had to be given up to accomodate new settlers, usually Arabs in places where much or most of the previous population remained. For instance, Jews in Tiberias had to surrender some of their homes to Arab invaders. Speaking of Tripoli today, it is not likely that the present population is descended from either the Christians who fled to safer Byzantine territory or from the Jews who were brought in to take their place.

It is of interest that al-Baladhdhuri's book was translated into English precisely by Prof. Philip Khoury Hitti as early as 1924. Hitti testified for the Arab side before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on "palestine" in 1946. That is, Hitti was an Arab nationalist at that time, although the 1924 edition is dedicated to Prof. Richard Gottheil, also a specialist in Middle Eastern history and languages, a Jew and a Zionist. [Hitti's version spells the author's name al-Baladhuri].

Ira Lapidus writes about that early period of the Arab-Muslim conquests:

the Arab Conquerors [were transformed] into an elite military caste
[A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: CUP 1988), p 44]

This observation by Lapidus fits in with al-Baladhdhuri's account of the conquests and is amply confirmed by Joseph Schumpeter's acount of Arab imperialism in his work Imperialism [see earlier posts on this blog; search for Schumpeter].
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Coming: love & admiration in the UK for the walt-mearsheimer propaganda tract, Jews in Jerusalem, etc.

The Arab Conquest -- Massacre, Enslavement, Population Transfer, and the like

Descriptions written nowadays of the Arab/Muslim conquest of the Fertile Crescent lands [633-642] often paint a benign, mild picture of the conquest, which supposedly did not cause major inconvenience or disruption in the daily lives of the inhabitants and made few changes. Even a respected historian like Bernard Lewis leaned towards this edulcorated or embellished view in his The Arabs in History. Carl Brockelmann, the German, does likewise, writing:

Emperor Heraclius [of the Byzantine Empire]. . . In 632. . . installed Cyrus . . . both as patriarch of Alexandria and head of the civil administration at the same time. His ecclesiastical policy and his tax demands weighed so heavily on the Copts that they necessarily greeted the Arabs as emancipators, just as their Syrian fellow [monophysite] believers had done. . . In return for the promise of a fixed payment of tribute [jizyah] the Muslims bound themselves to leave the Christians in possession of their churches and not to interfere in the administration of their communal affairs. . . [C Brockelmann, History of the Islamic Peoples (New York: Capricorn 1960), pp 56-57]
In Egypt, as in the other provinces, the Muslims took over the substance of their predecessors' administrative system; they even left all their functionaries at their posts, which were generally administered by Copts later also. [This seems generous, but the Arabs, nearly all of them illiterate, were not fit for administration] [p 57]
. . . `Umar dispatched Khalid ibn-Thabit to conquer Jerusalem, which soon surrendered; `Umar himself approved the rather mild terms [p 55]
The cities and rural areas which had submitted to the Muslims without a struggle retained their freedom and their property. . . Localities which had had to be taken by force of arms fell to the victors as booty [p 61]

Brockelmann rightly points out that Muslims placed the conquered cities in two classes, those that had surrendered and those taken by force. However, despite what Brockelmann says, even those who surrendered might be dispossessed, as we shall see below.

In short, there is a common tendency to whitewash the Arab conquest. These mild portrayals of the Arab Conquest often serve the policy needs of 21st century empires, just as today's "neo-colonialism theory" and anti-Zionism often serve those same interests.

The edulcoration notwithstanding, documents from the early period of Arab rule often depict a brutal murderous conquest. Now, Milka Levy-Rubin, an Israeli historian has thoroughly examined Arabic and non-Arabic sources, as well as archeological findings, to show that whereas in some places --typically inland and hilly areas-- the conquest was relatively rather mild, along the coastal plain of the Levant, from Ashqelon to Antioch, there were population transfers, enslavement and massacres of recalcitrant cities and towns, flight by masses of inhabitants, especially Christians, but others as well, induced emigration of non-Arabs soon after the conquest, the takeover by Muslims of homes abandoned by the refugees, who had often hoped to return if the Byzantine Empire had succeeded in retaking their cities, confiscation of homes for the sake of Arab warriors, new populations replacing the old ones, etc. She cites one case where Jews were brought in to replace Christians. One can imagine that these Jews had also been forcibly uprooted from their homes and brought to a coastal city for the conquerors' purposes.

Levy-Rubin makes clear that the reason why inland areas suffered less change in their daily lives and less oppression is that the conquerors feared that if the Christian population --Greek and Aramaic-speaking-- stayed in place in the coastal cities and towns, they might aid a future Byzantine attempt at reconquest. The Jews on the other hand could be trusted more by the Arabs since they had their own resentments of Byzantine anti-Jewish policy. Nevertheless, Jews too suffered from the conquest as in this Syriac account which depicts Jews being massacred along with Samaritans and Christians east of Gaza. Levy-Rubin writes that even after conquest of a town or city had been completed, the conquerors might try to induce the native population to leave. This policy succeeded in several places and in some places freed up the homes formerly housing the departed natives for Arab settlement. We know that many Jewish homes in Tiberias --for example-- were taken over by Arab settlers, although it is not certain that the Jews had left before their homes were taken over.

Here are some passages quoted from Milka Levy-Rubin's article. It represents important, thorough research:

We learn from the words of al-Baladhdhuri [Muslim historian writing in Arabic, died ca. 892] that the northern coastal strip was mostly evacuated of its inhabitants. . . Among the cities of which many of the inhabitants left, he counted. . . Gabala [not to be confused with Gbal = Byblos], Antarados (Tartus), Trablus (Tripolis), Beirut (Berytos), Tyros (Tyre, Sour [= Tsor]), Sidon. [M Levy-Rubin, "The [Arab] Conquest as a Shaper of the Map of Settlement in the Land of Israel in the Early Muslim Period," Cathedra (September 2006; Jerusalem, Yad Ben-Zvi, in Hebrew), p 56]

Meanwhile, Antioch [Antiochia, Antakiya] and Laodicea [Latakiya],

were partially abandoned [p 56]

However,

Caesarea was conquered by the sword [that is, it did not surrender] and its inhabitants were taken captive [and sold as slaves], and it seems that `Akko and Ashqelon too were mostly evacuated of their Christian inhabitants in the end. At the end of the process, the coastal strip was emptied of the overwhelming majority of its previous inhabitants, and the latter were replaced by a new population. [p 56]

What can we learn about the way in which the Christian population was evacuated from the coastal cities? At which stage of the conquest and in which way was it evacuated? . . . In many cases, the city was conquered first and only afterwards abandoned by its inhabitants. [p57]

Milka Levy-Rubin continues her article with details illustrating what happened in particular cities. We will return to her picture of events which vitiates much of Brockelmann's mild depiction, and the claims of other embellishers and edulcorators as well. And her main source is al-Baladhdhuri, a Muslim historian.

At a time, when charlatans like the late Edward Said have demanded adherence to an embellished picture of Arab and Islamic culture in the name of "leftist" political correctness --in the name of "anti-imperialism," God save us-- yet often serving the contemporary policies of empires, the ugly truth is a necessary corrective.
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Coming: more on James Baker and US Middle East policy, more from Milka Levy-Rubin on the Arab conquests, Jews in Jerusalem and Hebron, propaganda, peace follies, etc.