Rosen: Fact-checking the Hamas apologists
While most Americans have strongly condemned Hamas for its recent grotesque, unconscionable massacre of innocent civilians in Israel, others have passionately taken their side and hold Israel to blame. As philosopher Ayn Rand observed, when a difference of opinion is so stark and irreconcilable, the parties should “check their premises.” So, let’s start by fact-checking the false narrative that “the Palestinians in Gaza are victims of oppression by Israel who are occupying their rightful Palestinian homeland.”
The claim of a biblical-era historical nation of Palestinian people is a myth. About 3,200 years ago, the 12 tribes of Israel united in Canaan under King Saul and later split into the Jewish kingdoms of Judah and Isarel. In 134 AD, the Romans gave the name “Palestine” to the land formerly called Judea (meaning land of the Jews). But it was the name of a region, not a nation. The land has changed hands many times under various conquerors. From the dawn of history, national borders have been redrawn under “the right of conquest.”
Fast forwarding to the early 1920s, Palestine and a much larger contiguous territory known as Transjordan was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. On the verge of its collapse, it ceded the land to the League of Nations, newly formed after World War I. In 1922, the League placed administrative control under a mandate to Britain, with an instruction to create a “national home for the Jewish people.” The Brits promptly gave three-quarters of the land to the Arabs, creating Jordan. But Britain’s “Mandate for Palestine” still included a national home for the Jews, reconfirming the commitment of the Balfour Declaration issued by the British government in 1917.