Ik ga hier nog een uitgebreider stuk over schrijven, want deze kaarten duiken steeds weer op om het Palestijnse narratief - dat Israel is geboren in zonde en zij slechts weerloze slachtoffers zijn - te illustreren. Dries van Agt gebruikt ze, het Palestina Komitee, en ik meen ook ICCO. Het verhaal is duidelijk: het hele land was van de Palestijnen, en Joden bezaten slechts een paar plukjes land. Toen kregen ze van de VN opeens de helft toegewezen, logisch natuurlijk dat de Arabieren weigerden daarmee in te stemmen. Vervolgens pikten ze nog eens de helft van het aan de Arabieren toegewezen land in, en logisch dat de Arabieren dat niet accepteerden. Uiteindelijk veroverden ze het hele land en bleven er slechts een paar kleine plukje over voor de Palestijnen. Ami Isseroff legt uit wat er zo bedriegelijk aan deze propaganda is:
Of course it is a facile lie. The 1946 map does not show sovereignty or land ownership of Palestinian Arabs. It just shows settlements of Jewish Palestinians in the British Palestine Mandate. All the rest is colored green, as though coloring a map establishes the title of the Arabs to the land. A discussion of the difficulty of establishing land ownership in Palestine of 1946 and the origins of this "settlement map" is given in The Land Question in Palestine. The Arabs had no sovereignty over the land at any time, and they owned less than half of it. Despite Arab efforts to prevent Jewish land purchases, Jews owned about 8% (more by some estimates) of the land in the area that became Israel. Nearly 50% of the land was government land. Since the mandate was supposed to create a "national home" for the Jews, it is hard to understand why this land is colored green. Furthermore, despite big stretches of white area shown in the later maps, Arabs still own private property in those white areas - in Israel, as does the Muslim Waqf, as does the Greek Orthodox Church.
Het meeste land was onbewoond in 1946, en behoorde het Britse Mandaat toe, zoals het eerder tot het Ottomaanse Rijk behoorde. Er is daar nooit een onafhankelijke Palestijnse staat geweest, en voor het Britse Mandaat verwees de naam 'Palestina' slechts naar een geografische regio, niet naar een land of gebied met een autonome status en eigen identiteit.
In de derde kaart, waar de situatie tussen 1949 en 1967 zichtbaar is, moet Israels 'expansionisme' aantonen. Wat we niet zien is dat de oorlog die tot dit resultaat leidde door de Arabieren was begonnen en dat zij de Joden uit het gebied wilden verdrijven, misschien zelfs uitmoorden. De Palestijnen als het ultieme slachtoffer, die zonder dat ze er iets aan kunnen doen, steeds meer land verliezen. Solomonia, die eerder op de kaarten reageerde, schrijft hierover:
Thus a map of the 1947 U.N. partition plan which divided the area between Jews and Arabs appears to show a massive loss of "Palestinian land", reflecting the fact that the largely vacant and inarable Negev desert was partitioned by the U.N. to Israeli political authority. The third map in the series (labeled "1949 - 1967") shows further decline in "Palestinian land" which resulted from Arab losses in the 1948 war. That map fails to mention that that war was a war of aggression started by the Arab states, thereby absolving them of responsibility for those losses. That map also describes the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip and the Jordanian-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem as "Palestinian land". The last map (labeled "2000") inexplicably shows more than half of the West Bank, including the entire Jordan Valley excluding Jericho, as "Israeli land".
Die laatste kaart laat waarschijnlijk de gebieden zien die als "Area A en B" in de Oslo akkoorden zijn gebrandmerkt, waar de Palestijnen autonomie kregen. Dat Arabieren op veel meer plaatsen land bezitten, ook in Israel zelf, wordt even buiten beschouwing gelaten.
De kaarten halen op een sluwe wijze de verschillende vormen van land bezit, autonomie en politiek bestuur door elkaar, en laten bovendien iedere contekst achterwege.
RP
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Establishing an Irredentist Case
http://zionism-israel.com/ezine/Palestinian_Land_Loss.htm
A series of maps circulating on the Web propagates a lie. It purports to show "Palestinian" land loss from 1946 to the present day.
It looks pretty convincing, doesn't it? All that green area that was "Palestinian" in 1948 has shrunk to a few tiny enclaves.
(...)
It is not clear what the last map shows. It seems to coincide with Areas A and B of the Oslo Interim Agreement. From the date, 2000, it would appear that the map series was created in order to help torpedo the Camp David peace talks, as part of the Palestinian anti-peace effort. But Areas A and B do not represent land remaining after other land was taken away. They are in fact, the only land on which Palestinian Arabs ever had any autonomous recognized government at any time in history. Before the Oslo Agreements, the Palestinian Arabs had nothing. The green areas, if they are intended to show Areas A and B, show Palestinian land gained, not land lost. What the map shows is not related to the final settlement offers made by Israel in 2000, which constituted well over 90% of the land of the West Bank (see here)
Most of the lies behind the maps were exposed ably by Adam Holland in Solomonia. Jeffrey Goldberg debunked the map series again, and Dvar Dea did it most recently.
(...)
Presumably, the editors of Occupation Magazine, along with Sullivan and Cole and Lawrence of Cyberia believe that all the area shown in green in the 1946 map is "occupied." "Justice" thus demands that all the "occupied land" that the Arabs "lost" be "returned." "Peace with Justice" therefore must bring about the destruction of Israel according to this logic.
Irredentist claims are the stuff of dangerous national conflicts. They may be based on real or imaginary history. Germany really had a legitimate claim on Alsace, which had been taken by France in the Thirty Years war. Italy really had some legitimate claims on former lands of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Too much legitimacy and "justice" ensure that peace is impossible.
Once the legitimacy of irredentist claims is admitted, there is no end to irredentism and irredentist maps in the Middle East. Syrian maps show Lebanon and Israel as part of Syria. Turkey can claim that all of Central Asia, much of the Middle East and parts of Europe were torn from them by the machinations of Western colonialist imperialism over the last 200 years. The British ideology that supported the liberation of Greece and the Balkan countries was identical to the ideology that called, at the same time, for the restoration of the Jews, and it was advanced by some of the same people. The Arabs have maps of their receding empire, recalling past days of glory when they ruled Sicily and Al Andalus, now known as Spain. Christians can claim sovereignty over Jerusalem. That was, in fact, one of the factors that decided the fate of Jerusalem in the post-World War I negotiations over the future of the Middle East.
We Zionists can claim all of the land promised as a Jewish national home in the San Remo Treaty that was the basis of the League of Nations Mandate. That land is, in justice, part of the "land of Israel." It is land that the Jewish people "lost." Unlike the green areas drawn in the Palestinian maps according to the whims of the artist, this is not a myth. The borders were political reality, supposedly guaranteed in international law. That land included not only the entire West Bank and the Golan Heights, but also all of Jordan, which was torn from the mandate and given to the Hashemite dynasty by the British. This claim used to be made by the Israeli right. It is considered to be "extremist" and not "politically correct" of course. Andrew Sullivan and Juan Cole would never support that claim, but they are quite content to propagate Palestinian Irredentism.
Irredentism is suffused into national culture by those who wish to make peace impossible. The first stanza of the Deutschland lied ("Deutschland Uber Alles") stated the German claim to borders from the Adige to the Belt, from the Meuse to the Memel. All these locations are outside the borders of modern Germany. The Adige river, for example, is in Italy. The "Belt" is in Denmark. The Germans had their view of "justice," while the Danes, Italians and others have a different view. Whatever the claims of "justice," the anthem is now forbidden. The need for peace is given precedence over "justice." The anthem is still sung, however, by certain Germans who insist on "justice."
(...)
Ami Isseroff
March 31, 2010
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