History Lesson

From the Iconoclast

What They Never Learned, Or Chose To Forget

"viable" "contiguous" --words used by President Bush to
describe a "Palestinian" state

A "Palestinian" state is not "viable."

It has no natural resources and no human resources. It would have far too many people, because of the fantastic size of Arab families, an overbreeding that is deliberately encouraged in order to swamp, so it is hoped, the Infidel enemy. It can only exist on the basis of permanent handouts from others. Let those handouts come from other Arabs, and stop the payments from the Infidels.

As for a state that is "contiguous," that would mean that Gaza and the West Bank would somehow meet through a corridor of land. But such a corridor of land would cut Israel in two. Israel would no longer be "contiguous."

Does Bush know the terms of the Mandate for Palestine, or what that Mandate (one of many mandates planned, though all the others resulted in four Arab states, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan -- four of the present twenty-two members of the Arab League) was supposed to achieve? Does he know what its dimensions were supposed to be? Does he know anything about the history of the Ottoman vilayets that came to constitute Mandatory Palestine? Does he know about land ownership (with 90% of the land being owned by the Ottoman state, then passing to the Mandatory Authority, and then to its intended and rightful successor, the state of Israel? Does he know anything about the massive infusion of Arabs, chiefly from Egypt and Mesopotamia, on top of those who had arrived in the 1840s, as veterans of Abd el-Kabir's campaign in Algeria, or with Mehmet Ali, and who, along with the later arrivals, are now depicted as having been there "since time immemorial"? No, I don't see how someone so ignorant and so dumb could, since almost no one, including the very intelligent, know much or anything about that.

And the Israeli government seems peopled with those who have never learned, or chosen to forget, everything I have mentioned, and a good deal else I might have mentioned, and would have, had I not been concerned for my own health, and the effect on it of my own fury.