Outreach as Overreach

Perhaps the pivotal part of the outreach made by the so-called Palestinians to their western supporters is the notion that their country was stolen from them in the middle of the last century by a bunch of white, Eastern European colonisers abetted by the ‘international community’.

To understand why this is not even a half truth, one has to look back at the wider historical context of the conflict which began in 1948.

Up until the early part of the 20th century, the Eurasian landmass had been dominated by a number of significant territorial empires: the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, the Ottoman. The latter, the only Muslim empire, had ceased to frighten most western Europeans almost since the start of the modern era, even if the likes of the Bulgarians and Greeks were still atavistically annoyed with it.

In fact, in spite of the way that the strategic dance between the various great ‘powers’ of the Old World would lead to a World War in which our King and his cousin the Tsar began as allies, it was the Russian empire that had long most prompted European anxieties, and for many of the same reasons that it continues to do so today.

For Russian territorial ambition was seen to be coupled to a Messianic sense of global mission, an innately theocratic relationship between Church and State and an underlying tendency towards old-school authoritarianism and barbarism. Russia, it seemed, did not just want to be an empire, it wanted to be the empire, a new Rome. The Crimean War was the first proper sign of a modern confrontation which has never really gone away.

Many of those qualities I just associated with Russian imperialism apply to the political formations of the Arab-Muslim world too, and again, the ‘international community’ had long been aware of this prior to the global conflagrations of the twentieth century.

At the end of the first of these the immediate issue was what appeared to be the simultaneous collapse of all the aforementioned vast territorial empires. (It looked like Russia had joined in at first, but of course this conglomerate would later reconstitute itself as the USSR.)

The solution seemed to be to reconfigure these overstretched societies into nation states based on ethno-nationalist identities. There were people, like the Poles for example, who had long yearned for a country of their own. That sometimes these new entities worked out better than others is evidenced by the history which duly ensued.

Sometimes, huge population transfers were required for any kind of stability to take hold: Greeks left Turkey and vice versa. Sometimes these swaps were basically voluntary, sometimes not so much. Huge numbers were usually involved: 10m Germans had to find new homes at the end of WWII. (Huger, you will note, than anything which occurred in the Levant.)

Today Europe, at least the centre and the western part, has what looks like a permanent patchwork of broadly democratic nation states, though there are a few problematic areas remaining where either ‘separatist’ identities persist, or population groups lean more towards the authoritarian empire(s) still lurking to the east.

Reconfiguring the collapsed Ottoman realm for long term stability and ethno-nationalist contentment has proved far more problematic. There are many reasons for this, but I will focus on two here. 

Firstly, the helping/interfering Europeans oversimplified everything. The basic plan was to give almost everything outside Turkey (97% of the territory) to the Arabs, setting aside a much smaller area (3%) for the Jews of the Middle East.

This plan had been put together in outline long before large numbers of European Jews needed a new home after the Holocaust. It clearly overlooked a number of demographic complexities in the region, including other groups who might not fare so well under direct Arab-Muslim rule, such as the Kurds, Yazidis, Druze and so on. It also assumed, incorrectly, that the Christians would be OK in Lebanon. (Why they only really selected the Jews for an ‘exemption’ has a lot to do with European obsession with what we tend to call ‘The Holy Land’, something which also underlay the The Crimean War which, as the name suggests, would actually take place elsewhere.)

The second issue (equally serious I would argue), is that Arab cultural mentalities do not appear to natively support liberal democratic nation states, nor really warm to the idea of collaborative networks of ethno-states. When Ottoman power collapsed, some Arabs reconfigured into more traditional polities with, in effect, a tribal leader or monarch, while others experimented with the kind of single party totalitarianism which had so destabilised Europe. Yet underneath all of this, there was always the same messianic urge towards autocratic and theocratic territorial expansionism that has made the Russians such a pain in the tush for much of modern history.

Or, to put in even more simply: the Arabs were never really going to settle for anything less than 100% of the land which became available as a result of the end of Ottoman colonial rule. In their heads they carried their own rechargeable imperial ideal and immediately set about recharging it.  

The conflict which still plagues the region persists because from the start the Jews were prepared to defend their little oasis of western liberal democracy against the oriental tide of corrupt tyranny.

Nobody was planning to steal anything from the Arabs in the Levant. Yet they were hell-bent on stealing everything from the Middle-Eastern Jews, and not just within the nascent Jewish state. And, as we know they were beaten off, again and again.

Many had however chosen not to budge, and have the same rights today as any citizen of Israel. The ones who left did so in part because they were forced out as a result of the genocidal war they had started, rather like those aforementioned 10m Germans, yet many had left voluntarily. But if they had stayed, nobody would have taken anything from them except their right to have more rights than anyone else.

For unlike equivalent population swaps in Europe, nobody was going to be forced to move or surrender property as a result of the formation of the new state. The ‘international community’ was only insisting that one small part of the former empire would be the sovereign territory of the Jews and that the rest would belong to the Arabs and everyone could basically carry on as before. Nobody was going to be ‘colonised’, they would simply have to adjust to the new post-colonial political arrangement.

The Arabs’ failure to impose their preferred alternative arrangement militarily has been offset by some notable victories in both the global information war and in the General Assembly of the UN. 

Their unwillingness to settle for anything other than the ‘whole cake’ for themselves has been rather cunningly cloaked in the garb of victimhood, and what has been a process of de-colonisation, with clear elements of inevitability, necessity and desirability about it, has been consistently repackaged as a species of renewed colonisation.

This 'outreach' seems to achieve particular traction in the Western Hemisphere where decolonisation occurred earlier and generally did not involve the creation of new nations based on actual nations.

I’d hesitate to use the word cynical here, as there has always been an element of childishness about the way this is articulated, both by the Arabs and their growing horde of supporters outside the region. And together they have hijacked a number of key international bodies and perverted them with an ideology which inherently inverts most of the key facts.

Their greatest achievement has surely been inventing and propagating an imaginary nation state called Palestine in the 60s as cover for their almost totalist rejection of the very notion of permitting the non-Muslim peoples of the Levant to form such things.

And now the very peoples who have spent the past 1400 years actively resisting the Islamic flavour of ‘freedom’ find themselves havung to listen to a bunch of student nitwits chanting ‘Free Palestine’ as a way of re-branding their oppressors’ deeply ingrained, long-term urge to dominate as a form of heroic resistance.

What the Arabs most want you to think is that they have been treated especially unfairly, yet if you zoom out to see how the de-colonisation/nationalisation process was handled overall across Eurasia, they were originally presented with a far better deal than many others one could mention.

Better, frankly, than they ought to have expected, for one surely has to conclude that a truly just outcome would have admitted other former Ottoman subjects into their own self-determined polities, not just the Jews, and it is a black mark on the ‘international community’ that more was not done to achieve this, as it would always have been obvious that Islamic societies had a long track record of treating Muslims as second tier citizens, at best (along with around half of their own sort, per gender.)

Indeed, today’s ‘international community’ seems to want to finish the job for them. It is absurd that in 2025 millions should be living with the status of permanent, heritable refugee status and that the rest of us should be funding such nonsense. No other people displaced by the end of the empires has managed to wangle anything equivalent, and it is a patent scam almost wholly set up in order to permanently delegitimise the only independent, non-Muslim state within what was once the Caliphate.

All this does is perpetuate the war. A war that can only ever end the day that the Arabs accept something similar to the original deal: Almost everything the Turks used to have for them, but one tiny part will remain the 'forever home' of the Jewish people and they are going to have to live with that. The moment that they do, not another human being needs to die as a consequence of their belligerent obstinacy.

(You may note I have refrained from mentioning the Iranians (Persians) in this piece. Although they have lately involved themselves rather intensely in this matter, in their current political format at home they really represent a much bigger overall hazard and for just about everyone on our planet, not just its liberal remnants, so for simplicity's sake, I have not tried to crowbar them into my argument, and they were not direct participants in the 1948 debacle, indeed they were the second Muslim-majority nation to recognise Israel after Turkey. I have also over-generalised whenever I have used the word 'Arabs' - the argument required a broad-brush approach - but I do apologise for this.)