Eretz Yisrael:
I was rereading a national geographic article on ancient Ashkelon in Israel and its different historical epochs. Its last manifestation had been a Palestinian village, whose inhabitants fled after Israeli independence, or in their colourful language the "naqbah" (disaster) in 1948. What is interesting however is that Ashkelon has never had a Hebraic settlement period nor a historically defined Jewish presence. However a new colony of Russian and Ethiopian Jews over the past 50 years has sprung up near the settlement thereby providing a different population profile to the region.
Israel is a land of four regions; the Negev, Galilee, the coastal plains and the Jordan Valley. The lands that constitute the critical regions of modern day Israel for the most part don't have a particularly Jewish history. For instance the coastal region (which now comprises the heart of modern Israel) has never truly been Judaized and has become Jewish because of being the starting point for the resettlement period in the early 20th century, indeed after independence Israeli authorities were quite active in encouraging a dispersion of Jewish population from the coast. The Negev is part of the Sinai desert for all intents and purposes and its utility is some fertile loess deposits, mining concerns, access to the Red Sea through the deep sea port of Eilat and the provision of strategic depth to the nation of Israel but save for the myth of it being the grazing ground for the herds of the Jewish Patriarchs it has no historical significance. It is only further inland that the core of Judaic lands are to be found, Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. The Galilee forms the northern stretch of territories that comprised the heart of ancient Israel and are now renowned for their dense Arab populations. To the south is the border plain of Esdraelon, a swampy border region drained and made populated & productive by Jewish colonists, which leads on to historic Samaria and Judaea, presently the West Bank, and then the regions of Peraea and Edom. This territory spills into Jordanian territory and reflects the conjoined history of the Israeli-Palestinian people as being sedentary people defined by a very cohesive tribal matrix.
The present day cosmopolitan and densely populated coast of Israel has either been the territory of the Phillistines or the Phoenicians, sea faring mercantile civilisations that was sharply cutoff from the insular tribal kingdoms. Therefore it is the paradox of the modern age that the Jewish people have successfully settled in the urban regions adjacent to their historic nucleus, but are asked to give up those territories that have largely defined their nationhood. The Palestinians on the other hand are herded into compact zones whence their former lands are largely untilled and unproductive because 90% of the Jewish population are concentrated in urban regions. I see the paradox of a further partition in the case as being untenable. Phillistia and her five cities, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gath and Gaza, have been more or less Judaicised whereas Judea is the bastion of Islam in a region where national claims to the land are based almost exclusively on historic precedence. The contradictions are mounting and it is perhaps the culmination of a century of mutual bigotry and parochial nationalism feeding off one another.
Ps: Isarel and Arab leades are ideologically juxtaposed against once another and have had a historical antipathy for the other populations whereas in the Partition of the Sub-continent, the leaders of the differing parties were not defined by hatred of the other. Jinnah tried to stem the immigration of minorities from the newly created Pakistan whereas Nehru was geniunely committed to the advancement of the Muslim minority in India. Contrast this to the transferist stance of Ben Gurion, and the fascism of the Mufti.
Zachary Latif 10:18 |
