Historic Palestine: What you need to know!

I recently critiqued an article that used the term “historic Palestine” nine times in 21 pages without offering a definition even once. It is taken for granted that the reader would know what this term means. Not being a historian myself, I asked the historian Prof Amatzia Baram to explain it to me. He responded […]

(Second) Partition Plan Made Simple

Once upon a time, there was a huge piece of land that was taken under wing by arrogant European has-been empires when they successfully destroyed a rival empire. They divvied up the land and told the world they would hold it in trust for the indigenous peoples of those regions.One of these was named the […]

Does Israel Miss The British Mandate? We Might Just.

Seems we Israelis, or some of us, may have been nostalgic for the British Mandate period for — well, for ever-since-the-Brits-got-on-their-boats-and-shipped-back-to-the-UK. Professor Eitan Bar-Yosef of Ben Gurion University says we have missed them in two different ways; neither of these are very complimentary to us, but not in a mean way. In any case, I […]

British Mandate of Israel – OOPS! – Palestine

I’m killing myself trying to think how we Israelis can get out of this stupid debacle we are in whereby Arabs are now calling themselves Palestinians in order to get people around the world to march along the streets with fantastic posters on their behalf that say https://twitter.com/BrightonBDS/status/671082956862169088 Masses of concerned right-thinking (meaning left-thinking) people […]

“Palestinian” Refugee Status Was Easy to Obtain

Do you know how easy it was to get Palestinian refugee status from UNRWA in 1948? All it took was living in the British Mandate for Palestine for two years. Here is a quote from an article published in the Palestine-Israel Journal in 1995. A Palestine refugee is a person whose normal residence was Palestine […]