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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Who Owns Manhattan? By Antonio C. Abaya October 23, 2001 Yes, who owns or own Manhattan? Is it the descendants of the Manhattan Indians, who were its inhabitants before the coming of the white man? Or is it the descendants of the Dutch settlers from the Dutch West India Company who bought it in 1626 from the Manhattan Indians with beads, cloth and trinkets worth $24, and named it Nieuw Amsterdam? Or is it the descendants of the British colonialists who forced the Dutch out in 1664 and renamed the colony New York? Or is it the descendants of the American revolutionists who took possession of the city from the British in 1783 and later made it the temporary capital of the new United States of America? By the same token, who owns or own Palestine and the contiguous areas around it, known collectively to Christians as the Holy Land but sacred as well to Jews and Muslims? Is it the Palestinians whose ancestors used to live there for hundreds of years but who are now confined to squalid settlements in the narrow Gaza Strip and scattered pockets in the West Bank? Or is it the Jews whose ancestors also lived there even earlier, from 1900 BC until they were driven out by the Romans in 70 AD, long before the Palestinians� ancestors converted to Islam at around 640 AD, and who since 1897 have returned to their ancestral land, Zion, at first in trickles and later in floods, until the state of Israel was officially proclaimed in 1948, marginalizing and dispossessing the modern Palestinians of their own birthright? Yes, who indeed owns or own Palestine? And who owns or own Manhattan? I submit that the answer to both questions, and to other similar questions, is: The land belongs to whoever can exercise sovereignty over it. Exercising sovereignty means having a functioning government that passes and enforces laws, maintains relative peace and order, collects taxes and provides social services to its inhabitants, promotes economic activities for the general welfare, defends its territorial integrity against invaders and interlopers, and commands the loyalty and allegiance of the majority of its people. By these tokens, and more, Manhattan belongs to the Americans, of course. By these same tokens, the land that the Palestinians claim as theirs belongs to the Israelis. This may sound heartless to those whose hearts bleed for the Palestinians, but this is merely a statement of fact: the Palestinians do not exercise any sovereignty, as defined above, over any territory other than their enclaves; the Israelis do. ***** When the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, in victory for the Nationalists under Francisco Franco � who were supported by Hitler and Mussolini � and in defeat for the Republicans - who were supported by Stalin and an international brigade made up of American and European intellectuals infatuated with Communism � a Republican government-in-exile was actually formed, in Mexico City, and was recognized diplomatically by a handful of countries. But it could not keep up the fiction that it exercised sovereignty over Peninsular Spain or that it commanded the allegiance of the majority of the people there, and consequently died the death of irrelevance. Similarly, after the victory of the Communists under Mao zedong in 1949 and the defeat of the Kuomintang under Chiang kaishek, the fiction that the losers, licking their wounds in Taiwan, remained the real sovereign power over the Chinese mainland was maintained for a while, solely because of the intransigence of the Americans, but was eventually abandoned even by them, and the world has been the better for it. That claims of sovereignty must be backed up by military power against invasion and subversion if and when the situation demands it is best illustrated by the example of South Vietnam, which the Americans had propped up even with half a million of their own troops, but eventually to no avail. Even with considerable American help in lives and treasure, the South Vietnamese government just could not effectively exercise sovereignty over the country and gradually expired in the futile efforts to do so. ***** That the land belongs to whoever can exercise sovereignty over it may be said to justify colonialism and imperialism. But it can also be said to justify their countervailing phenomena: wars of independence (e.g. the American) and wars of national liberation (e.g. the Vietnamese) if and when they succeed. So in the final analysis, it justifies nothing. It merely states an empirical fact. It is the refusal to accept the empirical fact that leads to aberration and distortion, which in turn lead to misplaced romanticism and needless violence. In the case of Palestine and Israel, even Chairman Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian leadership have accepted that the state of Israel has as much right to exist as the Palestinian state that he is in the process of crafting, and that his Palestinian state will recognize the boundaries dictated by events of the last fifty years. But there are militant, irrational forces in his camp, such as Hamas, Hizbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, over which he has little or no influence or control, who insist on demanding that the Jews be driven to the sea and the land of Israel be returned to the Palestinians. Refusal to accept the empirical fact of Israel�s existence is behind Osama bin Laden�s justification for the use of indiscriminate violence against the Americans, for their support for the state of Israel, a justification that Chairman Arafat himself has distanced himself from. Fifty three years after the partition of Palestine into Israeli and Palestinian areas, there are at least two generations of Palestinians who have never lived in what was once the homeland of their parents and grandparents. Similarly, there are at least two generations of Jews who have known no other homeland except Israel. As the decades roll on, this demographic balance will shift more and more in Israel�s favor and has to be considered in addition to the historical debate on who was there first. Actually with all their petrodollars and all their vast empty spaces, the Arabs could have built a new homeland for the Palestinians in the uninhabited Sinai Desert adjacent to the narrow Gaza Strip assigned to them by the UN partition, if they were genuinely interested in the welfare of those displaced people. But one suspects that their real interest was to keep the pot of hatred boiling over those 53 years in order to exact revenge for the string of humiliating defeats that the Arabs suffered at the hands of the Israelis. ***** It is often argued that without American military and economic help, Israel would long have ceased to exist as a state. This overlooks the ingenuity, the intelligence and the inner fortitude that the Israelis have invested in their defense, as in everything else they do, as befits the highly urbanized and highly educated make-up of their people and armed forces, compared to the semi-literate Bedouin tribesmen in the Arab armies. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which the Israelis ALMOST lost, the Egyptian armies to the south and the Syrian armies to the north, combined, were equipped by the Soviets with more than 5,000 tanks and more than 500 state-of-the-art combat aircraft, more than the total Israeli inventory, when they attacked Israel almost simultaneously on two fronts. In addition, the attacking Egyptian armies were shielded by a wall of the latest Soviet surface-to-air missiles and their accompanying radar, so new then that they needed the expertise of Soviet technicians and advisers to operate, and so effective that they caused the Israeli air force the unprecedented loss of more than 70 aircraft in the first few days of hostilities. It was not until Israeli commandos deliberately sought out and captured, intact, a SAM battery and its radar, for their military engineers to examine, that they were able to quickly develop electronic counter-measures against the Soviet missiles and thus regain traditional Israeli command of the air. No amount of American hardware could have turned the tide of battle without the innovative resourcefulness of their users. On the ground, the Egyptian armies had crossed the Suez Canal into the Sinai Desert, but, deprived of their Soviet missile shield, they advanced cautiously. An Israeli armored regiment, commanded in the field by the man who much later became the present Prime Minister, Gen. Ariel Sharon, probed the Egyptian lines for a weak spot and found it between two Egyptian divisions. (In military tactics, command and control is weakest in the gray area between two units, especially if no reserve unit backstops the boundary). Stabbing through the Egyptian lines, Sharon poured 300 tanks into the opening and crossed the Suez Canal into Egypt. But instead of continuing on to Cairo, which was by then probably defended only by eunuchs, he wheeled his tank column around in a 180-degree turn, recrossed the Suez Canal into the Sinai Desert to rendezvous with the rest of his regiment, like a snake head joining up with its tail. Caught in an ever tightening anaconda grip and running out of water and food in the middle of the desert, the Egyptian Third Army was effectively destroyed as a fighting force. Again, it was not American military hardware that won the day � the South Vietnamese army received as much or even more before they were defeated � but the ingenuity and the cunning of the field commanders using them. ***** Faced with a catastrophic defeat, including imminent capture of some high-ranking Soviet generals trapped with the Third Army, the Soviet Union, patron and armorer of the two attacking Arab armies, pushed through the UN Security Council a resolution calling for a ceasefire and for Israel to disengage, a resolution which the Israelis blithely ignored as they tightened their anaconda grip even more and watched as, figuratively speaking, the dehydrated Egyptians� eyeballs popped out of their sockets. The Israelis finally relented and released their trapped prey, no doubt at the urging of the Americans, when the Soviets mobilized their helicopter-borne troops in the Crimea for a possible rescue mission in the Sinai Desert, a move which the Americans responded to by putting their Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean in the highest state of alert. It was probably the closest the world got to a nuclear war since the 1962 missile crisis in Cuba. To his credit, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, chief architect of his country�s successful surprise attack on the Israeli-occupied Sinai Desert, used his near-victory to extend the hand of friendship and reconciliation to the Israelis, whose legendary chutzpah was deflated by their near-defeat. A true statesman and visionary, President Sadat went to the unprecedented extent of going to Jerusalem in 1977 to meet with his Israeli counterpart, Menachem Begin, to lay the groundwork for a lasting peace, a gesture for which the two were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978. Sadly, however, President Sadat was assassinated in l981 during a military parade in his honor on the tarmac of an airbase outside Cairo, by members of the fundamentalist group, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led by Ayman al-Zwahiri who, in 2001, is the second-in-command and chief political strategist of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden. So who has been blocking peace in the Middle East? ***** This article appeared in the November 12, 2001 issue of the Philippine Weekly Graphic magazine. |