By Ismail Haniyeh

You hear all sorts of ridiculous arguments when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Passions run high, and in service of what they perceive to be a noble cause, some partisans do a disservice to history. It’s spurious to argue that Palestinians have a prior claim to Palestine because they are descended of the pre-Hebrew Canaanites. That’s nonsensical. No, our claim rests on the fact that an Arab army once gained control of the place about 1400 years ago. Ergo, the Jews must get out today.

The logic is simple: Caliph Omar accepted the surrender of the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem in 636 CE. Therefore the Jews are not permitted to exercise sovereignty in this part of the world in 2014. It’s a basic reasoning exercise. The manifest miscarriage of justice represented by the establishment of a Zionist state cries out to be righted, because a man named Sophronius – himself an ethnic Arab – handed over the city and its countryside to the Saracens. That is why Jews have no place here. Q.E.D.

The idea that inhabiting the land in ancient times somehow secures a claim to it in the here and now is patently absurd. The claim must rest on the fact that some of us got there slightly after ancient times, as the Roman Byzantine Empire was falling apart. That is the difference between a historically sound argument and arrant nonsense. Only the former can serve as justification for pushing the Jews into the sea. Any other contention would be unsupportable, in historical terms, for that purpose.

Later attempts to dislodge Arabs from Palestine do not diminish the force of the argument. The Crusaders controlled the land for a time, but ultimately failed; the Ottomans, for even longer, but they are no longer. They were unable to erase the fact that almost a millennium and a half ago, an army from Arabia accepted the surrender of the non-Muslim government in the Holy Land, a fact so formidable that it undermines any claim by anyone else ever, especially the Jews, who only recently conquered the place, which is immaterial because I said so.

Remember: it is only the conquests of the seventh century that count. Everything else is a footnote.

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