Long Live Arabistan!
by Gerald A. Honigman
This past May 8th, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent a letter to President Bush in which, among other things, he proclaimed Israel’s alleged original sin and the need to create yet another state for Arabs in the region.
Since he insists, there’s a way to meet some of his demands… well, sort of.
As most of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine was handed over to Arab nationalism in 1922 with the creation of what would later be renamed Jordan, a more than just partition of the land favoring the Arabs had already been completed between the two nationalisms competing for it. Arabs wound up with some 80% of that total area.
So, the real place where justice for Arabs has still not yet been addressed is in… hold onto your seats… Iran itself.
During the 7th century C.E., Arab Caliphal imperialist armies burst out of the Arabian Peninsula and colonized, settled, forcibly Arabized, and spread Islam by a conquering sword in all directions.
Judaea, renamed Palestine (for the Jews’ historic enemies, the Philistines) by conquering Romans after the second revolt of the Jews for their freedom, became settled and occupied by Arabs at this time…And so did Iran
Using southern Iraq as a springboard, southwestern Iran–Khuzestan province in particular–traded back and forth between invading Arab and Iranian rulers.
While it later became linked to Iran despite repeated Arab invasions, Khuzestan became so extensively Arabized that, in Safavid times (16th-18th centuries C.E.), the province was commonly known as Arabistan. In modern times, not until Iran’s Reza Shah defeated him in 1924, the Arab Sheikh of Muhammarah ruled much of the area.
Arabs have remembered all of this very well.
Once again, Iraqi-based Arabs — this time under Saddam’s banner — launched the long and bloody Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s that was largely fought over this oil-rich and strategically important area…Khuzestan for Persians, Arabistan for Arabs.
To deal with this problem, Iran has ruthlessly suppressed any manifestations of Arab nationalism by any and all means necessary. By the early 20th century, a proposal had been put forward to outlaw the Arabic language.
More recently, here’s some excerpts as to how the British Ahwazi Friendship Society reported the situation on July 29, 2005:
The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) released a statement condemning the recent violent repression of ethnic minorities in Iran following the election of right-wing hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad …Pointing to clashes between security forces and Ahwazi Arabs and Kurds, Nicola Dell’Arciprete, UNPO Assistant General Secretary, said: “The UNPO condemns the Government’s repressive policies against all the Iranian citizens. Iran is a multi-ethnic country in which half of the population belongs to ethnic minorities such as Azeri, Gilaki and Mazandarani, Kurds, Arabs, Lurs, Balochis, Turkmen…
Recall how Ahmadinejad likes to sit on his moral high horse lecturing Israel about such things. He did so again in his May 8th letter to President Bush.
“Palestine” underwent partition so, as on the Indian subcontinent (with the creation of predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan) and elsewhere, the political rights of competing nationalisms could be addressed. Had Arabs accepted the additional 1947 partition plan, they would have wound up with about 90% of the territory of the original 1920 Palestine Mandate.
Arabs rejected the 1947 division of the remaining 20% of the land left after purely Arab Jordan was created from the rest of it in 1922 because, in Arab eyes, there is no justice other than their own.
Jews–like Kurds or Berbers or Assyrians or Copts or black African Sudanese, and so forth–were entitled to nothing in what Arabs like to call their exclusive “purely Arab patrimony.” Note that the vast majority of Arabs were newcomers into the Mandate themselves as the Records of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League Of Nations and other solid documentation testify to. Indeed, so many Arabs were newcomers themselves that when the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) was created to take care of Arab refugees–formed after a half dozen Arab states invaded a reborn Israel in 1948 and their attempt at Israel’s destruction backfired–the very definition of the term refugee had to be redefined to accommodate Arabs who lived in the Mandate only two years.
Ahmadinejad refuses to acknowledge any of this, claims all Israeli Jews were from Europe (tell that to Israel’s Iranian-born President), and the like, yet answers the political aspirations of millions of other non-Iranians living on his own soil only with massacre and repression.
Hypocrisy at its worse…
In Khuzestan/Arabistan in particular, at any hint of unrest, Iran has been quick to act in its own national interests. Arabs have been ethnically cleansed from the area and replaced by others.
As just one of many examples, when Arabs of the Nahda (Renaissance) movement bombed Iranian targets not long ago in Ahwaz and elsewhere, Iran arrested thousands of them and set out to “fix” the problem by any means necessary.
Iranians continuously do likewise to Kurds, Baluchis, and all others who dare to assert their own political rights. Thousands have been killed as a result over the years in the name of Iranian nationalism.
So, this all begs the question of both the man and the nation he represents…
Why does justice supposedly demand that the sole, microscopic state of the Jews–half of whom were refugees from the “Arab”/Muslim world (and with no UNRWA set up to help them)–consent to national suicide so Arab settlers and colonizers can have their 22nd state and second one in Palestine, but Arabistan should not gain independence from Iran as well?
If a Palestine much smaller than Iran could undergo partition in the name of justice for competing nationalisms, then why not Iran? Recall that Arabs already got the lion’s share of justice in the partition of the original 1920 borders of Palestine.
So, Ahmadinejad, is correct.
It’s indeed time for the Arabs’ 22nd state to be born…
Long live Arabistan!
