Sacramento Union · Sacramento, California · 3 January 1955

CP-1955-001

Who Owns Palestine?

Letters to the Editor

Anwar Ali Khan

Shown from the top. The whole column — 3.5 times taller than it is wide — is in the enlargement.

Scan 328 × 1156 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

“To the Editor of The Sacramento Union: I would like to give ‘country parson’ some information concerning his letter to The Sacramento Union of December 31st. It is an incontrovertible fact that Palestine belongs to the Arabs, lock, stock, and barrel. More, it has been the cradle of Arab culture and civilization from time immemorial.

The sons of Israel did come there but for an asylum in the good old days of Moses — but in order to escape the wrath of the persecuting Pharaohs of Egypt, who were bent upon their extermination. In fact, there is no historical evidence now to show that they continued to live there — as ‘country parson’ completely fails to understand or realize.

Even if that is granted, they must have been absorbed by the inhabitants of the place and have so mixed and mingled with the indigenous population that after a few centuries they came to be known as Arabs, and, as such, it is nothing less than absurd to build the theory, as has been done since the ’20s, that the immigration of Jews, drawn from diverse nationalities and scores of countries, is just the return of the original inhabitants of their land.

The fact is that the huge influx of ‘Jews’ is nothing less than an invasion of Palestine by aliens, and exploiters. That there was no legal, much less any moral basis to deprive the Arabs of their homes, there can be no doubt.

It was ultra vires and against the very fundamentals on which the United Nations is supposed to stand and to safeguard which it claims to exist. As for ‘parson’s’ professed ‘understanding’ of Bible prophecy: After the Seventh Century A.

D., the sons of Isaac, and those who observed the letter of the law of Moses had to withdraw from Manaan (see history). The sons of Ismael (from whom the Arabs are descended) instead, became its political as well as its spiritual leaders.

The fact that the sons of Israel had to surrender the land of Canaan shows that they had become unworthy of the divine promise which God made to them through Abraham… Palestine is for those who keep the covenant which Abraham made with God. Christians also, no doubt, claim to fulfill the covenant.

But they seem to forget that the covenant lays down an important external sign, and that sign is circumcision of the male population. Only Ishmaelites have kept the sign both before and since the revelation of the Holy Quran. The prophecy of Abraham promised blessings to both Isaac and Ishmael.

According to this promise, the sons of Isaac were established over Canaan and the sons of Ishmael over Arabia. But when the last day arrived for the sons of Isaac, then, in terms of the prophecy of David, the promise was transferred from Israel to Ishmael. The claim of Israel was now only a racial claim, that of Ishmael was spiritual.

On the basis of their racial claim, the sons of Ishmael held Mecca and the territory around. On the basis of their spiritual claim they added Canaan to their possessions after the religious deterioration of Israel.”

Context added by this archive

A reader answering another reader in a Sacramento letters column in 1955, arguing the case entirely on scripture and history. The archive holds it because the argument is being made by name, in an American paper, nine years before the PLO.

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