Several hundred people rioted in early May outside Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue. Led by a group called Pal Awda NY/NJ, it harassed those attending the Greater Israeli Real Estate Event, which promoted land sales in Israel and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). Pal Awda is the New York and New Jersey affiliate of Al Awda, the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition, which itself is linked to Samidoun, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.
Many members of the mob masked their faces with keffiyehs, the checkered Arab headscarf now virtually de rigueur for gunmen of Hamas, another designated terrorist group, and its fan club members. Hamas led the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in Israel.
Demonstrators outside Park East Synagogue banged on drums, chanted “Israel should not exist,” “Stop the sale of stolen land,” and “Palestine will never die.” Some tried to breach police barricades. Of those inside the synagogue, one rioter insisted, “We need to make them scared.”
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The mob reprised a similar confrontation outside Park East Synagogue last year. Then, Pal Awda and its acolytes attempted to intimidate participants in a Nefesh ‘B Nefesh (Soul to Soul) event promoting aliyah (Jewish immigration) to Israel. They screamed, “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada,” and “Resistance you make us proud, take another settler out!”
In response, the office of then-Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, now the mayor, issued a statement saying the anti-Zionist “democratic socialist” believes “every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation.” But in the same sentence, he asserted “these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
In fact, Mamdani, mob members outside Park East Synagogue, and keffiyeh-clad bigots everywhere know little or nothing about international law or “Palestine.”
In the 1920 San Remo Treaty, victorious World War I Allies dealt with the territories of the defeated Ottoman Turkish Empire. Among other things, they created a new geopolitical entity called “Palestine” on both sides of the Jordan River. There, Great Britain, fulfilling its 1917 Balfour Declaration, was to facilitate the reestablishment of the Jewish national homeland — the objective of Zionism, the Jewish people’s national liberation movement.
In 1922, the League of Nations granted Great Britain its Mandate for Palestine. Article Six of the mandate encouraged “close settlement by Jews” on land west of the Jordan, which comprises today’s Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Strip. West of the river, because Britain had arbitrarily severed intended mandatory lands to the east and created the new Arab territory of Transjordan, now Jordan.
Near the end of World War II, the United Nations succeeded the League of Nations. The U.N.’s 1945 Charter, Chapter 12, Article 80, upholds the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine, including the right of close Jewish settlement.
Neither any subsequent U.N. General Assembly resolution — unlike the Security Council, the Assembly only recommends, not legislates — nor any other notional standard supersedes these actual international laws.
As for “Palestine,” in the 500 years of Ottoman rule, no district of the empire was referred to by that name. No subjects of the successive sultans called themselves “Palestinians.” Likewise, during prior centuries of Egyptian and Mamluk rule.
Rome had renamed Judea, land of the Jews, “Syria-Palestina” after crushing the Second Jewish Revolt in 135 C.E. The replacement term recalled the Philistines, originally an Aegean Sea people destroyed by Babylonia more than 700 years earlier. 19th-century writers, to deemphasize religious connotations of “the Holy Land,” retrieved the name “Palestine.”
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Nevertheless, Arab-American historian Philip Hitti told the 1946 Anglo-American Committee considering partition of western Mandatory Palestine that “there is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.” Instead, he claimed the entire Middle East was “a vast territory of Arab-Muslim lands,” intolerantly omitting Kurds, Berbers, Copts, Druze, Maronites, Greek Orthodox, Yazidis, and, of course, Jews.
But as Mamdani et. al. demonstrate, the “Palestine” lie, echoed now on the far Right, is an essential element of today’s anti-Jewish, anti-American, and neo-Marxist-Islamist catechism.
Eric Rozenman is the author of Jews Make the Best Demons: “Palestine” and the Jewish Question and, most recently, The David Discovery, A Novel of the Near Future.