Who are these people who call themselves “Palestinians”
Before I proceed with this subject, I like to make it absolutely clear that I am not a historian of any sort but, having an ancestral Jewish background going back thousands of years I have this burning thirst and desire to learn about the land of my ancestors. This burning thirst and desire has lead me to conduct years of extensive research on the Land of Israel and my people “The Jewish People”. To do this I laboriously read the Torah and the Bible (Old Testament) and acquired historic and archaeological data and information.
So let’s all look at who were the original so called “Palestinians”. To do this we have to go back to almost 3,000 years or more where the Philistines were an Aegean (Cypriot) people that died out almost 3,000 years ago. To be absolutely clear, there is absolutely no connection between this tribe and the modern day Arabs that identify as Palestinian. Even the land the two people dwelled in was different, Philistine was a tiny stretch of land in the same location as what is known today as Gaza. At this time the much larger area of Israel and the West Bank was almost exclusively inhabited by Jews. To suggest the Palestinians descend from this tiny tribe is positively absurd – they were a different ethnicity, with a different language and no traces of their culture exists in Palestinian culture today. This people became extinct 3,000 years ago, they are NOT the Palestinians.
Now let’s see where was Syria-Palestina.
When the Romans crushed the Jewish revolt of 132 CE in an attempt to discourage patriotism they renamed the region Syria-Palaestina (exiling many of the Jews at the same time). Syria-Palestina stretched from Egypt to Turkey and from Israel to Jordan, it had a diverse demography but the majority population was Phoenician, Greek and Roman.
Syria-Palestina was a foreign name forced upon a region that had never been unified. The Romans chose to name it after two ancient kingdoms Assyria and Philistine, both of which have long since died out. This Roman province had nothing to do with the modern day Palestinian state, either geographically or ethnically.
So who are the so called “Palestinians”?
The so called “Palestinians” are a mixed people and while the majority descend from recent economic migrants, who flocked to the area between 1850 and 1950. A few Muslim families trace their history to the Arab conquest of Jerusalem and some Jewish and Christian families go even back further. However, very few Arabs are indigenous – Arabs are not indigenous to the Israel (unsurprisingly they originate from Arabia, they arrived in the Land of Israel with the Muslim conquests of the 7th century).
At the beginning of the 20th century a number of Levantine Arabs reacted to Zionism by creating a nationalist movement of their own and like the Zionists they sought national self-determination. The problem with creating this non-Jewish nationalist movement was that the inhabitants of the region were incredibly diverse, there were Arabs, Bedouins, Druze, Kurds, Europeans, Arameans, Christians, Muslims, etc. and ‘not being Jewish’ was the only thing these people had in common. They had absolutely NO language, culture or religion to make them distinct from Jordanians or Syrians and the only thing that seemed to unify them was opposition to Jewish sovereignty in that region.
Since the end of Jewish sovereignty in the region, Israel remained a tiny province in much larger empires. Some of these conquerors referred to the area by the Roman name of Palestine (Philistia, Palestina, Mandatory Palestine, etc.) – but this always denoted a place and not a people. Irrespective of this fact, the Arab nationalists chose to name the nation they coveted “Filastin”, probably because this was the only consistently used name for the region that did not have strong Jewish associations.
Before Britain
relinquished control of the Mandate the inhabitants of the Mandatory Palestine
had mixed loyalties, some supported a Jewish homeland, some remained impartial,
a minority supported an Arab homeland and a larger number supported the notion
of pan-Arabism (which unified all Arab peoples – not just one small province).
It was pan-Arabism that had the support of the surrounding Arab states, while
powerful local clans like the Husaynis and Nashashibis fought for Palestinian
self-determination.
In reality, Palestinian nationalism was a minority position, one powerful Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, declared “There is no such country as Palestine! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”
When Syrian President Hafez Assad said to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people.”
Arafat was in no place to rebuke him as a few years earlier, he himself had declared…
The question of
borders doesn’t interest us… From the Arab standpoint, we mustn’t talk about
borders. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is
the Arabic nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and
beyond it… The PLO. is fighting Israel in the name of Pan-Arabism. What you
call “Jordan” is nothing more than Palestine.
– Yasser
Arafat
And it wasn’t just
the Palestinians and Syrians saying this…
The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan
In 1948, Jordan invaded and conquered the West Bank usurping the territory. They forbade Jews from living there and granted all non-Jews Jordanian citizenship… the local “Palestinians” embraced their new nationality without objection. There was no rejection of this new identity as Jordanians and Palestinians saw each other as one people, it was only because of British interference that they were artificially separated into two people.
One of the most common movements amongst 20th century Arabs was pan-Arabism, which advocated for the unification of Arab countries into an Arab superstate. When King Abdullah of Jordan usurped the West Bank he imagined it being one a stepping stone to ruling his own pan-Arab empire called “Greater Syria”. To his dismay the Israelis shattered this dream in 1967 after repelling an Arab attack on Israel, Jordan were driven out of the West Bank and in the blink of an eye his vision of a Greater Syria crumbled.
Why is it that on
June 4th 1967 I was a Jordanian and overnight I became a Palestinian?
– Walid Shoebat, a
former PLO terrorist
With pan-Arabism on
its knees, the Arabs attempted a different strategy to destroy Israel –
Palestinian independence. Up until this point Palestinian nationalism had been
supported by a small minority that had failed to unify the people behind their
cause. When the Grand Mufti attempted to establish the All-Palestine Government
in Gaza, it was defeated due to lack of power and public support. Other
attempts met a similar fate. In the sixties this changed, pan-Arabism was in
its death throes and Palestinian statehood emerged as its successor. The
Palestinian Liberation Organisation, headed by Arafat and supported by the Arab
League, effectively gave birth to the Palestinian people, they fabricated a
history and unity amongst the people that had never existed.
The Palestinian
people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give
them that identity through conflict with Israel.
– Yasser
Arafat
They created a flag
(which was all but identical to their brothers in Jordan) and fabricated a
history supporting their claim for sovereignty over all of the land, including
Israel.
Two hundred years ago there were no Palestinians, while there was a multitude of mixed ethnicities living in the land, they did not identify as a collective people. Nor is there any evidence of a Palestinian people every existing. There has never been a Palestinian monarch, a Palestinian language and all Palestinian art and culture is a construct of modernity. In contrast, Jews are an identifiable people with a shared history, monarchs and language with irrefutable ties to the land of Israel.
Though the nationalists chose to identify as “Filastin”, it was the Jews that first took on this name calling their newspapers, charities, and organizations such names as the “Palestine Post” and the “United Palestine Appeal,” while the Arabs eschewed the term as being “Jewish” and “Zionist.” For them, they were Muslims first, and “Southern Syrians” second.
To summarize all that I’ve provided historically, let’s ask ourselves....
If Palestine were a “sovereign” or “independent” country at some point in
history (or as some suggest, one that spans most of recorded history), then it
would be easy to answer these questions:
- When was it
founded and by whom?
- What were its
borders?
- Who was its
rulers?
- What
constituted the basis of its economy?
- Who were the
Palestinian leaders before the Grand Mufti?
- Was Palestine
ever recognized by a country whose existence, at that time or now, leaves
no room for interpretation?
- What was the
language of the country of Palestine?
- What was the
prevalent religion of the country of Palestine?
- And, finally,
since there is no such country today, what caused its demise and when did
it occur?
These questions cannot be answered as the “Palestinians” are modern people and Palestinian nationalism is actually younger than Zionism. They are not indigenous to the land, the majority are recent migrants attracted by economic opportunities created by the Zionists. Even those that pre-date the Zionists are on the whole migrants to the land attracted at different times, during different conquests and for different reasons.
Let’s look to Arafat, the KGB, and the Palestinian Narrative as is stated in the Gatestone Institute:
This comes from a document in the Mitrokhin archives at the Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Vasily Mitrokhin was a former senior officer of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence service, who was later demoted to KGB archivist. At immense risk to his own life, he spent 12 years diligently copying secret KGB files that would not otherwise have become available to the public (the KGB foreign intelligence archives remain sealed from the public, despite the demise of the Soviet Union). When Mitrokhin defected from Russia in 1992, he brought the copied files to the UK. The declassified parts of the Mitrokhin archives were brought to the public eye in the writings of Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew. He co-wrote The Mitrokhin Archive (published in two volumes) with the Soviet defector. Mitrokhin’s archives led, among other things, to the discovery of many KGB spies in the West and elsewhere.
What is found in the files are four main points:
- The PLO and
the Palestinian Narrative was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant
for ‘liberation’ organizations.” — Ion Mihai Pacepa, former chief of the
Foreign Intelligence Service of Romania.
- “First, the
KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo and replaced
them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem
and was, therefore, a Palestinian by birth.” — Ion Mihai Pacepa.
- “[T]he Islamic
world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain
of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought.
Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep… We had only to keep repeating our themes —
that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist
countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews.” — Yuri Andropov, former KGB chairman.
- As early as
1965, the USSR had formally proposed a resolution that would condemn
Zionism as colonialism and racism in the UN. Although the Soviets did not
succeed in their first attempt, the UN turned out to be an overwhelmingly
grateful recipient of Soviet bigotry and propaganda; in November 1975,
Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as “a form of racism and racial
discrimination” was finally passed.
Here’s information on three important Palestinian figures. I have a long list that is too long to add in this article.
Yasser Arafat
(PLO Chairman and Leader) was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted
Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha
special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as
the future PLO leader.
First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo,
replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and
was therefore a Palestinian by birth.
Saeb Erekat’s family is Bedouin. According to Bedouin genealogy, the family is part of the Huweitat clan which originated in the Hejaz area of Saudi Arabia, arrived in Palestine from the south of Jordan, and settled in the village of Abu Dis in the early twentieth century. Saeb Erakat was a Palestinian Politician and Diplomat.
Mahmoud Mirza Abbas (Palestinian President) was born into a completely Baha’i family and Abbas Effendi was his grandfather who had an important position among the Baha’is. His family left Iran following increasing pressure on the Baha’is. Abbas Effendi, the ancestor of Mahmoud Abbas, titled Abdu’l-Baha, is one of the most important figures in the history of the Baha’i sect.
It is not and has never been the Jewish peoples aim to deny these people of their recently found identity, we believe all people have the right to self-identity. But this must not come at the expense of Jewish right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.
