“In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.” [John Adams]
At the outset, we learn the following from the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs in answer to the question, ‘Who are the Palestinians?’;
Palestinian leaders claim that the Palestinians are descended from the Canaanite people who lived in the Land of Canaan before the Israelite tribes settled in it.
What is the source of the name “Palestine?” It is not Arab; it is derived from the name “Palestina,” by which the Roman Emperor Hadrian chose to call the land after the defeat of the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE. His aim was to erase “Judea.”
According to Palestinian historian Muhammad Y. Muslih, during the entire 400 year period of Ottoman rule (1517-1918), before the British set up the 30-year-long Palestine Mandate, “There was no political unit known as Palestine.” In Arabic, the area was known as al-Ard al-Muqadassa (the holy land), or Surya al-Janubiyya (southern Syria), but not Palestine.
Not a single Palestinian tribe identifies its roots in Canaan; instead, they all see themselves as proud Arabs descended from the most notable Arab tribes of the Hejaz, today’s Iraq, or Yemen. Even the Kanaan family of Nablus locates its origins in Syria. Some Palestinian clans are Kurdish or Egyptian in origin, and in Mount Hebron, there are traditions of Jewish origins.
Mr. Blinken, only when history precedes politics, can any progress follow. On 05/12/, 2015, the Jerusalem Post published Daniel Grynglas’ “Debunking the claim that ‘Palestinians’ are the indigenous people of Israel.”It serves as a good starting point to an understanding how so many “useful idiots” in the US State Department have failed in their endeavors to comprehend Jewish claims to the Land of Israel.
Mr Grynglas will take us back to the year 1831. The wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors were fought for many years on the battlefield between armies. In recent decades the arena of conflict has shifted from hand-to-hand combat to a war of narratives.
Everybody agrees that the current affluence of Israel, its modern infrastructure and economy were developed by the Jews. The Palestinian Arab narrative is that as the ancient, indigenous people of Palestine they feel dispossessed and they deserve to take over Israel’s riches. Jewish claims to our heritage in the Land of Israel are supported by abundant archaeological artifacts and historical records.
As one of many examples, the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of Jewish texts found in desert caves in the West Bank, near Qumran in the 1940’s and 1950’s, date from the 3rd century B.C. to the1st century A.D. They include the earliest known copies of biblical texts and documents, outlining the beliefs of a little understood Jewish sect.
As recently as March16, 2021, the Israel Antiquities Authority displayed newly discovered Dead Sea Scroll fragments at the Dead Sea scrolls conservation lab in Jerusalem, They announced discovery of dozens of new Dead Sea Scroll fragments, bearing a biblical text found in a desert cave and believed hidden during a Jewish revolt against Rome approximating to 1,900 years ago. [The Associated Press].
In October, 2019, a 5,000 year old city, the largest in ancient Israel, was exposed in the Sharon Valley. This was consequent to widespread excavations at the En Esur [Ein Asawir] archeological site, located near Wadi Ara, a major artery that stretches from Hadera to Afula, the northern Sharon valley, revealed a planned city from the Bronze Age. An even earlier settlement, dating to the Chalcoithic period [7,000 years ago], was uncovered in deeper excavations made beneath the city’s houses.
There are no records to support the “Palestinian” narrative. In history, art and literature there is no trace at all of any Muslim people referred to by anybody as “Palestinians.”In the midst of various arguments, what has been overlooked is a simple and incontrovertible way to prove that the vast majority of “Palestinians” are the descendants of the relatively recent Arab immigrants.
The claim that “Palestinians” are the indigenous people of Israel and that most of the present Palestinian Arabs have lived in these lands since time immemorial is a total fraud.
When Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt ruled in Gaza, prior to the Six Day War, there was no mention of “Palestinians”. This was simply because they were yet to be invented.
We first hear of Arabs referred to as “Palestinians” when Egypt’s President Nasser, with help from the Russian KGB, established the “Palestine Liberation Organization” in 1964. It was only during the 1970s that the newly minted “Palestinians” began to promote their narrative through murder and assassination. The Arabs have justified their attacks as acts of the indigenous people struggling for national liberation.
We are reminded by Daniel Swindell that “The Arabs used to chant that Palestine did not exist”. He notes that before the Arabs began to chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free, ” they used to chant that Palestine did not exist. In 1872, Jerusalem was made into an independent administration. It reported directly to Istanbul, rather than Damascus. The district encompassed Jerusalem, Hebron, Jaffa, Beersheba, and Gaza. During the late Ottoman period, the Sanjak of Jerusalem, with the Sanjak of Akka [Acre] and the Sanjak of Nablus formed what was referred to as “Southern Syria.”
In 135 CE, the Romans renamed the region of Judea to “Palestine”. This move was obviously to eliminate Jewish inheritance. In 1936, the Peel Commission met with the General Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, Awni Abd al-Hadi, who testified, “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. “Palestine” is alien to us . It is the Zionists who introduced it.”
After Israel was created, the Arabs switched tactics to claim that Palestine had always existed as a separate territory, but it had always belonged to the Palestinians. Really? Returning to Daniel Grynglas, before the State of Israel was born, the term “Palestinians” was used by the Jews to refer to themselves and their organizations. “The Palestine Post”, the Palestine Foundation Fund, Palestine Airways, and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra were all purely Jewish enterprises.
From the 1937 Peel Commission Report, records show that it was 19th and 20th century Jewish settlement and the resulting employment opportunities that drew successive waves of Arab immigrants to Palestine. “The Arab population shows a remarkable increase ….. partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the [Jewish] National Home”
Further, “..in the Jewish settlement Rishon l’Tsion founded in 1882, by the year 1889, the forty Jewish families settled there, had attracted more than four hundred Arab families…. Many other Arab villages had sprouted in the same fashion.”
British PM Winston Churchill said in 1939: “.. far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country [Palestine]..”
A useful background to earlier times is recorded in Think-Israel of July-August 2007. Written by Avi Goldreich, it is titled, “A Tour Of Palestine: The Year is 1696. It alludes to an author Adrian Reland [1676-1718], a Dutch Orientalist, born in Ryp, who studied at Utrecht and Leiden, was professor of Oriental languages successively at Harderwijk [1699] and Utrecht [1701].
He was a real scholar, geographer, cartographer and well known philologist, spoke perfect Hebrew, Arabic and ancient Greek, as well as European languages . His book was written in Latin. In 1695 he was sent on a sightseeing tour to Israel, at that time known as Palestina. In his travels he surveyed approximately 2500 places where people lived that were mentioned in the bible or Mishnah. His research method was interesting.
He first mapped the Land of Israel Secondly, Relandi identified each of the places mentioned in the Mishnah or Talmud along with their original source. If the source was Jewish, he listed it together with the appropriate sentence in the Holy Scriptures. If the source was Roman or Greek he presented the connection in Greek or Latin. Thirdly, he also arranged a population survey and census of each community.
His most prominent conclusions
1. Not one settlement in the Land of Israel has a name that is of Arabic origin. Most of the settlement names originate in the Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Roman languages. In fact, till today, except for Ramlah, not one Arabic settlement has an original Arabic name.
2. Most of the land was empty, desolate, and the inhabitants few in number and mostly concentrate in the towns Jerusalem, Acco, Tzfat, Jaffa, Tiberius and Gaza. Most of the inhabitants were Jews and the rest Christians. There were few Muslims, mostly nomad Bedouins. Nablus, known as Shchem, was exceptional, where approximately 120 people, members of the Muslim Natsha family and approximately 70 Shomronites, lived.
3. The book totally contradicts any post-modern theory claiming a “Palestinian heritage,” or Palestinian nation. The book strengthens the connection, relevance, pertinence, kinship of the Land of Israel to the Jews and the absolute lack of belonging to the Arabs, who robbed the Latin name Palestina and took it as their own.
On January 7, 2017, Richard Mather posted his “So-called Palestinians have no history in Israel, except as terrorists.” His introductory comments are very pointed. “Until it is acknowledged by the UN and other bodies that the Jewish people and not the Arabs are the indigenous inhabitants of Eretz Israel, it is going to be difficult to break the impasse of anti-Jewish prejudice that is the real obstacle to peace.”
Further, he says “all the evidence points to the conspicuous absence of Arab culture in late 17th century Palestine; and even in the 18th and 19th centuries the Arab inhabitants were not indigenous but were latecomers. This explains why, historically, Arabs never talked about Palestinian identity – because there wasn’t one. They were Egyptian, Syrian, Moroccan, Iraqi and Ottoman Arabs, and many of them expressed allegiance to the concept of a Greater Syria.”
In May-June 2008, Think-Israel released a master piece in history, “Tsafir Ronen’s, “Hadrian’s Curse – The invention of Palestine” The summary speaks volumes. It addresses the invention of “Palestine” as a psychological weapon for conquering Eretz Yisrael. It recalls almost 2,000 years ago when the Roman Emperor Hadrian cursed the Jewish People and decreed that Judea should be henceforth called “Palestine”, after the Philistines, an ancient enemy of Israel that had disappeared from the world’s stage more than 600 years earlier. It was his final twist of the knife and legacy after wars, massacres, persecutions and exiles that had largely extinguished presence from Judea.
Let us recall that in 1977, a member of the PLO leadership, Zahir Muhsein, the leader of the al-Sa’iqa Organization, revealed the truth in an interview with the Dutch newspaper,Trouw:
“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a ‘Palestinian’ state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism for tactical reasons.”
The name “Palestine” is not a country, but a geographic region. Ronen asks the question, “Will it be precisely the Israeli government that will resurrect Hadrian’s curse, previously lost in the depths of forgetfulness?” The inheritors of power, Obama and Biden may think so, but we have history and international law on our side., if only the Israeli Authorities would develop the intelligence to utilize them.
Finally, we have a real human being, who lost his beautiful daughter to “Palestinian” terrorists, Stephen M. Flatow, writing a paper in JNS entitled, “We need another Reagan plan for Israel” He recalls President Ronald Reagan who denounced his predecessor , the peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, for undermining Israel’s control of Jerusalem. Quoting directly from Reagan:
“Israel and Jordan are the two Palestinian states envisioned and authorized by the United States,” Reagan said. “Jordan is now recognized as sovereign in some 80 percent of the old territory of Palestine.” Consequently, ” the Palestinian Arab refugee issue could be solved through assimilation in Jordan, designated by the U.N. as the Arab-Palestinian state.”
The British Mandate for Palestine, as decreed by the League of Nations in 1920 (and subsequently endorsed by the United States), treated the entire territory as a single, indivisible unit. In 1922, the British created the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan on approximately 78% of Palestine.
At the end of the day, we can demonstrate that we never left i.e. the Jews continuous presence in the Land of Israel is a reality. We must dispel lies that Israel stole “Palestinian” land and draw attention to The British betrayal over Trans-Jordan. The wording, “postpone or withhold application of such provisions of this Mandate as he may consider inapplicable to the existing local condition is by the nature of the wording a temporary action. That action was only valid until there was a change in the conditions leading to that decision. It did not authorize the British to permanently cut off portions of the land and turn it over to a foreign people.
