by Phyllis Chesler
For years, I have risked scorn, defamation, and even physical menace for telling the truth about the “Palestinian” Lie.
Although the “Palestinians” claim a sacred national identity with roots in the Holy Land, the truth is that no such people or group ever existed historically. (Yes, I know that now, given the enormous propaganda and funding for terrorism that there is, indeed, a group of people who call themselves “Palestinians” and who are viewed as such by the immediate world.)
My point is that this group has no historical roots. That is my only point. And, given the enormous disinformation on this subject, I believe it is an important point.
For many millennia, the entire Middle East was only pagan, Jewish, Roman, Greek, and Christian. Islam itself only arose in the 7th century CE and Muslims thereafter conquered and colonized the Middle East and central Asia. Islamic genocide, imperialism, colonialism, forced conversions, slavery, anti-black racism, and both gender and religious apartheid characterized the Arab Muslim “takeover” of the region.
Perhaps as early as 1920, perhaps as late as the 1930s—or even the late 1960s, a decision was made about how to fight an infidel Jewish presence in the Middle East. Arabs who were formerly south Syrians, Egyptians, and Jordanians, or who were wandering Bedu, increasingly claimed a historical and religious presence in the Judaeo-Christian Holy Land.
It was a political and propaganda tactic, one which the United Nations, the world media, the professoriate, and the European Union has most ignobly aided and abetted.
Yesterday, former Speaker and Republican Presidential contender Newt Gingrich bravely and sanely stated that the Emperor Has No Clothes, or, as you will, he noted that there was a rather huge elephant in the room.
Gingrich said in a statement: “Remember there was no Palestine as a state,” he said. “We've had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places”.
The infamous Jeremy Ben Ami of J Street has now just issued a statement challenging—nay, strongly criticizing, Newt Gingrich’s point that there has never been a “Palestinian” people. According to Ben Ami:
Newt Gingrich’s comments about the Palestinian people and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are ill-informed, irresponsible and frightening. The former Speaker’s assertion that the Palestinians are an ‘invented’ people shows an appalling lack of understanding of the history of the Middle East in the last century following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire.
Former Speaker Gingrich is right. But in our times, the truth cannot hold its own against Big Lie propaganda.
In addition to all that we already know, and have written many times, Avi Goldreich has now called our attention to a book by the scholar, Hadriani Relandi, which he published at the end of the 17th century. The book, Palestina documents Relandi’s trip to the Holy Land (see Google Books to view the work). It is written in Latin. Relandi spoke Hebrew, Arabic, and ancient Greek, as well as many European languages. According to Goldreich, Relandi surveyed 2500 places where people who appear in the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Talmud once lived.
Essentially, Relandi mapped the Land of Israel and conducted a population survey and census of each community.
Relandi concluded that: “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. Till today, most of the settlements names are of Hebrew or Greek origin, the names distorted to senseless Arabic names. There is no meaning in Arabic to names such as Acco (Acre), Haifa, Jaffa, Nablus, Gaza, or Jenin and towns named Ramallah, El Halil and El-Kuds (Jerusalem) lack historical roots or Arabic philology".
In 1696, the year Relandi toured the land, Ramallah, for instance, was called Bet'allah (From the Hebrew name Beit El) and Hebron was called Hebron (Hevron) as it was in the Bible and the Arabs called Mearat HaMachpelah "El Chalil", their name for the Jewish Patriarch Abraham.”
Ironically, outrageously, UNESCO has just supported the “Palestinian” right to bar Jews from placing the Machpelah on Israel's Heritage Site list, the place where our Jewish ancestors are buried.
Relandi found that the majority of the land was utterly desolate. Where inhabitants existed, they were mainly Jews and Christians and they mainly lived in Jerusalem, Acco, Tzfat, Jaffa, Tiberius and Gaza.
“There were few Muslims, mostly nomad Bedouins. Nablus, known as Shchem, was exceptional, where approximately 120 people, members of the Muslim Natche family and approximately 70 Shomronites, lived. In the Galilee capital, Nazareth, lived approximately 700 Christians and in Jerusalem approximately 5000 people, mostly Jews and some Christians. “
In Goldreich’s view, Relandi’s 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.”
Goldreich concludes: Spain has a history of Arab rule, not Israel. Based on the Arab Muslim assimilation of Greek and Roman science, they were able to leave a “genuine Arabic cultural heritage: literature, monumental creations, engineering, medicine, etc. Seven hundred years of Arabic reign left in Spain an Arabic heritage that one cannot ignore, hide or camouflage. But here, in Israel there is nothing like that! Nada, as the Spanish say! No names of towns, no culture, no art, no history, and no evidence of Arabic rule; only huge robbery, pillaging and looting; stealing the Jews' holiest place, robbing the Jews of their Promised Land. Lately, under the auspices of all kind of post modern Israelis -- also hijacking and robbing us of our Jewish history. “
I hope that someone sends this information to Newt Gingrich immediately. He will believe it and use it to strengthen his argument. There is absolutely no point in sending it to Jeremy Ben-Ami who has too deep an investment in the Big Lie.
Over the years, I have argued in favor of a “two state solution.” I have written about the pain and sorrow of the Other. And yet: the “two state solution” might already exist. Jordan is the "Palestinian" state. Or, as my friend and colleague, Dr. Mordechai Kedar has argued, a “two state solution” is hardly realistic given tribal and clan rivalries. In his opinion, more stability might be gained with a nine or ten (city) state solution.
Gingrich has announced that he will move the American Embassy to Jerusalem if he is elected President. This confirms that the man knows something about the history of the place and is not willfully misguided by blatant and noxious propaganda.
Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/10975#.TufNR1ZvIi5
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
2 comments:
Dear Phyllis, I agree with you and Newt Gingrich that the "Palestinian Arab People" is an invented term, but you still haven't zeroed in on who invented it, when they invented it, and why. We know these things because of the highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. He is Major General Ion Mihai Pacepa. This is not his opinion, it is from his personal knowledge because he was personally involved.
According to General Pacepa the PLO Charter was drafted in Moscow in 1964. In its preamble, it contains the term "The Palestinian Arab People" three times. It is the first time that collective noun was used to describe Arabs local to Palestine. The preamble also refers to their desire for political self determination or self government. The facts in the preamble were affirmed by the first 422 members of the Palestinian National Council created contemporaneously. Each was hand picked by the KGB.
Why did the Soviet dezinformatsia invent the Palestinian People and their quest for self government? Since the 20s there had been terrorist attacks against the Jews in Palestine motivated by religious jihad. In 1928 or '29, 133 Jews in Safed and Hebron were massacred resulting from false rumors commenced by the Arab Executive, an antizionist group, that the Jews were trying to take over the Al Aqsa mosque. . In 1936 through 1939 there were additional attacks fomented by Haj Amin al Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The efforts of the dezinformatsia served to reframe future attacks from religious jihad to secular nationalism. Arafat was persuaded to stop calling for annihilation of the Jews and switch to a goal of "liberation" of the Palestinian People. It worked like a charm. See: Brand, Soviet Russia, the Creators of the PLO and the Palestinian People. http://www.think-israel.org/brand.russiatheenemy.html The quest for self rule was also fictional. The Arabs local to Palestine had never ruled themselves and there was never, prior to 1964 any national movement for self government, only a national anti-zionist movement. See: Brand, Was there a Palestine Arab National Movement at the End of the Ottoman Period? http://www.think-israel.org/brand.palnationalism.html
Excellent article by Prof. Chesler; thank you. And an excellent post from salubrius.
Just to add a few more references, first about the non-existence of a "Palestinian nation" or people "from time immemorial," see Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial, which cites tables and data from the British Mandate Palestine Census report of 1931 tabulating the extremely long list of foreign birthplaces of Muslims resident in the Jerusalem district at that time, and the amazingly diverse and large number of foreign languages spoken in Muslim villages through the Mandate as native tongues, including Afghani, Berber, Kurdish, Malaysian, Urdu, etc. (Peters, pp. 228-9). She also cites the geographic survey of Moshe Braver of hundreds of Israeli Arab villages, made in the 1970s, which documented the large percentage of foreign born Muslims in those villages as late as the 1970s, well over a quarter of the population (pp. 263-8). She also cites anthropological in-depth studies of specific Israel Arab villages, which prove the same thing.
But even more to the point than all this irrefutable stuff is her relatively brief review (pp. 168-70, 196-8) of the occupying Egyptian and Ottoman policies, under their respective rule of the Holy Land area during the 19th century, of constant forcible settlement, decade after decade, of many thousands of Muslims from Egypt, Libya, Turkey, Syria, Iraq or elsewhere, including whole tribal groups and entire villages, into Palestine in order to repopulate and keep up a stable tax-base and regime presence in a largely desolate buffer land suffering constant attrition of numbers through local feuds and fierce internecine warfare, and state wars between the Ottomans and the Egyptians, epidemics, high infant and adult mortality rates reflecting very poor hygiene and malarial marshes, and constant out-migration. The Muslim population constantly fell away in numbers, and was replaced too often over the centuries for them now to claim mainstream long-term ancestral residence in the land by the end of the 19th century.
Anti-Zionists like to pretend that Peters' work is not solid scholarship, but they ignore her cited sources, which are obviously more than solid enough. In regard to the historical background, moreover, she is entirely validated through the independently pursued, detailed and well documented research of Aryeh Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land-Settlement and the Arabs (1984), especially his Chapter 1, pp. 7-36. He gives specific data on which tribes, villages and groups arrived when, where they were settled, etc., etc., throughout the 19th century. Other studies could be cited. These are sufficient.
In regard to the malign influence of the Soviet Union in all this, see the book by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous Place (1978), describing his experiences as US ambassador to the UN during 1975-6, and relating Soviet manipulations at the UN during the the 70s to delegitimate liberal democracies or allies of the liberal democracies in the Third World and to legitimate instead terrorist movements against them as "liberation," "national resistance," "anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist" movements. The Apartheid and racist charges were first raised then to delegitimize Israel and to legitimate instead the Palestine Liberation Organization and, with it, all similar "resistance" movements, no matter how atrocious their methods. Also see Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, UN Ambassador to the UN 1981-5, "How the PLO was legitimized," Commentary, July, 1989, pp. 21-8, available on-line at the Commentary website archives.
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