Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the "Palestinian nationality" and suggests a new strategy for dealing with the "Palestinian people":
A poster at this website recently asserted, in response to my assertion that there are no “Palestinians”: "A nation is an idea, a shared identity, and Palestinians have that in spades. They are not going away. Even when they travel the world, they consider themselves refugees and maintain their national consciousness."But this does nothing to establish that the “Palestinian nationality” is not a politically-motivated construct. And that that politically-motivated construct of a “Palestinian people” out of local Arabs (those in Gaza and the area renamed by the Jordanians in 1948 as "the West Bank"), can be undone by non-Arabs and non-Muslims. Simply expose the idea for what it is. Refuse to write the phrase without quotation marks: "Palestinian people." Quote endlessly from all the Arabs who made quite explicit why this phrase, and this idea, was developed. It has been foisted on the West. So was, in 1938, great sympathy, and understanding, for the campaign of Henlein and his master Hitler to achieve "the legitimate rights" of the "Sudeteners."
Once the understanding spreads that the war against Israel is a classic Jihad, and is not, and never has been, a "clash of two tiny peoples" etc., this will bring a greater clarity not only to the confused Israeli public (and its largely unimpressive political leaders), but also to the larger Infidel world. The world needs to comprehend how that Jihad against Israel is only a subset of the more general, worldwide Jihad effort. That effort is expressed locally, and uses different instruments depending on what is possible, and effective, taking into account local conditions and the nature of the local Infidels.
Here's a sample of what should be better known:Before the Six-Day War, not a single Arab spokesman, at the U.N. or anywhere else, and not a single Arab document, referred to the local Arabs as the "Palestinian people." They appeared, as if by magic -- summoned by the public-relations advisors to Arafat -- only after that war made clear that the Arab dream of going in for the kill had been dashed, and that a different, long-term effort was necessary.
The intention of that effort was to persuade former supporters of Israel in the Western world that Israel had won territory to which it had no legal, moral, or historic claim. Since the area had been known in the West as "Palestine," then the local Arabs would become the "Palestinian people." As the older and better-educated generations died out, the young, the naive, the uninformed, would come to think something along the simple-minded lines of "well, there's a place called Palestine, and there's these people who are the Palestinian people, so of course they must be the ones whose land it is."
It was at that level that the “Palestinian people” was created -- a level that required an absence of any historic sense, any real and detailed knowledge of the history of that area, and of the Middle East, not merely in the 20th century, but during the 1300 years before. The men who served on the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, none of them Zionists, had a much better sense of why the Mandate's aims -- the establishment of a Jewish National Home -- were not only justified, but also admirable. That is why those who had a wider sense of history, and who were untainted by that widespread mental pathology that takes different forms in different people (even the form fruste can be deadly), such as Churchill and Smuts, were Zionist sympathizers to a man.
While the Shukairy "drive them into the sea" line was muted for the Western world, and the "Palestinian people" theme drummed into Western minds, in black Africa, where the Israelis had had a very effective foreign-aid program before 1967, things went more quickly. All that was needed was bribery of key government officials and diplomats; and overnight most African states cut relations with Israel. Those agricultural projects, those irrigation projects, that had been so useful, were forced to end. There was, of course, no real Arab aid ever given. It was only bribes to particular officials, and then, of course, money to extend the reach and power of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. One result was the revolt of Nigeria's Christians against the new Muslim militancy -- the Jihad, as Col. Ojukwu called it, against those Christians.
Western leaders, as well as Israeli leaders, should cease to use the phrase "Palestinian people." Instead, they should start to use such carefully-constructed phrases as "the autonomy for local Arabs will of course depend on to the extent that such autonomy is commensurate with Israeli security, since there are already twenty-two Arab states. Also, we cannot remain unaware of the doctrine of Jihad as a permanent duty, so that opposition to Israel as an Infidel state should not be expected to diminish no matter what its borders. Indeed, we have every reason to believe that further territorial concessions that cause Arab Muslims to perceive Israel as more vulnerable will only increase the likelihood of open warfare, and will whet rather than sate the desire for combat to further the aims of Jihad."
Who writes or says anything like that? It's all true, and necessary, but no one does. But perhaps they will start, as they realize that they, the entire West, the entire Infidel world, are in the same boat with Israel, and this is no time for that boat to become a ship of fools.
The so called Palestinians are refugees whom were
actually created by the Arabs. After the formation of the State of Israel, the Arabs living there were told to leave and they could return after the Arabs invaded Israel. Unfortunately, for them, the dumb ass Arabs lost the war even thought they outnumbered Israel 10 to 1.
The word Palestine is actually a Jewish name and
the Palestinian People is the "great lie" created by the terrorist supreme "Arafart".
What is amazing and more discouraging is the so-called "intellectual elite" in America believe in the "great lie" and not because it is true but because it fits their political idealogy.
Truely, the world is a mess!!!
Don't forget to mention that Arafat, this 'great palestinian leader' was born in Cairo and as such he was an Egyptian.
His gravestone however, says he was 'born in Jerusalem'.
An Arab doesn't stop lying simply because he is dead...
"The word Palestine is actually a Jewish name..."
-- from a posting above
No, it isn't. It is an adjectival form, elevated to a noun in Roman times. It comes from "Syria palaestinorum" or "Syria of the Philistines" after an extinct sea-faring people who held five small coastal cities near Gaza, a phrase that was then reduced to "Palestine." It was put into deliberate use by the Romans, after the destruction of the Second Temple, in order to efface the Jewish connection to the land that might be more obvious if such a toponym as "Judea" continued to be used. The Romans also changed the name of Jerusalem to Aeolia Capitolina. The first name-change stuck, in the Western world, and in Western Christendom the word "Palestine" became the natural way of referring to a land area on both sides of the Jordan river (extending on the eastern side out to the desert, but without carefully delinated borders) and on the west side of the Jordan, to the Mediterranean.
The Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition (the one to use for such matters) defines "Palestine" thus:
"we may describe Palestine as the strip of land esxtending along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea from the mouth of the LItany or Kasimiya River (33 22' N.) southward to the mouth of the Wadi Ghuzza; the later joins the sea and runs thence in a south-easterly direction so as to include on its northern sid ethe site of Beersheva....Eastward there is no such definie border. The River Jordan, it is true, marks a line of delimitation between Western and Eastern Palestine; but it is practically impossible to say where the latter ends and the Arabian desert begins."
So Jordan, in its populated parts (not the Syrian Desert) comprises Eastern Palestine, and Israel Western Palestine.
What does this mean? It means that in Jordan both Eastern Palestinians (Jordanians) and Western Palestinians (from the territory now held by Israel) live. A persone born in Jordan to "Western Palestinian" parents would call himself Jordanian. A person born in Jordan to parents who were born in Jordan, to grandparents who were born in Mandatory Palestine, would call himself whatever is most advantageous to him, depending on where he travels, to whom he speaks, and who harbors what suspicions. It is best, in Arab countries, to be a "Jordanian" not a "Palestinian," despite all the support for "Palestinians" as the shock troops of the Jihad against Infidel Israel. On the other hand, at least until recently, one might garner more sympathy from the unwary Westerner by calling oneself a "Palestinian" who lives in Jordan, that is to say, a "Western-Palestinian Eastern Palestinian." And what of those who were born in, say, the West Bank in 1953, and were therefore Jordanian at birth, and now live in Amman? Such a person would be a Jordanian, but no ordinary Jordanian. Rather, from 1948 to 1967, those people born under Jordan's rule in the West Bank, and Jordanian citizens (no one talked then of "Palestinians" or of a "Palestinian people" -- that came, hesitatingly, and then with greater assurance, sometime after the defeat of June 1967) from birth. In order to distinguish such people from those "Palestinians" born in Eastern Palestine, i.e. east of the Jordan River, it would be best to speak of Western-Palestinian Eastern Palestinians (born in Israel and the West Bank, and now living in Jordan) and Eastern-Palestinian Eastern Palestinians (born in Jordan of parents or grandparents who were from "Eastern Palestine" and still living there) and the final group, those people who were born in Jordan, as were their parents and grandparents. These would be the Jordanians, or rather the plain-vanilla unadjectivized Eastern Palestinians, mostly of Bedouin extranction.
Thus a Muslm Arab born in Jordan, who holds a Jordanian passsport and Jordanian citizenship, may nonetheless call himself (and harbor with a special sense of affliction that may mold his entire worldview, even beyond the resentment by Muslims, and especially Muslim Arabs, for the notion of an Infidel nation-state being permitted on land once held by, and therefore forever belonging to, Muslims. Such a person is, therefore, if we use the geographic designations of the Encyclopedia Britannica and other Western sources for almost the past 200 years, " a "Western-Palestinian Eastern Palestinian." Of course, I haven't bothered to go into the fact that a great many of the Muslim Arabs who claim to anyone who will llisten to be descended from "Western Palestinians" living in "Palestine" (there was no separate unit called "Palestine" -- it was a virtual construct, in the minds of Western Christians, except during the period of the Crusader Kingdoms), and now live either in Israel and the territories it won in war (and to which it had a prior claim based on the explicit provisions of the Mandate for Palestine), or in Jordan, are in fact people whose presence in the area very often does not go back further than the 1920s and 1930s, when the Arab Muslim migration into Mandatory Palestine was far larger, though illegal, than any Jewish migration allowed by Great Britain, the Mandatory authority that was supposed to, but did not, "facilitate Jewish immigration" and "encourage close Jewish settlement on the land" by the express terms of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.
Does that make it all clear?
I thought it would.
The moral of all this is :
What a tangled toponymic web Muslim Arabs weave, when e'er they practice to deceive, first by making up the "Palestinian people," and then by pretending that no matter how far back some Muslim Arab (or often not an Arab, but even Kurds, Berbers, Turks, Muslims from Bulgaria moved there by the Ottomans in the 1880s -- all of them more-or-less Arabized by now, though many know exactly where their true origins lie, and which grandfather came from Iraq in 1923, and which from Egypt in 1932), no matter how tangential his connection to "Palestine," (and for the purposes of getting on, and remaining on, the U.N.program, apparently a world without end, that pays "Palestinian" refugees (and so few ever die -- immortal like Gogol's dead souls, and so many seem to be born, that the ranks are suspiciouslly enormous, for who is to say which Arab is merely a local one who found a way to make a work-free permanent living, so that a system has been created that encourages locals, indistinguishable in language, religion, and so on from the "Palestinian refugees," to simply declare or have themselves declared as such. And some of them may even begin to believe it. The Arab Muslim world is based on stories, rumors, conspiracy theories, tales that in the telling, begin to be believed by the teller himself -- with great emotion, with great sincerity.
It was the Romans (with some help from Greeks), and not Jews, who came up with "Palestine" and employed the term with the same kind of political calculation that caused the Jordanian Arabs, after 1948, to rename "Judea" and "Samaria" (but the Egyptians apparently saw no need to rename the equally Biblical "Gaza")-- the words which had been in continuous use in the Western world since they were used in the Bible (those placenames were good enough for Jesus)--as the "West Bank."
Of course this political renaming is hardly limited to that little sliver of dusty land in the Near East. Renaming Days in Eden have been a common feature of life. Constantinople (as it it was known for a thousand years, when it was the largest and richest city in Western Christendom) becomes Istanbul. Saigon becomes Ho Chi Minh City. Burma, Myanmar. Ceylon, Sri Lanka. Lourenco Marques, Maputo. Upper Volta (a name given by Europeans) becomes Burkina Faso ("strong man" in the local language). For all any of us knows, under renewed Muslim rule, just to finally efface, once and for all, the Jewish connection to the city, the Arab Muslims might rename Jerusalem, in some period hence, Al-Quds.
As for what might happen to the placenames of Western Europe if the islamization continues, and in a century, or 80 years, or 50 years, or less, makes life so intolerable for Europeans that they simply leave for North America and Australia, one can only guess.
From 1066 And All That
RE: Does that make it all clear?
No as I thought Syria came out of Transjordan after the British carved up the area into Syria and Jordan.
One thing is clear, Palestine is a name that has taken many meanings, but it is clear that their never was a Palestinian people with a distinct language and culture.
It is indeed ironic that the "Palestinians" demand their rights as "Palestinians." The term Palestine was give by Titus to the land of Judea & Sumeria when the Romans wanted to obliterate a Jewish connection to their homeland. He turned to his historians and asked the worst enemy of the Jews. When Titus learned the worst enemy was the Philistines, he renamed the place Palestine or Philistine. Unknown to Titus and the "Palestinians" of today is that the word Philistine means Invader in Hebrew. Look at the irony the invading Moslem Arab nomads are demanding their rights as "Palestinians." We demand our rights as "invaders!" How religion plays into this dynamic is now becoming readily apparent thanks to the work of people like Mr. Spencer & Mr. Fitzgerald.
Hugh,
I am honored.
I cannot impeach the historical accuracy of your point. Sadly, the goal of the establishment of the Palestinian nation cannot be denied. They want to erase Israel, violently if necessary, peacefully if the Jews can be convinced. All binational state schemes end with the Jews living in some state of dhimmitude under the leaky umbrella of Arab and Islamic culture.
My objection to this semantic device of encapsulating the Palestinian people in quotes, accurate though it may be, is that it is a lost cause. The local Arabs are thoroughly convinced of their Palestinian identity. They will not be disabused of this notion, by intellectual arguments or at the point of the sword.
Should we reopen the fight that was both won and lost in 1967? The fight as I see it is against Islam itself, at least against Jihad and Islamic supremacy; whether or not these can be decoupled from the rest of Islam is for another forum, or at least another forum posting. To advance the war of ideas against Islam we need to create a new discourse and convince the media, public figures and our vasciallating politicians that it is valid and necessary. This is a herculean task, but one we are slowly winning, with the unwitting support of Islamic leaders, and of course the Islamic canonical texts. If we hoist upon ourselves the renaming of a people against their will, we have an unwillable scenario.
There is a danger in creating a vocabulary that it not recognized by the wider world of infidels. It separates us, makes us look like we are living in a fantasy world, when in fact we are the resonable ones. To succeed in the mainstream media and the political consciousness of the average infidel, we need to keep things clear. Our fight is not against the Palestinians or the local Arabs of Israel. It is not a violent fight, but one of ideas. Big ideas are much stronger than small ones. Questioning Islam is easier that questioning the genesis of the Palestinian nationality. Questioning Islam is starting to get results. If we stay on message we will win.
I have noticed a surprising trend among Muslims who awaken from the sleep of Islam's mental shackles and moral distorions: they begin to sympathize with the Jews and even Israel; people such as Wafa Sultan who speaks warmly and admiringly of the Jews, Irshad Manji, and the vast Iranian expatriate community the United States as well as a large portion of the Iranian population whose voices are currently silenced amid the din of the Mullocracy. There are other intellectuals as well, and no doubt a large portion of the Muslim population questions the blind hatred of Israel and the Jews that is par for the course in their media. This madness is a symptom of Islam, not of the conjuring of the Palestinians out of the local Arabs of Israel.
Quijybo
Paleo-humans should do.
Maybe they'll read a second book one of these eons.
Hugh, everything you say is out of books. Nations do not exist in nature, they are the result of brute politics and self-creation. There was no Dutch nation before the 1600s, and in fact Dutch is the old English word for German - for that is what most Dutch were, ethnically, Plattdeutsche no different from those in Lower Saxony and Holstein. (Those who were not were Frisians, a nationality that has almost been obliterated by the novel Dutch entity.) The French deny the existence of a Breton and Occitan nation, in spite of the obvious fact that these two nations speak different languages and have different cultures from those of the northern plains from which French hails; and history has led us to the point where there certainly is no such thing as an Occitan nation - purely because of centuries of union with France. Italy is the most fantastic instance of nationality having nothing to do with race, language or history: never united at any point between 568AD and 1870AD, its dialects belong to five different linguistic groups (Venetian, Italo-Celtic, Tuscan, Italo-Neapolitan, Sicilian), not to mention the wholly separate Ladino and Sardinian languages, and are all mutually incomprehensible. Yet the Italians have regarded themselves as one nation from the dark ages, and have always adopted a single literary language - first Latin, then Florentine - however distant it might have been from their natural languages.
Since 1967, a certain group of Arabs have insisted on regarding themselves and being regarded as "Palestinian". They share a great many common experiences, a common language, a common ideology, and common institutions. That makes a nation. Remember, there was no such thing as Austria before 1945-1955 (the pre-war entity was vastly unpopular, and the majority of the people always desired reunion with Germany) and no such thing as Bangladesh until 1971. But whatever the flaws of these entities, nobody doubts for a second that they amount to nations. And bear in mind that one of the common experiences of Palestinians is resentment, not only towards the Jews, but also towards the fellow Arabs who have kept them locked in closed towns (a.k.a. "refugee camps") for decades, refusing them citizenship and rights, essentially treating them as pariahs. I suspect that more than one Palestinian would laugh in your face if you insisted to his that there is no difference between him and the smart city Sunni or Alawi elites that kept them as virtual prisoners in what should have been (on your theory) their own national soil.
And how far the "Palestinian" rot has spread. I was looking through Amazon for books on the history of Israel in biblical times. Apparently, one of the classic/standard/very long works is "The History of Ancient Palestine" by Gosta W. Ahlstrom. This professor was at the University of Chicago.
Assuming this goes up to AD 70/135 (or earlier), what has "Palestine" got to do with it? If you can't bear to even mention the word "Israel" - the biblical kingdoms can hardly be referred to as a Zionist entity - so far - what's wrong with Canaan? I suppose it lacks Muslim resonance.
The word "Palestine" does not offend me when used by Western archeologists, or Biblical scholars in the Western world. Ancient Palestins is just fine. I don't consider it an attempt to delegitimize Israel, or to ignore the presence of a Jewish commonwealth or kingdom. But of course if someone, in writing such a book, or in writing a book about some time in the past, even the most recent past, then one's antennae would be quivering.
Take, for example, someone who writes that "when the Mandate system was being set up, it was Haj Amin el Husseini who was in the 'Palestinian' delegation -- that is a clear anachronism, and not an innocent one.
The word "Palestine" has a long history of being used in the West, and it was understood, by the educated, to mean that place, the Holy Land, in which Christianity began. But there was no attempt to deny that it was also the place where the history of the Jews had been made, that they had lived there for more than a thousand years, that the place was full of sites associated with Jewish history, and the Old Testament, and indeed, Western travellers on the Grand Tour of Europe would, by the second half of the nineteenth century, add in "Palestine" and would, in that "Palestine," view not only sites associated with Christianity, but also sites associated with the history of the Jews. I have no quarrel with the book title that you mention above, about "Ancient Palestine." It strikes me as completely innocent, and perfectly justified.
The word "Palestine" was also used by Jews in the Western world, to refer to that part of the Ottoman Empire that they hoped to return to in order to rebuild, out of the ruin and desolation that was described by every Western traveller to the area, a place for a revived, second Jewish commonwealth. After nearly 2000 years, that seemingly fantastic dream was realized. If the state of Israel is destroyed, there will never be another chance, a third Jewish commonwealth. That will be it.
Zionists in Warsaw or the Pale in Russia would plan to move to "Palestine." Nothing wrong there. That toponym, though it has its roots in the Roman desire to make a political point (effacing that Jewish connection to the name, and in so doing, to the land) has been in continuous use in the Western world, and it makes sense for people to have used it as long as there was no other name to be given to it. Now, of course, there is: the name is Israel. And those people who attempt to reify, to call into existence, a non-existent polity called "Palestine" whenever they write or say "Israel/Palestine" or the "problems between Israel and Palestine" -- when Israel is Palestine, and Palestine is Israel -- are either ignorant, or careless, or not ignorant or careless, but are doing it deliberately, in order to promote the Arab Muslim view of things. It should not be allowed to fly under anyone's mental radar.
What has not been in continuous use is the existence of a separate political/administrative unit, coterminous with "Palestine" as that word is understood in the West, under Muslim rule -- Turkish or before that, Arab. Under the Ottomans that territory which comprised what the Western world regarded as "Palestine west of the Jordan" was divided into various admnistrative units or vilayets (just like the three vilayets, Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra, that were joined to form modern Iraq), and a separate sanjak for Jerusalem.
It is the deliberate appropriation, for political purposes, of the placename and the (post-1967) invention of the phrase "Palestinian peope: that is the subject of the article at the top of this thread. The local Arabs were not distinguishable, in any significant way, from either the Arabs within Israel's pre-1967 borders -- i.e. based on the 1949 temporary armistice lines -- or from the Arabs in Eastern Palestine, called Jordan. The world seemed quite willing to accept this fiction; so did the Israelis, not exactly known for the keenness of their political sense. The result was just as desired: a failure of either Israel, or its supporters, or those who were simply part of the vast group that was not terribly interested in the matter one way or the other, having no idea that there was any kind of threat from Islam, that the wars made on Israel were part of a Lesser Jihad, and that OPEC revenues, Muslim migration to the West, and the exploitation of Western technology to disseminate the full message of Islam would permit Muslims, world-wide, to expand that Lesser Jihad to a full-fledged campaign all over the world -- and most dangerously, within the Lands of the Infidels to be found in Europe.
Which is where we are now.
Forget the incapacity of Israel, its diplomats, its leaders, to make the articulate case for Israel. They haven't proven themselves to possess the right flair with language, and attention to how language is a weapon that the Arabs, so keenly aware of propaganda, and how to persuade people, have been using to their advantage while the Israelis keep prating about "peace" and, a good number of them, lazily or unthinkingly employing the phrase "the Palestinians" or "the Palestinian people."
We don't have to be as careless or stupid as those in Israel who accept that nonsense. We can label things correctly, and in so doing, help the Israelis but even more importantly, help ourselves to identify what it is they, and we after them, face.
Hugh,
Your points are well taken as regards the modern construct and misuse by Muslim propogandists regarding Palestine. However, we can never forget the true Palestinian nation which has always consisted of those peoples indigenous to the Holy Land and who have always lived there: namely, the local Christians, the Samaritans, and that small but significant Jewish (Sabras) population who were never exiled. These are the only people who have a legitimate right to call themselves Palestinians and be recognized as the rightful inhabitants of Judea and Samaria.
The Arab nations you mention are all Muslim (except for Lebanon) and can never protect the rights of indigenous Christians whose national rights still cry out for recognition.
These Christians are the nation whose status is long overdue for recognition under the second paragraph of the Balfour Declaration which guaranteed, "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine..."
The Muslims already have all their Arab countries to call their own, the local Christians only have Judea, Samaria and Nazareth. A two state solution is indeed called for but it must be a Jewish State with a protected Christian minority(Israel) and a Christian State with a protected Jewish minority (Palestine) united in a confederation for self-defence and mutual prosperity.
This alone can be a framework for a just peace because there can never be real peace as long as the Muslim demographic is allowed to remain and grow.
Paolo,
You agree with Hugh that there never was a "palestinian people" before the 1960s, when such a people emerged through a collective will. The problem for your argument is that the very covenant [or charter] of the PLO, the organization that is supposed to embody "palestinian nationalism," states explicitly in its first article that "the Palestinian people is part of the Arab nation [qawm]" and that "Palestine is an inseparable part of the great Arab fatherland [watan]." So here the very group that supposedly has a national consciousness sees itself first of all as Arabs, with "palestinians" merely being part of the Arab nation, and "palestine" being part of the Arab fatherland. Please read the PLO Charter and check.
To continue with the artificiality of the notion --for the Arabs themselves-- spokesmen for the Palestinian Arabs at the hearings of the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine in 1946 argued that there was no such thing as "Palestine" in history. Now, of course, these people have been subject to intense indoctrination, indeed to brainwashing, since 1948. Since the 1960s they have been indoctrinated with the "palestinian people" notion. But they and their leaders have never given up their Arab identity. Arafat, when speaking in Arabic, used to constantly emphasize their Arab identity. Moreover, why does the Arab League so fervently support the PLO's claims to the Land of Israel if those people are not Arabs?
Another item, the Arabs did NOT traditionally use the name "palestine" or Filastin for the country. The early Arab conquerors had called the southern part of the country Jund Filastin [Filastin military district]. However, this district comprised only the southern part of the country. The northern part [Galilee, northern Samaria, the adjacent part of Transjordan] was called Jund Urdunn [Jordan military district]. Jund Filastin corresponded to what the Byzantine Empire had called Palaestina Prima [see "Filastin" in Encyclopedia of Islam]. Few populations in the world have been subject to such intense indoctrination as the Palestinian Arabs since 1948. I believe that the "palestinian people" notion was a creation of psychological warfare experts, although the evidence is mainly circumstantial. This a subject that requires more study but may have to wait until archives are opened, if the documents have not been destroyed already.
I certainly agree with Hugh that Israeli leaders should stop using the term "palestinian." The notion of a "palestinian people" is an obstacle to peace and was probably meant to be so by its inventors.
"...this is no time for that boat to become a ship of fools."
Too late. Not only has that ship been boarded; it has already sailed.
Eliyahu,
Or even better, use "Palestinian" to refer only to Christians, Samaritans, and Jews living in Judea and Samaria while refering to the Muslims simply as "Arabs".
"Forget the incapacity of Israel, its diplomats, its leaders, to make the articulate case for Israel. They haven't proven themselves to possess the right flair with language, and attention to how language is a weapon that the Arabs, so keenly aware of propaganda, and how to persuade people, have been using to their advantage while the Israelis keep prating about "peace" and, a good number of them, lazily or unthinkingly employing the phrase "the Palestinians" or "the Palestinian people."
The Zionist Conspiracy is failing! With the Jews in control of the world press, Madison Avenue (advertising), and the worldwide banking industry, it is just shameful how the Jews have let this happen.
Q: IS THIS ANY WAY TO RUN A WORLD DOMINATION CONSPIRACY?
A: I don't know, ask the Islamofascists!
Seems to me that a Palestinian by any other name is still a Philistine
Upon further reading of Hugh's points I'll amend that:
A Palestinian by any other name is still an Israeli.
Now do I have it ?
Paolo -
"... there was no such thing as Austria before 1945-1955 (the pre-war entity was vastly unpopular, and the majority of the people always desired reunion with Germany)..."
I presume you mean before the Anschluss which took place in 1938. The pre-war (WWII, 1939-45) Austria was NOT unpopular with Austrians because they wanted 're-union with Germany' (they had never been part of Germany to start with) but because their Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had been dismantled after the first world war - they wanted their Empire back because it seemed that their national pride lay in that.
The Anschluss wasn't a union or even a re-union; it was a military occupation by the Wehrmacht after the Austrian Nazi Party had staged a coup d'etat.
Read all about it at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschluss
I knew there would be problems the moment we let those d***ned communists become teachers - especially History teachers.
Paolo-
Further, for the situation before the Anschluss, i.e. the existence of Austria (yes, it did exist, contrary to that which you imply) see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschluss#Situation_before_the_Anschluss
and remember that the WW I was 1914-18 as far as Europe is concerned.
Certiorari: this is largely off the point, so I will answer briefly. Nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire was at best a mood: every Austrian understood that those days were past. Union with Gemany was a practical political program steadily pursued (before 1933) by all major political parties. There were two attempts to annexate Austria to Germany, both backed by government, opposition and public even across the bitter political division between conservatives and socialists. One was in 1919, when the Austrian and German governments simply declared union (I have in my stamp collection the postage stamps from the period, overprinted Deutschoesterreich, "German Austria"). The second was in 1931 and was more subtle: the two countries declared a "Customs Union", which in German history was a prelude to unification. In both cases, the Western Allies, Britain, France and Italy, supported by the not inconsiderable power of Czechoslovakia, forced the break of the agreement against the will of both countries and under the threat of immediate invasion. The collapse of the 1931 agreement led to a run on the banks in both countries, which brought about the collapse of economies across Europe, the abandonment of the Gold Standard by the pound and the franc, and the arrival of the Great Depression in Europe, which had until then managed to survive the catastrophe in America. Finally, the rise of Nazism in Germany made the Anschluss less popular in Austria, but not to the extent that when the German tanks eventually came, the majority of the population did not welcome them with flowers and universal cheering.
If you want to discuss the point further, we can do it in private or in some other forum.
I have read Bulgarian newspapers of the 1944-48 period, and they refer to the Jews in 'Palestine' as "Palestinians".
When Freeciv adds a Palestinian people to conquesr the virtual world in that game with, then we could prepare to start to believe them. Not quite yet tho, as Frank Zappa stated:
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
Frank Zappa
And with Hamas closing down the last brewery there, well, there goes the nationhood.
"I have read Bulgarian newspapers of the 1944-48 period, and they refer to the Jews in 'Palestine' as 'Palestinians.;"
-- from a posting above
Yes, before the declaration of Israel's independence, during the Mandatory period, in Europe, the word "Palestinian" was used, and exclusively, in Europe and North America (by Jews and some non-Jews) to describe the Jews lviing in the area of Mandatory Palestine. The "Palestine Legion" was the Jewish self-defense force formed by Vladimir Jabotinsky, writer, translator, feuilletonist ("Altalena"), political leader and teacher. The "Palestine Orchestra" -- Toscanini conducting, played in good times and bad, and even during the Arab Revolt (not the "Palestinian" Revolt) of 1936-1938. What is now the Jerusalem Post was formerly the Palestine Post.
What's in a name? Sometimes, a great deal. Sometimes, everything. Sometimes nothing. And sometimes, as with the recently-invented "Palestinian people," both everything and, in the final analysis, nothing.
One more try: A Palestinian by any other name is still an Arab?
I think I've got it; by George I've got it!
Pravo,
I find the very name "palestine" to be offensive. It was used by Greeks and writers in Greek before Alexander's conquest of the Orient [Oriens in the Roman sense] in a loose, hazy sense, just as Syria was a loose Greek name for what was later called the Levant [Syria was not a native name - See Guy LeStrange and Victor Berard]. After Alexander, Judea was customary in Greek & Latin for the areas inhabited by and/or ruled by Jews. Judea, that is, Iudaea or Ioudaia, derives from the Aramaic word Yehudaya, meaning "the Jews" [this explanation comes from Felix Abel]. Judea was the official Roman name for the country until the Romans had suppressed the Bar Kokhba Uprising, when they applied the name "Syria Palaestina" to Provincia Iudaea. Hence, "palestine" is a name applied to the country by the Roman Empire, or imperialists, if you like, specifically in order to punish and suppress the Jews [this too is Abel's judgement, shared by Jewish historians].
Hence, "palestine" is a name applied to the country by the Roman Empire, or imperialists, if you like, specifically in order to punish and suppress the Jews [this too is Abel's judgement, shared by Jewish historians].
Alas, this is a distinction without meaning. The same could be said for scores of modern nations.
Eliyahu,
I understand why the term can be offensive to modern Israelis but FrankLev is correct about the failure of modern distinctions. As pointed out above, even early Zionists such as Jabotinsky freely used the term for Jews living in the Mandate and the Balfour Declaration paved the way for the establisment of "a Jewish state in Palestine"
At this time the only people called Palestinians were Sabras (a.k.a. Palestinian Jews), local Christians, and Samaritans. It wasn't until Husseini coopted the term that Muslims started using it and even then they were generally just called Arabs.
The change in self-identity among Palestinian Christians did not really came about until after 1948. Before that, Christians defined themselves as Palestinian, but never as Arabs. Usually they saw their community as Rum Catholic, Rum Orthodox etc. They would refer to the Muslims as "Arabiya" but never themselves. They would sometimes simply refer to all Muslims as "Turks" or even use the insulting "Hagarenes".
For this reason, let's go back to using "Palestinian" only of those with ancient historical roots in the land and exclude the Muslim invaders who have no right to it.
Oops, I meant: "At that time (during the mandate) the only people called Palestinians were Sabras (a.k.a. Palestinian Jews), local Christians, and Samaritans.
I knew there would be problems the moment we let those d***ned communists become teachers - especially History teachers.
Exactly. Wish I'd said that.
Paolo:
To what extent does Palestinian nationhood really springs from the breasts of Muslims who claim attachment to the land, however tenuous -- as opposed to absolute fealty to Islam -- and how much is it the perception created in western minds by decades of propaganda?
Prior to 1948 the only people who refered to themselves as "Palestinians" were the Jews. The "Palestine Post," became the "Jerusalem Post" for just that reason.
I dont know arguing about the origins of a name seems pretty pointless. We all know the romans named the area palestine after the Philistines but I dont know what difference this makes anyways. You have now a Bosnian nationality who speak the same language as the croats and serbs but who happened to be either muslims, catholic, or orthodox. Or a Kosovar nationality to describe albanians who live in a serbian province. As long as we are not fooled into believing they are nationalistic struggles seperate from Islam domination we are okay. If the palestinians want to call themselves palestinians go for it. I am more offended when countries take others identities like the macedonians yugoslavs pretending to be the real heirs of alexander the great.