WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Society - Palestinian myth.txt

Text File | 2003-10-05 | 10KB | 168 lines

THE MYTH OF A "PALESTINIAN" PEOPLE

 by Yehezkel Bin-Nun
December 26, 2001
 MIDI: "When You Wish Upon A Star"

"Palestinians doubt Blair can deliver," announces the BBC. "Four
Palestinians die in West Bank," reports CNN. "IDF demolishes building
used by Palestinian gunmen," announces Israel's government run Channel
1 News. The modern media is filled with stories about the
Palestinians, their plight, their dilemmas and their struggles. All
aspects of their lives seem to have been put under the microscope.

Only one question never seems to be addressed: Who are the
Palestinians? Who are these people who claim the Holy Land as their
own? What is their history? Where did they come from? How did they
arrive in the country they call Palestine? Now that both US President
George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (in direct
opposition  to the platform he was elected on) have come out in favor
of a Palestinian state, it would be prudent to seek answers to these
questions. For all we know, Palestine could be as real as Disneyland.

The general impression given in the media is that Palestinians have
lived in the Holy Land for hundreds, if not thousands of years. No
wonder, then, that a recent poll of French citizens shows that the
majority believe (falsely) that prior to the establishment of the
State of Israel an independent Arab Palestinian state existed in its
place. Yet curiously, when it comes to giving the history of this
"ancient" people most news outlets find it harder to go back more than
the early nineteen hundreds. CNN, an agency which has devoted
countless hours of airtime to the "plight" of the Palestinians, has a
website which features a special section on the Middle East conflict
called "Struggle For Peace". It includes a promising sounding section
entitled "Lands Through The Ages" which assures us it will detail the
history of the region using maps. Strangely, it turns out, the maps
displayed start no earlier than the ancient date of 1917. The CBS News
website has a background section called "A Struggle For Middle East
Peace.'' Its history timeline starts no earlier than 1897. The NBC
News background section called ''Searching for Peace'' has a timeline
which starts in 1916. BBC's timeline starts in 1948.

Yet, the clincher must certainly be the Palestinian National
Authority's own website. While it is top heavy on such phrases as
"Israeli occupation" and "Israeli human rights violations" the site
offers practically nothing on the history of the so-called Palestinian
people. The only article on the site with any historical content is
called "Palestinian History - 20th Century Milestones" which seems
only to confirm that prior to 1900 there was no such concept as the
Palestinian People.

While the modern media maybe short on information about the history of
the "Palestinian people" the historical record is not. Books, such as
Battleground by Samuel Katz and From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters
long ago detailed the history of the region. Far from being settled by
Palestinians for hundreds, if not thousands of years, the Land of
Israel, according to dozens of visitors to the land, was, until the
beginning of the last century, practically empty. Alphonse de
Lamartine visited the land in 1835.  In his book, Recollections of the
East, he writes "Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw no living
object, heard no living sound.." None other than the famous American
author Mark Twain, who visited the Land of Israel in 1867, confirms
this. In his book Innocents Abroad he writes, "A desolation is here
that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action.
We reached Tabor safely.. We never saw a human being on the whole
journey." Even the British Consul in Palestine reported, in 1857, "The
country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore
its greatest need is that of a body of population."

In fact, according to official Ottoman Turk census figures of 1882, in
the entire Land of Israel, there were only 141,000 Muslims, both Arab
and non-Arab. This number was to skyrocket to 650,000 Arabs by 1922, a
450% increase in only 40 years. By 1938 that number would become over
1 million or an 800% increase in only 56 years. Population growth was
especially high in areas where Jews lived. Where did all these Arabs
come from? According to the Arabs the huge increase in their numbers
was due to natural childbirth. In 1944, for example, they alleged that
the natural increase (births minus deaths) of Arabs in the Land of
Israel was the astounding figure of 334 per 1000. That would make it
roughly three times the corresponding rate for the same year of
Lebanon and Syria and almost four times that of Egypt, considered
amongst the highest in the world. Unlikely, to say the least. If the
massive increase was not due to natural births, then were did all
these Arabs come from?

All the evidence points to the neighboring Arab states of Egypt,
Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. In 1922 the British Governor of the Sinai
noted that "illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai,
but also from Transjordan and Syria." In 1930, the British Mandate
-sponsored Hope-Simpson Report noted that "unemployment lists are
being swollen by immigrants from Trans-Jordania" and "illicit
immigration through Syria and across the northern frontier of
Palestine is material." The Arabs themselves bare witness to this
trend. For example, the governor of the Syrian district of Hauran,
Tewfik Bey el Hurani, admitted in 1934 that in a single period of only
a few months over 30,000 Syrians from Hauran had moved to the Land of
Israel. Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted the Arab
influx. Churchill, a veteran of the early years of the British mandate
in the Land of Israel, noted in 1939 that "far from being persecuted,
the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied."

Far from displacing the Arabs, as they claimed, the Jews were the very
reason the Arabs chose to settle in the Land of Israel. Jobs provided
by newly established Zionist industry and agriculture lured them
there, just as Israeli construction and industry provides most Arabs
in the Land of Israel with their main source of income today. Malcolm
MacDonald, one of the principal authors of the British White Paper of
1939, which restricted Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel,
admitted (conservatively) that were it not for a Jewish presence the
Arab population would have been little more than half of what it
actually was. Today, when due to the latest "intifada" Arabs from the
territories under 35 are no longer allowed into pre-1967 Israel to
work, unemployment has skyrocketed to over 40% and most rely on
European aid packages to survive.

Not only pre-state Arabs lied about being indigenous. Even today, many
prominent so-called Palestinians, it turns out, are foreign born.
Edward Said (Left), an Ivy League Professor of Literature and a major
Palestinian propagandist, long claimed to have been raised in
Jerusalem. However, in an article in the September 1999 issue of
Commentary Magazine Justus Reid Weiner revealed that Said (Right)
actually grew up in Cairo, Egypt, a fact which Said himself was later
forced to admit. But why bother with Said? PLO chief Yasir Arafat
himself, self declared "leader of the Palestinian people", has always
claimed to have been born and raised in "Palestine". In fact,
according to his official biographer Richard Hart, as well as the BBC,
Arafat was born in Cairo on August 24, 1929 and that's where he grew
up.

To maintain the charade of being an indigenous population, Arab
propagandists have had to do more than a little rewriting of history.
A major part of this rewriting  involves the renaming of geography.

For two thousand years the central mountainous region of Israel was
known as Judea and Samaria, as any medieval map of the area testifies.
However, the state of Jordan occupied the area in 1948 and renamed it
the West Bank. This is a funny name for a region that actually lies in
the eastern portion of the land and can only be called "West" in
reference to Jordan. This does not seem to bother the majority of news
outlets covering the region, which universally refer to the region by
its recent Jordanian name.

The term "Palestinian" is itself a masterful twisting of history. To
portray themselves as indigenous, Arab settlers adopted the name of an
ancient Canaanite tribe, the Philistines, that died out almost 3000
years ago. The connection between this tribe and modern day Arabs is
nil. Who is to know the difference? Given the absence of any
historical record, one can understand why Yasser Arafat claims that
Jesus Christ, a Jewish carpenter from the Galilee, was a Palestinian.
Every year, at Christmas time, Arafat goes to Bethlehem and tells
worshippers that Jesus was in fact "the first Palestinian".

If the Palestinians are indeed a myth, then the real question becomes
"Why?" Why invent a fictitious people? The answer is that the myth of
the Palestinian People serves as the justification for Arab occupation
of the Land of Israel. While the Arabs already possess 21 sovereign
countries of their own (more than any other single people on earth)
and control a land mass 800 times the size of the Land of Israel, this
is apparently not enough for them. They therefore feel the need to rob
the Jews of their one and only country, one of the smallest on the
planet. Unfortunately, many people ignorant of the history of the
region, including much of the world media, are only too willing to
help.

On second thought, it may be unfair to compare Palestine to
Disneyland. After all, Disneyland really exists.