The myth of the Palestinian People

Yehezkel Bin-Nun
(January 7, 2002)- first printed-worth repeating


"Palestinians doubt Blair can deliver," announces the BBC. "Four Palestinians die in West Bank," reports CNN. "Many Palestinian families divided," says NBC. 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? And how did they arrive in the country they call Palestine? Now that both U.S. 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. After all, 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. But 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, a news outlet 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". In it is included a promising sounding section entitled "Lands Through The Ages" which assures us it will detail the history of the region using maps. But 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.



But 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 The only article on the site with any historical content is called "Palestinian History - 20th Century Milestones" which seems only to confirm that prior to 1900 there was no such concept as a Palestinian people.

While the modern media may be 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 "The 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, in 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. But 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". Indeed 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 Land of Israel Arabs 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.



But not only pre-state Arabs lied about being indigenous. Even today, many prominent so-called Palestinians, it turns out, are foreign born. Edward Said, an Ivy League Professor of Literature and a major Palestinian propagandist, long claimed to have been raised in Jerusalem. But in an article in the September 1999 issue of Commentary Magazine, Justus Reid Weiner revealed that Said actually grew up in Cairo, Egypt, a fact which Said himself was later forced to admit to. But why bother with Said? PLO chief Yasser Arafat himself, and 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. But ever since Jordan occupied the area in 1948 they renamed it the West Bank. This is a funny name for a region which 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, which cover the region and 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 over almost 3000 years ago. The connection between this tribe and modern day Arabs is nil. But who is to know the difference?

Given the absence of any historical record, one begins to understand why Yasser Arafat claimed that Jesus Christ, a Jewish carpenter from the Galilee, was a Palestinian. Every year at Christmas time Arafat went to Bethlehem and told worshippers that Jesus was in fact "the first Palestinian."



In spite of the historical evidence, the media have succeeded in implanting the idea that there is a people called the Palestinians. 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. In fact, no independent Arab state ever existed in the geographic area Arabs call Palestine. Nor was there ever, throughout human history, a country called Palestine. The last independent state to exist in the region, prior to the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948, was the ancient Jewish State of Judea 2000 years ago.



If the Palestinians are indeed a myth, then the real question becomes "Why?" Why invent an imaginary people? The answer is, the myth of the Palestinian people serves as the justification for the Arab occupation of the Land of Israel. While the Arabs already possess 21 sovereign countries of their own (more than any other 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. {Including the so-called progressives of Pacifica Radio}