"Palestinians" Aka "Arabstinians"

May 17, 2010

By Nurit Greenger

It irks me a great deal to see how the Arabs, calling themselves "Palestinians," have managed to create a ring of lies and deception, they and the anti-Israel camp constantly use to justify their demands of Israel to 'de-occupy' the Palestinian land of the "West Bank." This kind of pressure the world has been putting on the State of Israel right to its sovereignty equals the pressure of a tourniquet around a bleeding wound. So who are these "Palestinians? What territory is referred to as the "West bank"?

Late in 1967 the “Palestinian” people was created out of whole new cloth. The name "Palestinians" is not mentioned in UN General Assembly Resolution 242, adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967 in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. It is also not mentioned in Resolution 338, adopted on October 22, 1973 which called for a ceasefire in the Yom Kippur War. Reason being, until the Jordanian occupation of Judea, Samaria and part of Jerusalem ended in 1967, such a people never existed.

Jordan, that illegally occupied and ruled over Judea and Samaria for merely 19 years out of the historical four thousand years of Jewish history in the region, (Jewish history is 4,000 years old. The history of Judea and Samaria is older), applied the term “West Bank.” The fact that the “Palestinians,” aka Arabs, insist on using the term “West Bank” means that they in fact accept Jordanian rule as legitimate and not an illegal occupation. In turn, that implies that they are the same people as that other oh-so-ancient people on the East Bank of the Jordan River, the “Jordanians.” And that is a fact. These Arabs are literally brothers and cousins of the Jordanians.

The "Palestinians" hold to historical revisionism according to which they claim they are the descendants of the Philistines, after whom the Roman Emperor Hadrian named the land. History attests otherwise. The [real] name is Philistines; they were the people who occupied the southern coast of Canaan and from time to time, they even occupied a greater piece of land. Nebuchadnezzar of the Chaldean Dynasty, the ruler of Babylon at that time, dispersed the Philistines. They resettled and totally assimilated and vanished. Moreover, the Israelites who entered the Promised Land called them “Philistine,” in Hebrew, "Plishteem.". The name " Plishteem" in Hebrew means “invaders.” Till today, the Arabs, calling themselves “Palestinians,” do not know the history of those ancient people after whom they named themselves.

"Palaestina" is a Latin word that comes from the Greek term "Palistia," which means a wrestler. This odd term was used by the Greek invaders to refer to the Jews who were, in that period called Yisrael, a term that comes to Jews from their Torah, the "Old Testament." The name Yisrael relates to the biblical story of Jacob who wrestled with the angel and was then renamed by G-d Yisrael. The Greek term "Palistia" is the translation from the Hebrew word Yisrael, which means, one who wrestles with G-d, referring to Jacob, who G-d renamed Yisrael.

It is fascinating to know how history, referring to the Jews, is recorded with the name “Palistia.” The Greeks came to be long after the Israelite kingdom was divided and also after the exile of the Kingdom of Israel, leaving in the areas only the Kingdom of Judea.

It is also possible that centuries before, to distinguish themselves from the Northern Tribes, who, collectively, named themselves “Yisrael [Israel],” the members of later to be the Kingdom of Judah, had already identified themselves as “Yehudim.”

The fact is that the very name “Palestine” has no meaning, except with reference to the Jews. The Roman Emperor Hadrian gave the order to destroy the Jewish land the way the Romans destroyed Carthage. He invented and renamed the land “Syria Palaestina” "so that the name of Judea the Rebellious be remembered no more.” This seems to mean that Hadrian named the land after the Philistines - Plishteem, the most hated of all the historical oppressors of the Jews, and did not use a nickname that referred to the Jews themselves.

The "Palestinians" claim they have a long history in the land of Israel. This is fallacy. Such claim has no historical documentation. Today, the "Palestinians" are calling themselves by a Latin name, which is the language of the Crusaders. One should raise the question: what did these ancient people, the “Palestinians,” call themselves before the Roman Emperor Hadrian coined the name “Palaestina,” under which the Romans buried the name Israel with the hope it would be forgotten and disappears forever?

Regardless of what Hadrian's reasons were, by the time the Romans came to be, the Philistines had long ago (approximately 700 years) disappeared from the historical record of the region. Doubtfully Hadrian even knew of them. What he did know was the Greek legacy of the region, in particular the language of the Greeks that, at the time of the Romans, was commonly spoken in Judea. He also must have known that the Greeks referred to the Jews in a derogatory manner as the "Palistia." Historically, using the name "Syria Palaestina" for the region makes more sense than naming it after the long dead people, the Philistines, who, in all likelihood, Hadrian had no understanding of their historic role.

Reference to the Greek origin of the term Palistina comes from the article THE MEANING OF PALESTINE by Norman Cohen (Aug. 2007) (http://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2007/08/meaning-of-palestine-by-norman-cohen.html) adapted from an article by David Jacobson (June 2001) titled "When Palestine Meant Israel" published in the Biblical Archaeology Society Review.

In either case, the name was not given because of a distinct people by that name inhabiting the country.

From these historical facts we see that the term "Palestinian" NEVER referred to anyone except the people called Yisrael who, today are called Jews. The term Jews lumps all surviving members of the ten tribes of Yisrael into the tribe of Judah who inhabited the land granted by G-d to Judah.

After the Persian Empire overthrew Babylonia, in 538 BCE, the Persian Cyrus the Great gave the Jews permission to return to their Yehud Province. As noted in the Biblical accounts of Jehoiakim, Ezra and Nehemiah, more than 40,000 Jews said to have returned Home and they re-built their Temple in Jerusalem. In the generations that followed they were called Yehudi from which the term Jew derives.

The State of Israel real boundaries

In reality, the historic Eretz Yisrael-the Jewish State's boundaries encompassed much greater land than the present State of Israel.

If one reads the Torah, the First Five Books of the Old Testament, and other Canonical books dating from the "Biblical" Period, one clearly understands that the land of the Jews extended along the Mediterranean shores, well into Lebanon to the north and to the south-west from below what is known as Gaza Strip. The ancient Land of Israel included much of what is today Lebanon to the north, it incorporated all of the Golan Heights, extending in the direction of Damascus to the north-east, extended well into Jordan to the east and all the way down through the Gulf of Aqaba to the east-south.

The argument that Sinai belongs to Egypt is historically utter nonsense. Though it is not clearly known to where, in the Sinai Peninsula, the boundaries or the Jewish Land precisely reached, those borders clearly were more expansive than the current dividing line is marked.

As for the whole of the State of Israel, along its prejudice against Jews, the world has conveniently forgotten that the original League of Nations Mandate for "Palestine", known as the promised Homeland for the Jews, incorporated all the land out of which Trans-Jordan was later carved and the Golan Height detached from, all without even asking its proprietor, the Jews, approval.

Then, after extracting a country called Trans-Jordan out of the legal Land of Israel, the British went on to divide and divide again the promised Jewish Homeland. Ultimately, the land of the Jews became a thin sliver of land west of the Jordan River.

After Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence, while Arabs remained living among Jews in the new State of Israel, Jews were expelled from all the land Jordan occupied. The world wants to whitewash and forget the fact that since before the Roman times Jews lived in all of that land and over their long history there they never relinquished the land to any of the many invaders. It was the Jews, not the Arab invaders, who were forcibly expelled from their land.

As for the land these Arab "Squatters'" claim as their own, that too is a thief of history. For the most part the present Muslims living in the land of Eretz Yisrael-the Land of Israel have their family origin in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt and other Arab lands. Most of them arrived to the land when the early Zionists began settling, the largely un-occupied land, acquired from Ottoman-Turks' absentee owners. The Arabs came as laborers seeking work in the early stages of development of farming and industry the Jews were building. These Arab people are no more "Native" to the land than the Eskimos.

The “Palestinians” are a population of immigrants, no less than the Jews, and from the same period. The British, Perfidious Albion mandate, severely restricted Jewish immigration while it permitted unrestricted Arab immigration into the Mandate of Palestine. The “Palestinians” also include Bosnian Muslims brought in by the Turks in order to prevent the immigrant Jews from becoming a majority in the Land.

Factually, the “Palestinian” people have no history, no culture, no language and no religion of its own. They do not even have a genuine credible name. They call themselves by a name from the language of the Crusaders, whom they hate and revile daily.

Sadly, the world has bought into the Arab Narrative that presents the Arabs as the victims of oppression by Jews. This false image is daily reinforced by the contemptible, blatant actions of the UN and the media that has taken upon itself to re-write Jewish history in order to conform to the Arab Narrative. Occasionally, this narrative is pierced by facts. One such case is that in areas the Arab control their policy is to systematically destroy archaeological evidence of Jewish existence in the biblical period. Regrettably, such facts get reported in the global media as an odd and insignificant item. The notion that such behavior is part of the Arabs' wider systematic effort to erase Jewish existence evidences in their ongoing efforts to strengthen their deceptive claim to the land, is never published and seen in the biased media.

It’s a tragedy that Jews don’t know the real " Palaestina" story, the real story of the Land of the Jewish Nation. Even Israelis, including their leadership, don’t know it.

There are indeed grim consequences for forgetting Jewish history. One of them is that others, standing in the wings, will claim the history of the Jewish Nation as their own.

It is long past the time for Jews to assert the truth, in particular first to other Jews and then the world at large. The failure of the Jews to do so until now has given the Arab invader the opportunity to claim Jewish history as their own, and today most of the world and its media buy into that false reinvented history.

From here on, when Israel negotiates with the "Palestinians" it must insist on negotiations that are based on facts, not hallucination.

The real nineteen year “occupation” of Judea and Samaria, aka "West Bank," ended with the Six-Day War in June, 1967. That was when the illegal occupier, Jordan, lost the war and withdrew its presence from the "West Bank" and the names Judea and Samaria came into use again. Save for Britain and Pakistan, for nineteen years the entire world regarded Jordan an occupier and its presence west of the Jordan River illegal.

The United Nations Resolution 181, the Partition Plan for Future Government of Palestine, adopted by the General Assembly and approved on 29 November 1947, does not contain the term “West Bank.” It consistently and exclusively refers to “Judea” and “Samaria.” Judea means the land of the Jews. The term “West Bank” did not exist in 1947. It was an invention of the illegal occupier, the Arabs. The Arab effective propaganda of lies and deception has served their goal well and today the world insists on referring to the Judea and Samaria area as the "West Bank."

It is no longer about land for peace, land for food, or land for fuel. It is about the Jewish State of Israel, about Israelis and the facts, based on truth only.

*I dedicate this article to Yaakov Golbert, Roy Brahen, Paul Ross, "Radio Rote" and Shmuel HaLevi, who assisted me in putting it together.